600 Hour, Level 5, Update!
Hola todos!
I have made it to Level 5, and it sure feels nice to be here! I am absolutely loving how well this program works and how far I've progressed in my spanish-learning journey! I wanted to give you all an update on my progress and let you know what've I've been up to for the last 300 hours.
Level 4 recap:
This level was definitely different than the previous levels. In the beginning, I was feeling super confident in myself. Most intermediate videos below rank 65 were pretty accessible, podcasts like Espanol Con Juan and Learn Spanish and Go started to feel comfortable, and childish shows like Pocoyo and Bluey started feeling easy to follow. At about 450 hours, I dove into anime like Dragon Ball Z and Avatar the Last Airbender. Both were difficult, and some episodes left me lost, but it feels really good to have more content open up.
At about 500 hours, after my last post, I began to feel the "dip". I don't know how to describe it exactly, but it felt like so many new words were popping up, and old words being used in different contexts, that I started feeling a little bit of regression. It was almost like I was losing confidence in the words and phrases I did know. I decided I was best served sorting DS videos by easy and working myself back up. This last a solid 75 hours or so.
Where I'm at now:
I feeling really good again. I am caught up on most videos up to levels 54-55 (minus Christmas videos and Baba is You series), and after some testing, I can watch pretty much any intermediate video at 90% comprehension. YT channels speaking at native-like speeds (Linguriousa, Luisito, etc) are really starting to open up.
As for hours per day, I can comfortably reach 3hr per day and up to 6 on the weekends. It's gone from a marathon to reach a 100 hour month to relatively easy to hit my 100h goal. So far for August, I'm on track to reach 120 hours.
Overall, I'm feeling just about in line with the program and expectations for level 5.
Goals for Level 5:
For watching content, my goal is to continue getting better. I still have roughly 1500 intermediate videos left, so I will continue knocking them out. I believe I'm ready to start mixing in Advanced videos, but I'm feeling like I will wait another 150-200 hours just to keep catching up on some of the intermediate content I want to watch. I am also continuing on Dragon Ball Z, mixing in some dubbed The Office, and have a couple of other shows I'm mixing in to keep things fresh. My next big show I want to watch is My Hero Academia dubbed in Spanish.
For reading, I am planning on holding off any serious reading until 1000 hours. That said, I am on LinQ and Beelinguapp getting some speaker-assisted reading, and I'm watching My Daily Spanish on YT which has subtitles for her videos. I think this will help dip my toes in reading without worrying about harming my internal vocalization.
For speaking, I have zero plans to start until 1000 hours, and I'm still thinking of waiting until level 7. I have no real need to start speaking beyond daily greetings.
Thanks for letting me rant! I hope you have as much success as I have!
Vamanos!
Previous Progress Reports:
Posted Aug 13, 2024, 11:50 PM UTC