190 hours - Like Magic

First post here. Around 190 hours. Was meaning to write a report at 150, but just getting around to it now. I grew up around a lot of Mexican immigrants, and always wanted to learn Spanish, but never was able to take a class or find a method that actually works. I took some time with Duolingo a few years ago, but gave up when it felt like that wasn't going anywhere. I found the Easy Spanish youtube channel a couple of years ago as well, but that was mostly too hard for me to understand without the subtitles.

I found Dreaming Spanish in December and thought the idea sounded interesting. I remember putting in over 999 hours into Pokemon as a kid, so putting in 1500 hours to learn a language didn't actually sound that crazy. I decided to commit for 50 hours and to give up if I didn't see any difference. I tried starting with the beginner videos since I had done so much Duolingo, but to my surprise that wasn't really worth much and I had to start with the most basic videos on the site. After about 10 hours I could tell that I was improving though.

Getting to 50 hours was hard. I really had to pay attention to understand what was going on, but eventually things started to click and I was able to start listening to the Chill Spanish podcast around 70 hours which really helped. I've now finished Chill Spanish and can understand a lot of the intermediate videos. It's a little insane because I remember trying to listen to the Dreaming Spanish podcast when I first started and it was mostly unintelligible, but now I can understand it pretty well.

The whole process really feels like magic. I never would have imagined that my comprehension would be where it is at now with just a few months of practice. If I stopped right here it still would have exceeded my expectations, but I plan on continuing until the end. The road still feels very long, but the initial results have been pretty amazing.

Downsides

One downside of this approach, for me at least, is that this is somewhat addicting. Before starting Dreaming Spanish I had cut down on my Youtube usage quite a bit because I found that addicting, but this is just as bad in some ways. I'm obviously gaining so much more from this than I do from watching random Youtube videos, but the way that I feel after watching so many videos, isolated and a little depressed, is very similar.

This process is going to take quite a lot of time and is not very social. But I think switching to more podcasts soon will help with that. Just watching videos for too long can put me into a bad mental state and I need to remember to take a break when I feel like this because it is really tempting to just watch the number of minutes go up a little bit more. This is just something that I need to be mindful of. Other than that, this has delivered more than I thought was possible already and I am very grateful for Dreaming Spanish and all of the wonderful reports that I read on this subreddit. Onwards to 300 hours.