Progress Update: 1500 Hours and over 1 Million Words Read

Hi all. Updating my flair today, so figured I’d do a brief update. I recently hit 1500 hours tracked. 482 of those hours were on the Dreaming Spanish website and the other 1018 hours are from outside of the platform, although a small percentage of that includes some DS podcasts and DS videos watched on YouTube. I also hit 1 million words read a few weeks ago. I started this journey in January 2023, so coming up on two years.

I’m basically of two minds of my progress so far:

Glass half empty: I originally thought I would be “done” by now or at least that my listening would be basically done. I feel like I’ve seen some people at 1500 hours say they can listen to virtually anything at 1500 hours, and that is not true for me for whatever reason. There is definitely another level (at least one more) I have to work through for hard/native stuff. I think there are a lot of valid reasons for the “discrepancy” between my level and others at 1500, including ambiguity tolerance. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, and I’ll get there eventually. I’m just trying to be honest about my ability. My speaking and reading feel about where they should be given the practice time I’ve put into those, but for whatever reason, I continue to get a little frustrated by my listening comprehension limitations. 

Glass half full: I can comfortably consume a lot of content right now completely in Spanish after starting from nothing. All I’ve done is listened/watched/read Spanish stuff (the 1500 hours), listened to Language Transfer once in English, and glanced at some grammar/verb stuff probably adding up to two hours max in the last two years.

What I would tell myself today if I was starting out all over again: This really works! But it’s super slow and a real commitment. This process is kind of like the stock market - there will be good days and bad days, but the overall trend is always upward, and if you stick with it you will eventually get to where you want to be. Try not to overthink things. Most importantly: try to spend more time getting CI and way less time thinking about the “best” way to do things or why it’s not working faster.

Goals for 2025: I was very inspired by u/ayjayp's 2700h update post recently and am trying to take his philosophy ("30 min of half-zoned-out input is better than 0 minutes") to heart, so I'm upping my daily goal (from 2 hrs/day to 3 hrs/day) and hoping for a more productive year. My goal for 2025 is to have 100 tutoring sessions (I've been taking 2/week) and to get to the point where I can enjoy more difficult content like Leyendas Legendarias.

Thanks as always to everyone in this community and the whole DS team!