Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

[rowanexer]

There seem to be a lot of people on reddit who are convinced that it is "settled science".

You may want to let them know that those in know know that "settled science" is pseudoscience.

Well, perhaps they are thinking of a scientific consensus?
I don't read a lot of research for this. And they are perhaps looking for some sort of research paper explicitly comparing different methods to find out which is the best. I have no idea if such a thing exists.

[iguanamon]

These days people come to the forum having already watched all the usual polyglot suspects on youtube, perusing reddit, and other sources. It's hard to dissuade them. I don't even try. When I start a language, I want to pronounce it correctly. A good course will work with pronunciation from the beginning. A good audio course like Pimsleur, will also train pronunciation. Used in combination a good text/audio course and an audio only course will work well in tandem.

The thing is that learners are impatient and sometimes, afraid to speak, which does not help. You can't learn how to pronounce without- pronouncing. Nobody starts out with perfect pronunciation. Very few end up with perfect pronunciation. "Acceptable" pronunciation is my goal. Can I speak with natives in a long conversation? If yes, I have succeeded.

As our traditional textbook/audio courses continue to age and are not being renewed, at the same time the new media/app courses are not quite up to the task for self-learners. We still have to "cobble together" multiple sources/resources to learn. This is where the forum is still relevant and helpful because many of us here have done so successfully and are willing to share.

Of course, if they know it all from youtube and reddit, if they want a "one stop shop" solution... well... not much we can do then.

[tastyonions]

What really gets me is people hardselling methods that they themselves didn't follow to learn their strongest languages.

"All you need is MASSIVE INPUT. (Ok, I also studied this language for years at university, lived in a country where I was forced to speak it, and took a couple dozen exams on it but I learned NOTHING from all that. Trust me.)"

[Irena]

What really gets me is people hardselling methods that they themselves didn't follow to learn their strongest languages.

"All you need is MASSIVE INPUT. (Ok, I also studied this language for years at university, lived in a country where I was forced to speak it, and took a couple dozen exams on it but I learned NOTHING from all that. Trust me.)"

This! That's exactly what irks me. All that "useless" formal study was the foundation that made the massive input effective later on. B2+massive input = C1/C2. Massive input alone = not much.

[rdearman]

There seem to be a lot of people on reddit who are convinced that it is "settled science".

You may want to let them know that those in know know that "settled science" is pseudoscience.

They wouldn't listen anyway. They will just drink the coolaid when the cup comes around.

[vonPeterhof]

A few months ago they actually released a video interviewing a person who supposedly got
to a very high level studying primarily with DS. He doesn't have an exact count of the hours because he started watching them on YouTube instead of their website where there is a time tracker, but he claims that during the lockdown in 2020 he had several months where he consumed about five hours of content per day. The part where he goes into his prior history with Spanish also reveals that he's pretty much a textbook case of a false beginner, having had the typical disappointing experience of second language instruction at a UK school plus several attempts to study independently with things like Duolingo, which I guess makes his example a little less applicable to complete beginners (to say nothing of the shared vocabulary and grammatical parallels boost English speakers get in most Romance languages, compared to speakers of languages from outside of Western Europe).


Personally, while being sceptical about the pedagogical claims I do find DS an extremely useful tool for my current purposes, which is to stay in touch with Spanish via engaging and level-appropriate content while I focus most of my efforts on actively learning other languages. This ready availability of dozens of hours of graded audiovisual content is something I'm dearly missing in Kazakh and especially in Hmong, where there's extremely little middle ground of available media between children's videos showing and naming colors and shapes and hour-long interviews about Minnesota politics

[tractor]

A few months ago they actually released a video interviewing a person who supposedly got to a very high level studying primarily with DS. (…) The part where he goes into his prior history with Spanish also reveals that he's pretty much a textbook case of a false beginner, having had the typical disappointing experience of second language instruction at a UK school plus several attempts to study independently with things like Duolingo, (…)

They claim that "speaking this early will invariably result in hard-to-fix non-native pronunciation, noticeably bad grammar, and poor word usage", and here we have an interview with a person who had Spanish classes at school as well as trying other methods, and thus, probably both spoke and read early on...

[anitarrc]

I had one year of Spanish at a university, nearly 30 years before I moved to Central America. But! the Mexican professor was very good and made us speak, write and speak more.
I only picked it up again when I started writing articles about Spanish cars and trucks
All the rest was massive input of many years. In any situation, from automotive technology over bedroom to zopilote.
I never learned vocabulary. But yes, I sat down and exercised grammar. Till today, sometimes I check on El Conjugador if i can't avoid to write some legal text

If you want to learn medieval terms, read Ildefonso Falcones or watch El Cid (the latter bored me after watching to much bloodshed, but it it is great to hear Os and other types of 2nd person plural spoken, which you never would in Latin America)

And if you like it more melodic, then listen to Los Tigres del Norte or Calle 13 and read what the songs are about. I'd prefer that to some "dreaming" video

[Cavesa]

I've been seeing a lot of people posting on reddit asking when they should start practising speaking with Dreaming Spanish. Some of them even talk about how they don't feel ready and they'll only start after 700 or 800 hours (!).

Dreaming Spanish recommends that students don't start reading until they've done 300 hours of listening. They don't recommend starting speaking until 600 hours in.
(https://dreaming-spanish-emails.s3.us-e ... panish.pdf)

And yet FSI only takes about 600-750 class hours for students to reach B2/C1 proficiency in a category 1 language.

If a Dreaming Spanish student has done no speaking until 600 hours in, I doubt they could be at B2 of C1 level, although maybe they can reach that for listening/reading.

So what gives? I like comprehensible input but I can't understand how they neglect other language skills, or why they think that speaking can be improved by listening. It's bringing back bad memories of the AJATT cult. Any thoughts?

A good thread, thank you. Dreaming Spanish is massively popular on the LL subreddit, together with uncritical CI enthusiasm and textbook hating.

Overall, I think we should make a distinction between the DS material and DS method. Some time ago, the same thing was discussed about Assimil (the bottom line was: excellent material to use, but the method to use it is not really optimal, at least not universally).

From what I've seen of DS (it was way bellow my level, when I learnt about it, but I was curious and had a look), I think it is a very good resource as a supplement to other stuff. Tons of graded listening material. What is there not to love about that, it is one of the good options on the market.

But the current pure CI enthusiasm, whether the people use DS or anything else, is in my opinion extremely harmful. Most people need a combination of sources and approaches. And I know extremely few people, who can progress efficiently without any explanations and other such unpopular stuff among the CI zealots. I also fail to find it so fun to get bored with hundreds of hours of beginner audio to get to intermediate listening skills and none of the rest, if you can spend a few hundred hours taking the shortcut of a good textbook, and then jump right into native stuff you are genuinely interested in. Call me picky, but I'll take a scifi or detective show over a random beginner video.

The few "success" threads I've seen confirm my impressions, and also my somewhat similar experience, when I had relied far too much just on tv shows in Italian and ended up with a disappointing disparity between C1/C2ish listening and A2ish speaking and writing. Oh, and the reports describe even the listening as far bellow C1.

I'd say purely CI based approach can be good only in these situations:
-you are one of the few people that simply have brains wired in such a way, that they learn from this much more efficiently than the rest of us.
-you don't need the active skills at all, or at least not in the forseeable future
-you don't need efficiency at all, Spanish is a hobby, and then who am I to judge how do you spend your free time.

As to the last question, whether listening improves speaking. Yes, it does. But massive amounts of listening are, based on my experience and observation, necessary at the intermediate stage. And the better your base knowledge and skills are, the more is the massive amount of listening gonna help. Relying on CI from the start is like trying to reinvent the wheel at all costs, just because you don't find content wheel users cool enough.

Basically the idea is that if you speak too early you'll make mistakes and they'll become fossilised. Other gurus like Antimoon have also talked about this (https://www.antimoon.com/other/myths-mistakesok.htm). So a lot of these Dreaming Spanish students freak out about not speaking well at 600 hours and then delay it by doing more listening so that they don't harm their speaking ability.

Oh you can get fossilised mistakes from various sources. One of them is also wrong interpretation of input. You can easily guess a rule wrong and get used to what do you guess it to work like, instead of the reality.

Perhaps what you've mentioned is one of the biggest problem of this approach. Yeah, you can always do with more listening. But it serves no purpose to postpone speaking ad infinitum, because you will simply suck at first no matter how late you start.

I have to say that even though I have been doing Spanish for almost the last 3 years, I'd never heard of 'Dreaming Spanish', which is probably a good thing.

Dreaming Spanish isn't bad. Basically it's youtube videos where the guy talks in graded Spanish, and uses pictures and gestures so you can understand what he's saying. It gets recommended A LOT on reddit.

Yes, it is massively popular on reddit, and perhaps a few more forums. I doubt it will spread much further than that. Sure, if they had as good marketing as Duo, anything could spread. But right now, it isn't so. And while the DS idea is highly attractive to reddit, where majority of users is anti-textbook and anti-grammar at all costs, DS simply doesn't promise the single thing mainstream market is obsessed about. Speaking. A mainstream learner is taught to believe "speaking first", it's what majority of the marketing of the conventional language schools promises, it's what the tutors online promise, it's what youtubers blabber about all the time, and so on.

Many learners won't jump on the "you shouldn't speak for hundreds of hours", they'll react like "then what are those hundreds of hours good for? I want to speak!". For the core part of the DS fans on reddit, it is primarily about their honor as textbook haters, results are secondary to method. And as far as they don't really need results anytime soon and are in just for the fun, I have nothing against that.

[Cavesa]

I imagine if anyone goes 100 hours and feels like they aren't getting anywhere they will naturally stop. As an immersion-plus sentence mining learner right now, it is pretty obvious that I am making good gains despite never speaking and never intending to speak and no longer "being serious".

That's good for you or me or members of a forum like this, but don't underestimate how long people will go fooling themselves that everything is around the corner. Or comes after the magic number of hours. We already know there are thousands on apps like Duolingo who think that 3+ years down the line that their A1/A2 game doodling is progress.

The very point of these things mentioned in OP is that all the believers support their beliefs in collective justifications and delusion. So despite possibly not getting anywhere very quickly they will not naturally stop.

One of the issues is also the course itself convincing the people that they need several hundred hours to see any results. So, mere 100 hours won't make the CI enthusiast question the method. Just like Duolingo has managed to convince people that successful learner=the one that doesn't abandon the sloooooow Duo game ever.

And the echo chamber on reddit will work like "just keep going", that's very true.

What really gets me is people hardselling methods that they themselves didn't follow to learn their strongest languages.

"All you need is MASSIVE INPUT. (Ok, I also studied this language for years at university, lived in a country where I was forced to speak it, and took a couple dozen exams on it but I learned NOTHING from all that. Trust me.)"

This! That's exactly what irks me. All that "useless" formal study was the foundation that made the massive input effective later on. B2+massive input = C1/C2. Massive input alone = not much.

Couldn't agree more. But the sad part is, that the CI zealots get angry, when presented with this argument. I sometimes post on those threads (to bring in a different argument and not let a newbie surrounded just by the CI brainwashing), and there's usually an A2ish person, who tries to convince me that tons of coursebooks and exercises and practice have had nothing to do with my C1 or C2 success

The part where he goes into his prior history with Spanish also reveals that he's pretty much a textbook case of a false beginner, having had the typical disappointing experience of second language instruction at a UK school plus several attempts to study independently with things like Duolingo, which I guess makes his example a little less applicable to complete beginners (to say nothing of the shared vocabulary and grammatical parallels boost English speakers get in most Romance languages, compared to speakers of languages from outside of Western Europe).

Yes, this is actually a situation, where I can imagine DS being wonderful. A false beginner, who has been learning mainly grammar, vocab, etc, and who really needs to add more beginner level exposure to make all that theory come alive. But people will wrongly assume "textbooks bad, DS the only thing you need"

There seem to be a lot of people on reddit who are convinced that it is "settled science".

You may want to let them know that those in know know that "settled science" is pseudoscience.

Well, perhaps they are thinking of a scientific consensus?
I don't read a lot of research for this. And they are perhaps looking for some sort of research paper explicitly comparing different methods to find out which is the best. I have no idea if such a thing exists.

Some people don't like it, when I point it out, but: the quality of research articles in language learning/teaching is enormously inferior to that in medicine and science. The articles I've read were clearly biased, many variables not taken into account, samples chosen based on the desired results, etc. If medicine research was so sloppy and biased, there would be many dead as the result. In case of LL, you just get lots of disappointed people, who miss out on opportunities and are not unlikely to give up forever.

I wish I had kept a link to "my favourite" article that was supposed to prove superiority of just exposure over textbooks. The author clearly wanted to prove their point. So, they made sure to pick the compared groups accordingly. The "textbook group": a bunch of normal college students, with average motivation, normal class going attitude, no clue whether any self-study in between classes etc. The "exposure group": a small group of very exceptional immigrants (definitely not the average ones), who had achieved high level in the language, and it wasn't even clearly stated that they hadn't ever touched a textbook (they probably had). The result presented by the dumb researcher was: "see? exposure is much better, just look at the results of the two groups!".

The truth is, that none of the methods is superior, people tend to succeed the most with a combination, but we will probably never get a high quality research paper on that. Setting up such an experiment to prove that would be very difficult. You would need a large sample of people, to diminish the effects of variables such as IQ and levels of motivation. You would need to make sure your groups really follow just the method, which might be hard (especially if your guinea pigs are more motivated to learn than to be good guinea pigs). So, for example getting clean slates untouched by textbooks would be hard in the world of obligatory language classes at school, and you'd also need to make sure whether your CI group doesn't secretly study a grammar book, and the textbook group doesn't consume input in their free time. You would need to do a long term experiment, which is already hard (just imagine getting a funding for that!).

Unless you get all that, you will get the usual trash, which tends to approximately as reliable as comparing one legged and two legged runners and claiming that the training method is behind any difference.