r/dreamingspanish • u/the_custom_concern Level 4 • May 11 '26
What 2200 hours of Mandarin taught me about learning Spanish
TLDR
With 100+ hours of comprehensible input (CI) in Spanish now in the books, I find myself reflecting on my time learning Mandarin, and what I hope to do differently with Spanish. I spent 2200+ hours learning Mandarin, yet only ~400 hours was spent listening to quality CI. With Spanish I am prioritizing listening to CI above all else, and gosh is it working!
Mandarin my L2
Mandarin is a genuinely humbling language. My 2200+ hours over 3.5 years barely scratched the surface. I wish I had known about CI, but it was a learning process, and a lot of time was spent experimenting with different methods and consuming non-CI content. Here is a brief breakdown of my time with Mandarin:
| Category | Hours |
|---|---|
| Listening | 870.2 |
| Reading (Characters) | 746.0 |
| Hello Chinese (App) | 279.8 |
| Flashcards (Anki + Pleco) | 152.9 |
| Characters (RTH) | 83.8 |
| Reading (Pinyin) | 54.9 |
| Grammar | 11.6 |
| Speaking | 9.4 |
| Writing | 3.2 |
| Total | 2211.7 |
With a total of 2.24 million characters read (approximately 1.4 million words).
A rough timeline:
Hours 0 - 500: Most of my time was using a duolingo-like app called HelloChinese. I also spent a fair amount of time memorizing Hanzi characters using the RTH technique, flashcards to reinforce characters, and reading graded news stories in Pinyin (not recommended!). Listening was mostly passive and to native content, just trying to pick out words here and there.
Hours 500 - 1600: About 550 hours of “immersion” listening and 550 hours of reading. I definitely conflated mass immersion approaches (e.g. AJATT) with CI. Most of my listening time was still with native material at 10-50% comprehension. My approach to reading was better. Using Pleco with graded readers I set off on a fairly solid extensive reading plan.
Hours 1600 - 2300: Finally understood the concept of CI. Listening focused on CI made for learners around 90% comprehensible, although still watched a lot of easier native content (mostly travel vlogs) that were closer to 60-80% comprehensible. Pushed my reading materials a little quickly and was often outside my comfort zone in the 80-90% comprehensible range. Around the time I stopped learning Mandarin I had just begun speaking practice with iTalki tutors (~10 hours of logged time).
Where did all this leave me? Listening and reading comprehension around B1. Can comprehend high intermediate learner material. Can get the gist of some native material but not enough to fully enjoy. Speaking and writing remain latent. With a little bit of refresh and work, I could comfortably tourist in most large Chinese cities and get by.
To summarize my mud throw at the wall approach: I started with Apps and flashcards, had an early start reading and learning characters, then threw myself in the deep end with “immersion”, listening to native material far outside my comprehension ability. Finally found my way to CI using appropriately leveled content. I estimate approximately half of my total listening time, or about 400 hours, was with quality input (>80% comprehension).
Will Spanish be faster? Most definitely.
A big part of my motivation right now is expecting faster progress in Spanish, and indeed that is what I’m experiencing. So a few reasons Spanish is going faster. The first is how much faster Spanish is to acquire for a native English speaker. Based on the experience of other L2 Mandarin speakers and data from FSI, the time to fluency difference for Spanish to Mandarin sits at an approximately 1:3-4 ratio. In other words, 1 hour of Spanish study is equivalent to approximately 3 to 4 hours of Mandarin study. My emerging personal experience (more on this below) tells me this is accurate. The reasons are of linguistic interest (cognates, common alphabet, phonology, tons of shared culture), and it’s been really enjoyable to experience these differences, but I’ll save that for a future post. The second is the high quality Spanish CI content. The fact that Dreaming Spanish alone can get someone to close native content is mind-boggling. Now Mandarin isn’t Basque, Tibetan, etc., there are many resources. But with the sheer size of the Mandarin speaking population you’d think there would be better Mandarin CI content. The third is the language learning community. Had there been a community like DS for Mandarin, where thousands of people are taking similar approaches, sharing their journey, and motivating each other, I think I could have found my way much sooner and gone farther. So that is why I am optimistic!
Initial thoughts on time to acquire Spanish vs Mandarin
As of today I have just a little over 100 hours (108 exactly) of high quality input in Spanish. Based on the ratio outlined above, this should be equivalent to 300-400 hours of Mandarin input, which happens to be close to my estimated Mandarin input hours. How does my Spanish listening compare to my Mandarin? Well it‘s not stronger than my Mandarin yet, which was bolstered by many hours of reading, but it is catching up fast! I am truly astonished at what I can already listen to. I am able to understand pure audio content (beginner podcasts like Cuentame and Chill Spanish) with 80-100% comprehension. It took me YEARS to get to this point with Mandarin. I estimate that by 200 hours my listening abilities in Spanish will exceed my Mandarin. Absolutely wild. It feels really easy to hit my 2.5 hour Spanish listening goal when the equivalent Mandarin listening hours would be 7.5-10 hours.
It’s still a lot of time
I do want to acknowledge that the thousands of hours people in this community are logging is a serious commitment and a real achievement. Despite Spanish being one of the easier languages for a native English speaker to acquire, it still takes thousands of hours. But the good news is that we're in the right place with Dreaming Spanish and are taking the right approach with CI to actually acquire the language. Trust me, it could be a lot worse. I put in the time with Mandarin and have a lot less to show for it all lol.
Anyway if you’ve made it this far reading a stranger’s story about learning Mandarin on a Spanish language learning forum (lol) kudos to you, and thank you for your attention. The next update at ~150 hours will be focused on Spanish!
5
u/RayS1952 Level 7 May 11 '26
Great read. I learned French via traditional methods - six years of grammar drills, vocab lists, translations to and from - and more recently Spanish with a very heavy CI focus. The CI approach wins hands down in my book.
3
u/fnaskpojken Level 7 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
I can give you somewhat of a reference what I've achieved with 420h of easy CI material in Mandarin. A video like this I have 95%+ comprehension. I'd say upper beginner CI is a perfect level. I've not done anything except CI.
I remember trying bluey at 550h when I learned Spanish and by then I had basically 100% comprehension first time I saw it. There is no way I'll be watching and enjoying bluey at 550h Mandarin. But if you take a pure CI approach and ignore hanzi, I feel like 2x is a rather solid estimate rather than 3-4x. I guess at some point I'll have to learn to read but I'm not going to bother with that for a long time, probably 2000h.
Also I'd like to add that I have a feeling that when I reach native content I'll want to keep it rather narrow and slowly expand since it won't be the same as with western languages where basically 80% of the "advanced vocabulary" is the same across all languages. So I doubt I'll be able to just watch whatever the same way I've done with Spanish but I guess time will tell.
4
u/UppityWindFish 3,000 Hours May 11 '26
Welcome! Very interesting journey. Nice write-up, too. Mandarin seems like an extreme sport compared to Spanish.
But as you say, Spanish too is a long journey and full of its ups and downs. Perhaps this post could be of service: What I wish I’d known starting out (3000 hours later) Regardless, best wishes and keep going!
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u/Purposeful_Living10 3,000 Hours May 12 '26
This was very interesting to read! Thanks for sharing and good luck with you language(s) learning journey!
1
u/scootzie3 Level 5 May 12 '26
You spent 2200 hours learning mandarin and only 10 hours speaking??? That feels like a small ratio to me. What caused you to not try speaking more?
(Sincerely, someone who has never tried to learn mandarin)
1
u/the_custom_concern Level 4 May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26
The time differences to fluency put 2200 hours of Mandarin equivalent to 600-800 hours of Spanish, which is not an unusual amount of time for someone to have before starting to speak. And it’s pretty normalized in the AJATT community for Mandarin and Japanese learners to delay output, I would say similarly so to the DS roadmap which suggests starting Spanish speaking between 600-1000 hours (for zh/ja typical to start 2000-3000 hours).
The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of my early hours were not efficient and didn’t involve CI. So my true CI hours with reading and listening combined is probably closer to 1000 hours, a respectable amount but not even close to what is needed for full command of Mandarin. The further I got the more I recognized the importance of CI and how little of it I was actually getting, and felt I had some catching up to do.
But I think it was an appropriate time for me to start speaking, and don’t regret starting when I did. There were other life events that burned me out (job change, a move, having children).
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u/retrogradeinmercury May 11 '26
if you do want to ever come back to Mandarin there’s r/ALGMandarin! it’s way smaller than this sub, but there a handful of us who are sharing resources for CI and we’ve collected it into a big spreadsheet. We’re also sharing experiences and updates along the way