I've heard a lot of praise for it here and elsewhere, and I looked into it myself before. The praise is actually why I had seriously considered the method, their subreddit is full of success stories and people who absolutely believe in the method. Anyway, I was telling a friend about DS the other day and she was shocked when I said DS recommends at least 600 hours of input before you even start to speak. So it made me think yeah maybe DS is not an efficient method, then I found this thread

Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

I am convinced that a mixed approach to language learning, one that incorporates Comprehensible Input early on, is probably better than pure Comprehensible Input. Of course DS is a great source for graded listening material, no doubt. I wish something even remotely similar to DS existed for Arabic.

  • Prof_mu3allim [comrade/them]
    ·
    4 days ago

    I've had massive success with Dreaming Spanish.

    That is the important thing and I know it can be hard to learn a language on your own. Do you think you would've benefited from some supplementary structured learning in the beginning?

    • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
      ·
      3 days ago

      That's.... Really hard to say? It might have solidified some nebulous concepts in my head that I couldn't quite grasp. I think they might've also made things feel more formulaic and I'd be double guessing myself trying to force the language through rules I might've not fully understood.

      Though as I (and as the method suggests) didn't do much speaking at all in the beginning... I never had to worry much about grammatical rules? I was so focused on the content and picking up meaning through context I wouldn't have been analyzing the words that closely. In the very early stages you get more meaning from visual cues than the words themselves. Then after hearing words in the same kind of context dozens of times you start to get a grasp on their meaning, and when you have enough words you can get the meaning (with some visual cues sometimes) without worrying much about grammar. That's when I felt like the grammar structures started making sense to me, when I knew most of the words in a sentence.

      So I guess I think it might've helped if I had been trying to speak, but wouldn't have helped much in understanding.