[October 2024] Spanish Progress Update

Hola a todos 👋

I’m back again to report my progress as I sum up the month of October.

How have you been?

Mine has been great because I got more Spanish recently versus the previous month (September).

To see why, I’ll explain now what happened in October, including the discoveries I made.

October Update

Right away, I’ll show you my total input for October.

Here’s my total Spanish input for the month, courtesy of the Dreaming Spanish tracker:

The grand total of all these minutes is 117 hours and 42 minutes.

In a 31-day month this averages out to 3.80 hours per day.

Most of the best times were in the final week of October, wherein I got plenty of vacant time in my hands. And I was prepared to spend it on Spanish immersion. It was during this time that I crazily grinded for 1,014 minutes in a single day!

Looking back to my September goals, I was hoping to get to 300 hours in total for Spanish CI (comprehensible input) content, hence the strong final week. Unfortunately I only finished at 289 hours, which is nevertheless close to the target.

I discovered some pretty awesome things, including:

• More grammar points starting to make sense, my favorite being the uses of que to build more complex sentences, plus the tengo que rule and its variations
• New vocabulary helping me understand much more sentences than before
• Noticing conjugations and how a single word can change using different conjugations depending on the situation and point of view
• The use of audiobooks and adding them into the content mix
• The spellings of Spanish words, including correct and incorrect ones I was assuming in my head, thanks to reading
• Being able to search YouTube on specific topics I want to watch (typing in keywords)

Another milestone worth celebrating is that I finished all of Dreaming Spanish’s beginner videos, and now I’m graduating and moving towards intermediate videos.

I also tend to celebrate when a new word I discovered comes up in two or more different situations. Just being able to carry a single word elsewhere is already a success!

Goals for November

Now that October is finished, it’s time to move on towards November.

However, I want to be careful with setting goals that are too ambitious. But I also need to set goals that would push me hard. Therefore it has to be balanced for it to work.

Here are the goals I could think of:

• Greater Focus on Spanish – I mentioned this because I’m also dabbling in other languages such as Mandarin and Japanese, as well as maintaining my Korean which is my first foreign language. That’s why I wish to keep Spanish my main vertical for November.
• 300 Hours in November – I will try to ramp up to 10 hours per day for this month while I’m still feeling hot in Spanish at the moment. It’s more doable because I can listen to audiobooks already, plus I’m diving into an ocean of intermediate Dreaming Spanish videos.
• Commence Reading – At my level, I’m confident I can now pull the trigger for Reading 📖, because it’s time to correct my spellings and put my eyes to work. Then later on I plan to practice writing in Spanish because I want to be well-rounded in the language.

That’s all for now.

While I have this challenging input goal, I can allow myself to relax a bit because Christmas season is approaching. Usually November is the time I start planning for gifts, so I expect some days to be below average.

How are you in your Spanish learning journey? Let me know by leaving a comment below.