Learning Spanish — Part 12

Yesterday I got a FutureMe e-mail from myself a year ago (I really enjoy their service, I’m subscribed, and use an ad-blocker for it) asking myself to review my progress against a year ago, and it has been about a month since I last wrote an update.

Currently Level 5, 638 hours logged, 362 hours to level 6, 510 hours of DS-only content watched, 3064 videos, 494 days practiced.

Comparisons from last year in 2025

Estimating Comprehension

When reviewing my understanding of videos in the past, I’ve used a “gut feeling” of a rough percentage of what I felt I understood from the meaning of the sentences spoken or read, regardless of how well I had acquired (or not at all) each individual word/particle. The first video on my list to review/compare from August 2025 was “Guess the Photo” (elo 46), one of the hardest Superbeginner videos on Dreaming Spanish — its elo number is well into the intermediate category. This time, I decided to pay extra close attention and painstakingly confirm whether I understood every word of the first 5 minutes. This can make things harder because the end of a sentence or the next sentence can give hints to understand what came before it. When Pablo is describing the game, he uses words/phrases like “apuntaros”, “coge boli”, “a veis acertado”, “yerva” (I know it’s a plant), “pico” (mountain peak from context), I wonder if I’d recognize what they meant if they were said to me in out of context verbally, but while watching the video it’s easy to understand. When he says “en esta primera photo se ve algo verde” — “se” is still kind of mysterious to me. It has a vibe of “[it] does/did/is something”, like where there is no definite actor taking the action, or like when you’re describing that something “is done”, just not by someone specific, or when saying “it looks like something”. When he says it here I understand “in this first photo I see/we see/there can be seen something green”. When he says “se han acabado vuestras otra oportunidades…” that sentence took too much effort to understand “when you’re finished with your other opportunities/when the other opportunities end… (he’s going to show the full photo)”. Everything else I understood precisely up to the 5 minute mark where I stopped. :) Last year I rated my overall comprehension “80~90% of the words spoken”, now I would say it’s solidly 90% or more. I rewatched Shelcin’s “No More Salad, Thanks” (elo 14) but it’s all acquired vocabulary, which I felt in 2025 too. For the intermediate category, Tamara’s “I have bipolar disorder” (elo 77) video was challenging for me a year ago due to both the speed and vocabulary, now it’s much less about speed. A year ago I said my comprehension would drop lower than 50% and today I can say it’s more like what the 60–70% range feels like, largely because she’ll use several words in sequence I don’t know or don’t understand well. A year ago this wasn’t really watchable, now I can understand much more about her disorder as she describes it, how it affects her life and the people in it, the treatment she is receiving, the comorbidities that come with it, how it sounds like she has two personalities (manic versus depressive), how she expresses manic energy through creative works, and how she says “you are the most important person in your life”. For the Advanced category video “Claudia’s Claudia Plays Wordle: Can She Guess It?” (elo 47), one of the things that makes this video challenging is that she’s playing a word game and guessing what the words could be — sometimes even guessing words that don’t exist, which as a learner, I wouldn’t know. I rated myself ~50% last year, and I would say I couldn’t rate myself below 70% at this point, where most of the video is very understandable except for a part in the middle where she’s guessing at words. I still wouldn’t know what “vicio” (vice) or “vicho” (apparently colloquial/slang for bicho/bug) meant (a year later I decided I would finally just look it up). Those seem like pretty obscure words to be fair (especially since I like to focus on Latin American Spanish). For one of the hardest videos on the site, “[swearing] Chihuahua and Mexico” (elo 90) — right off the bat it’s hard to understand. Pablo and Iván are talking, and Pablo says something about “tocando me”. There’s bits I don’t understand, and then Pablo asks him what they’re going to talk about today. Iván mentions he’s from Chihuahua, Mexico, and then the intro music plays. Pablo asks if it’s a town or a city, he says it’s a city with ~million people, they talk about whether it’s big or small for a city. It’s hard to follow. They talk about how many inhabitants Mexico have and compare with some other countries. Right around 1:22 is when I’m pretty sure I heard the first swear word. :) It’s really hard to follow, my comprehension wavers in and out, especially when Iván talks excitedly. It’s still too advanced for me, but it’s way closer than it was a year ago.

Cartoons from Last Year

Bob Esponja Episodio 1 de la temporada: Se Busca Ayuda A year ago I said the narration was “a bit fast” — today I would say it isn’t, but it has what sounds like a french-ish accent. Also back then I only watched 2:14 minutes (sorry if you love the show, I find it so loud). I would say it’s everywhere from “super easy” (when Spongebob just repeats “estoy listo!” over and over) to “what???” (ie a random sentence with a bunch of jargon or words I’m not familiar with is said rapidly by a character). The exaggerated voices of cartoons add to the relative challenge. I’d call it somewhere between 50–70% after watching 5.5 of 8-ish minutes of the episode.

Power Rangers Episode 10 de la temporada 1: Terror en las alturas I decided to try a new episode this time. The episode starts with an airport with one of those ambient voices talking, and the narrator follows shortly after, loudly talking over her to announce the episode title. Kimberly is talking on the phone and asks for Trini to be put back on. Her uncle is taking her to fly and it’s going to be really fun. Zach gets turned down by the girl of his dreams. Rita has a new plan that can’t lose. The bullies (Eugune and Farkas) are sitting outside admiring the fantasy of a pilot’s life. I watched up to 3 minutes. I wouldn’t say it’s lower than 70%, definitely feels like I could watch the rest of the episode without getting too fatigued/bored from difficulty.

Sheera Episodes I mentioned in part 11 that I finally re-watched Sheera Season 1 episodes 1–3. So I watched the first 8 minutes of the 4th episode. I would say around 70~80%ish comprehension from an episode I hadn’t seen in a long time and never watched like I watched the first 3.

August 2026

I mentioned in part 11 that I was planning to watch Avatar the animated series from start to finish, and give myself credit for it, and I did. It felt like a solid 70% comprehension, in particular, the parts that were comprehensible were easy to understand. The parts that weren’t would have several sequential sentences one after another that I didn’t parse. Like other cartoons, Avatar would often have simpler but much faster speech patterns (ie frantic/excited), versus when I would switch back to intermediate Dreaming Spanish videos with slow, measured, careful speech. I felt both were exercising different kinds of “mental muscles” (for lack of a better term) and that it’s good to have the diverse exposure.

Also during the month I watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in Spanish. About 1/2 into the movie I wrote that it was much harder than Avatar to understand. For Avatar my comprehension felt like 70–80%, where I understand 70% pretty well, but the 20–30% not at all, like when adults are having a serious discussion about politics or something, as an example. For Spider-Man, it was more like 30–40% understanding. With comprehension that low, and since it was an experiment, I didn’t log the time.

I dabbled in a few other shows, and found that around TV-Y7 or so (My Little Pony, Avatar) shows are very watchable now! However, shows aimed at young adults/adolescents, which have more nuanced humor, more advanced vocabulary, etc. are still too hard. I feel like sometimes I’m “really pushing it” with my comprehension limits with these cartoons, but thinking the engagement (versus a random intermediate video) makes up for it.

Moving Forward

The Avatar experiment was a success. My plan now is to work my way through 52 episodes of Pokemon: Liga Índigo, another TV-Y7-rated show (~17 hours of content, at ~20min/episode), and watching DS here and there in between. With Avatar, I was trying to keep a pace of about 3 episodes per day and was fairly consistent (just over an hour). I’ll probably just stick to my hour-a-day goal for the foreseeable future, unless I experiment with lowering it (which I don’t currently plan to) to see how it affects my consistency.

I still plan to keep reevaluating every so often, keep getting my one hour a day in, keep working my way through the next 362 hours…

At the end of this month, I plan to do another review of how it’s going with Pokemon and using cartoons for Spanish learning at this level.

Have a great week! :)