Is Dreaming Spanish a Waste of Time?

Dreaming Spanish promises to teach you Spanish without studying. Does it work and is it any good?

Dreaming Spanish:

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[andrealamexicana]

Thank you so much for this video! ❤ we are working even more on the super beginner videos to make them more entertaining, engaging and fun! Congrats on your journey! 🎉❤

[Comprehensible_German]

Dreaming Spanish is one of the best things that ever happened to the Spanish learning community 🧡 I love seeing how far Pablo has already come with his vision!

[cathybroadus]

I credit Dreaming Spanish with opening my mind to just how humans learn languages. Pablo has a winning model.

[jamesmccloud]

I'm only at 300 hours. I look back at my first few hours of Dreaming Spanish and understanding barely anything at the SuperBeginner level despite having studied basic grammar and vocabulary before. Now, I am quite comfortable watching intermediate and sometimes advanced videos that have easy topics. Still can't understand full native content yet, but the progress I have made without resorting to translation, vocabulary drills, or grammar study is incredible. This is truly the future. Can't wait for 1000 hours and when I finally start speaking. At first, I had a lot of doubts about the process and if language acquisition was legit, but in hindsight I can clearly see the massive difference in comprehension just by me listening to comprehensible content. Hope more people realize this and refrain from traditional study methods.

[bobbygeorge]

Great review Matt. I am closing in on 1100 hours but have yet to make any effort to practice speaking but I experienced something last week that proved to me that this method works. My family and I were in Barcelona last week at La Sagrada Familia when we were notified that my daughter had passed out due to hypoglycemia and that we needed to go to the medic station. I was able to understand everything the medic was telling me and was able to speak to her in Spanish without too much difficulty. I know that I made mistakes but I am confident that I will improve once I begin to practice speaking. Keep up the great videos and congratulations on the growth of your channel.

[agus_boccaloni]

Thank you for making this video! I am so glad our videos have been helpful to you! This is amazing feedback and we will definitely use it to keep improving :) Good luck with your Spanish learning journey!!!

[MarcRice]

I have 340 hours as of this moment and I have no choice but to speak Spanish every day. I have people who work under me, so far reasons of safety and productivity, I have to make every attempt to communicate. There is no way around it. I make mistakes, but they understand me. Dreaming Spanish is wonderful and one needs to listen in order to be successful at their target language. 800 hours? I’d be doing Ted Talks in Spanish

[thexjib]

This the the superior method for learning Spanish. I stared from close to zero and now I am understanding the advanced content. Still not speaking very much but that is OK, it will come. There is a lot of satisfaction that comes from increasing you comprehension, it happens so slowly but eventually you get there.

[kingly]

I have to credit Pablo and Dreaming Spanish with really sending my language learning journey to a new level. Just a wonderful resource. I'm not a 100% sure learning some grammar, etc. isn't a faster method for adults to learn, but regardless receiving loads of input is undeniably key to the process.

[Muppetkeeper]

8 months later, I have several updates from my own experience. I now have 820 hours of input, a lot of that from podcasts alongside DS. I'm back in Spain and I can understand most native speakers if they speak directly to me, but I know this will improve as I approach 1000 hours.
As for Dreaming Spanish itself, the website has gone from strength to strength, they have new hosts, some are hilarious, and new editors and content quality. Seriously, some of the most recent videos are like professional short films.
I'm now listening 2 hours a day, and hope to reach 2000 hours by the end of 2025. I'm just on the edge of being able to watch native media, and am slowly adding reading into my study, which helps a lot when preparing to speak.

[HingYok]

Dreaming Spanish is definitely on my recommendation list, along with Spanish Playground, How to Spanish, Easy Spanish, and many others. This is based on Steven Krashen's hypotheses, which are themselves based on children's first language acquisition. I've seen some criticisms about Dreaming Spanish not explicitly teaching grammar, but if you think about how you acquired your mother tongue, did you have to learn grammar as a toddler? Probably not, but when we do start learning grammar of our mother tongue in school, it might be way easier than learning the grammar of a language we're unfamiliar with.

[hollowedboi]

Feel like for language learners, spending money is for convenience of time and planning, while doing things for free is more effort to set things up and have a self-service game plan. As well as ads. So it’s up to the learner what they’re willing to do.

[stevenc]

I'm up to 216 hours on Dreaming Spanish and it's been great. One thing to note is that the majority of the super beginner and beginner videos are free, so you can get pretty fair before really needing to subscribe. And the price is extremely low. I'd say most people will need the site for no more that 2 years. That's less than $200 for learning a language.

[Shibbyify]

I was about 1.5 years in my Spanish journey in 2021 and still at a struggling A2 level. Then I signed up for DS and after about 9 months I was solidly intermediate. It was like rocket fuel. But there's still a gap between the advanced videos and native content. That's my main gripe.
It's worth every penny. I would download the audio of every video and listen to them over and over. If I could go back I probably would've used the Refold Spanish Anki deck and DS together to really accelerate my Spanish. It's not pure comprehensible input but I find some methods of study are like steroids for immersion. The ALG approach can sometimes be a bit self righteous that nothing works but pure comprehensible input.

[coryjorgensen]

Comprehensible input is very cool, especially when you get the "lightbulb" moment. There's not as much of it for Icelandic, but I managed to cobble together enough resources that I've gotten to around a B2-C1 by just listening, watching and reading. Thanks for the excellent video!

[PQ_]

I wish this was available in more languages, it sounds fab

[danielstuart]

I started using Dreaming spanish a year ago and like you one day, I was hit by a lighting bolt when I realized that I wasn't translating in my head any more. At this point, I completely understand, Beginner and Intermediate and pretty much get the gist of the advanced videos although I don't always catch every word. So it literally works as advertised. I also read Olly Richards books which are great and I still do Duolingo. With Duolingo, I've completely turned off the listening exercises as I've now realized how bad some of the bots are and you can't just speed up the playback and make authentic native spanish. I wish I would have found dreaming spanish sooner. So now, I feel comfortable reading, writing and understanding spanish. Now my weakest part is speaking. I'm starting to work on that now that my vocabulary is larger.

[СтивС-кф]

Excellent and fair review. Pablo and company set the gold standard for comprehensible input. I am at 220 hours and I know the method really works. I can listen to intermediate podcasts (e.g. Espanol con Juan) easily.

[Drogobo]

I just hit 64 hours of Dreaming Spanish. I can see my progress already!

[notapersonbutachaosgoblin]

I was recommended Dreaming Spanish by a Spanish teacher who modeled her entire class curriculum in a similar storytelling fashion. That was probably two or three years ago. Watching Dreaming Spanish flourish has been beautiful