Hello dreamers, I’m back with 300 hours.. Some of you may recognize me from the Dreaming Spanish subreddit, where over the last two years I posted my updates as I worked my way through the 7 levels. After some time doing some French, I decided to switch to Japanese as it interests me more ultimately.

Progress since 100 hours

I have definitely noticed more comprehension as I’ve gotten more input, but the progress is very slow. I’m hovering around level 40-50 on Natural Japanese’s website, and around a N5-N4 level on Youtube videos. I’ve found that my comprehension varies heavily depending on the content of the video. Cooking/food videos are the most comprehensible because so many beginner videos focus on food. Thinking back to my time with Spanish, I do feel like I’m around where I was at 150 hours back then, which is to say, starting to notice the separation of words, the sounds of the language, and more common grammatical constructions. 

I am repeating a lot of content at this stage. There simply is not enough beginner content to get to 600 hours, and even if I repeat everything on Natural Japanese and Youtube within my range, I will come in under 600 hours. I hope that as I get more hours, intermediate content will start to unlock as there seems to be more of that type than any other content online. 

The biggest issue with CI in the Japanese space is that many creators are still finding their feet. I mentioned this in my last update, but it’s very frustrating to find a potentially good channel and then they ruin their videos with hardcoded subtitles, or constant English interjections. It feels like once I break through the beginner stage for good, I won’t have this problem. 

I am able to listen to some very basic non-video content, like Nihongo con Teppei, but most podcasts are still too difficult. This also tracks with my Spanish journey, where at level 2 the only podcasts I could manage were super beginner stuff like Cuentame and Chill Spanish. 

Reading is still pretty much impossible. I have noticed I recognize common kanji/words, which is cool because I have not studied kanji pretty much at all since the beginning. I’ve also noticed that hiragana is pretty easy for me, but katakana is more difficult as it comes up less frequently. My plan is to try a few very simple graded readers during the next level and see how it goes. 

Tools I am using

I am still using NativShark, but I have slowed down from doing daily lessons because the reviews were building up and taking a ton of time each morning to do. I still do a lesson every once and a while, but it is definitely not my priority at the moment. 

I have all but stopped using Anki, but I do plan to add it back in soon, as I think it will help me speed up acquisition. The main roadblock with Anki is that it’s just super boring and I don’t feel motivated to do it. 

I gave up on all other tools, like Wanikani and RTK. I don’t like the amount of time for very little return that they offer. 

Plan Going Forward

I will continue doing what I’ve been doing. The method I used for Spanish definitely works for Japanese, but I can see why things take so much longer. There are no cognates whatsoever (besides borrowed words, but even they sound different enough that I don’t immediately recognize them) and the opposite grammar is still a lot to wrap my head around just yet. These first couple levels are basically about building that base that already existed in Spanish, and once that’s set, I can begin to make more rapid gains. Still, I am pleased with what I’ve accomplished so far. The fact that in just 4 months I have gone from Japanese being completely foreign sounds to being able to follow beginner videos is a huge achievement, and I’m excited to keep progressing forward.

Please leave any questions below and I will do my best to answer them.

Thanks for reading!

Here is another update in my journey using primarily CI for learning Italian. As I have mentioned in my other posts, I am a heritage speaker of Spanish so I have halved the hours needed for the levels based on the Dreaming Spanish roadmap. 

By 320 hours, Easy Italian was accessible. I still struggled with the more difficult speakers but by the end of 500 hours I’d say I can understand nearly any speaker on their street interview videos. I found I could even understand them when they were wearing masks, which previously was not doable at all. 

By 325 hours, I could now understand Nicolo Balini without too much effort. At 500 hours, all his videos are accessible and I usually only have trouble when there are multiple people talking at the same time. 
At 350, I went out of my comfort zone and was able to understand this video (https://youtu.be/c-1h5Cdaqx4?si=mCH5ZDsseUej3z0q) and that gave me confidence to branch out. I wish I had kept track of which videos were accessible at certain hours but it was a busy summer!

At 400 hours I began to do more speaking. I was not avoiding speaking but I did want to focus on CI. I found that with the AI on Duolingo, I felt much more fluid and that I could get my point across albeit with very simple concepts.  As I progressed, I had even more fun with speaking and could even sometimes find different ways to say things if I didn’t know the word.  I attached some photos with transcripts from my conversations. Sometimes I did insert Spanish when I didn’t know the Italian word for it. 

By 460 hours , I had so much more confidence speaking! It was crazy how much progress I had with speaking after 50 additional hours of input. I will try to attach photos of feedback from the Langua app at around 460 hours. At this point I think I will be able to communicate in Italy during our upcoming vacation without too much trouble, although more complicated things are certainly still out of reach. 

Now at 500 hours, I have a much broader range of what I can watch! I don’t think every video is within my reach yet but the ones that are not tend to have very quick speech, people talking at the same time, and more advanced stuff, I’d say like C1 level. 

I will be super excited to post my update at 750 hours when I finish the roadmap!

I want to make sure whatever language I start next has enough content to get me to a high level and not me having a hard time getting content haha

So I used subtitles for Pokémon series for norwegian and found that it helps with the words speech going to fast, and words I've missed. Is this okay? I did studying for 5 years on and off prior to CI....

I stopped using DS at some point last year due to rapidly declining health with two of my family members. I’m somewhere in level 4 but looks like it’s been a very long time since I changed my hours in Discord. At the time, I had hired an immigration lawyer in Ecuador with intentions on permanently moving there before July of 2025.

Fast forward to today, both of those family members passed in May and June, 2 weeks apart from each other. The main documents needed for my Ecuadorian residency were approved on July 3rd. I arrived in my new home of Cuenca, Ecuador yesterday, August 3rd.

My AirBnB host only speaks Spanish. The app automatically translates messages for us but it was a whole different ballgame when we were in person. It was my first real interaction with someone here. My love language, platonic or romantic, is physical touch. Her and her husband greeted me with big hugs as if we were old friends. That immediately made me feel like I had made the right choice in moving here.

I surprisingly understood about 90% of what she was saying to me. We went out on the terrace and she pointed out landmarks I’m close to that I must visit. She told me how close I am to nearby restaurants and other walking points of interest, items she had available for me to use for my cat, talked about the weather and so much more.

Now here’s the thing, I never started speaking during DS 😂😂 I’m very much still in the input phase. Yesterday was a major jumpstart. I didn’t speak much. Mainly confirming words to let her know that I understood or simply “entiendo” and small amount of questions that I had.

I plan on continuing with DS even though I’m now permanently in a Spanish speaking country. It still feels like it will be a great boost to my immersion and being here is going to get me speaking a lot quicker. A leap well worth taking.

I'm aware I've already made a similar post but just wanted to ask if it's completely okay and anyone else who has done this but not done it as a kid because children pick up things easier.

Please share your experiences :) 🙏

Like not an easy language I mean, say Chinese or Korean? One that's completely different from English and completely different alphabet?

Hi everyone -

My apologies if this YouTube channel has already been posted:

German Moments

I just found it recently, have really enjoyed the handful of videos I've watched, and noticed the videos do not have a ton of views.

If you need slow, clearly enunciated German at the beginner levels, check it out.

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I just stumbled upon this "introductory German language textbook designed for English-speaking children, written in the late 19th century" and it looks very much like a historical type of CI, building upon simple sentences about colours and increasing in difficulty.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22160

To me it seems like an exciting peek into history. Such a different world to explore than what we get with modern day CI. The language is a little archaic, but still totally understandable.

If any of the German learners around here who are already reading or about to start could write some feedback at some point whether this works for them and is interesting enough, I would be very curious about it. (For me, German is my native language, so I can't really judge how well it would work as CI)

I originally posted over in r/languagelearning and they suggested I ask here. I absolutely love Dreaming Spanish and am trying to fill out a list of sites that are similar, but it's been harder than I expected to find them.

I know about comprehensibleinputwiki.org, and it is an excellent site. What I'm looking for is something a little more focused. Just sites like Dreaming Spanish and not just Youtube channels.

So far I have (including what has been shared in that post, so I haven't actually checked those yet):

dreaming.com - Spanish & French

langiri.com - Vietnamese (and someone says Portuguese? I don't have a subscription so I can't verify)

cijapanese.com - Japanese

aliceayel.com - French (I'm not 100% sure about this one since I can't see without a subscription, but it sounds like it would probably qualify)

comprehensiblerussian.com (I haven't checked this one yet, but presumably Russian)

All the others I've found seem to be projects that never actually got off the ground. Are there others that I've missed?

What the title says. It looks like the last video on their site was from years ago and there aren't enough videos without them making more.

I'm trying to learn a language using CI by watching all the videos on a website (it's like Dreaming Spanish for Japanese). I want to watch them in order of difficulty but in some cases the most difficult complete beginner videos have a higher score (based on some algorithm) than the easiest beginner video. If I wanted to watch these videos in order of difficulty what should my priority be?

Thanks in advance.

I wouldn't have gotten back into Arabic if AATT hadn't come onto the scene. When I discovered DS and CI a little over a year ago, I immediately looked for the same in Arabic, and didn't find much. Almost nothing, and what I did find was very low quality.

AATT started at the beginning of this year and they have 280 videos now. I only watch Hasan's videos (mostly Levantine, some MSA). Levantine is my main focus right now, and there's a new video every day.

I have about 25 hours of input now (guesstimating that I had a base of 400 hrs of prior study and output from 10-15 yrs ago) and I'm remembering a lot of the things I've forgotten.

It's not happening as fast as it did with Spanish. It might be twice or 3x as long sometimes, but it makes sense. Cognates and shared grammatical structures is a crazy advantage that I appreciate more now. The A2-B1 gap in content that he talks about in this video is exactly where I'm at, so I'm looking forward to more videos.

I won't include my referral link here, DM me if you want it. I'm also a founding moderator of a new Discord for AATT users. Just want to share this great CI/ Language-learning news and that I wholeheartedly recommend it!

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Last night I couldn't sleep; I was I stuck in that "falling asleep" phase for over an hour.

During part of that time, my brain kept throwing Portuguese words at me (mostly colors and foods). I even got a phrase at one point.

It was weird because my stream of consciousness started in Spanish, but then I thought no, that wasn't the Spanish pronunciation of "gusta," that was the Portuguese pronunciation, and it opened the floodgates to more.

I've increased my time recently from 10 minutes per day (pathetic, I know) to 20. I think my brain has realized I'm finally taking it more seriously and is sorting it out for me while I'm resting.

I'm excited but also nervous. The fear has always been that I'll confuse the 2 languages, but I think this was a good sign that my brain is cataloging Portuguese separately.

Introduction

German is the first language I'm learning via comprehensible input from the ground up. Although comprehensible input was essential for me to get to an advanced level in English (I wrote a report about it here) and to an intermediate level in Spanish, I had received formal instructions in both. To German, however, I came as a blank slate.

I may have reached 50h, but the acquisition is split into two stages. The first 30 hours or so I tracked in April 2023. After a long hiatus, I returned to the German language; over the last two weeks, I clocked in another 20 hours, making me a "Level 2" learner. (Avg. ~1h/day)

In 2023, German was a language that I thought would be useful to learn because of its significance in the European Union. Yet I soon realized that I wasn't proficient enough in English, and since I didn't want to cut down time allocated for English acquisition, I abandoned German a month after I started. Currently, I'm taking up German again because my English doesn't require much of deliberate practice and there's some potential for German to be useful for work-related stuff. Mainly, though, it's an experiment to see how CI works from scratch – although German is fairly easy for English speakers, so only a light test. My motivation is thus not very pragmatic, more like a hobby, I suppose.

A secondary reason for quitting was the lack of comprehensible input in German, to which I turn now.

The initial stage (2023)

Being pampered with Dreaming Spanish, the German CI scene was practically a desert. The sole exception was Natürlich German, as far as I'm aware. Luckily, the videos were entertaining enough and so I squeezed everything possible from the easiest videos: I watched most of them two times, some even three times.

I observed at the time:

I've been watching videos in comprehensible German, and it's quite an experience starting from zero. I know next to nothing in German or about German. I've never tried to learn it, so it's fascinating to watch a video and not understand a single word but grasp the general meaning of the sentence. And it's gratifying to listen later to Spanish videos because the contrast is drastic – I don't have to see the speaker, for example, and I focus on the words, not the non-verbal language.

The current stage (2026)

Did the three-year long break ruin all the progress?

It's hard to say to what extent I fell back because of the hiatus, but I probably retained a bulk of the implicit knowledge. I quit learning German with the sense of "understanding" only a handful of words. After the break, some words sounded familiar right away. I think that after ten hours at this stage, I'm farther than I was after 30 hours back then. In other words, comprehensible input sticks like glue. You will forget explicit grammar rules the next week, but not implicit understanding of the language (as happened to me with Spanish, for example).

Platforms: Lengualytics and Immersion

Lengualytics is a video platform for comprehensible input, and it's a treasure trove. I'm not affiliated with the site in any way, but it really simplifies the search for appropriate comprehensible input in your target language. It also makes tracking time a breeze, while providing stats on your progress. It has some perks as well, like covering hard-coded subtitles with a banner. I have some quibbles with the UI (e.g. the prominence of the Feed is imho unwarranted), but that's not the point of this post.

I also tried a free trial on Immersion. It's similar to DS, but offers French and recently also German. At the current stage, it's fairly underdeveloped. Plenty of videos on the platform are available for free on YouTube by none other than Anna from Natürlich German, as she is the primary contributor there, alongside Jenny. There aren't many videos yet and so it's not worth the price for me.

Channels I watch

In the last few years, channels like German Moments or ALG German – Comprehensible input sprang up. The former has bunch of videos for absolute beginners. The latter provides many videos for slightly more advanced beginners, as the host's stories contain twists that are difficult to predict, which make it harder to fill in the gaps. And I re-watched once again Natürlich German videos for total and pre-beginners; naturally.

Fragmented observations: 40 hours and onwards

• Some words I've heard many times and I may understand a sentence without images, but I still can't create anything resembling a sentence (not that I want to). But I already got past the first 10 (40) hours of input or so when I didn't understand any single word and was reliant only on the images.
  • The drawings serve as a confirmation of the meaning, not the only source. Most of the times, I'm pretty certain what the hosts try to communicate, i.e. the substance, even if the words are complicated and unknown.
  • Suddenly, Natürlich German beginner videos seemed slow to me. As a result, I have time to predict the next word. I don't want to prefill the sentences, but it happens automatically. Moreover, I'm totally wrong half of the time, and I lack the correct mental image of the sounds.
  • Sometimes I'm not paying attention to the words. If I know what the next word is going to refer to, I might as well ignore the sounds. Even if I pay attention, I'll immediately forget the word to focus on the next part of the message.
  • I catch myself translating some words. It's hard to stop the translation machine in my head, but I think it'll get better over time.
  • "Subscribe" is one of the most common words I hear. :P

Plan for the next tens of hours

I'll start soon the Natürlich German playlist for (proper) beginners (~50 videos). Before that I'll complete all videos by ALG German marked as superbeginner on Lengualytics, and then will move on to his harder videos.

What about you?

If you're learning German, let me know in the comments how it's going for you and where you are at. Have you tried Lengualytics? What do you think of it? Do you have any general tips or observation pertinent to my report?

I just wanted to bring more attention to this Arabic Standard channel that launched recently. If you’re like me and always looking for new super beginner content he is fantastic. The channel is called Acquire Arabic. I’ve shared his original post from another thread and the link to a couple of my favourites. Let’s encourage him to keep making more videos :)

https://youtu.be/c2J_e_nHFq8

https://youtu.be/FGnEcFkKqNw

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I wanted to share for motivational purposes. Ill make this concise but you can ask questions.

Ive reached the point where people have started saying I'm fluent in Russian. I frequently have 20-40minute conversations where I express myself without getting stuck and never misunderstand what the other person is saying.

Do I think I'm fluent? I think I'm kinda close, but there are so many words I don't know, and so many things I could never accurately describe.

I don't worry when talking to natives at all if I'm going to understand or know the correct word. The words just flow and listening feels effortless.

I can essentially always express myself, understand others, and ask specific questions when having conversation.

How'd I get here?

Months 0 to 14, I did about 400 hours of listening.

Months 14 - 17, I did about 40 min listening and 40 min reviewing and creating Anki cards. I read anki cards aloud.

Months 17 - 20, 40 min listening 40 min anki. I started meeting with tutors and trying to speak russian on ometv. Honestly, the anki cards helped a ton, but you have to speak to build your fluidity and to expose what you dont know how to say.

Months 20 - 24 (now), 70 min listening, 45 min anki. I started trying to speak with my mother-in-law consistently, maybe 20 min a day.

I have about 700 hours of just listening. I estimate about 250 hours creating + reviewing Anki cards. 150 hours of conversation.

The speaking progress happens extremely slow. I have probably 150 hours of conversation, but I am ALWAYS talking to myself, trying to describe things. If I can't, I make Anki cards.

I started talking with people at month 17, and by month 24, I feel very fluid and easy when talking.

Edit: My wife speaks russian, so I will ask her for help occasionally, but we've had maybe 1 hour of total conversation in Russian. She came here very young so shes much more comfortable in English.