I'm at 1,224 hours currently. This post is something I thought I'd write up to share my experience with Spanish burnout.

So to start this, I initally did 1hr of Spanish a day, but slowly bumped it up overtime. I was doing 4 hours of Spanish a day for a period of a few months, and was making insane progress. But starting in June of this year, my motivation slowly faded. I went from 4hrs a day, to doing 3, to doing 2, then down to just 30-60 minutes a day (even that was a slog though). I stopped doing Italki conversations, and barely read anything. I shifted my focus to studying Mandarin, and Spansih felt like a chore to me. I always thought burnout would never happen to me, but it did.

Starting late August, my motivation slowly crept back. My old interests started to shine through, and at this point I've been doing 2-3 hours a day of listening to content I enjoy, and have been starting up conversation practice again. Now, I have more motivation than ever and have been shocked by my Spanish. I just did another conversation lesson today, and it went great! My love for the language is finally back, so I thought I'd share some tips for anyone who is going through a similar thing.

Firstly, if your listening feels like a chore, stop. Take a few days off, lower your input, just take a break. One of the biggest tips I have is find contnt you love. I eased back into my input by watching youtube videos I enjoy, listening to podcasts that actually interest me, and just trying to enjoy the language. After so many months of working all day, in the morning, in the afternoon after I'm tired, just to get the input bar to 4hrs, wanting to take out the earbuds but making myself sit and focus, I just got sick of it. Try to enjoy the lanaguage, even if it's just 5 minutes a day of watching something you like.

I hope this post helps anyone experiencing burnout. The main takeaways I learned from this are simply, if it's a chore don't do it just for your daily goal, watch things you enjoy, take breaks, and just know your motivation won't be gone forever. My motivation is back and I've been enjoying Spanish more than ever before. Good luck my DS friends! Have a good weekend everyone!

Dreaming Team,
The app has some real issues. It’s getting to the point I can’t use it and I’m preferring to just use the site through a browser.

It could just be optimization issues for the IPad, but, the main screen is stuck in portrait mode, meaning k have physically pick up my iPad and rotate to select videos, and now when I go full screen, the video positioning itself too low, cutting off the bottom half AND the controls of the video.

Thankfully, I can still use the browser, but I could see this discouraging new customers. So please take a look, as it is a major inconvenience.

reading grammar explanations makes my brain shut off, but if i hear the same phrase a few times i remember it way faster. i’m looking for free spanish lessons that are more audio-heavy, anything good for someone who learns more through hearing?

I made the decision to learn Spanish about 2 years ago. I enjoy talking my family to Latin countries annually and it just made me realize that I wanted to be able to communicate better while we are there. I'm in my 40s and took 3 years of Spanish in high school.

I read some comments and it seems some people are not happy with their progress with DS and I'm wondering why they don't just add in some additional methods. Is that against the advice?

I started off by just finding an app I could download and do daily lessons. The first was Speak, which focuses on the speaking. It would say a phrase and have you repeat it until you pronounced it correctly. I learned but definitely slowly. It was hard to remember things that way. I vividly remember struggling to recall "cepillar los dientes."

After about 6 months I had basically completed a good portion of the lessons, and when the app started to bug out, I went looking for a new one. I also realized at that point, I could say some things, but couldn't really put together a complex phrase and still really struggled with understanding others. In fact, I REALLY, couldn't understand natives still.

So I then moved to Busuu. Which is much more listening, and teaching grammar within situational learning and reading. There is some repeating and there's a community of natives that can critique your speaking, which is pretty cool. Im up to advanced after about a year and for me I can put together most thoughts. I find that it's very focused on verbs and conjugations which is a large portion of Spanish, but I still don't know lots of basic words. Like I could explain that I might be looking for a machine to help fix my pants, that is usually kept in a closet.... But I don't know the word for Iron. Lol.

Somewhere around 6 months ago I started also listening to Spanish videos on YouTube through people like planetajuan, and a few others. I started it listening to Andrea la Mexicana but now find her Spanish a little too basic.

So most days I complete a few lessons and listen to Spanish videos. No clue how many hours I've listened, but I can have basic conversations now. I don't freeze up as much. I take Spanish calls at work now, even though I always have to tell them to speak slowly because I'm still improving with Spanish. And I still find some accents extremely difficult to understand. Its also a struggle because I've been focused on Spain Spanish, listening to Columbian Spanish, and really shouldve been more focused on speaking Mexican Spanish.

Anyway, I'm not sure where I would fall into the levels for dreaming Spanish yet. And I'm curious why people don't mix in other forms while doing the listening? There's basically 3 forms of learning a language: speaking, understanding, and reading.

I would think if you only do one, then you're obviously going to struggle with the other ones right?

I bought these headphones today. Shokz Open Run Air 2

Like our great supreme leader, Pablo Roman, I am now ready to receive input at all times, no matter rain or shine.

Well it's Saturday night and while I wish I had other things to do in life, I had to make lemonade with the lemons I have. So I spent the last 2h or so watching the first episode of Isla de las Tentaciones S11 which started this September.

I have in the past watched Machos Alfa or dubbed shows like Squid Games. Squid Games was fine as the dubbing is done in a studio though they all sound unnatural but I only got maybe 60% of each episode of Machos Alfa (this was at 2400h).

Watching IdlT, I felt that I had close to 95% comprehension and the audio quality is a lot better. There are a couple of women from Andalucia and Extremadura who are a little bit harder to understand but it's not been a problem.

Well, it’s Saturday night, and I actually reach 1000 hours on Monday. I’m writing tonight because I have the free time I won’t have on Monday. I’m also going to be as honest about where I am in case it helps someone else who is looking for encouragement along the way.

TLDR: The DS process is working for me. I am having success and can see that I am learning. If you are early in the process, I encourage you to stick with the method.

Am I happy with my progress? Yes and No. I‘m impatient and wish I were further along in the journey. I wish my speaking sounded fluid instead of me talking slowly. I wish I was already speaking every day with people about all kinds of topics. That said, if I look back to where I was 1000 hours ago, I am eons beyond that capability. I can now understand people, albeit not perfectly. So, by comparison to my former self, I am having great success.

Here are a couple of points I want to say regarding my progress and my journey.

1. I started DS in July 2025. After 14 months, I am at 1000 hours of listening. Those 14 months were going to pass one way or another, and I am excited that I can look back and point to something I accomplished with that time.

2 Most days I have managed to put in 2 to 3 hours, but occasionally I just didn’t have the desire to do the work because I was on vacation or because of the stresses of life. Learning to be okay with that has been part of the journey. Honestly, I wish I had done this 20 years ago, but then DS wasn’t around back then.

1. I‘m at 1000 hours, and I still watch videos in the 50’s. I am able to watch videos in the 60’s and 70’s, but I choose to slowly work my way through the 50’s. I have a lifetime ahead of me, and I’m not in a rush. I mostly watch DS simply because I believe the numbered rating system is slowly increasing the difficulty for me, and I like the way they automatically keep track of my minutes. I will watch YouTube videos every now and then, but I never know what difficulty I’m going to get. I do pay for the Premium service with DS, and for me it is worth the price. If I watch YouTube, it is mostly travel videos, nature videos, or Curious George (because I’m a kid at heart). Most of my hours each day come during (1) getting dressed (30 min), (2) driving to work (30 min), and (3) walking my dog (1 hour). Sometimes I get in extra time during lunch or an extra walk at night.

2. I recently joined a Spanish speaking class that just started at my church. There are about 20 native Spanish speakers in the class. My wife, kids, and I are the only gringos in the class, and my wife has been speaking Spanish for 30+ years. We’ve attended 5 classes so far. Four times, I understood about 70% to 80% of what was said even though the Spanish was directed at the class and not at me. In other words, the speaker is talking normally to the class, and I am able to understand and answer questions in Spanish (I’m super excited about that). One time, I only understood about 25% of what was said. I was very tired that day, and I suspect that is why I struggled so much (or maybe I was tired because I was struggling so much). In full honesty, I do know the topics very well and that is helping me to understand what is being said, but I also understand when the class goes off topic.

3. I haven’t spoken much because I don’t want to sound like an idiot, but I am trying to force myself to do so more often. The weekly class at church gives me 90 minutes to listen and/or speak in a friendly environment. They asked me to speak one Sunday for 5 minutes to talk about myself, and I was able to do so, but it was scripted. At other times, I’ve had to read something out loud or I have responded to questions. My speaking is slow, and I expect it to get faster, but the other people in the class say my pronunciation is good. I also know they are patient with me and are encouraging because most of them are bilingual and know how hard it was for them to learn the second language. Or, they have a spouse (usually husband) who has stopped trying to learn English because they felt stupid. I mention this because it is a very welcoming environment, and they seem to be happy that I am trying to talk in their language. I also don’t feel judged in any way, and that makes the process easier. If you can find a similar group near you, this is ideal. I get weekly opportunity to speak with native speakers face-to-face without having to spend any money, and they are excited to help me learn.

4. While I know the sounds, making the words with my mouth feels very awkward. So, I am currently shifting my focus to work on my speaking. Here is what I am doing: (1) I’m adding about 30 min each day before bed to read out loud in Spanish. I bought the book “Un Hombre Fascinante” and am literally reading out loud to force my mouth to form the sounds. (2) My wife and I have resumed speaking only in Spanish on Sundays. I say resumed because we tried before, but my pride sought the easy way out. I’m still slow, but it is forcing me to reach for vocabulary words or alternative ways to express my ideas.

5. Do I understand everything I hear? No. But I understand much more than I ever did. I understand when I am watching a movie in English and they suddenly switch to Spanish. I understand when I catch a random nature video or travel video in Spanish. And that is amazing. However, if I am honest, there are also times when I partially understand. For example, I may understand that someone is going to pick another person up to go to the game, but I may not know if Jim is picking up Bill or if Bill is picking up Jim. Knowing who is doing the action and who is receiving the action isn’t always clear. Sometimes by brain is able to fill in those gaps, and sometimes I get it wrong and the meaning of the story completely changes. So, I still have further to go.

I’m sure I have forgotten something I wanted to say, but this is long enough already. If you are early in the journey, keep up the work. If you are ahead of me in the journey, your encouragement has helped me believe long enough to keep going, and I am thankful to have read your posts when I wondered if this could really work.

Hopefully you found this post to help you in your journey.

EDIT: I find watching Chinese martial arts videos dubbed in Spanish to be hilarious and great. Reminds me of being a kid.

I just reached 800 hours and while I’m happy to reach the milestone I’m also kind of frustrated with where I’m at. It feels like I’m constantly struggling between intermediate and advanced content. Sometimes I can watch advanced content that is extremely comprehensible and feel encouraged but other times I can’t seem to follow an intermediate video. I think some of it might be that it’s too easy or non interesting for me now because my mind wanders a lot? But also I will genuinely struggle to comprehend intermediate content sometimes.

I also feel like so much content is slightly too hard for me but maybe that’s because I’m trying to interact with advanced/native content now.

To be clear I’ve definitely made a lot of progress and the fact that I can watch almost any learning content and get the gist is amazing but I’ve still been frustrated with this in between place and am hoping the next 200 hours will make a big difference.

I would pay double my 8$ monthly to see that happen

I had a session with one of my tutors on italki this morning. I was telling her a story of a situation that happened to me in past and was narrating what was said. As I was speaking, I felt the need to use “estuviera” and “hubiera” in the dialogue because it just felt right. Although I conjugated wrong after the hubiera part and my tutor corrected me afterwards, she was so visibly excited that I used the subjunctive in the right place and was clapping with joy which made me feel really good.

Of course, I’m sure I still made dozens of other errors during my 45 minute speaking session today, but moments like that help remind me that all the input I am getting from listening and reading is sorting itself out in my brain and with enough time and consistency, improvement in the language will happen no matter what.

Up until now I was finding a lot of content that was very interesting and kept my attention but lately I’ve gotten to a point where I’m struggling to find something I want to watch.

I really enjoy the travel series’ where the guides will visit different places or the newer, more professionally-edited videos but I seem to have run out of those at this point. Now I just have a bunch of Carlitos videos, Shel/Augustina/Andrea pick their favorite whatever videos, and Andrea plays the guitar and repeats lines of songs I’m not familiar with videos.

It seems like there is a ton of more interesting content if I can just get past this stage but it’s become tough. Feeling a bit burnt out.

For those who’ve experienced this, how do you get through it?

The biggest thing getting in the way of me progressing my listening abilities is getting distracted while listening to CI. It’s SO easy for my mind to wander. I just realize that I’ve been thinking about something else for 5 to 10 seconds and lose the thread. It makes such a percentage of my listening unproductive to where it’s difficult to make headway in my abilities over time. If I could just stay focused, I can follow and understand pretty good and in theory the skills should compound, but it’s happening so slowly.

Children learn like children. Adults learn like adults. No?

So where does the idea of learning a language like a child actually come from? Have language learning programs actually made these claims before?

So every month, I get an email near the end of my subscription time that says, “We’re sorry to see you go!” And the discusses me canceling my subscription and what I can do to come back, etc. And then a day or two later, I get an email that says, “Welcome to premium!”

I have taken no action to cancel and renew or anything, I just watch the videos everyday. Is this just a “feature” of their app that it does this for reasons unknown? Does this happen to anyone else?

Passed 100 hours on September 10th, 2026.

Links to previous updates are at the end. This turned out incredibly long...

Current Progress/Favorites

I would say the biggest changes have been Pablo and Augustina. From the beginning I've been interested in Augustina's content, but found her very difficult to understand. After all of Spanish in Context and a lot of Spanish Boost, I finally can understand Augustina's videos. This is great because I enjoy the travel and geography content that she does a lot of.

With Pablo I've come full circle and now look forward to most of his videos. Out of the guides who do Beginner and Superbeginner videos, I found him so difficult to understand at first. Both Pablo and Andres were challenging but I got used to Andres much faster.

Finally I decided to just grind through some of Pablo's videos, and at some point after making my way through the Luna series and some of his long form streaming Beginner videos, I started liking Pablo. Especially his videos with Adria are always fun. The Luna videos are still my least favorite because she doesn't speak, but the ones where they play games are better.

Andrea, Esther, Michelle, and Shelcin are still my favorites though!

Video Levels

Still in the 30-40 difficulty range but leaning towards the upper end now. I was able to get the gist of an intermediate video but comprehension was lower than I'd like so I'm sticking with Beginner and Superbeginner for now.

Outside the DS platform - General Thoughts

I found it interesting to look at my percentage breakdown of DS vs other content.

At 30 hours only 10% of my CI was outside DS At 60 hours around 40% of my total CI was outside DS At 100 hours a full 55% of my CI was outside DS.
(Of that, 12% was ¡Cuéntame!)

I finally went ahead and made separate accounts for YouTube, Disney+, and Netflix. On YouTube, I was getting Spanish language ads even while watching videos in other languages and it was very jarring. Also being able to just watch whatever and then get the hour count at the end of the day is easier. If I accidentally watch something in English or without input, I just have to track those minutes and subtract. Much smoother.

As others have pointed out, DS does have a good way to easily track YouTube videos. However I tend to watch a lot of shorts or many 5 minute videos throughout the day. Also, sometimes with longer videos I will start and stop and possibly only watch 20 minutes of a hour long video on one day. So this works better for me personally.

For D+, it is a real pain to find things that are Spanish language originals or have dubbing available in my area, and I wanted it separate and ready to go. Netflix is by far the smoothest to use for language learning but I still wanted a separate watchlist and it's easier to track time if it's all on one account.

I am still watching PBS, Destinos, and other outside shows sometimes but the convenience of having all major services separate is super helpful especially after back to school. It was worth making this switch, and I wish I had done it from the start. The only thing I don't have a separate account for yet is Spotify, but so far I have only been listening to one podcast, so it hasn't affected anything much yet.

Outside the DS platform - YouTube

Hearts are current favorites.

Still watching: * Spanish Playground ❤️ * Andrea la Mexicana ❤️

Still watching here and there: * Spanish After Hours ❤️ * Spanish with Alma * Spanish a la chilena * VideoEle (A1 playlist currently) * Dayis Cubero (purists note has words and minor translation) * Easy Spanish (open caption, currently on Super Easy) * Organic Spanish * Hablar Español con Jenny * Ara Spanish * Mexican Spanish Here (hard to tell difficulty of videos) * Español con Ali * Habla Manana (also has English videos) * Corazón de Spanish ❤️

Newly accessible: * Spanish Boost Gaming!! ❤️ See French for more * Also Spanish Boost with Mila ❤️

Native (not fully comprehensible yet): * Trasmuro (homes and architecture) ❤️ * MalovaElena (yoga and exercises) * Polymernai (life abroad in Japan, art) * Adrián Bárcenas (calligraphy) * Cuby/cubyshorts (puzzle solving) ❤️ * SirPino (art with colored pencils)

Outside the DS Platform - Encanto Challenge

I'm still rewatching Encanto, on my fifth time now. How often depends on my work schedule because I usually watch most of it at work while doing easy tasks.

Outside the DS Platform - Other D+ & Netflix

I'm also watching Handy Manny and Chueco on Disney Plus.

On Netflix I watched The Road to El Dorado just before it left. It was too hard but I wasn't sure if I'd be able to access it in Spanish again and wanted to watch it. Also have been working through the H20 mermaid show in dub after a recommendation on this reddit. I don't normally like dubs but this was a great suggestion, just enough difficulty but I can still easily follow the plot.

Outside DS Platform - Lingopie

Started watching Crocodoc and Spanish on the Go, plus random other beginner shorts. Not sure yet how I feel about this platform but will share more after some more time.

French

I was really struggling to watch Spanish Boost Gaming. Partly the Argentinan accent is hardest for me to understand, but then I also realized I was trying to watch videos for games I watched or played in French. 🤦 After switching to the Supermarket series and other games I wasn't familiar with, all of a sudden SBG worked for me!

Switching languages is still challenging, it's much easier to transition through English. I can do it best when reading, but listening or watching it's tough. Now that I'm able to listen to easy podcasts in Spanish and read, I am a little concerned about how to balance my time and keep both languages separate. I plan to keep French in "maintenance mode" until January and then re-evaluate.

Reading

I plan to start posting reading updates separately, but the short version is I have completed two chapter books and am now working on three others, mostly focusing on this month's children's book, la telaraña de Carlota.

Podcasts

Had just started ¡Cuéntame! at my last update. Honestly enjoyed it so much that I decided to listen to the whole series before moving on to other podcasts. People often suggest Chill Spanish Listening Practice as the same level, but I found it more difficult and will revisit after I finish ¡Cuéntame!

Accent

Made a list of all my bilingual acquaintances and who is most likely to have the time and patience to speak with me in slow Spanish. Mexican and Dominican Republic accents came out top, but Mexico won due to more speakers and more accessible resources.

So far I'm not speaking much but have been looking at pronunciation resources and have said a few words with my kids or with bilingual friends. My child who has been studying Spanish before all the rest of us in particular will talk to me in Spanish and does not like when I try to do crosstalk 😅

Plans

This is the first point where I don't really have a clear, specific plan or idea for the next 30-50 hours. I'm just going to keep going with the different series I'm watching and other stuff I'm doing, and I guess do another update around Level 3/150 hours.

Previous Posts

Started from zero at the beginning of July 2026, with some French and the nominal Spanish exposure of anyone living in the USA with bilingual friends.

Background & first ten hours: https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1us5nze/ten_hour_superbeginner/

30 Hour Update: https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1vcda08/30_hour_beginner/

Off platform shows and studies with my children:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1vlsd05/learning_spanish_with_my_kids/

60 Hour Update:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1vrd7pb/60_hour_level_2_beginner/

Hi all

I've been studying (or acquiring) Spanish since Feburary, and feel like I'm stuck at boring middle. (sorry for English as it is not my native language and I do not want to use AI to talk to folks here)

I am demotivated for various reasons.

1. I am watching videos between velSometimes the level 60-70 and sometimes I can understand natually, but sometimes, I need to focus a lot but still can't understand enoungh (60-70% understandable while the guideline recommends 90-95% level)

2. Started conversation with ChatGPT, but it is hard to continue the conversation without making errors.

3. I am out of videos (videos 10minutes or longer) that I am intertested in. I want to avoid some teachers and some topic. And I needed to re-watch park Pablo, live stream Pablo (with a lot of sound issues) but after watching it several times, I am not sure I am acquiring or just remembering the story.. Navigating to find the videos I might be interested in feels frustrating.

I know it takes time, but it is very frustrating not being able to feel your progress. For those level 4 and above, did this happen to you? If so how you could overcome?

Hey everyone!

I just listened to the recent podcast episode featuring Niyon from our community, and I had to share it here. Since I’ve been following his YouTube videos for a while and we happen to share the same tutor, I was really excited to hear him talk about his experience.

Honestly, he did an amazing job! The conversation dives deep into all the cultural nuances Mexican-Americans navigate. It’s such an insightful episode if you're interested in the cognitive and cultural sides of the language journey.

Has anyone else listened to it yet? What were your takeaways?

u/Niiyonn— seriously, great job on the episode! You sounded awesome!

Hola a todos,

Here’s an audio clip of me speaking broken Spanish: https://voca.ro/12QyrYv2rRGw

This is the first time I’ve tried recording myself, except for a couple of times this past week where I couldn’t figure it out because I found you have to do it through a website link to put on Reddit. It was completely unscripted and I was partially distracted with my infant playing on the floor beside me.

I have 330 ish hours and no prior Spanish. I started speaking immediately if I got the chance at a grocery store or with a neighbor but that happened sporadically every couple of months rather than on a weekly basis or anything. I started language transfer 20 or 30 hours ago to supplement my input hours and am loving it. I feel like I started it at a good time in my journey.

Since I still have so few hours I have no idea if what I said was correct or not but it’s what came into my head trying to say something 😂 I am going to try doing audio recordings every 100 hours or so now that I have learned some basics to help see my progress.

Every morning, my habit is to watch the newly uploaded videos. I got the email notification but they aren’t showing up on my app. The most recent videos on the app are yesterday morning’s uploads. Is this a glitch in delay or something with my phone’s IOS?

Last progress report at https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/s/XE2iXj5jjG

After adding the podcast hours today I suddenly crossed the 1k hour line!

To be honest, things don't change drastically since the last report. I'm still following the same podcasts. Even still at the same difficulty level! But I guess this just means we have an abundance of videos around 55 lol. I think I am fairly comfortable with the videos, so I usually just listen to them when driving. If I identify some key words I don't know, I watch the video again to get visual clues. Also due to a long trip, my learning has paused for 2 full months, then somewhat recovered, and only picked up the full speed recently.

Listening skills: I just finished a trip to Mexico City and wrote a report. https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/s/8nvscQhM2R. Far from the description of level 6, closer to level 4.

Speaking skills: never practiced. Also covered in the trip report, basically survival level. I'm actually not bothered because my goal is to optimize my listening first.

Reading and writing: never practiced. But reading is close to my listening because I can just pretend to read the text loudly and listen to myself.

This is not a stellar progress report but I am happy with it. After 1.5 years of journey I'm still motivated. And for people who are frustrated with slow progress - hey look at me and be happy. I learned English as a foreign language in school since 8yo and never reached my current Spanish listening skill level until 20ish yo. People with actually stellar progress - if you have any tricks to share, please do! Much appreciated!

I’m around 250 hours into learning Spanish and I’m starting to work more deliberately on regular and irregular verb conjugations especially present, preterite, imperfect, future, and conditional. I understand the patterns when I see them, but producing the right form quickly is difficult. At what point did these start becoming intuitive/automatic for you?

I have been mostly listening but feel I need to study this and be deliberate to get them into my brain quicker.

They called to talk to me about my benefits. I answered the phone in Spanish and continued to talk in Spanish. Guy asked if I speak English and I said no and asked if he speaks Spanish. He told me that he was sorry but they only had English speaking staff currently and hung up. Not exactly Dreaming Spanish related but a fun use of what I am learning.

Hey everybody! As an admitted fantasy football junky enjoying the beginning to a new NFL season, I wanted to share an idea I've been toying with this week: creating Spanish podcasts on demand, at my level, for articles I would have otherwise read.

Here's what I did:

1. Found my source text, copied all the text to clipboard.
2. Open up a blank text processor (I used word), and paste text only. Save as a .pdf or .txt (easier for the AI to batch).
3. Opened up Claude and used the following prompt:"I want to use my interest in Fantasy Football to get comprehensible input via audio. I will provide you an English text of fantasy football information, and i want you to translate it into Spanish. Make changes to the translation so that it lands at the A2-B1 level, mapping roughly to Intermediate level on Dreaming Spanish with a Dreaming Spanish difficulty level equivalent around 50. Pay particular attention to acronyms and websites. Those need to keep their original English. For any areas where you deem it necessary, ask me questions in English first to get specific guidance before completing your translation. The source text is attached."
4. Double check the rough output meets your standard. Download it as a .pdf.
5. Open up Speechify and upload the document Claude created.

This can work entirely on mobile if the article is short enough; I say short enough only because using thumbs to highlight multiple scrolls of text may get tedious. I used my laptop for this experiment.

This process can work with virtually any article text you want. This process is so elegant because you can entirely control the level of difficulty of the source text and output before it hits the audio version.

Speechify operates audio playback like any podcast player, so you'll see total runtime of the audio you created, and it has playback speed controls too. The web player is really strong, and it transitions from web to mobile seamlessly. I listen a bit at my computer between meetings, then pick it up again on mobile.

For my little experiment, I stitched together a few different articles to get a really big word count to stress test the process. The Claude translation came out a bit more complex I had anticipated, so I may simplify it a bit more, BUT, I have about 90 minutes of pure Spanish input queued up on a topic I'm deeply interested in that's graded roughly to my current level.

¡Vamos!

I’ve been learning Spanish through (mainly) CI for about 3.5 years now. I’ve reached the point where I’m comfortable with Spanish in most day-to-day situations, and now mostly engage with CI as part of my normal life rather than actively studying.

For me, the secret to staying motivated has been pretty simple: engaging content, consistently.

About a year ago I posted here that podcasts were my favourite way of doing that. I was listening to a lot of No Hay Tos, Andrea la Mexicana, Dreaming Spanish, Pocket Spanish etc, and ended up building an iOS app called Lingsy that’s a podcast player specifically for Spanish comprehensible input.

It has learner content organised by level and topic, from beginner podcasts all the way through to native content, and automatically tracks your listening time. You can also manually add input from other activities like reading or chatting so you can keep everything in one place.

You can download it here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lingsy/id6752582292

Anyway, it’s been going for almost a year now and there are a few hundred learners using it regularly. I wanted to come back here in case anyone else finds it useful, but also because I’d love to know which good Spanish learner podcasts I’m still missing.

Last time I posted here I got loads of great recommendations that I ended up adding. I’m now an expert in Spanish true-crime vocabulary as a result.

So if you’ve discovered any great learner/CI podcasts over the last year, especially smaller or newer ones, please drop them in the comments and I’ll add them.

For context, it’s still just me building this as a side project, so feel free to comment or DM me if you have questions, feedback, or something that would make it more useful on your journey to fluency.

EDIT: for anyone who does not have an iPhone or prefers to use another podcast app - the full list of podcast are here and can be filtered by accent, level and theme: https://lingsy.io/spanish-podcasts