[hintymad]

How do you pass the initial language barriers? I'm trying to learn Spanish with Netflix shows and the Language Reactor, but I find it extremely hard to understand spoke Spanish. The characters speak so fast that I couldn't discern individual words or phrases. For a lot of times, they speak as if they are murmuring. When I was learning English, my ability to understand spoken English grew with my ability to read, but in the case of Spanish, I can read a lot more advanced text than being able to listen...

[NoInkling]

Have a look at Dreaming Spanish, it exists precisely to bridge the "comprehensibility gap" for learners.

https://www.dreamingspanish.com (or find the Youtube channel)

There's tons of free content to keep you occupied for a while, and then there's a paid tier if you want more down the track. After choosing the level that's suitable, I recommend starting with Pablo's videos - he's the founder and I still like his style the most, particularly his older videos before things expanded. Just click on whatever looks interesting.

[hintymad]

Thanks! I've been on it for some time. I can understand Beginner level most of time, even with 1.25x or 1.5x for most of the videos, but I find most of Intermediate can be significantly harder to understand. One possibility is that the there are more idiomatic phrases in Intermediate, like the use of reflexive verbs, such as hacerse, levarse, ponerse, irse and etc under different context. They are so different from English and I still need to translate them instead of comprehending them.

[NoInkling]

Keep at it, consistently doing a bit every day, and you'll get there. I went through all the free beginner videos (at the time) before moving onto intermediate, then did the same before moving onto advanced, and only then was I really able to start watching stuff made for native speakers without feeling too lost. I'm not a CI purist though, I looked up words or grammar points occasionally, but I didn't actively try to study or memorize anything.

[baby]

this is akin to incomprehensible input and you need it, after listening to a lot of it your brain will start recognizing patterns and decompose things on its own, for now just brute force through as much of it as you can.