Hola amigos!
I’m back again with a progress update for Spanish this November to let you know how I’ve been.
I hope you’re also following along no matter how big or small your progress might be.
Admittedly, I over promised on the input hours I was planning to do. However, it helped me push my overall hours.
Along with this, I’ll be sharing some other updates I have encountered with regards to the Spanish language. Including new things I explored to further improve my level overall.
November Update
I began Spanish with solely Dreaming Spanish as my resource. At the core of it is my tracker for my immersion time.
That’s why I would like to begin by sharing my total time accumulated over the month:
To sum it up, my November total time in immersion is 120 hours and 48 minutes.
This averages to 241.6 minutes per day, which is right above 4 hours per day.
Here’s a different visual to look at it:
The red line represents my average while the bars represent individual days showing the amount of input I’ve gathered. Obviously there are some great days while some at a bare minimum.
This puts my overall milestone with Spanish listening time at 410 hours at the start of December.
Initially, I was only immersing using Dreaming Spanish. But today, my listening input comes from a variety of resources such as:
- YouTube videos
- Podcasts
- Audiobooks
- Radio
- Movie (I watched one!)
Notice I mentioned ‘listening’ input. Nowadays I’m starting to explore ‘reading’ input because I heard it’s great for vocabulary.
That’s why I began to explore and discover content to read at my level. This led me to subscribe to the library of Instituto Cervantes in my area. I began with their online library to check for easy books.
To date, I already explored three short stories that are 30 pages long for each book, which are short and containing a lot of pictures inside.
Talking about exploration, I also began tapping into ChatGPT to assist me with certain things. At the moment I have it help me with vocabulary, as well as creating a study plan for Spanish to see what it can give me.
To be honest, I’m still not sure how to make AI work 🤔
With all these activities and accumulation of input, what then has it brought me when it comes to my ability? Have I improved compared to last month?
At the very least, here are my observations:
- Grammar isn’t that concerning at all since I can continue immersing without having to study any grammar lesson
- My vocabulary growing from context definitely feels much stronger than just studying or memorizing words
- Basic reading isn’t that difficult anymore, especially in shorter forms such as subtitles, short stories, and YouTube headlines. But thicker forms of content are still a torture (books, paragraphs, etc)
- New problems emerge – increasing listening speed, diverse accents, and varying words from different Spanish-speaking countries – just to name a few
- There’s still a lot to learn, especially new vocabulary and grammar (I’m simply acknowledging the unknown)
- Whenever I try to output (writing messages and talking to myself), it’s still the same struggle – I couldn’t form deeper thoughts and sentences yet (I definitely have better grasp of grammar than before)
I guess this is what I can personally accomplish at 410 hours, alongside my English and Tagalog advantage. As always, I will keep on going to see if breakthroughs do occur at a later time.
At least according to FSI, it’s around 600 to 750 hours for Spanish.
Goals for December
Ah, Christmas season.
I’m going to assume real life will be busy during this month.
But I should continue progressing my Spanish with the following goals:
- Get to 600 Hours – With over 400 hours as a starting point, I will try to reach this target because it represents Level 5 in the Dreaming Spanish roadmap, which is nice to achieve before the New Year. Plus it’s the lower end of the FSI estimate.
- Access More Variety of Content – Recently I’ve been curious with Spanish accents, thanks to many interesting podcasts and videos that introduced me to them. Aside from DS, I intend to explore the vast resources out there, including content from various Spanish-speaking countries.
- Read More Short Stories – This I could finally achieve with the help of my new library card, which paves the way for reading and further increasing my vocabulary.
That’s all for now. Christmas will definitely make these goals a challenge already so I won’t add much.
I wonder what your December goals are? Please write to us down in the comments 🙂
