150 Hour Update (LEVEL 3!!)
Just hit 150 hours and officially entered Level 3, so I wanted to make another progress update since my last post at 100 hours. I have been doing dreaming Spanish for a total of 56 days.
Over the last 50 hours, I feel like things have changed pretty noticeably. I can now relatively comfortably watch videos around difficulty level 45, which honestly feels kind of crazy considering I started around level 10–15 at 0 hours.
I also have about 14 hours of input outside of Dreaming Spanish now:
6 hours from the Spanish Boost Gaming Supermercado series
Around 8 hours of podcasts
The podcasts I’ve been listening to are:
Cuéntame
Chill Spanish Listening Practice
Español al Vuelo
My comprehension with those feels roughly like:
Cuéntame: ~99%
Chill Spanish Listening Practice: ~97%
Español al Vuelo: ~80%
Español al Vuelo definitely feels like a noticeable jump up in difficulty compared to the other two.
One big change over these last 50 hours is that my daily input has gone way up. Before, I was averaging around 3 hours a day pretty consistently, but now that school ended, Spanish is basically all I do. The last two days I got around 7 hours each day.
I also completely stopped doing outside study like Babbel. Every time I tried doing other forms of study, I kept thinking, “I could just be getting more input right now and moving through the roadmap faster.” So eventually I just stopped.
That said, I still don’t necessarily think a pure CI approach is the absolute most efficient way to reach fluency. I just think it’s the only method I genuinely enjoy enough to sustain long term, and consistency matters more than theoretical optimization.
One thing that’s been bothering me lately is conjugated verbs and tense recognition. This happens constantly:
I’ll understand literally every word in a sentence, including the subject and the verb, but I still won’t fully register when the thing is happening.
Most of the time context fills in the gap, so comprehension overall is still fine, but it’s frustrating noticing how often tense information slips past me even when the rest of the sentence is crystal clear.
I’m hoping that naturally resolves with more exposure.
My current long-term goals are still:
Begin reading around 600 hours
Begin speaking around 800–850 hours
At my current pace, I’m hoping to hit 600 hours sometime in August.
I also experimented a little bit with crosstalk. I don’t really have anyone in my personal life I can do actual crosstalk with, but I’ve used AI a few times for it. I basically prompt it to:
speak only Spanish,
keep things fairly easy,
adjust difficulty based on what I seem to understand.
I’ve probably only done maybe 30 minutes total so far, but honestly it surprised me how much I could understand and respond to.
Now for the part I’m questioning a little:
The roadmap says that at Level 3 you should be able to start watching intermediate videos. But I’ve also seen a lot of people say they stayed in beginner for another 50+ hours watching harder beginner videos before transitioning.
So I’m wondering:
Is being comfortable around level 45 where I “should” be at 150 hours?
Should I just dive straight into intermediate videos?
Or should I spend another chunk of time squeezing more out of advanced beginner content first?
Another thing I’m conflicted about is the roadmap’s description of Level 3.
Some of it feels very accurate:
I definitely rely much less on visuals now.
Podcasts are becoming genuinely comprehensible.
Sometimes I can even look away from the screen during Dreaming Spanish videos and still follow along.
But the roadmap also says you start developing a good intuition for grammar and sentence structure.
Honestly, I don’t really feel that yet.
Maybe for extremely basic sentences, sure. But if you asked me to produce a genuinely useful sentence with correct grammar, I would have absolutely no clue where to even start.
So I’m curious if that’s normal for this stage too.
Overall though, even if progress still feels slow day to day, there’s obviously something happening because 50 hours ago level 45 content would have felt significantly harder than it does now.
Would appreciate any feedback, advice, or reassurance from people further along the roadmap.