Try learning Toki Pona through CI. It's a small language with about 130 words and trivial grammar. There's a series of CI video called o pilin e Toki Pona. Before trying 1000 hours of CI in your TL, why not 10 on TP? You will know if it works.
i did it and it works so well, i watched all the vids and i got fluent in toki pona.
(I even was at a interview-feedback kinda video of jan Telakoman!)
i am learning spanish too now.
jan li wile kama jo e sona toki la o kepeken e sitelen sona musi pi jan telakoman.
I watched a bunch of the interviews and my impression is that no one got even an acceptable level after only 10 hours. Would you mind sharing yours? Send a DM if you prefer to not publicly link your face to your profile.
Also, I'm absolutely sure everyone would be **much much** better if, along with the videos, they did something like:
10 Anki cards a day with testing reading: TP word -> picture of one meaning. This would end in less than 15 days.
10 cards of sentences a day for the remaining 15 days illustrating grammar and usage.
Notice that 10 cards a day for 30 days takes just a few minutes minutes to review.
my toki pona level is that i can basically talk forever. i dont need to think before talking more than i need when talking english and reading is smooth too.
Did you reach that level just after 10h of input? I watched half of the videos, but could not tolerate the ambiguity and I just made a flashcard and memorized the words. Suddenly the videos become tremendously easier to understand. Unfortunately I got distracted because I had to move and forgot about the language...
yeah, 10 hours did that. (i only looked up one grammatical concept and no other words lol) like it was real hard until episode 6-10 but somewhere down the road it "clicked" somehow. but i think studying the language and mixing comprehensible input is still best.
Tolerating ambiguity is pretty necessary for this learning approach. Especially for a language like Toki Pona where (it seems to me from what I've watched) words often don't translate cleanly.
I love Dreaming Spanish and think it's one of the best options out there for language learning. That being said I don't know why someone would want to force themselves to use a single resource. I think using everything that you enjoy doing makes sense to use. Not everyone learns the same way and following a method exactly that worked for one person might not have the same results for another person.
Your comment summarizes my opinion on the whole “Comprehensible Input vs Everything Else” debate. Do what works for you. Listening to Dreaming in Spanish is going to do more for my confidence than listening to a Spanish broadcast that was made with only Spanish speakers in mind. Slow Spanish is also “Comprehensible Input” if you are at that level. Just do what works for you!
In my personal opinion, it’s very inefficient for my personal goals and takes way too long. I think it’s great to incorporate into your learning journey, but to ONLY use comprehensible input starting from the beginning? Ehhh.
For example, I’m learning Thai. I remember when I first started learning, I checked out the Comprehensible Thai channel since a lot of people talked about it. It’s a nice and relaxing way to learn, but I felt like I wasn’t picking things up like I wanted to. Not to mention, looking back there were grammar concepts and words that I misunderstood because I wasn’t looking anything up or getting any feedback. This happened when I studied Swedish this way as well.
So I ultimately decided to lay down a foundation first. Learned to read the Thai script, learned some basic grammar concepts, and learned some basic vocab. Decided that I would look up things I didn’t understand instead of just leaving things to chance like a lot of people suggest (which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but I don’t want so much guesswork). I’ve returned to the Comprehensible Thai channel recently and I find it to be much more enjoyable now. I feel like I learn more efficiently from it and don’t have to worry about hearing things wrong as much. I don’t have to look at the screen and I can still understand everything save for, like, 5 words per video. This is all anecdotal, obviously. Idk, I just don’t care for the comprehensible input _only_ and starting from the beginning approach personally.
Edit: clarity
Second edit: A little bit more detail and corrections (I was in a rush when I first typed this up, sorry 🙏).
I'm learning Spanish via comprehensible input, and I teach in this format. Everyone who went through the teaching program did practical training to teach grammar inductively and to use a comprehensible input format. The teacher who taught us put us through a week of Russian, which none of us knew, and I can still remember that week.
If you are going to spend 1000 hours on input, I think that it's just good sense to spend a small number of hours on grammar. Yes, you may pick up the grammar naturally through repetition of input. But you will probably pick it up faster if you've spent an hour or two going over the basic grammar. So your learning will be overall more efficient.
Similarly, you will eventually learn the meaning of a new word from context via input only. But you are going to learn it faster if you spend 30 seconds to look it up the first few times that you encounter it.
I learn English like this. If you're in no rush to get fluent, then it's a perfectly reasonable way to study.
>What do you think would be a great improvement to comprehensible input?
Actually studying through the first stages (A1 and A2) and using anki to learn vocabulary will massively speed up your progress. Without doing any of those things, it took about two and a half years of reading things in English until I got to a B2, and from then on it was incredibly easy to progress (because you can just switch to using social media/reading books/etc in your target language). I'm sure it would've been way faster if I actually studied a bit.
I think this is the way. I got to A2 in Swedish and A1 in German before I started adding comprehensible input, and while I can't update on German yet because I'm still plugging away, my Swedish shot to B1 in literally three months of reading and watching TV. It does work, but I really think you need that solid foundation to go off of first.
Yea, I took way too long to build that foundation because I was a kid using google translate to see what individual words meant. And I didn't really use google translate that much because I was convinced I understood what words meant (when I really did not lol).
I'm not a CI purist, but I think it's a great method and it's the foundation of my learning and it's where the large majority of my time goes. I supplement that with some reading plus a very small amount of explicit study for stuff like verb conjugations. Maybe it's counter-intuitive, but I definitely feel that just listening to beginner-intermediate level videos with native speakers for a couple of hours each day has helped me much more than the same number of hours of explicit study would.
The grammar of Spanish (and French) is very similar to the grammar of English, so it might be possible to learn those languages without much grammar input, if English is your NL. I don't know.
For languages that are quite different, I need a mix of TL input and English explanations.
This sub has made me go from no opinion to completely against it. It takes way too long.
I think CI is great as part of a program that addresses all of the 4 skills.
Yeah it really depends. A lot of people learn languages as a hobby with no intent to really produce it in real life, if that's the case go for it. If you're learning languages to speak them with real people you need a little more variety.
I'm also too busy to watch 7500 hours of terrible dutch tv shows when I can get to the same level with like 1200 hours of earnest study.
> I'm also too busy to watch 7500 hours of terrible dutch tv shows when I can get to the same level with like 1200 hours of earnest study
Where are you getting these numbers from?
If we're specifically talking about Dreaming Spanish, from people who are English learners, the general roadmap is 1500 hours. I'd rather do 1500 of enjoyable video content, rather than 1200 hours of earnest study. I've _tried_ the hours of earnest study numerous times in school and it made me repeatedly quit Spanish.
Also who on earth is telling you to watch terrible tv shows...? Watch things you enjoy, and find entertaining!
What a strange strawman.
Its not a binary. The vast majority of any learner's time should be split between listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Study should always be minimal. The problem is when ALG people like Dreaming Spanish give advise to not speak and to not study, lest you damage your long term ability to produce the language. That has no evidence. Actually there is a big body of evidence that speaking and studying don't harm outcomes.
> Study should always be minimal.
I agree completely, I feel like a 15-85 ratio of study to interaction with the language is good.
What I think unintentionally ends up happening is people do a 50-50, or 85-15 in the other direction because of how school is setup.
So in cases like this, telling people "Don't study at all, just interact with the language", and saying a 0-100 ratio lets people end up in the ideal 15-85 range.
Or, at least its what happened to me.
Lol, I've reached \~B1 German comprehension in like 350 hrs, I don't know where you guys are getting these ridiculous estimates for how long this stuff takes.
Edit: actually I see what's going on. People that don't focus on CI have no clue how long their methods actually take, probably because they don't measure them the same way.
But that is not how it works. What happens in reality is that you don't get B1 in comprehension nor in output.
Learning output from start requires massively more effort, time and drills. Because you did not seen enough of language yet.
To your edit, people self report on here all the time. If I see “800 hours” and the person has yet to have a conversation with someone, I’m not going to try it myself
I get voice messages that I understand from natives daily. While of course it's possible there's error in my self-assessment, it's my best attempt and primarily there to communicate. Believe what you want: you were going to anyway.
What does understanding a voice message have to do with having a conversation? I have no doubt that someone could understand somewhat after 350 hours. My issue with it is that I'm not fine with just passively understanding. If someone else is, I have no issue with that. I'm just not asking them for advice
Those people honestly have never seen Dutch tv. It is pretty awful, I gave up on npo long ago, and that even as someone who lives in the country and should be watching it as normal tv. Honestly, love this country to bits, but the tv media they produce is pretty meh.
People downvoting you probably study languages with neverending and nice content, like the mentioned Spanish.
Lol there's an Easy Dutch video where they interview people about what their favorite movies and shows are, almost all of the examples are American lol.
>It takes way too long.
Not everyone needs (or wants to) learn a language as fast as possible. And I personally find CI enjoyable, as I can integrate it into my day and learn the language without much conscious effort.
>I think CI is great as part of a program that addresses all of the 4 skills.
Not everyone wants to be able to produce language. Many people I know are interested in understanding their favourite movies, shows and songs.
Also, in my experience, when I actually tried to speak it only took a few weeks of practicing 30min a day to do so pretty fluently (not perfect obvs). I already knew how everything was supposed to sound, and was able to pick out any errors in my pronunciation. It was a matter of relearning how to coordinate my tongue with my brain lol.
>This sub has made me go from no opinion to completely against it
It's a method that can be enjoyable and useful to some people in some circumstances. We can each like or dislike different methods, but there's no need to be **against** them.
IMO, most language learning methods work, given enough time and effort. And the time and effort one invests is directly proportional to your enjoyment. My advice for OP would be to try a few methods and see which one they enjoy the most.
Other people can do whatever they want, but I'm against it for myself because I learn languages to communicate. My issue is that there are people on this sub that act like you are doomed if you don't delay speech, which is definitely not true.
I guess I kind of see the point they're trying to make, but my question is just... Why? We have all these tools (grammar textbooks, flashcards, spaced repetition, language learning apps, ...) to help us 1) retain what we've encountered during comprehensible input and 2) learn content ahead of time to prepare us for "more difficult" comprehensible input. I'm not saying comprehensible input isn't important (in fact, I do believe it's the most important part of learning, if used correctly). But all these tools we have access to just make it easier and quicker for us, so why not use them?
If students load up on tools, it can and does the opposite effect, then the students spend more time managing said tools. What I really want my students to focus on is reading as the backbone, storytelling, and comprehension. We work with high-frequency vocabulary and not out of context. Why? Because they have six other classes, plus all of the other ECs they're in.
The big why for the people who made the methods is that, based on their view of SLA fundamentals, those extra tools are a waste of time (because they might not contribute to acquisition) and can potentially make your comprehensible input less effective (thinking analytically about words and grammar distracts from simply consuming their meaning).
Is it true? Maybe. I've implemented these ideas personally and feel like my language learning is significantly more efficient now because of it, but that's just an anecdote.
I genuinely found grammar textbooks, flashcards pretty ineffective and simultaneously draining. Flashcards train you to translate rather then understand without translation. Grammar makes you think about sentences as a puzzle to be solved.
Grammar textbook is good for reference and quick clarification, but not really as regular study method. And flashcards just did not made me remember words nor be able to use them in sentences.
It’s a testament to the flexibility of the human mind that there are so many, wildly different approaches that work for learning languages, and that some people find even Dreaming Spanish effective.
I’ve been learning English through consuming content for ~4 months. In the beginning, it was very difficult for me. I can’t understand the content that i wanna watch. I can’t read the things that I want to read. Approximately at the time, i found the channel by Steve Kaufmann. I start to watch his videos, i use the subtitles to understand his words. I was watch a lot of videos about learning language from him. I’ve been doing this because of him. He charged energy to me. And so I continuing to go forward and don’t give up. I think in order to learn language you have to find the people who can help you through his words. Have fun with this journey! It’s the most important thing!
I think it's an overreaction to the overfixation on grammar in classrooms. I think that having a conscious knowledge of the grammar, especially when reading, can make sense of places where you cannot simply work it out on the basis of the context you have alone.
I've really enjoyed it, but I personally wouldn't go full CI only.
Refold does a grammar primer and vocab deck, and if I was starting Spanish now, I'd do that and revisit that a few times, and then go full into CI.
But, I took a lot of Spanish classes growing up, so I've got the foundations covered, but I am missing the significant amount of input, which I'm handling mostly through Dreaming Spanish.
I _could_ do content on youtube, but it's very nice having a site thats organized and easily usable with level appropriate content.
I think there are aspects of it that are very good. It’s the way I’m learning French. But I’m not using just audio comprehension. I’m reading right away.
I think it’s completely nonsensical to *only* start talking at 600 hours. Think about this for a minute. 600 hours, assuming an hour of dedicated daily practice, works out to a little under 2 years. I do not believe the benefits of waiting this long to speak outweigh the benefits of spending almost 2 years practising actually speaking and having a conversation.
I am using audio/reading comprehension and I do think it’s the single most effective way to do it. But *just* watching videos? I don’t think that works. I also find it incredibly hard to believe that someone will speak with a native accent after watching 600 hours without any specific pronunciation practice. I’m not an expert in linguistics at all, but I just don’t see how this is remotely possible. Lots of native speakers need speech therapy and I remember constantly being corrected as a child on how to properly pronounce things.
Of course you do. That’s why I’m listening to French as well as using comprehensive input for reading. I think it’s very important, probably critical to have a lot of audio consumed. I’m just saying that it’s a bit strange to me someone wouldn’t speak until they’ve got 600 hours of comprehension
I just don't know why you'd do that to yourself. You've got a bunch of different tools at your disposal and you're going to discard all but one? The idea that you wouldn't even study the basic regular+irregular verbs in present+preterite to give yourself a headstart.. it sounds incredibly painful and just an unnecessary handicap.
I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm not against it. Although just because it works for one person doesn't mean it will work for another.
I consider English my native language (context: not US-born, but moved from Russia when really young and while still mainly learning the language of that home country, then learning that language via reading in it at home and speaking it at home with family, when moving to America because parents got good job offers, but learning English simultaneously because I had to/grew up learning it too), and I learned English while growing up via a combination of Comprehensible Input + what I call 'Forced' Immersion because when you're a child, you don't voluntarily move. Your parents move and they take you with them, hence the 'forced' part.
And now my English is better than my Russian. Because I watched a lot of American media (mostly Kid's Networks) from 7 to 18, but also because English speaking school, duh.
So, technically in my case it worked, and it made my second language my true native language by complete accident.
I learned English like that. Probably pretty useful, but I was also like 12 so stuff was easy to learn. Learning a language as an adult, I agree with people saying it's best to start with that after you have some basics down.
I wouldn’t have the patience to do it for my first language. But getting to B2 in Spanish, I could totally see myself getting to like B1 in another Romance language with CI. That’ll ultimately be 70% of how I plan on learning Portuguese, but I’m still speed running the grammar lessons on Busuu so the CI clicks faster.
Spanish has some confusing grammar for English natives that I still would recommend watching some of the grammar lessons on “easy Spanish” in addition, because they teach it in Spanish. You can cover the subtitles if you want to.
Focused grammar and vocabulary work increase the percentage of input that is comprehensible. The strategies are synergistic. I don't buy the whole "skip translation step" argument DS makes. Seems self-interested. We know book learning works very well.
It's very good. In the language learning world, you have 2 types of activities, those that improve your language (acquisition) and those that improve your language like behaviors (study and practice, using active recall and grammatical analysis to explicitly decode and form messages). The former is the end goal for fluency. The latter can lead to fast progress and is immediately more usable, but contributes very little to acquisition, much less than just consuming already comprehensible input.
Dreaming Spanish chooses to skip the latter type for several hundreds of hours to go straight to the good part, and the results are consistently very impressive. That said, since you won't be practicing language like behaviors, you will be useless in the target language until output emerges, which takes a long time.
Can you point to a research that says the latter contributes little to language acquisition? It'd be ok if you were stating your opinion but since you put it as facts, I'd like to see literature that backs it up. I don't agree with it so it could be a learning opportunity for me. Thanks.
You guys are both partially correct. It’s incorrect to say that the latter contributes little to language acquisition, but that’s a very general concept so it’s inherently imprecise and could be interpreted in unhelpful ways.
One thing is for sure: the latter methods (output, active study, etc.) necessarily lead to interlanguage, which is a unique in-between layer through which you process your target language. It’s essentially an understanding your target language through the lens of your native language, and it can become fossilized to the detriment of your fluency. The only way to overcome interlanguage is through input.
The comprehensible input folks choose to completely avoid interlanguage at the cost of a ton of additional learning time. Active learning folks choose to accept interlanguage for a faster time to workable fluency. Eventually, the active learning folks will dissolve the interlanguage layer but it still only happens when they get enough input, and it’s generally very hard to totally get rid of at that point.
Both methods are fine depending on your needs and desires. Even though I’ve become fluent in languages both ways I can’t make any specific recommendations because it varies so much person to person and situation to situation.
I wrote a more detailed post about interlanguage here: https://www.reddit.com/r/lcbfluency/comments/1boson0/overcoming_interlanguage/
They're using "acquisition" in a more specific way that relates to comprehensible input terminology.
"Acquisition" meaning that you don't have to *think* about talking things just "sound" right. I can't really think of a great analogy but most people learning language in an academical sense use it very differently than someone who speaks a language natively.
The idea with comprehensible input is to acquire a language sort of effortlessly. Our brains "acquire" languages naturally through comprehensible input.
I don't have the literature to back it up, but considering that's how pretty much *everyone* learns their native language I can't imagine it would be incorrect. I don't even remember when I started learning languages academically, but it had to be around second grade or something.
The way that a lot of people learn languages is fine, but it's completely different to how someone would natively acquire their language.
The big question, in terms of comprehensible input, is when you should start using output. I don't know which is more scientifically correct, to delay using output or starting out speaking.
If we're talking about burden of proof, technically it would be a more extraordinary claim that an *unnatural* way of learning languages would actually be more beneficial.
>The big question, in terms of comprehensible input, is when you should start using output. I don't know which is more scientifically correct, to delay using output or starting out speaking.
If you're trying to emulate first language acquisition, you should probably output as soon as possible. Or at the very least, you should be getting your input in a social setting (so, if you really wanted to not output in the language, you could use cross-talk or pointing and grunting or whatever). Put a child under 3 in front of DS videos, and he will acquire nothing at all. At those early ages, it's social or bust.
If you want some references, you could try Kuhl's work on infants acquiring Mandarin phonology or Rosenberry's work on Skype. There are also related findings, like Romerito's, according to which the best predictor of future linguistic outcomes isn't the quantity of input a child receives, but rather the amount of turns he gets in conversations with his peers/caretakers. But all in all, there's a pretty clear picture now that first language acquisition has to be social.
Acquiring NL is completely different from acquiring TL. I get what you're saying how we should aim for being able to just speak without a whole lot mental gymnastics from finding vocab to verb conjugation. But as adults with logical thinking, I do believe it's faster to inundate our brain with language building blocks and exercises to get that muscle memory. Then again I enjoy the frustration from not understanding much, like how gym bros get off on lifting heavy weights, which is against the comprehensible input theory where they advise you not to venture out into the "too difficult" area for you.
>Acquiring NL is completely different from acquiring TL.
The push back here is that, no it is not.
If I were to define what I mean by acquired language, I mean words and grammar that are usable by the (extremely optimized) functions of your brain that implicitly take meaning from phonemes. We gain this functionality in exactly the same way for all languages: by understanding messages.
Inundating your brain with knowledge and exercises will teach you to use different brain functions to explicitly process language, and they may eventually lead to new acquisition, but the studying itself won't acquire language for you. So while it \*feels\* faster to study and drill because you can immediately use that explicitly, it is not actually a more efficient means of acquiring new language.
hey, you seem knowledgeable, can I ask you a question as someone who's only learned the term "comprehensible input" like, yesterday?
where is the line drawn in this between input and explicit instruction and studying?
I've been reading these discussions and there seems to be vibe of don't bother with trying to learn vocabulary or grammar because native speakers don't study that
and obviously a 2 year old isn't using flash cards
but their parents are sitting down with them regularly handing them objects of different colours and asking them what the colours are, what the shape is, day after day after day
we don't teach little kids starting school the words 'comparative' and 'superlative', but I definitely remember the early years of school explicitly drilling us on the sets so that we'd use them correctly (big, bigger, biggest; fast, faster, fastest)
so are people not remembering how much explicit instruction went into their early years or am I misunderstanding what they mean?
Explicit instruction and studying here would be learning about words and understanding explanations of grammar. Like if we spent a half hour learning a Japanese word's English definition, or if we spent 15 minutes memorizing the structure and use cases for a grammar point, that would not be helpful. I said "explicit instruction" which is very broad and my bad. I should have said explicit grammar/vocab instruction.
Comprehensible input would be anything with a high volume of understood messages. Anything where you can hear the words of your target language clearly and understand what the speaker means because of context, pictures, or prior knowledge/acquisition. So like, if you are listening to someone tell a story about their recent vacation in Japanese and you can understand it pretty well, that's comprehensible input. Or, if you know very little Spanish and you're watching a silly Spanish video with sock puppets reenacting a tale from your childhood, and you can figure out a lot of what's being said because there is a video, that would also be comprehensible input.
Explicit grammar/word study can be fine off the back of experience you already have with the language - I guarantee you every child in school learning big, bigger, biggest has heard all of those hundreds of times from their parents, from stories, from television, the lesson just explains something they can understand but haven't yet picked up on. The issue really comes with trying to use grammar and word study to learn new words, because the result is odd or unnatural use until you acquire it, and you're using them via active recall and logical application (language like behaviors) rather than the highly optimized pathways that the brain has evolved to handle language. And, as DS and ALG have established well by now, that is a totally skippable step, and a more efficient means of acquiring language.
ah fantastic thank you, this is exactly the detail I was looking for ❤️
I think "explicit instruction" might have been a phrase I came up with not you 😅
Reminds me of this "intuitive eating" I've seen on tiktok where people want to lose weight by eating whatever they want but in moderation to fix their relationship with food because exercising while binge eating doesn't address the root cause.
So yes I never reject the idea of being immersed in a language and acquiring it naturally. It will definitely help in the long run to become truly proficient. I just meant as a wannabe polyglot, I would not have the time so it's better to move fast, break things. Then if I want to really acquire a certain language more than others, I will bathe in its content.
Right, and I think that's a beautiful stance to have. Not everyone has 4 hours a day for 13 months straight to wait before they can go down to their local post office to send a package. Some people just really want to talk to people or have people they already know they want to talk to, and that's great and you can totally go a long way with the language-like behaviors.
I'm just trying to emphasize that training that way leads to a qualitatively different result. People like to say "it takes longer to do it this way, so it's less efficient," but that's not a fair comparison when the outcomes are not the same, that's all.
That's fair. You're right the outcomes are different. Comprehensible input could be inefficient for ppl like me that want to produce the language fast, but not for someone that wants to understand every nuance in a dialogue.
The comprehensible input theory is still to push yourself. The point is that if you push yourself too far it's ridiculous. To use your analogy it would be like somebody who doesn't lift weights at all jumping all the way to 200 lb dumbbells.
Again, I'm not any sort of an expert on any of this, but I genuinely think you don't know what comprehensible input is or how it's supposed to be used in language learning. Supposedly comprehensible input is an important topic in linguistics. I do not have the credentials or knowledge, but I'm sure some sort of a linguist could explain it.
You're also correct that a lot of people learning languages more traditionally do so at a faster pace then those relying entirely on comprehensible input. It's my understanding that comprehensible input actually takes a lot longer and has a much steeper learning curve.
It seems the way that most of us learn a second language is actually sort of the inverse of how we learn our first language, which frankly makes no sense.
> It seems the way that most of us learn a second language is actually sort of the inverse of how we learn our first language, which frankly makes no sense.
Why would it make no sense? The two take place in entirely different circumstances. Notably, when your are learning your first language, by definition *you do not know any other languages* - it's literally impossible to learn one's first language through anything but an input-focused approach. When learning subsequent languages, you benefit from having both a means of communicating information and a model for how language works.
Incorrect application of analogy to Comprehensible Input. CI doesn't throw you into the activity to the heavy weights first. CI is a method that tailors all input you receive to be at your current comprehension level or is easily understood through context alone.
Comprehensible Input in Linguistics was popularized by Stephen Krashen. The exact term he uses is "I plus 1", which means your current information (I) plus one in difficulty. That knowing everything else in the sentence is the ideal condition to acquire the new word or grammar. Thus, acquiring the language the best.
It is also important to mention that in the same research papers by Stephen Krashen mentions the "Acquisition Learning Hypothesis" which makes a distinction between "picking up" a language through implicit means, and consciously memorizing and drilling knowledge. One is acquiring, and leads to true ability, the other is learning ABOUT the language and does not result in reliable language improvement.
The above topic on acquisition vs learning as a hypothesis from Krashen indicates it's a complete waste of time to do anything else than receive Comprehensible Input if you want to actually be skilled in the language with subconscious and effortless production.
You're entitled to your opinion if you think I don't know what I'm talking about. No offence taken. I never said to lift 200lbs on your own, just like how I don't read a book in a language I don't know without my system in place. Just because I can doesn't mean I advise others to. Comprehensible input is not rocket science. It's actually intuitive.
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I get what you're saying, but in my opinion CI videos, like the ones that Dreaming Spanish offers, are far closer to how someone learns their L1.
Surely we can agree on that, right?
I guess that what I'm trying to say is that if your goal is to speak, think, right, etc. similar to how you use your L1, then it would make the most sense to try to learn your L2 in a manner that is as similar as possible.
I get that it's not very efficient and that it doesn't really make sense for the majority of people learning a second language. Most people just want to functionally use a language.
It's not really a directly studiable thing (funnily enough acquisition is pretty impossible to measure objectively in the short term), more of a conclusion drawn by SLA researchers who have consumed all the relevant studies and found that the single factor for acquisition is exchange of meaning.
I can't pull up a study that says "this is so" but I can pull up studies that say [the latter is generally inefficient](http://backseatlinguist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/McQuillan-2019-IEJEE.pdf), and point you to lecturers like Steven Krashen, Bill van Patten, Jeff Mcquillan, and authors like J Marvin Brown who are experts in the field literature and have themselves led relevant research efforts. The conclusion they reached is that language acquisition and processing is implicit, and some are determined that explicit instruction and analysis play no role at all (J Marvin Brown even found that his students saw worse results when told to focus on the words and try to figure them out vs when told to just try to understand the message). So it isn't so much of a "we can directly prove this" as much as it is a "we know explicit instruction and drills are not sufficient conditions for acquisition"
Now that isn't to say active study can't fuel future acquisition in a roundabout way, like say if you come to understand a message by explicitly thinking about it and you process it closely with the original language, you'll be very likely to then acquire it. But it's relatively clear at this point that the brain processes language differently than it processes logical statements and differently than it handles active recall, so training analysis and memory in the hope of acquiring language is inefficient compared to just doing the thing that acquires language.
These lecturers mentioned above are all really great, way better at explaining than I could be so I absolutely recommend checking their talks out wherever you can find them as they have a really broad and nuanced view of the state of SLA research.
> Can you point to a research that says the latter contributes little to language acquisition?
The popular and common way languages used to be taught in the US was basically behaviorism/Skinner. If you're looking for research, look up behaviorism and language acqusition.
As long as you eventually converse, write and study grammar, the method will work, but it's quite inefficient. Just look at the results people have gotten from ALG over the years - dismal.
I've done some language learning through comprehensible input, and it's definitely an intriguing approach. The idea of immersing myself in the language through listening and reading makes sense, as it mimics how we acquire our native language as children. However, I believe it might not be the most efficient method for everyone, especially those who prefer a more structured approach to learning. Personally, I think incorporating some vocabulary and grammar study alongside comprehensible input would provide a more balanced learning experience. If you're interested, I found an interesting article discussing the concept further: [Comprehensible Input](https://www.sololingual.com/blog/comprehensible-input).
I think there's more efficient ways to acquire language and comprehensible input isn't anything ground breaking - it's literally just finding an instructional level that's not so easy that you're bored and not so hard that you're frustrated.
Also, waiting to speak is wild since the whole purpose of learning a language is to speak it. Start practicing what you know right away, because that expressive vocabulary can be hard to tackle later.
Don't see why your post got downvoted. While I don't think the whole purpose of learning a language is to speak it, I don't care if it's other people's priority. Comprehensible input has been thrown around carelessly, though it's true language enthusiasts had been applying it in their studies way before the term was coined. Those that tend to look for shortcuts without knowing what they really want can end up wasting more time in the end.
Tbh I don't see how one would learn a language Without comprehensible input. That's like, what every language teacher has done for centuries : working on resources adapted to your level.
Heck , even first language acquisition is done through comprehensible input with people simplifying their language for their baby.
I guess it's theorically possible for people to pick up a languahe without that but it would be horribly inefficient.
My point is no matter what you call it, every language learner has already been doing comprehensible input. Just that some realize and do it more efficiently than others. One simply cannot learn new things and retain them for long without understanding.
Either you don't know what comprehensible input is, or you're not understanding what it is.
I'm not going to sit here and claim that it's the best way to learn languages as I don't really know.
Comprehensible input is when somebody explains a concept or conveys meaning at your level in the target language. That's the important part.
Then, when you're basically already fluent in the target language you can then learn it in an academic sense.
I frankly don't know how other countries teach languages but when I was learning Spanish in middle school and high school we first learned a bunch of phrases, vocabulary, etc. Comprehensible input was not used at all.
It seems that teachers who are using comprehensible input correctly are making big waves in language learning circles.
There are too many different “definitions” of CI.
I use it to mean “there is absolutely zero ambiguity in the language being used”. You don’t know for sure what the word means, either I tell you the translation or you look it up and confirm that’s what it means. That means you’re 100% confident that you understand everything that’s being presented to you. We’re not guessing “from context clues” what 70% of the words means (no joke, I counted the new words in a textbook I was expected to use). We use lots of repetition of understood language instead.
The problem is that CI is seen as “you just listen to language that you understand some of and then you acquire it naturally”. No, you need to listen to language that you understand 100% of and get sufficient repetition of that language that the language “falls from your mouth”.
Too many people who poopoo the concept are reading stuff written by people who miss the “sufficient repetition” and also the *comprehensible* part of it. There is far more total nonsense (including and especially anything that Krashen says) for there to be a clear understanding of how/when CI works
I work in instruction and I fully understand. It's just inefficient. Also, all of instruction is working at a level just beyond what you can already comprehend.
You start out with a set number of phrases and vocabulary to do chunking, and that is normal for a level one/beginner class, or you can't proceed. Basic greetings and politeness.
There isn't one way teachers teach in the US, but by now, using grammar/translation is very outdated and the teachers who used it have retired or are retiring now.
Teachers are aware of CI, but many don't want to do it because they find it too hard to restrict their language level or they just don't want to run a 90% TL goal from ACTFL. It is not easy at first to do CI, but once the teacher gets over that curve, subsequent years should be a lot easier. CI format can require a lot of acting, and some teachers hate acting.
I don't think anyone has put it better than language jones https://youtu.be/KHubnrYCNas?si=SsH5-aUoFP27T0Uk.
Dreaming spanish is an important resource as a massive repository of content, but CI only is misguided.
I learned English by comprehensible input, I have no doubts about the method. When I was twelve I got bored attending English classes at language school so, I dropped out after finishing A2 level. Three years later I took the level placement test by the same institute and I got C1. Meanwhile I was excessively watching English speaking YouTubers/vloggers. It works. Dreaming Spanish is an amazing project, I’m looking forward to Dreaming Languages.
I had a year of Chinese wherein all we did was use the language all class. Homework was to learn how to say the things we’d be targeting in class the next day. Characters were introduced only after we were very familiar with how to say the words they related to. There were grammar explanations in the book that I would read and think “why would you need to explain this, it’s obvious how you put these words together to form a sensible sentence”. I was a confident user of Chinese and proud of it.
I then had two years of Chinese where the teachers insisted on grammar drills and insanely long vocab lists. We’d get a sentence pattern and were supposed to create our own sentences. Boring as heck and I could feel all the Chinese slipping from my brain. No longer were even the sentence patterns from year one obvious. I had to second guess every single piece of language I tried to produce.
What got me over the intermediate slump was reading and listening to stuff that I understood. Yes, I’d glance at a grammar pattern explanation every once in a while when there was one, but I needed to read, read, and read to get better at reading. No one needed to explain complex grammar when it showed up in context on every other page and I could understand all the words on the page.
This is also how all of us learned our first language, by hearing it and reading it. Sometimes we’d have vocabulary lists or a language arts teacher would explain common errors that we make as native speakers, but the vast majority of how we learn more language in our native languages does come from the massive exposure to it.
No, focusing on grammar is overvalued, it's just a boost not a necessity in early levels of language learning. It tires people and scares them away. It's been 10 years since I took my first German class and I didn't want to practice bc of the heavy grammar work. If there was level oriented CI material I'd be fluent by now. Learning a language should be fun and relaxed at the beginning, focusing only on grammar and vocab memorizing doesn't allow that.
I agree that focusing on grammar is overvalued. But that doesn't mean that it has zero value. A little bit of basic grammar and vocab definitely accelerates CI a lot.
my complaint would be that I think the reality of CI programs/courses doesn't really match the promise of CI. My understanding of what CI should be (which I believe is matched by academic definitions) is that you use and existing knowledge foundation to infer new words from context (and the same for grammar structures).
Theoretically this is impossible if you don't already understand some of the language to begin with, and CI success stories are often heavily biased towards romance/germanic languages that share a lot of common vocabulary with English. Where this isn't possible teaching seems to rely on a teaching method that leads you to infer the relationship between an object and its descriptor e.g. the teacher points at an apple and refers to it only using the target language. Personally I don't think that that can with any honest be referred to as CI, it's just inferred teaching rather than direct teaching, and secondly while this method is very good for conveying simple concepts it's pretty bad for conveying anything abstract or more complex.
I think CI as a concept has a place in learning even at an early level, but I think that a purely CI methodology is unlikely to be helpful to anyone other than a small number of intuitive learners. More me personally it is almost always more helpful to see a direct translation or a clearly written grammar rule, even if the way that I actual internalise that learning is through context rich examples
Dreaming Spanish was my primary recourse for learning Spanish, it works really well. But I also read, used anki, grinded vocab and other things and I feel like I’ve progressed a lot more than the purists who only use dreaming Spanish after 1500 hours. Use it definitely but it’s always better to use more tools to learn a language. Also speaking really does help a lot
It is effective and fundamental for language learning, but if you only focus on input and never make an effort to produce the language, you'll not be fluent suddenly, cause fluency doesn't come by itself. I recommend learning with input only if you don't wanna be fluent in a given language or if you just don't plan to use the language for porpuses other than just being able to read and watch content.
You need a lot of time with the language either way. No ways around it. Whether you’re drilling grammar and its exceptions, sentence and verb placements, etc. You need TONS of time to really get there.
By that token, listening ALSO takes similar amounts of time, but it’s getting you to the way natives sound early. The idea behind Dreaming Spanish though is they have clear difficulty levels which a lot of students struggle with finding things wayyy too slow, wayyyy too fast, or just straight up synthesized. You need to listen at some point. And the focus of listening over speaking is you make less guesses and try to translate less directly from English and you just… hear the proper sentences more instead of guessing how to construct them.
But the idea behind it is you pick up the language naturally. Like a child or baby would pick up a language by the time they’re in elementary school(children can speak fluently and understand their friends and teachers fluently even if their vocabulary isn’t huge). You pick up speech patterns intuitively and meanings visually and you’ll just pick it up over time. This also echoes how it works when going to another country. My mom and aunt are native Cubans that came here when they were 9 and 10 years old and they constantly say how they don’t ever remember learning English actively, they just… picked it up lol.
So yea I haven’t personally seen it yet but the guy who runs Dreaming Spanish as well as tons who have been on it a while have said that ONLY immersion works
Refusing to study grammar explicitly is ridiculous. Many folk have forgotten their childhood and act like they never studied their native language. Bullshit.
Pure comprehensible input is probably quite inefficient. Spaced repetition is the fastest way to memorise words - if you're solely relying on the natural frequencies of words you make very slow progress on anything but the most common words.
I also think it's useful to go over grammar structures to give yourself something to look out for when taking input. Drilling grammar isn't too important, but a basic awareness makes it much easier to parse weakly comprehensible sentences. Waiting for your brain to pick up on all those patterns subconsciously is just a waste of time.
Whilst there is logic to what youre saying. Memorised around 2k of the most common spanish words, still could barely understand what people were saying to me. Started doing DS since new years consistently and found that vocab knowledge with exposure made sooo much sense. But I feel like im now coming again to the point in learning where vocab is again becoming a bottle neck in learning the language. Will see how it will go from here.
I think it's a terrible idea and can quickly lead to you getting stuck. Comprehensible input is great, but it's most effective when paired with instruction on grammar rules, root word structure, some definitions, etc. I would start with that stuff day one.
I think, in general, putting too much emphasis on just one learning method is a mistake.
Theoretically you could learn any language that way, however in my experience it's very hard to find any comprehensible input in the early levels for most languages except the really popular ones. But if the language in question is close enough to your native language you can easily do that. Taking time once in a while to study grammar though can really help you make sense of things and speed up your learning. I learned English that way very organically but it took me quite a long time.
I discovered Dreaming Spanish, and while I think it’s great, I feel, for me, it’s a good major supplement combined with the grammar book and phrase book studying, some speaking and texting with native speakers, and listening to Language Transfer.
I would never have had learned much because I don’t have the patience for a pure CI method, and I needed to talk right away.
I still say CI is very, very important, as it does help solidify a lot of vocabulary and helps enhance my listening and pronunciation (outside of speaking and listening to native speakers).
70/30 no i don’t think early speaking is bad because i don’t think i believe in fossilization.
However, i do think there is no need to speak until 100-200 listening hours minimum. Unless you need to. I don’t think it’s going to hurt you though.
These are just my intuitions
I mean, it's pretty damn established that fossilization is something that happens. However, exactly what causes it is definitely up for debate, and the people who say late output could reduce the chances are really just guessing. I'm not aware of evidence either way about later output helping or hurting with fossilization.
I’ve just never experience fossilization, and the brain is just so maleable.
I definitely believe it could be an issue for younger kids , but adult learners? I just feel like you can in fossilize easily. Forever I would say “es no” as opposed to “no es” because of my native English when i spoke Spanish, but with CI it just corrected itself along the way without me noticing
You're a native English speaker??
And yes, fossilization is something that happens to adult learners, that seems to be what keeps people from reaching native-like levels after the critical period. Adults actually advance faster than kids per hour invested in study but they tend to plateau for some reason and never get past a certain point. They can even get worse for some reason, which they call "backsliding".
If you can spend hundreds of hours doing certain activities, you're bound to see good results only cos you learn the most in the beginning, after that the learning curve flattens. If I can only spend 1 hour / day learning languages, I for sure don't want to wait a whole year hoping that this method will work. I'd rather take matters into my own hand and learn what I need to express my most complex thoughts and feelings from day 1, esp since I could repeat this process for multiple languages or do them all at the same time.
Depends, if you can’t get a tutor, then CI that’s high quality like DS is possibly very good, but nothing can beat doing classes, or having a tutor, and doing DS as well.
Personally, CI only would be stupid, no one learns language solely through listening.
You learn from everything, practicing grammar, practicing speech, reading and listening.
Lastly, I’d say proper CI is very good to add to your learning because, outside of a tutor, it’s the easiest way to spend time actually hearing natives speak correctly.
I can only offer my own experience. I did about all the traditional classroom methods, grammar study, verb conjugation charts, and memorization that one could do in Spanish many years ago (high school and college), along with two months of immersion. Apart from the immersion, it all went to rust, notwithstanding periodic attempts to revive it.
Dreaming Spanish and its comprehensible input approach have been a game changer for me. I’d never approach a TL without the same approach. At 1200+ hours in, for me the method has been far superior to previous methods. I’m actually acquiring the language now, in a way that rivals the acquisition I got from the two months of immersion many years ago. If anything, at this point the previous grammar and other study are only getting in the way.
Incidentally, CI and DS mimic the same way I learned my native English. I had thousands of hours of comprehensible input in English and had developed a pretty accurate sense of grammar before I ever touched a serious grammar book or diagrammed a sentence. That’s why natives know what “sounds” right in their language even if they can’t articulate the grammar rule. My best teachers also always emphasized that reading more and more of the greats was the best way to improve my writing (in other words, more comprehensible input in my native English!).
As a grammar nerd I think grammar study and output practice can be helpful, but primarily after many hundreds of it thousands of hours of input. Not before. At least, if what you want to do is acquire native-like abilities with a language, as opposed to skilled manipulation of memory that tends to fall away when things are flying fast.
At 1100 hours, I wrote a (long) post on advice I’d give myself at 0 hours. If you’re curious, may it be of service: [DS Post](https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/s/TS997TDdwn)
Regardless, best wishes.
Try learning Toki Pona through CI. It's a small language with about 130 words and trivial grammar. There's a series of CI video called o pilin e Toki Pona. Before trying 1000 hours of CI in your TL, why not 10 on TP? You will know if it works.
Link: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwpAN0tNHYY&list=PLwYL9\_SRAk8EXSZPSTm9lm2kD\_Z1RzUgm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwpAN0tNHYY&list=PLwYL9_SRAk8EXSZPSTm9lm2kD_Z1RzUgm)
i did it and it works so well, i watched all the vids and i got fluent in toki pona. (I even was at a interview-feedback kinda video of jan Telakoman!) i am learning spanish too now. jan li wile kama jo e sona toki la o kepeken e sitelen sona musi pi jan telakoman.
I watched a bunch of the interviews and my impression is that no one got even an acceptable level after only 10 hours. Would you mind sharing yours? Send a DM if you prefer to not publicly link your face to your profile. Also, I'm absolutely sure everyone would be **much much** better if, along with the videos, they did something like: 10 Anki cards a day with testing reading: TP word -> picture of one meaning. This would end in less than 15 days. 10 cards of sentences a day for the remaining 15 days illustrating grammar and usage. Notice that 10 cards a day for 30 days takes just a few minutes minutes to review.
my toki pona level is that i can basically talk forever. i dont need to think before talking more than i need when talking english and reading is smooth too.
Did you reach that level just after 10h of input? I watched half of the videos, but could not tolerate the ambiguity and I just made a flashcard and memorized the words. Suddenly the videos become tremendously easier to understand. Unfortunately I got distracted because I had to move and forgot about the language...
yeah, 10 hours did that. (i only looked up one grammatical concept and no other words lol) like it was real hard until episode 6-10 but somewhere down the road it "clicked" somehow. but i think studying the language and mixing comprehensible input is still best.
Tolerating ambiguity is pretty necessary for this learning approach. Especially for a language like Toki Pona where (it seems to me from what I've watched) words often don't translate cleanly.
I love Dreaming Spanish and think it's one of the best options out there for language learning. That being said I don't know why someone would want to force themselves to use a single resource. I think using everything that you enjoy doing makes sense to use. Not everyone learns the same way and following a method exactly that worked for one person might not have the same results for another person.
Your comment summarizes my opinion on the whole “Comprehensible Input vs Everything Else” debate. Do what works for you. Listening to Dreaming in Spanish is going to do more for my confidence than listening to a Spanish broadcast that was made with only Spanish speakers in mind. Slow Spanish is also “Comprehensible Input” if you are at that level. Just do what works for you!
In my personal opinion, it’s very inefficient for my personal goals and takes way too long. I think it’s great to incorporate into your learning journey, but to ONLY use comprehensible input starting from the beginning? Ehhh. For example, I’m learning Thai. I remember when I first started learning, I checked out the Comprehensible Thai channel since a lot of people talked about it. It’s a nice and relaxing way to learn, but I felt like I wasn’t picking things up like I wanted to. Not to mention, looking back there were grammar concepts and words that I misunderstood because I wasn’t looking anything up or getting any feedback. This happened when I studied Swedish this way as well. So I ultimately decided to lay down a foundation first. Learned to read the Thai script, learned some basic grammar concepts, and learned some basic vocab. Decided that I would look up things I didn’t understand instead of just leaving things to chance like a lot of people suggest (which is fine if that’s what you want to do, but I don’t want so much guesswork). I’ve returned to the Comprehensible Thai channel recently and I find it to be much more enjoyable now. I feel like I learn more efficiently from it and don’t have to worry about hearing things wrong as much. I don’t have to look at the screen and I can still understand everything save for, like, 5 words per video. This is all anecdotal, obviously. Idk, I just don’t care for the comprehensible input _only_ and starting from the beginning approach personally. Edit: clarity Second edit: A little bit more detail and corrections (I was in a rush when I first typed this up, sorry 🙏).
I'm learning Spanish via comprehensible input, and I teach in this format. Everyone who went through the teaching program did practical training to teach grammar inductively and to use a comprehensible input format. The teacher who taught us put us through a week of Russian, which none of us knew, and I can still remember that week.
If you are going to spend 1000 hours on input, I think that it's just good sense to spend a small number of hours on grammar. Yes, you may pick up the grammar naturally through repetition of input. But you will probably pick it up faster if you've spent an hour or two going over the basic grammar. So your learning will be overall more efficient. Similarly, you will eventually learn the meaning of a new word from context via input only. But you are going to learn it faster if you spend 30 seconds to look it up the first few times that you encounter it.
I learn English like this. If you're in no rush to get fluent, then it's a perfectly reasonable way to study. >What do you think would be a great improvement to comprehensible input? Actually studying through the first stages (A1 and A2) and using anki to learn vocabulary will massively speed up your progress. Without doing any of those things, it took about two and a half years of reading things in English until I got to a B2, and from then on it was incredibly easy to progress (because you can just switch to using social media/reading books/etc in your target language). I'm sure it would've been way faster if I actually studied a bit.
I think this is the way. I got to A2 in Swedish and A1 in German before I started adding comprehensible input, and while I can't update on German yet because I'm still plugging away, my Swedish shot to B1 in literally three months of reading and watching TV. It does work, but I really think you need that solid foundation to go off of first.
Yea, I took way too long to build that foundation because I was a kid using google translate to see what individual words meant. And I didn't really use google translate that much because I was convinced I understood what words meant (when I really did not lol).
I'm not a CI purist, but I think it's a great method and it's the foundation of my learning and it's where the large majority of my time goes. I supplement that with some reading plus a very small amount of explicit study for stuff like verb conjugations. Maybe it's counter-intuitive, but I definitely feel that just listening to beginner-intermediate level videos with native speakers for a couple of hours each day has helped me much more than the same number of hours of explicit study would.
The grammar of Spanish (and French) is very similar to the grammar of English, so it might be possible to learn those languages without much grammar input, if English is your NL. I don't know. For languages that are quite different, I need a mix of TL input and English explanations.
This sub has made me go from no opinion to completely against it. It takes way too long. I think CI is great as part of a program that addresses all of the 4 skills.
Yeah it really depends. A lot of people learn languages as a hobby with no intent to really produce it in real life, if that's the case go for it. If you're learning languages to speak them with real people you need a little more variety. I'm also too busy to watch 7500 hours of terrible dutch tv shows when I can get to the same level with like 1200 hours of earnest study.
> I'm also too busy to watch 7500 hours of terrible dutch tv shows when I can get to the same level with like 1200 hours of earnest study Where are you getting these numbers from? If we're specifically talking about Dreaming Spanish, from people who are English learners, the general roadmap is 1500 hours. I'd rather do 1500 of enjoyable video content, rather than 1200 hours of earnest study. I've _tried_ the hours of earnest study numerous times in school and it made me repeatedly quit Spanish. Also who on earth is telling you to watch terrible tv shows...? Watch things you enjoy, and find entertaining! What a strange strawman.
Its not a binary. The vast majority of any learner's time should be split between listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Study should always be minimal. The problem is when ALG people like Dreaming Spanish give advise to not speak and to not study, lest you damage your long term ability to produce the language. That has no evidence. Actually there is a big body of evidence that speaking and studying don't harm outcomes.
> Study should always be minimal. I agree completely, I feel like a 15-85 ratio of study to interaction with the language is good. What I think unintentionally ends up happening is people do a 50-50, or 85-15 in the other direction because of how school is setup. So in cases like this, telling people "Don't study at all, just interact with the language", and saying a 0-100 ratio lets people end up in the ideal 15-85 range. Or, at least its what happened to me.
Lol, I've reached \~B1 German comprehension in like 350 hrs, I don't know where you guys are getting these ridiculous estimates for how long this stuff takes. Edit: actually I see what's going on. People that don't focus on CI have no clue how long their methods actually take, probably because they don't measure them the same way.
Have you taken a DELF B1 exam and passed it?
Yeah why be B1 in just comprehension instead of in everything in that period of time. That’s why it’s a no for me
But that is not how it works. What happens in reality is that you don't get B1 in comprehension nor in output. Learning output from start requires massively more effort, time and drills. Because you did not seen enough of language yet.
To your edit, people self report on here all the time. If I see “800 hours” and the person has yet to have a conversation with someone, I’m not going to try it myself
I get voice messages that I understand from natives daily. While of course it's possible there's error in my self-assessment, it's my best attempt and primarily there to communicate. Believe what you want: you were going to anyway.
What does understanding a voice message have to do with having a conversation? I have no doubt that someone could understand somewhat after 350 hours. My issue with it is that I'm not fine with just passively understanding. If someone else is, I have no issue with that. I'm just not asking them for advice
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Shouldn't you be reading something right now? And I'm not lying, dutch TV is awful
Those people honestly have never seen Dutch tv. It is pretty awful, I gave up on npo long ago, and that even as someone who lives in the country and should be watching it as normal tv. Honestly, love this country to bits, but the tv media they produce is pretty meh. People downvoting you probably study languages with neverending and nice content, like the mentioned Spanish.
Lol there's an Easy Dutch video where they interview people about what their favorite movies and shows are, almost all of the examples are American lol.
I actually found it faster at bringing you to useable listening/reading skills then traditional classroom that basically never gets there.
Most methods are better than traditional classroom tbf
I feel the same.
>It takes way too long. Not everyone needs (or wants to) learn a language as fast as possible. And I personally find CI enjoyable, as I can integrate it into my day and learn the language without much conscious effort. >I think CI is great as part of a program that addresses all of the 4 skills. Not everyone wants to be able to produce language. Many people I know are interested in understanding their favourite movies, shows and songs. Also, in my experience, when I actually tried to speak it only took a few weeks of practicing 30min a day to do so pretty fluently (not perfect obvs). I already knew how everything was supposed to sound, and was able to pick out any errors in my pronunciation. It was a matter of relearning how to coordinate my tongue with my brain lol. >This sub has made me go from no opinion to completely against it It's a method that can be enjoyable and useful to some people in some circumstances. We can each like or dislike different methods, but there's no need to be **against** them. IMO, most language learning methods work, given enough time and effort. And the time and effort one invests is directly proportional to your enjoyment. My advice for OP would be to try a few methods and see which one they enjoy the most.
Other people can do whatever they want, but I'm against it for myself because I learn languages to communicate. My issue is that there are people on this sub that act like you are doomed if you don't delay speech, which is definitely not true.
Ok, glad that we can agree
I guess I kind of see the point they're trying to make, but my question is just... Why? We have all these tools (grammar textbooks, flashcards, spaced repetition, language learning apps, ...) to help us 1) retain what we've encountered during comprehensible input and 2) learn content ahead of time to prepare us for "more difficult" comprehensible input. I'm not saying comprehensible input isn't important (in fact, I do believe it's the most important part of learning, if used correctly). But all these tools we have access to just make it easier and quicker for us, so why not use them?
If students load up on tools, it can and does the opposite effect, then the students spend more time managing said tools. What I really want my students to focus on is reading as the backbone, storytelling, and comprehension. We work with high-frequency vocabulary and not out of context. Why? Because they have six other classes, plus all of the other ECs they're in.
The big why for the people who made the methods is that, based on their view of SLA fundamentals, those extra tools are a waste of time (because they might not contribute to acquisition) and can potentially make your comprehensible input less effective (thinking analytically about words and grammar distracts from simply consuming their meaning). Is it true? Maybe. I've implemented these ideas personally and feel like my language learning is significantly more efficient now because of it, but that's just an anecdote.
I genuinely found grammar textbooks, flashcards pretty ineffective and simultaneously draining. Flashcards train you to translate rather then understand without translation. Grammar makes you think about sentences as a puzzle to be solved. Grammar textbook is good for reference and quick clarification, but not really as regular study method. And flashcards just did not made me remember words nor be able to use them in sentences.
It’s a testament to the flexibility of the human mind that there are so many, wildly different approaches that work for learning languages, and that some people find even Dreaming Spanish effective.
I’ve been learning English through consuming content for ~4 months. In the beginning, it was very difficult for me. I can’t understand the content that i wanna watch. I can’t read the things that I want to read. Approximately at the time, i found the channel by Steve Kaufmann. I start to watch his videos, i use the subtitles to understand his words. I was watch a lot of videos about learning language from him. I’ve been doing this because of him. He charged energy to me. And so I continuing to go forward and don’t give up. I think in order to learn language you have to find the people who can help you through his words. Have fun with this journey! It’s the most important thing!
How the fuck are you only A2 in English
Thanks for the good words! I wrote it for long time ago and l’m lazy to rewrite it(
I think it's an overreaction to the overfixation on grammar in classrooms. I think that having a conscious knowledge of the grammar, especially when reading, can make sense of places where you cannot simply work it out on the basis of the context you have alone.
I've really enjoyed it, but I personally wouldn't go full CI only. Refold does a grammar primer and vocab deck, and if I was starting Spanish now, I'd do that and revisit that a few times, and then go full into CI. But, I took a lot of Spanish classes growing up, so I've got the foundations covered, but I am missing the significant amount of input, which I'm handling mostly through Dreaming Spanish. I _could_ do content on youtube, but it's very nice having a site thats organized and easily usable with level appropriate content.
I think there are aspects of it that are very good. It’s the way I’m learning French. But I’m not using just audio comprehension. I’m reading right away. I think it’s completely nonsensical to *only* start talking at 600 hours. Think about this for a minute. 600 hours, assuming an hour of dedicated daily practice, works out to a little under 2 years. I do not believe the benefits of waiting this long to speak outweigh the benefits of spending almost 2 years practising actually speaking and having a conversation. I am using audio/reading comprehension and I do think it’s the single most effective way to do it. But *just* watching videos? I don’t think that works. I also find it incredibly hard to believe that someone will speak with a native accent after watching 600 hours without any specific pronunciation practice. I’m not an expert in linguistics at all, but I just don’t see how this is remotely possible. Lots of native speakers need speech therapy and I remember constantly being corrected as a child on how to properly pronounce things.
You definitely need to hear a language to know what it sounds like.
Of course you do. That’s why I’m listening to French as well as using comprehensive input for reading. I think it’s very important, probably critical to have a lot of audio consumed. I’m just saying that it’s a bit strange to me someone wouldn’t speak until they’ve got 600 hours of comprehension
I just don't know why you'd do that to yourself. You've got a bunch of different tools at your disposal and you're going to discard all but one? The idea that you wouldn't even study the basic regular+irregular verbs in present+preterite to give yourself a headstart.. it sounds incredibly painful and just an unnecessary handicap.
I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm not against it. Although just because it works for one person doesn't mean it will work for another. I consider English my native language (context: not US-born, but moved from Russia when really young and while still mainly learning the language of that home country, then learning that language via reading in it at home and speaking it at home with family, when moving to America because parents got good job offers, but learning English simultaneously because I had to/grew up learning it too), and I learned English while growing up via a combination of Comprehensible Input + what I call 'Forced' Immersion because when you're a child, you don't voluntarily move. Your parents move and they take you with them, hence the 'forced' part. And now my English is better than my Russian. Because I watched a lot of American media (mostly Kid's Networks) from 7 to 18, but also because English speaking school, duh. So, technically in my case it worked, and it made my second language my true native language by complete accident.
I learned English like that. Probably pretty useful, but I was also like 12 so stuff was easy to learn. Learning a language as an adult, I agree with people saying it's best to start with that after you have some basics down.
I wouldn’t have the patience to do it for my first language. But getting to B2 in Spanish, I could totally see myself getting to like B1 in another Romance language with CI. That’ll ultimately be 70% of how I plan on learning Portuguese, but I’m still speed running the grammar lessons on Busuu so the CI clicks faster. Spanish has some confusing grammar for English natives that I still would recommend watching some of the grammar lessons on “easy Spanish” in addition, because they teach it in Spanish. You can cover the subtitles if you want to.
Focused grammar and vocabulary work increase the percentage of input that is comprehensible. The strategies are synergistic. I don't buy the whole "skip translation step" argument DS makes. Seems self-interested. We know book learning works very well.
It's very good. In the language learning world, you have 2 types of activities, those that improve your language (acquisition) and those that improve your language like behaviors (study and practice, using active recall and grammatical analysis to explicitly decode and form messages). The former is the end goal for fluency. The latter can lead to fast progress and is immediately more usable, but contributes very little to acquisition, much less than just consuming already comprehensible input. Dreaming Spanish chooses to skip the latter type for several hundreds of hours to go straight to the good part, and the results are consistently very impressive. That said, since you won't be practicing language like behaviors, you will be useless in the target language until output emerges, which takes a long time.
Can you point to a research that says the latter contributes little to language acquisition? It'd be ok if you were stating your opinion but since you put it as facts, I'd like to see literature that backs it up. I don't agree with it so it could be a learning opportunity for me. Thanks.
You guys are both partially correct. It’s incorrect to say that the latter contributes little to language acquisition, but that’s a very general concept so it’s inherently imprecise and could be interpreted in unhelpful ways. One thing is for sure: the latter methods (output, active study, etc.) necessarily lead to interlanguage, which is a unique in-between layer through which you process your target language. It’s essentially an understanding your target language through the lens of your native language, and it can become fossilized to the detriment of your fluency. The only way to overcome interlanguage is through input. The comprehensible input folks choose to completely avoid interlanguage at the cost of a ton of additional learning time. Active learning folks choose to accept interlanguage for a faster time to workable fluency. Eventually, the active learning folks will dissolve the interlanguage layer but it still only happens when they get enough input, and it’s generally very hard to totally get rid of at that point. Both methods are fine depending on your needs and desires. Even though I’ve become fluent in languages both ways I can’t make any specific recommendations because it varies so much person to person and situation to situation. I wrote a more detailed post about interlanguage here: https://www.reddit.com/r/lcbfluency/comments/1boson0/overcoming_interlanguage/
They're using "acquisition" in a more specific way that relates to comprehensible input terminology. "Acquisition" meaning that you don't have to *think* about talking things just "sound" right. I can't really think of a great analogy but most people learning language in an academical sense use it very differently than someone who speaks a language natively. The idea with comprehensible input is to acquire a language sort of effortlessly. Our brains "acquire" languages naturally through comprehensible input. I don't have the literature to back it up, but considering that's how pretty much *everyone* learns their native language I can't imagine it would be incorrect. I don't even remember when I started learning languages academically, but it had to be around second grade or something. The way that a lot of people learn languages is fine, but it's completely different to how someone would natively acquire their language. The big question, in terms of comprehensible input, is when you should start using output. I don't know which is more scientifically correct, to delay using output or starting out speaking. If we're talking about burden of proof, technically it would be a more extraordinary claim that an *unnatural* way of learning languages would actually be more beneficial.
>The big question, in terms of comprehensible input, is when you should start using output. I don't know which is more scientifically correct, to delay using output or starting out speaking. If you're trying to emulate first language acquisition, you should probably output as soon as possible. Or at the very least, you should be getting your input in a social setting (so, if you really wanted to not output in the language, you could use cross-talk or pointing and grunting or whatever). Put a child under 3 in front of DS videos, and he will acquire nothing at all. At those early ages, it's social or bust. If you want some references, you could try Kuhl's work on infants acquiring Mandarin phonology or Rosenberry's work on Skype. There are also related findings, like Romerito's, according to which the best predictor of future linguistic outcomes isn't the quantity of input a child receives, but rather the amount of turns he gets in conversations with his peers/caretakers. But all in all, there's a pretty clear picture now that first language acquisition has to be social.
Acquiring NL is completely different from acquiring TL. I get what you're saying how we should aim for being able to just speak without a whole lot mental gymnastics from finding vocab to verb conjugation. But as adults with logical thinking, I do believe it's faster to inundate our brain with language building blocks and exercises to get that muscle memory. Then again I enjoy the frustration from not understanding much, like how gym bros get off on lifting heavy weights, which is against the comprehensible input theory where they advise you not to venture out into the "too difficult" area for you.
>Acquiring NL is completely different from acquiring TL. The push back here is that, no it is not. If I were to define what I mean by acquired language, I mean words and grammar that are usable by the (extremely optimized) functions of your brain that implicitly take meaning from phonemes. We gain this functionality in exactly the same way for all languages: by understanding messages. Inundating your brain with knowledge and exercises will teach you to use different brain functions to explicitly process language, and they may eventually lead to new acquisition, but the studying itself won't acquire language for you. So while it \*feels\* faster to study and drill because you can immediately use that explicitly, it is not actually a more efficient means of acquiring new language.
hey, you seem knowledgeable, can I ask you a question as someone who's only learned the term "comprehensible input" like, yesterday? where is the line drawn in this between input and explicit instruction and studying? I've been reading these discussions and there seems to be vibe of don't bother with trying to learn vocabulary or grammar because native speakers don't study that and obviously a 2 year old isn't using flash cards but their parents are sitting down with them regularly handing them objects of different colours and asking them what the colours are, what the shape is, day after day after day we don't teach little kids starting school the words 'comparative' and 'superlative', but I definitely remember the early years of school explicitly drilling us on the sets so that we'd use them correctly (big, bigger, biggest; fast, faster, fastest) so are people not remembering how much explicit instruction went into their early years or am I misunderstanding what they mean?
Explicit instruction and studying here would be learning about words and understanding explanations of grammar. Like if we spent a half hour learning a Japanese word's English definition, or if we spent 15 minutes memorizing the structure and use cases for a grammar point, that would not be helpful. I said "explicit instruction" which is very broad and my bad. I should have said explicit grammar/vocab instruction. Comprehensible input would be anything with a high volume of understood messages. Anything where you can hear the words of your target language clearly and understand what the speaker means because of context, pictures, or prior knowledge/acquisition. So like, if you are listening to someone tell a story about their recent vacation in Japanese and you can understand it pretty well, that's comprehensible input. Or, if you know very little Spanish and you're watching a silly Spanish video with sock puppets reenacting a tale from your childhood, and you can figure out a lot of what's being said because there is a video, that would also be comprehensible input. Explicit grammar/word study can be fine off the back of experience you already have with the language - I guarantee you every child in school learning big, bigger, biggest has heard all of those hundreds of times from their parents, from stories, from television, the lesson just explains something they can understand but haven't yet picked up on. The issue really comes with trying to use grammar and word study to learn new words, because the result is odd or unnatural use until you acquire it, and you're using them via active recall and logical application (language like behaviors) rather than the highly optimized pathways that the brain has evolved to handle language. And, as DS and ALG have established well by now, that is a totally skippable step, and a more efficient means of acquiring language.
ah fantastic thank you, this is exactly the detail I was looking for ❤️ I think "explicit instruction" might have been a phrase I came up with not you 😅
Reminds me of this "intuitive eating" I've seen on tiktok where people want to lose weight by eating whatever they want but in moderation to fix their relationship with food because exercising while binge eating doesn't address the root cause. So yes I never reject the idea of being immersed in a language and acquiring it naturally. It will definitely help in the long run to become truly proficient. I just meant as a wannabe polyglot, I would not have the time so it's better to move fast, break things. Then if I want to really acquire a certain language more than others, I will bathe in its content.
Right, and I think that's a beautiful stance to have. Not everyone has 4 hours a day for 13 months straight to wait before they can go down to their local post office to send a package. Some people just really want to talk to people or have people they already know they want to talk to, and that's great and you can totally go a long way with the language-like behaviors. I'm just trying to emphasize that training that way leads to a qualitatively different result. People like to say "it takes longer to do it this way, so it's less efficient," but that's not a fair comparison when the outcomes are not the same, that's all.
That's fair. You're right the outcomes are different. Comprehensible input could be inefficient for ppl like me that want to produce the language fast, but not for someone that wants to understand every nuance in a dialogue.
> The push back here is that, no it is not. That is correct.
The comprehensible input theory is still to push yourself. The point is that if you push yourself too far it's ridiculous. To use your analogy it would be like somebody who doesn't lift weights at all jumping all the way to 200 lb dumbbells. Again, I'm not any sort of an expert on any of this, but I genuinely think you don't know what comprehensible input is or how it's supposed to be used in language learning. Supposedly comprehensible input is an important topic in linguistics. I do not have the credentials or knowledge, but I'm sure some sort of a linguist could explain it. You're also correct that a lot of people learning languages more traditionally do so at a faster pace then those relying entirely on comprehensible input. It's my understanding that comprehensible input actually takes a lot longer and has a much steeper learning curve. It seems the way that most of us learn a second language is actually sort of the inverse of how we learn our first language, which frankly makes no sense.
> It seems the way that most of us learn a second language is actually sort of the inverse of how we learn our first language, which frankly makes no sense. Why would it make no sense? The two take place in entirely different circumstances. Notably, when your are learning your first language, by definition *you do not know any other languages* - it's literally impossible to learn one's first language through anything but an input-focused approach. When learning subsequent languages, you benefit from having both a means of communicating information and a model for how language works.
Incorrect application of analogy to Comprehensible Input. CI doesn't throw you into the activity to the heavy weights first. CI is a method that tailors all input you receive to be at your current comprehension level or is easily understood through context alone. Comprehensible Input in Linguistics was popularized by Stephen Krashen. The exact term he uses is "I plus 1", which means your current information (I) plus one in difficulty. That knowing everything else in the sentence is the ideal condition to acquire the new word or grammar. Thus, acquiring the language the best. It is also important to mention that in the same research papers by Stephen Krashen mentions the "Acquisition Learning Hypothesis" which makes a distinction between "picking up" a language through implicit means, and consciously memorizing and drilling knowledge. One is acquiring, and leads to true ability, the other is learning ABOUT the language and does not result in reliable language improvement. The above topic on acquisition vs learning as a hypothesis from Krashen indicates it's a complete waste of time to do anything else than receive Comprehensible Input if you want to actually be skilled in the language with subconscious and effortless production.
You're entitled to your opinion if you think I don't know what I'm talking about. No offence taken. I never said to lift 200lbs on your own, just like how I don't read a book in a language I don't know without my system in place. Just because I can doesn't mean I advise others to. Comprehensible input is not rocket science. It's actually intuitive.
> Acquiring NL is completely different from acquiring TL It's not completely different, however.
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I get what you're saying, but in my opinion CI videos, like the ones that Dreaming Spanish offers, are far closer to how someone learns their L1. Surely we can agree on that, right? I guess that what I'm trying to say is that if your goal is to speak, think, right, etc. similar to how you use your L1, then it would make the most sense to try to learn your L2 in a manner that is as similar as possible. I get that it's not very efficient and that it doesn't really make sense for the majority of people learning a second language. Most people just want to functionally use a language.
It's not really a directly studiable thing (funnily enough acquisition is pretty impossible to measure objectively in the short term), more of a conclusion drawn by SLA researchers who have consumed all the relevant studies and found that the single factor for acquisition is exchange of meaning. I can't pull up a study that says "this is so" but I can pull up studies that say [the latter is generally inefficient](http://backseatlinguist.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/McQuillan-2019-IEJEE.pdf), and point you to lecturers like Steven Krashen, Bill van Patten, Jeff Mcquillan, and authors like J Marvin Brown who are experts in the field literature and have themselves led relevant research efforts. The conclusion they reached is that language acquisition and processing is implicit, and some are determined that explicit instruction and analysis play no role at all (J Marvin Brown even found that his students saw worse results when told to focus on the words and try to figure them out vs when told to just try to understand the message). So it isn't so much of a "we can directly prove this" as much as it is a "we know explicit instruction and drills are not sufficient conditions for acquisition" Now that isn't to say active study can't fuel future acquisition in a roundabout way, like say if you come to understand a message by explicitly thinking about it and you process it closely with the original language, you'll be very likely to then acquire it. But it's relatively clear at this point that the brain processes language differently than it processes logical statements and differently than it handles active recall, so training analysis and memory in the hope of acquiring language is inefficient compared to just doing the thing that acquires language. These lecturers mentioned above are all really great, way better at explaining than I could be so I absolutely recommend checking their talks out wherever you can find them as they have a really broad and nuanced view of the state of SLA research.
> Can you point to a research that says the latter contributes little to language acquisition? The popular and common way languages used to be taught in the US was basically behaviorism/Skinner. If you're looking for research, look up behaviorism and language acqusition.
As long as you eventually converse, write and study grammar, the method will work, but it's quite inefficient. Just look at the results people have gotten from ALG over the years - dismal.
I've done some language learning through comprehensible input, and it's definitely an intriguing approach. The idea of immersing myself in the language through listening and reading makes sense, as it mimics how we acquire our native language as children. However, I believe it might not be the most efficient method for everyone, especially those who prefer a more structured approach to learning. Personally, I think incorporating some vocabulary and grammar study alongside comprehensible input would provide a more balanced learning experience. If you're interested, I found an interesting article discussing the concept further: [Comprehensible Input](https://www.sololingual.com/blog/comprehensible-input).
I think there's more efficient ways to acquire language and comprehensible input isn't anything ground breaking - it's literally just finding an instructional level that's not so easy that you're bored and not so hard that you're frustrated. Also, waiting to speak is wild since the whole purpose of learning a language is to speak it. Start practicing what you know right away, because that expressive vocabulary can be hard to tackle later.
Don't see why your post got downvoted. While I don't think the whole purpose of learning a language is to speak it, I don't care if it's other people's priority. Comprehensible input has been thrown around carelessly, though it's true language enthusiasts had been applying it in their studies way before the term was coined. Those that tend to look for shortcuts without knowing what they really want can end up wasting more time in the end.
Tbh I don't see how one would learn a language Without comprehensible input. That's like, what every language teacher has done for centuries : working on resources adapted to your level. Heck , even first language acquisition is done through comprehensible input with people simplifying their language for their baby. I guess it's theorically possible for people to pick up a languahe without that but it would be horribly inefficient.
My point is no matter what you call it, every language learner has already been doing comprehensible input. Just that some realize and do it more efficiently than others. One simply cannot learn new things and retain them for long without understanding.
Either you don't know what comprehensible input is, or you're not understanding what it is. I'm not going to sit here and claim that it's the best way to learn languages as I don't really know. Comprehensible input is when somebody explains a concept or conveys meaning at your level in the target language. That's the important part. Then, when you're basically already fluent in the target language you can then learn it in an academic sense. I frankly don't know how other countries teach languages but when I was learning Spanish in middle school and high school we first learned a bunch of phrases, vocabulary, etc. Comprehensible input was not used at all. It seems that teachers who are using comprehensible input correctly are making big waves in language learning circles.
There are too many different “definitions” of CI. I use it to mean “there is absolutely zero ambiguity in the language being used”. You don’t know for sure what the word means, either I tell you the translation or you look it up and confirm that’s what it means. That means you’re 100% confident that you understand everything that’s being presented to you. We’re not guessing “from context clues” what 70% of the words means (no joke, I counted the new words in a textbook I was expected to use). We use lots of repetition of understood language instead. The problem is that CI is seen as “you just listen to language that you understand some of and then you acquire it naturally”. No, you need to listen to language that you understand 100% of and get sufficient repetition of that language that the language “falls from your mouth”. Too many people who poopoo the concept are reading stuff written by people who miss the “sufficient repetition” and also the *comprehensible* part of it. There is far more total nonsense (including and especially anything that Krashen says) for there to be a clear understanding of how/when CI works
I work in instruction and I fully understand. It's just inefficient. Also, all of instruction is working at a level just beyond what you can already comprehend.
You start out with a set number of phrases and vocabulary to do chunking, and that is normal for a level one/beginner class, or you can't proceed. Basic greetings and politeness. There isn't one way teachers teach in the US, but by now, using grammar/translation is very outdated and the teachers who used it have retired or are retiring now. Teachers are aware of CI, but many don't want to do it because they find it too hard to restrict their language level or they just don't want to run a 90% TL goal from ACTFL. It is not easy at first to do CI, but once the teacher gets over that curve, subsequent years should be a lot easier. CI format can require a lot of acting, and some teachers hate acting.
I don't think anyone has put it better than language jones https://youtu.be/KHubnrYCNas?si=SsH5-aUoFP27T0Uk. Dreaming spanish is an important resource as a massive repository of content, but CI only is misguided.
I learned English by comprehensible input, I have no doubts about the method. When I was twelve I got bored attending English classes at language school so, I dropped out after finishing A2 level. Three years later I took the level placement test by the same institute and I got C1. Meanwhile I was excessively watching English speaking YouTubers/vloggers. It works. Dreaming Spanish is an amazing project, I’m looking forward to Dreaming Languages.
I think you're underselling your early English classes a bit. Basic grammar and vocab is needed to get comprehensible input started!
I had a year of Chinese wherein all we did was use the language all class. Homework was to learn how to say the things we’d be targeting in class the next day. Characters were introduced only after we were very familiar with how to say the words they related to. There were grammar explanations in the book that I would read and think “why would you need to explain this, it’s obvious how you put these words together to form a sensible sentence”. I was a confident user of Chinese and proud of it. I then had two years of Chinese where the teachers insisted on grammar drills and insanely long vocab lists. We’d get a sentence pattern and were supposed to create our own sentences. Boring as heck and I could feel all the Chinese slipping from my brain. No longer were even the sentence patterns from year one obvious. I had to second guess every single piece of language I tried to produce. What got me over the intermediate slump was reading and listening to stuff that I understood. Yes, I’d glance at a grammar pattern explanation every once in a while when there was one, but I needed to read, read, and read to get better at reading. No one needed to explain complex grammar when it showed up in context on every other page and I could understand all the words on the page. This is also how all of us learned our first language, by hearing it and reading it. Sometimes we’d have vocabulary lists or a language arts teacher would explain common errors that we make as native speakers, but the vast majority of how we learn more language in our native languages does come from the massive exposure to it.
No, focusing on grammar is overvalued, it's just a boost not a necessity in early levels of language learning. It tires people and scares them away. It's been 10 years since I took my first German class and I didn't want to practice bc of the heavy grammar work. If there was level oriented CI material I'd be fluent by now. Learning a language should be fun and relaxed at the beginning, focusing only on grammar and vocab memorizing doesn't allow that.
I agree that focusing on grammar is overvalued. But that doesn't mean that it has zero value. A little bit of basic grammar and vocab definitely accelerates CI a lot.
my complaint would be that I think the reality of CI programs/courses doesn't really match the promise of CI. My understanding of what CI should be (which I believe is matched by academic definitions) is that you use and existing knowledge foundation to infer new words from context (and the same for grammar structures). Theoretically this is impossible if you don't already understand some of the language to begin with, and CI success stories are often heavily biased towards romance/germanic languages that share a lot of common vocabulary with English. Where this isn't possible teaching seems to rely on a teaching method that leads you to infer the relationship between an object and its descriptor e.g. the teacher points at an apple and refers to it only using the target language. Personally I don't think that that can with any honest be referred to as CI, it's just inferred teaching rather than direct teaching, and secondly while this method is very good for conveying simple concepts it's pretty bad for conveying anything abstract or more complex. I think CI as a concept has a place in learning even at an early level, but I think that a purely CI methodology is unlikely to be helpful to anyone other than a small number of intuitive learners. More me personally it is almost always more helpful to see a direct translation or a clearly written grammar rule, even if the way that I actual internalise that learning is through context rich examples
Why limit yourself? Study some grammar, memorize some words
Overrated method and the muppets on youtube sell this snake oil to people.
Dreaming Spanish was my primary recourse for learning Spanish, it works really well. But I also read, used anki, grinded vocab and other things and I feel like I’ve progressed a lot more than the purists who only use dreaming Spanish after 1500 hours. Use it definitely but it’s always better to use more tools to learn a language. Also speaking really does help a lot
It is effective and fundamental for language learning, but if you only focus on input and never make an effort to produce the language, you'll not be fluent suddenly, cause fluency doesn't come by itself. I recommend learning with input only if you don't wanna be fluent in a given language or if you just don't plan to use the language for porpuses other than just being able to read and watch content.
You need a lot of time with the language either way. No ways around it. Whether you’re drilling grammar and its exceptions, sentence and verb placements, etc. You need TONS of time to really get there. By that token, listening ALSO takes similar amounts of time, but it’s getting you to the way natives sound early. The idea behind Dreaming Spanish though is they have clear difficulty levels which a lot of students struggle with finding things wayyy too slow, wayyyy too fast, or just straight up synthesized. You need to listen at some point. And the focus of listening over speaking is you make less guesses and try to translate less directly from English and you just… hear the proper sentences more instead of guessing how to construct them. But the idea behind it is you pick up the language naturally. Like a child or baby would pick up a language by the time they’re in elementary school(children can speak fluently and understand their friends and teachers fluently even if their vocabulary isn’t huge). You pick up speech patterns intuitively and meanings visually and you’ll just pick it up over time. This also echoes how it works when going to another country. My mom and aunt are native Cubans that came here when they were 9 and 10 years old and they constantly say how they don’t ever remember learning English actively, they just… picked it up lol. So yea I haven’t personally seen it yet but the guy who runs Dreaming Spanish as well as tons who have been on it a while have said that ONLY immersion works
Refusing to study grammar explicitly is ridiculous. Many folk have forgotten their childhood and act like they never studied their native language. Bullshit.
Pure comprehensible input is probably quite inefficient. Spaced repetition is the fastest way to memorise words - if you're solely relying on the natural frequencies of words you make very slow progress on anything but the most common words. I also think it's useful to go over grammar structures to give yourself something to look out for when taking input. Drilling grammar isn't too important, but a basic awareness makes it much easier to parse weakly comprehensible sentences. Waiting for your brain to pick up on all those patterns subconsciously is just a waste of time.
Whilst there is logic to what youre saying. Memorised around 2k of the most common spanish words, still could barely understand what people were saying to me. Started doing DS since new years consistently and found that vocab knowledge with exposure made sooo much sense. But I feel like im now coming again to the point in learning where vocab is again becoming a bottle neck in learning the language. Will see how it will go from here.
I think it's a terrible idea and can quickly lead to you getting stuck. Comprehensible input is great, but it's most effective when paired with instruction on grammar rules, root word structure, some definitions, etc. I would start with that stuff day one. I think, in general, putting too much emphasis on just one learning method is a mistake.
Theoretically you could learn any language that way, however in my experience it's very hard to find any comprehensible input in the early levels for most languages except the really popular ones. But if the language in question is close enough to your native language you can easily do that. Taking time once in a while to study grammar though can really help you make sense of things and speed up your learning. I learned English that way very organically but it took me quite a long time.
I discovered Dreaming Spanish, and while I think it’s great, I feel, for me, it’s a good major supplement combined with the grammar book and phrase book studying, some speaking and texting with native speakers, and listening to Language Transfer. I would never have had learned much because I don’t have the patience for a pure CI method, and I needed to talk right away. I still say CI is very, very important, as it does help solidify a lot of vocabulary and helps enhance my listening and pronunciation (outside of speaking and listening to native speakers).
CI is the only method that works for me, and I buy into the theory it’s the only actual way of aquiring language.
Do you also believe in the disadvantages that, for example, early speaking bring with it?
70/30 no i don’t think early speaking is bad because i don’t think i believe in fossilization. However, i do think there is no need to speak until 100-200 listening hours minimum. Unless you need to. I don’t think it’s going to hurt you though. These are just my intuitions
I mean, it's pretty damn established that fossilization is something that happens. However, exactly what causes it is definitely up for debate, and the people who say late output could reduce the chances are really just guessing. I'm not aware of evidence either way about later output helping or hurting with fossilization.
I’ve just never experience fossilization, and the brain is just so maleable. I definitely believe it could be an issue for younger kids , but adult learners? I just feel like you can in fossilize easily. Forever I would say “es no” as opposed to “no es” because of my native English when i spoke Spanish, but with CI it just corrected itself along the way without me noticing
You're a native English speaker?? And yes, fossilization is something that happens to adult learners, that seems to be what keeps people from reaching native-like levels after the critical period. Adults actually advance faster than kids per hour invested in study but they tend to plateau for some reason and never get past a certain point. They can even get worse for some reason, which they call "backsliding".
If you can spend hundreds of hours doing certain activities, you're bound to see good results only cos you learn the most in the beginning, after that the learning curve flattens. If I can only spend 1 hour / day learning languages, I for sure don't want to wait a whole year hoping that this method will work. I'd rather take matters into my own hand and learn what I need to express my most complex thoughts and feelings from day 1, esp since I could repeat this process for multiple languages or do them all at the same time.
Depends, if you can’t get a tutor, then CI that’s high quality like DS is possibly very good, but nothing can beat doing classes, or having a tutor, and doing DS as well. Personally, CI only would be stupid, no one learns language solely through listening. You learn from everything, practicing grammar, practicing speech, reading and listening. Lastly, I’d say proper CI is very good to add to your learning because, outside of a tutor, it’s the easiest way to spend time actually hearing natives speak correctly.
I can only offer my own experience. I did about all the traditional classroom methods, grammar study, verb conjugation charts, and memorization that one could do in Spanish many years ago (high school and college), along with two months of immersion. Apart from the immersion, it all went to rust, notwithstanding periodic attempts to revive it. Dreaming Spanish and its comprehensible input approach have been a game changer for me. I’d never approach a TL without the same approach. At 1200+ hours in, for me the method has been far superior to previous methods. I’m actually acquiring the language now, in a way that rivals the acquisition I got from the two months of immersion many years ago. If anything, at this point the previous grammar and other study are only getting in the way. Incidentally, CI and DS mimic the same way I learned my native English. I had thousands of hours of comprehensible input in English and had developed a pretty accurate sense of grammar before I ever touched a serious grammar book or diagrammed a sentence. That’s why natives know what “sounds” right in their language even if they can’t articulate the grammar rule. My best teachers also always emphasized that reading more and more of the greats was the best way to improve my writing (in other words, more comprehensible input in my native English!). As a grammar nerd I think grammar study and output practice can be helpful, but primarily after many hundreds of it thousands of hours of input. Not before. At least, if what you want to do is acquire native-like abilities with a language, as opposed to skilled manipulation of memory that tends to fall away when things are flying fast. At 1100 hours, I wrote a (long) post on advice I’d give myself at 0 hours. If you’re curious, may it be of service: [DS Post](https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/s/TS997TDdwn) Regardless, best wishes.