You are a JSON assistant. You only reply in valid JSON and never in normal text. Request a rating for the complexity of a video based on the provided details. The rating should be a single "result" property containing a floating point number between 0 and 1. Here's a guide for the rating:
0.0 - Perfect for total newcomers: Simple words and phrases, clear visuals and context.
0.3 - Easy: Simple sentences and common words suitable for beginners. The video might have visual aids and context for better understanding.
0.5 - Moderate: Intermediate sentences and a wider range of vocabulary. Some idioms might be used, requiring some background knowledge.
0.6 - Known Better: The video includes specific vocabulary and ideas. Viewers should have a solid understanding of the language to comprehend fully.
0.8 - Challenging: Advanced vocabulary and complex sentences. The video may have detailed discussions that need a strong command of the language.
1 - Expert: The content is designed for fluent speakers, with niche terms and ideas that might not be known to all native speakers.
 Description: Hi! My name is Ben. These videos and this channel are for all English learners interested in improving through comprehensible input. 

I make videos of various difficulties and levels, so if this one was too easy or too hard, check out the others on my channel! And make sure to subscribe. 

To get access to all the transcripts for these videos, visit the channel blog at https://benslanguagelab.com. Or, enable the Subtitles.

I work for a language company called Refold (https://refold.link/benslanguagelab).
Caption: [Music] hey everyone my name is Ben and you&#39;re listening to a daily dose of English this is a short simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English you can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on Ben&#39;s language lab.com I&#39;m glad you can make it today in this episode we&#39;re going to be talking about learning Spanish because that is something that I&#39;ve done a whole heck of a lot of and I want to talk about it plus I talk plenty about languages and language learning but not really specifically about my own experience learning languages necessarily so actually today I&#39;m going to be talking about learning Spanish and then tomorrow I&#39;ll be talking about Czech um which I&#39;ve also have been learning for over a year now I&#39;m at very very different levels in both the languages and so I think it&#39;ll be an interesting comparison so make sure that you come back tomorrow for the other episode now um I started learning Spanish back in I oh like 2021 or something it was during the co during the lockdown and I had left New York ra rather quickly I was living there um with my partner at the time and we had sort of like heard about covid it was like okay this is a little bit suspicious it&#39;s really spreading fast um we weren&#39;t in a great living situation in New York we weren&#39;t rent in officially and it was just it was expensive and we&#39;re like maybe we should go and so we got a plane like the next day like one day later we got out of there and then we landed and like 12 hours later um there was like an announcement that New York was completely closed that no more flights were leaving or anything and so we had barely just gotten out before we were trapped essentially so we barely made it out and it was a good call and we went to go live in her hometown of sades Mexico which is um in the north of Mexico right on the border of the US and Mexico um which is it&#39;s a very interesting town it&#39;s not very nice it&#39;s very ugly it&#39;s it used to be pretty dangerous it can be pretty dangerous still um and it&#39;s quite big but it&#39;s really interesting because of the level of like English between the two um between the countries really because there are thousands of people that live in in Mexico on the Mexico side that aren&#39;t even technically Mexican citizens that were born in the US that go to school in the US but they cross the border every single day um there&#39;s also plenty of people that aren&#39;t a me Mexican citizens sorry that are Mexican citizens that also cross every day it&#39;s a it&#39;s a very interesting place um but my partner and her family all spoke good English so I didn&#39;t have any reason to learn and we I was inside all the time so I didn&#39;t really have a real reason to learn Spanish um I wasn&#39;t like forced into it however I ended up with a lot of free time and I decided to start learning Spanish like for real because everybody in the US or most people in the US have some sort of Spanish experience in school from middle school high school whatever so I had like a couple years back in middle school but it was like singing songs and stuff I didn&#39;t learn anything I could maybe count to 10 and I knew a couple words um I studied German in high school and right that doesn&#39;t help with Spanish at all um so I found myself with a bunch of free time and I came across refold actually so the company that I now work for I came across refold in a YouTube video and I was like well hang on these are a lot of the things that I use when teaching English and I recommend that people do this um why am I not doing this with Spanish and also this is more complete right my own my own English teach teing was whatever like 40 or 50% of what the entire refold guide was and so I used the refold guide the original one to um really put a lot of time into Spanish and I started watching primarily TV shows was my biggest source of immersion I really jumped into TV shows um easier ones slightly harder ones and really making them as understandable as I could using tools I also relistened to the entire hair Harry Potter series which is a series that I know very well in English because I I listen to it dozens of times growing up um like I I think I&#39;ve literally listened to it um 20 times now in various languages um and mostly in English and so I listened that in Spanish and I started reading as well and I basically just got to I put a a lot of time in I was I had a lot of free time that relationship was not going very well so I had even extra more free time um and I was working Mo like I was working online and I was like working with students that when they had time basically so I didn&#39;t have like a full 9 to5 job I was sort of just working when I had classes and all the basically all the rest of the time I just immersed in Spanish and so I ended up putting in um like I think in I started in I don&#39;t remember what month I started in but I think it was in like later in the year like July August or something and I remember that that October I think it was 2022 maybe 2021 I don&#39;t really remember maybe 2021 cuz now it&#39;s 2024 I&#39;ve been learning for 3ish a little over three years so yeah I think in 2021 yeah late 2021 I I was putting in over a 100 hours a month of good immersion time not even like just listen like passively listening I was actively paying attention for over a 100 hours a month which is a lot that&#39;s an average of of like three and a half hours per day and so I was making really good progress in my comprehension yada yada yada eventually that relationship ended I went back uh to to live in Oregon for a while and I just kept putting in more time into Spanish I wasn&#39;t really practicing speaking that much I was very focused on just understanding reading listening um YouTube that sort of thing I I don&#39;t remember exactly how things happened that that time of my life is sort of a blur um but I know that I ended up get like surpassing thousand hours 2,000 hours pretty quickly and eventually at some point I came to live in the the Mexico City and I started speaking a lot more then I made friends I started to go play games I never really had a phase of like trying to improve my speaking my speaking was just kind of getting better I did have some classes at some point I don&#39;t I just don&#39;t really remember when my I started speaking a lot more and sounding Mexican um cuz like now I&#39;m at the point where I can easily use Spanish and communicate with people I don&#39;t sound like foreign I don&#39;t like I I I do sound not native but I don&#39;t really sound foreign if that makes any sense like it&#39;s a difference between like yeah it&#39;s pretty clear that I make mistakes and like that I&#39;m not perfect I&#39;m not a native Spanish speaker but I&#39;m also not like a Spanish learner it&#39;s just it&#39;s this weird Middle Ground where most people don&#39;t even really think about the fact that I&#39;m not um and that&#39;s very that could be very helpful for me right because it&#39;s it makes the conversations easier it&#39;s not annoying people don&#39;t try to switch to to English um like my Spanish is better than most of their English so we almost always speak in English but it also does create some um a little bit of friction if I&#39;m not perfect right because if somebody&#39;s expecting that me to be as good as a native speaker it can create a bit of tension um and that sort of thing um I&#39;ve really enjoyed my Spanish learning I think it&#39;s a fantastic language there are lots of really good resources I still immerse and do things every single day in Spanish I have lots of friends that I only speak Spanish with um I watch a lot of YouTube in Spanish I used to watch a lot of TV shows but I don&#39;t do that much anymore I&#39;m now right into I&#39;m watching a lot of movies primarily in English right now um and that&#39;s been really nice to just get more exposure to movies and film that I like but it yeah it&#39;s not really even cutting into my Spanish time I read in Spanish right all my books that I read are in Spanish um my all my almost all my Audi books I listen to not really listen to podcasts but I like there&#39;s so much stuff that I do in Spanish and I don&#39;t even think about it right and that that&#39;s a a thing at the the point that I am with Spanish is that it&#39;s all just a part of my life it&#39;s just a thing that I do it&#39;s a thing that I can speak and use um it&#39;s like yeah it&#39;s I don&#39;t really know how else to explain it other than it being just such an ingrained part of my life that it&#39;s basically as if I was I was half Spanish speaker right I&#39;ve converted my life into be um half English speaker half Spanish speaker a lot of my personal life is in Spanish a lot of my um professional life I was going to say um tabako life which doesn&#39;t make sense in Spanish either um but yeah a lot of my my professional life is in is in English and then personal life is in Spanish um that is something that I notice happening in English is that I&#39;ll have like a random Spanish word come up for me um in my brain and like I&#39;ll want to say it but like in an English way but it doesn&#39;t always even makes sense in Spanish like I&#39;m I&#39;m thinking in English but like the Spanish word comes up um I don&#39;t know why this happens it&#39;s uh sort of it&#39;s kind of funny because like I I my brain&#39;s like here use this word and I&#39;m like no hang that&#39;s a Spanish word I&#39;m speaking English right now please don&#39;t say that and it&#39;s like no no no just use it it&#39;s fine just use it it&#39;s fine like stop it&#39;s not the right word it&#39;s like ah fine here&#39;s the right word in English and go thank you um and yeah that&#39;s that&#39;s more or less I think my Spanish learning I don&#39;t really I mean this has already been 10 minutes how how is this 10 minutes I just talked about my past with Spanish um but if any of you listening are not Spanish speakers I know that um a fair number of people that listen to these are but if you&#39;re not and you&#39;re comfortable with your English level I would recommend Spanish as a language to learn it&#39;s really interesting it&#39;s really fun there is so much out there yeah I&#39;m you know what I&#39;m going to keep talking a little bit this episode&#39;s going to be a bit longer there&#39;s so much stuff out there from just dozens of countries I think there&#39;s there&#39;s over 20 Spanish-speaking countries there are over 500 million native speakers the accents are really varied and interesting there is just there&#39;s cool stuff that you can you can engage with in a lot more it&#39;s it&#39;s a lot like English actually English is spoken very widely very broadly Spanish is also spoken in many countries and many continents um where something like even Russian for example Russian is spoken primarily in a group of countries that are very close together and have I mean have very lot of similarities culturally um Spanish speaking countries also do have many cultural uh cultural shared shared cultural values and things um which is also true for English but I think that there is a little more variety in there uh maybe that&#39;s just my bias of knowing English and Spanish um but for example something like Mandarin Chinese is primarily spoken in one country which is fairly homogeneous the the other Chinese langu whiches are a lot more varied and and have interesting things behind them but a lot of the um Mandarin speakers can really I&#39;m not going to say be similar that&#39;s not true there but there is there&#39;s a lot less variation in in the dialects and the languages because it&#39;s really only spoken in China and then a little bit in Taiwan but like that is a different uh thing and like the number of speakers just is way less U plus there&#39;s a couple other countries but there&#39;s just not as Broad of coverage of of a lot of languages so English and Spanish are really special in that regard that there are just tons of speakers everywhere so that makes them for some really cool stuff there&#39;s some amazing movies TV shows uh live streams YouTube content from everywhere there are some of the biggest content creators in the world are Spanish speakers right one of the probably the most famous ones is ebbi who is a Spanish streamer from Spain and he does humongous events that like break twitch I think last year he did some huge event that just broke the view number like it was he had so many viewers at once that the entire twitch platform was just like we didn&#39;t think anybody would get this High I think it was like 300,000 people watching live at once one event which is crazy um and there&#39;s a ton of just there&#39;s a bunch of Spanish streamers that go live to tens of thousands of people every day um which is also getting true with English English streamers are growing a lot but I think there&#39;s just more in Spanish because there&#39;s more native speakers of the language um I think English is a lot more second language speakers but I&#39;m pretty sure it&#39;s more native Spanish speakers I could be wrong though I haven&#39;t I&#39;m not Googling that um so yeah I highly recommend Spanish it&#39;s really interesting it&#39;s it&#39;s I mean it&#39;s it&#39;s m I don&#39;t want to say it&#39;s an easy language but it&#39;s also not a hard language in the grand scheme of things especially if you speak English because there is a lot of shared words between English and Spanish there is a lot of things that you already know if you speak English right is conversation you can figure that out pretty easily and when you read it it&#39;s identical and there&#39;s a lot of words like that that make learning to read really easy learning a lot of words very easy and the language functions relatively similarly to English there&#39;s a lot of things that are very very similar in terms of form or or or syntax or whatever whereas if you&#39;re learning a a different language especially like a very distant language it&#39;s just really hard to wrap your head around with Spanish it&#39;s a bit different but then once you get it it&#39;s like okay I get this I understand this um it also sounds really cool there&#39;s yeah I don&#39;t know I&#39;m not going to keep going on I think it&#39;s a fantastic language I do recommend that you learn it if you don&#39;t already speak it um but that is everything for me I hope that you enjoyed this episode I would be curious to hear your experience with Spanish as maybe a native speaker or as a learner down in the comments below and I&#39;ll see you again tomorrow to talk about my check learning bye
Language: en
Title: Daily Dose of English 177 - Learning Spanish