I dream in Spanish now (kind of)

28 May, 2025

This definitely wasn’t on my 2025 resolutions list. In fact, I had no language goals whatsoever. But on January 13th, I was feeling too sick to exercise and needed something to make me feel like I was still improving myself.

"Wait, I thought you were learning Japanese?"

If you’re a friend reading this—first of all, hi! And second, you’re totally right. I’ve wanted to learn Japanese for YEARS. I have the Anki graveyards to prove it. The trauma of different counting systems. The embarrassing moments of accidentally saying things I definitely didn’t mean with brand new people. It’s all there.

But the truth is, Japanese takes a long time. Talk to anyone who’s seriously done it—they’ll tell you it’s NOT all fun and games. And for someone like me, who actually wants to take the JLPT N1 someday, this isn’t just a casual hobby. It’s a long-term commitment. I plan on traveling out of state for this test, I’m not going to walk in with the minimum amount of hours and the possibility of failing!

I still want to learn Japanese (and we’ll get into that in another post), but after realizing my husband doesn’t have the time to teach our kids Spanish due to work, I had to rethink my approach. So, I decided to learn Spanish myself. That way, I could speak it with him—and in turn, our kids would start learning alongside me. Learning Spanish is not something you can just do in your sleep. But compared to Japanese? You might as well be learning in your sleep. Japanese can take a bit over half a decade to fully grasp—For English speakers, Spanish typically takes about 1 to 2 years to become proficient.

Enter Dreaming Spanish

Dreaming Spanish is a video platform that offers comprehensible input (CI) that you can’t really find elsewhere. Here’s the thing: Learning Spanish is no small feat, but compared to Japanese? It feels like nothing. While Japanese can take years to fully grasp—some estimates say around 6 years for many learners—Spanish is on the other end of the spectrum. For English speakers, Spanish typically takes about 1 to 2 years to reach a conversational level. That’s a huge difference, and suddenly, learning Spanish felt doable. I could actually see myself having conversations sooner rather than later, and that kind of instant progress was exactly what I needed.

There is a roadmap which estimates the amount of hours it takes to reach a certain level and you watch videos that correspond to the amount of hours you have immersed in the language. There is a huge and wonderful community on reddit full of DS users who are there to help motivate you to keep going too with encouragement and their own personal stories in the form of update posts.

Alongside Dreaming Spanish I also used this program called Anki for quite a bit. It’s commonly used in the medical school community but its second most common usage is actually language learning. There are totally free decks out there where it will give you the most common words in the language for you to memorize using the flashcard system. While some people are Dreaming Spanish purists, I personally love the statistics offered by Anki and personally can attest to its usefulness with learning filler words. I’ve noticed that I feel ahead of the roadmap using Anki. But it’s really up to you what do you want to do. Pablo the creator of DS has his own reasons for not liking the use of flashcards. That’s okay. Everyone journey is going to look different.

“So how much can you possibly learn in 50 hours.”

Quite a bit! I’m on my way to level 3 now currently at 105 hours at the time of writing this portion of the post. But at 50 hours I was able to watch content at my level COMFORTABLY. When you first start out it’s hard to get a lot of time into learning because it’s mentally draining. My brain felt overloaded and I was having a kind of- Tetris effect for Spanish where everything started to sound like Spanish or look like it and it’s all that would occupy my mind. And now with 105 hours under my belt I’m able to ask more efficient questions, engage with content more meaningfully , and even listen to podcasts. I also finished my first ever Spanish chapter book “Diario De Una Dork” and it got easier the longer I sat with the words.

I’ve started changing just about every media I can into Spanish. Minecraft, Phasmophobia, The Sims 2, Genshin impact. And at this level it’s not actually that hard and I am able to read enough to get the point most of the time given the text gives a lot of detail. This makes getting input in fun and just a part of everyday life.

I had no clue I could make progress this quickly, so if you had ever wanted to learn Spanish I’d highly recommend this. It feels a little too good to be true but for once it’s not! When we have a bit more time on our hands the kids will be joining me in the fun more formally with their own accounts. They LOVE DS videos and begs me to watch various things in Spanish now, so I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Love, Serenity.

PS: Yes I do actually dream in Spanish sometimes. Yes real Spanish that I had to google translate as soon as I woke up. It tends to happen if I study late at night and pick up a new word. You can dream in two target languages at once as one of those dreams also included Japanese. So have fun guys! My first dream was on 1/23/25, so early but if you spend a lot of time I believe it's bound to happen for you too! <3