Lessons from learning a third language with CI (progress report and discussion)
When I first became convinced of the power of CI (thank you Stephen Krashen), I decided to do Spanish and Russian (I am a native English speaker). I found it very challenging ... too challenging. So I put Russian on the shelf and focused on Spanish because Pablo was creating the gold standard with Dreaming Spanish. Shelving Russian was in part because my poor brain couldn't handle two languages at the same level and partly as "a proof of concept." I estimate that it will take 4000 hours of CI to get my Russian where I want it, and before I invested that much time I really wanted to determine that for me, the CI approach really was better than traditional methods (sorry Dr. Krashen and Pablo that I didn't take your words for it).
Now I am currently at more than 1100 hours of CI in Spanish. I have no question that this method works for me. I don't even read the posts anymore that want to debate this point. I have read the first four Harry Potter novels in Spanish and am almost done with number five; native speakers of Spanish don't switch to English when I speak to them in their own language, etc., etc. Without question, this method works for me, end of story.
So at 1110 hours, I took Russian off the shelf. I still aim for 200 mins/day of Spanish. Once I hit 1500 hours, I plan to reduce that to 2 hours a day and increase my Russian input. But for now, I am only doing 30 minutes a day of Russian. And so far it is working. Having the languages at vastly different levels helps keep them separate in my mind.
My first stop, and the stop I recommend for anyone wanting to add a third, fourth, nth language is the following Reddit page:
and follow the link for "Aural resources" and then scroll to the language your are interested in. They do an excellent job of curating the CI resources available for many languages.
Of course that is when it hits you. CI is growing in popularity on the internet but nobody does it like Dreaming Spanish. There is no close second. There is no distant second. Pablo & company are on a different plane altogether. I am not trying to throw shade on the many fine content creators out there (I support some of them on Patreon), but it is like a time machine back to the beginning of DS when it was just Pablo, with inconsistent production values, laboring in obscurity.
And this brings me to my main point.
The most important videos on DS are the superbeginner and beginner videos.
From my perspective of more than 1100 hours, I know I have a long, long way to go still in Spanish, but there is no shortage of content out there. No, I am not ready for "La casa de papel" yet, but what I can understand feels unlimited. But in Russian (and I suspect in many other languages) the challenge is going from absolute zero to the level where you can understand A1 videos in that language. There simply is nowhere close to enough content out there.
So Pablo, if you are reading, I have heard in a video or perhaps read it here that your plan is to have an embarrassingly large amount of Spanish content before moving on to another language. I hope you will consider, however, starting to develop superbeginner resources for whatever language comes next. It probably isn't Russian (I am guessing Mandarin) but getting absolute beginner content out there for a number of languages would help so many learners such as me.
And many thanks for DS, leaving home reminds me of how great we have it here.
I will end this love letter by quoting Carly Simon:
Nobody does it better
Makes me feel sad for the rest
Nobody does it half as good as you
Baby, you're the best
EDIT: I should say, that given the lack of SB/B content for Russian, I have gotten myself two Cross-talk partners.