September 2025 | Spanish Progress Report

Without conferences or conventions or family reunions to contend with, September’s already looking so much better than last month!

Let’s look at the numbers:

The Stats

Input hours (at the end of the month): 35 in September; sitting at 460 total.

Monthly streak stats:

The Content

Content I’ve been enjoying lately:

People in the comprehensible input spaces frequently recommend Spanish Boost Gaming, so I knew I wanted to try watching eventually, but I’m not a huge Let’s Play* watcher – oh my goodness, I was so wrong to worry. I’ve really, really been enjoying his Supermercado simulator series.

I also watched a number of videos about Mexican Independence Day, which is on September 16th (and, as I learned, also the evening of the 15th!) I liked this one from Pablo, and this podcast episode from How to Spanish about how they celebrate the day.

Finally, I watched an intermediate series on DS about Mexican drug cartels (the first few episodes are free.) Cartels & drug trafficking are a phenomenon that simply don’t affect daily life for most U.S. citizens – hearing from a Mexican citizen about what the cartels are doing on the ground, as well as how they impact daily life and culture, was really informative & interesting.

Content I’ve found a bit too difficult:

Dreaming Spanish has been putting out videos they filmed while their whole team was together for a bit in Spain, which means there’s a lot of group conversation content – it’s very fun to watch, but it’s definitely harder to follow with the additional side-talking and speed of the flow of conversation.

This video and this video are two that came to mind as being especially difficult.

I’ve also been branching out to at least try videos that are at a more advanced level; they’ve been fun, and I’ve understood a lot more than I was expecting, but this video about Catalonian & Andalusian rivalry, as well as this video with Dreaming Spanish’s graphic designer (both Premium-only videos) were ones where I know I missed like 40-50% of the content.

September Reflections

Without a lot of travel and family events, this month was a major success – I only missed hitting my goal on 3 days, and none of them were in a row!

I also made it to the Spanish conversation group twice, which added about 90 minutes on top of the hour of input I already managed on those days. I’ve really enjoyed going to this group so far – it’s really humbled me (my Spanish is so much more halting and simple than I’d like it to be) but it’s showing me my areas of weakness very well.

My past tense capabilities are incredibly poor, which really hinders even basic conversation. I’m considering breaking further from the “input-only” method to study past-tense conjugations, just to be able to talk with people better.

On the bright side, I watched 2 hours of content labelled as “advanced” on the DS website this month, as opposed to August’s 13 minutes. I think I’m feeling a lot less intimidated to try videos out, even if they look more difficult at first glance.

enjoying content

A bonus for the “content I’ve been enjoying” phase would have to be the video that got me to start watching SBG in the first place, Spanish for Men. In the DS subreddit, there was some drama over a user who posted asking for more “content for men,” because he felt a lot of DS content was “geared towards women”. This is… patently untrue**, and apparently Martin (the guy running the channel) caught wind of it, because he put out a video for men, complete with a long compilation of hunting, car mechanic, and gun-building simulator games.

It was hilarious. I watched the whole thing.

I’d heard people talk about forgetting that they were “doing input” because they were enjoying what they were watching or listening to so much, but I don’t think I’d fully experienced it until watching Spanish Boost Gaming. Martin is hilarious, and sometimes I’d genuinely be over 30-40 minutes into a video before remembering, “Oh yeah, I’m doing this for input, not just for fun.”

the slog…

The intermediate slog is definitely a thing, and it’s already getting to me a little – the content I know I’ll find really interesting is just out of reach for me, so I’m stuck at a more boring place – but finding gems like SBG and some of DS’s more cultural/sociological videos have been life-savers for maintaining my consistency.

The progress I’m noticing is very tiny – I’m watching the occasional “advanced”-level video, and I’m more confident speaking even if my vocabulary is still catching up – but the point of these reports is so that I can look back and see how far I’ve come, and I’m certainly already a little further than I was in August!

I think these “reflections” need a little more structure to them to keep me concise (I am quite bad at that…) so next month I may try out something a little different – regardless, I will see you there with even more input under my belt!

¡Ciao ciao!

*genre of video where you watch someone else play a video game

**While DS does have more female content creators on it, the content they create is hugely varied, and only a fraction of it focuses on anything specifically “feminine.” There’s women doing travel content in remote/wilderness-y areas, talking about scientific discoveries, covering drug cartels and local politics… and none of the men are making fishing/hunting/power tool videos. Make of that what you will…