I agree with t_harangi: in order to follow media content you need well over 20.000 words (as per Lingq count). If you enjoy the series, do keep on watching but lower your expectations. I’d concentrate on picking up sentences here an there and, over time, little “exchanges”: questions/answers, statements/reactions, etc. This is a very good exercise for improving listening comprehension. If you’re able to understand those short snippets, it means that your listening capacity is developing and you’ll be able to understand more and words as you increase your vocabulary (which you mostly do by reading)
I have just started watching some series on Netflix and I do believe that once I have enough words that this will be a really useful method as I can just keep watching and reading and while doing this train my ears to understand, but now having just over 10.000 words I thought “yeah I will be able to understand quite a lot” and it is not the case I guess I still have another 10.000 words to go until I can really enjoy a series and know more or less exactly what is going on. But there are times within a series in which I can understand 100% but within a whole episode of a series I only really understand 20% at the top.
I guess I am just gonna have to keep grinding away at Spanish and get more of an understanding of the grammar!
10k ist just a beginning
rookie numbers hahaha
Oh, stop it, I haven’t reached 10k in Hebrew and in Russian the majic number is probably over 30k. Sigh. 
we are both still riding that long road of language fluency I have made myself a new goal by the time I have been learning Spanish for 1 year I want to have over 20.000 words.
“but I have a lower tolerance for missing details of TV shows as opposed to books :-)”
Me too. Even at 31K+, I usually keep the Spanish subtitles on for this very reason.
when did you notice that you started slowing down with your known words? upon reaching 10.000 I do feel as if I am slowing down and just keep passing the same words that I have already highlighted yellow.
I am the opposite! In my case, anything that I do not understand in series is irrelevant and, in books, it bothers me quite a lot.
For example, I am watching ‘Rick and Morty’ and some of the jokes are difficult to understand both because of reference that I simply do not shell, as well as because I don’t understand some word or other that is well specified. I just let it go and enjoy the show.
Whereas books I feel the need to understand the content; if I don’t, I feel that I did not read the book. I really need a good grasp of the content, every word and passage are important.
+jonesjack It means you must move on to more challenging material
Well I have just imported my first book and it is now my goal to try and complete it the name of the book is " El lobo de wall street"
I start watching and listening right away to get used to the flow and rhythm of the language.
I understand around 90% of movies content in English with around 10 000 words vocabulary. Though, there is a reference to other languages where 10 000 English words, could be around 20 000 words in the Russian language for example.
At the moment I am learning French and Chinese from complete scratch and as soon as I get around 1k words in both of them, I will for sure dive into some language learning sitcoms in Chinese/French (to hear the pronunciation, watching on facial muscles and lips moving of actors etc). And not known words would go as flashcards here on LingQ.
By myself, I find learning languages by watching movies a good idea, but it’s a time-consuming process for sure, so therefore not for everyone.
For example, I am familiar with English since 1991, but not speaking it on daily basis, different tests said that I am around 5500-7500 words, but I believe I am at least at 10 000. My grammar is awful, but at the moment, I am working every day to fix that. So, I decided to work on Breaking Bad (didn’t watch it before) movie to get some useful grammar sentence patterns and new words. The first episode of the first season which is 57 minutes long, took me around 4.5 hours to work through, 172 LingQ’s created, most of those 172 LingQ’s are around 3-4 flashcards remind marker, but this movie for sure not for those who are let’s say A1-B2 at studying English (I am thinking by myself I am around B1 on grammar/vocabulary and B2 on speaking where my passive vocabulary sometimes wake up). My 2 cents into this discussion and God bless Grammarly for correcting my mistakes
time most definitely flys I think I wrote this when I have like 2000 words in Spanish thinking I knew loads of words haha still not there just yet!
I agree with Katy. Day1, native material, preferably of something you’ve seen in your L1 before. Waiting is a mistake, and subtitles makes it more of reading exercise. A better alternative to waiting would be to start out watching only 10 min a day and gradually increase.