rowanexer wrote: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.
Le Baron wrote: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.