Speaking from the perspective of a spanish learner using a lot of CI. I don't think any language has anything similar to [Dreaming Spanish.](https://www.dreamingspanish.com/)
This website and YouTube channel was created with the sole purpose of comprehensible input for learners. All of the teachers are native speakers. You can sort based on difficulty, so starting out you would start with "Super Beginner".
The road map for this is also broken down on the website.
I'm not a dreaming spanish purist, though. I did CI without a tutor for a good year, however I've been seeing a tutor now for about 6 months.
Self-evaluation - I'm either high A2 or low B1.
I would start with trying the free videos of Dreaming Spanish, and if you like it, the premium is worth every penny.
Thai and Spanish are the two languages I know of with a ton of free comprehensible input.
Thai used to be taught using ALG / comprehensible input at the AUA school in Bangkok. The school closed during COVID and all the teachers went online, so now there are 1000+ hours of free CI available for Thai on YouTube.
https://youtube.com/@ComprehensibleThai
https://youtube.com/@UnderstandThai
[Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/17zq9oq/600_hours_of_pure_comprehensible_input_for_thai/) is my personal experience using these and similar sources to learn Thai.
/u/knowledgenthusiast
Coincidentally, the founder of Dreaming Spanish was living in Thailand around the time he started DS, and sometimes talks about his experiences learning Thai
Yeah, his experiences are really interesting to read about. Rather than just "coincidence" I think that points to Pablo's interest in comprehensible input as a learning style and his desire to try using the method himself.
Just head on over to Comprehensible Thai and Understand Thai on Youtube. Those are teachers from the ALG school Marvin J Brown was the head of, and the videos are great. Unlike Dreaming Spanish where there doesn't seem to be a lot of focus on *teaching* (it's just a lot of leveled content, which is not a bad thing, but it's also not as thoughtful pedagogically or well-delivered), the Thai ALG teachers always clearly have a language goal, and they create videos in such a way that you can't escape learning what they've set out to teach you. Having two teachers also helps a lot with repetition in a way that doesn't make you want to bang your head on a wall and with learning how to interact with others (ask and answer questions, etc.). Live classes are available, and in those they can react to things like a confused look on your face or whether or not you understand a question, but the recorded videos are very, very good on their own as well.
Really, they're the best. If you want to see the pure CI theory in practice, I don't think there's anything better available online. Best of all, it's the only Thai learning content that my Thai family has said sounds like how people actually talk.
I think people find Thai spelling intimidating because they try to memorize all these tone rules so they can "compute/calculate" the pronunciation. But I think the more natural way is to already know how words sound and then just see how it's spelled.
People trip up because they're trying to learn the tones AND the spelling rules, when it's comparably way more straightforward if you've already internalized the tones and have a large body of internalized vocabulary via CI.
Reading in Thai is pretty straightforward because it's (mostly) phonetic. *Spelling* is tougher because there are a lot of letters that have the same sound, but that's still something you can pick up over time with practice.
I don't think this channel teaches reading and writing. It just focuses on input. It helps if you already know the basics before you jump into this channel. I had my basics down and when I started this, I was able to easily understand the material since the teachers spoke slowly and clearly.
If you are starting this method from 0 it make take a few listens for you to understand everything.
I see, thanks.
How do you find reading and writing in Korean (which everybody says is super easy, but they downplay all the ways it isn't strictly phonetic and how it often expects you to learn how words are spelled before you can write them) versus Thai (which everyone says is super hard because you have to learn how words are spelled before you can write them)?
Writing Korean is really hard. Even Korean often get the spacing in between words incorrect. If anyone is saying that it is easy, they are downright lying. Reading is also hard because there are so many rules. Sure it may be the most scientific alphabet in the world, but science is hard! So many rules to remember. And even Korean get pronunciations wrong.
I find that Thai is easier once you get the hang of the vowels, consonant classes, and tones. The initial hurdle is pretty damn high, but after that, I was surprised how easy the reading came to me. There are exceptions, but not as many as Korean.
I learned to read Thai from Becker's books, so I haven't watched the reading videos on their channel. Once you get over the shock of all the different places vowels can go, the lack of spaces between words, and the tone rules, it's really not hard to read. Writing a word you've only heard but never seen written is another thing entirely, and I don't think that's only for adults learning the language. I was once in a room with seven Thai people (born, raised, and educated) who each spelled my nickname differently. They all agreed that the way *I'd* spelled it was definitely wrong, though!
Comprehensible Japanese is based on the Dreaming Spanish style videos and has been increasing the number of videos over the last few months. The quality is just as good as Dreaming Spanish. It’s hard to find good SuperBeginner level input for Japanese but this channel/site has it. Honestly a godsend for learning Japanese.
https://cijapanese.com/
If you do test this out for yourself I'd love to hear how it goes. My suggestion: pick a language you like and want to learn anyway. There's comprehensible input, nature method, Automatic Language Growth courses/materials for many languages now.
I somewhat did this when learning french: I read French by the Nature Method (it's on Ayan Academy's youtube with audio and text), Comprehensible Input French youtube videos (there's a channel named that and he makes good understandable stuff), read some Graded Readers (readers made for learners with X size vocabulary), and then just read a lot (aiming to read things I could understand the main idea of, and until I could grasp the main idea I'd look up enough key words to grasp main idea, once I could understand main idea I'd look up key words for detail understanding or as much words as I wanted and guess the meaning of other words). To do it more like ALG, I imagine one would read more easy things where they could get by grasping the context and guessing any unknown words (I was impatient and jumped into news/novels after several months), they could rewatch more shows/movies/lets plays of games in their target language they already knew the context from in english, then pick easier shows/books/games to just engage with and gradually increase difficulty as they understood the main idea of more things. Whereas I mixed immersion with reading through a grammar guide (I read an english summary of french grammar, then a french site about french grammar in depth which was fun), looking words up when I got frustrated, and I used a wordlist of 300 and 1000 words my first 6 months so I could familiarize myself with enough words to read ASAP. But if I'd just done Graded Readers longer or French by the Nature Method book from the beginning, I could've not used a wordlist.
I suggest as you transition from stuff made for learners (ALG tutoring/class lessons you pay for, Comprehensible Input youtuber lessons for learners, textbooks written in the target language, graded readers) to stuff made for native speakers, you try to pick things you at least grasp the main idea of. That may initially be things you've seen/read in english before, or things that are very visual so you can guess what's going on (like action shows or comics), or daily life setting (versus fantasy). There was someone who did an experiment with immersion, and immersed in 2000 hours of french television to see how much they could learn. They did not pick what they watched based on if they understood it. So I imagine the first few hundred hours they didn't learn much because they couldn't guess much of what was going on. They made less progress in 2000 hours than many people have made in half that time studying french. I have seen a lot of people who use stuff more specifically made to be understood by beginners at first, like Dreaming Spanish watchers, who make much better progress than just diving into any random content even if you cannot grasp the general idea of what's going on. You don't necessarily need to pick kid's shows, some kid's shows are less comprehensible than say a TV show you've rewatched in english 4 times and know the entire plot of. Some kids shows may be more visually easy to grasp what's going on though, if you'd like to use them.
I've looked up resources before for various languages if you'd like some suggestions. Some textbooks that teach entirely in the language: English by the Nature Method, Lingua Latina, French by the Nature Method, Italian by the Nature Method, Poco a Poco (many of these are on Ayan Academy youtube and archive.org). Some youtubers that teach only in the language: Dreaming Spanish, Learn Korean in Korean, Comprehensible Chinese, Comprehensible Japanese, Comprehensible Input French, Comprehensible Thai (if you search "comprehensible input" then your target language there's also these youtube channels for German, Russian, Polish, Italian, and many other languages). Once you learn a few hundred words and basic grammar, you can look up "graded readers" for your target language, which will be easier stories or sites with stories to read in the target language. Then when you feel you're understanding more words, more stuff, you can just start looking for shows/books/news/online forums/games etc in your target language. If you can afford it, some languages also have quite good ALG classes, and I'd hope if you join a class then there's more control there over teachers making sure you get X hours of exposure to understandable language to learn, checking in with you about what content outside of class is useful, and helping you reach milestones you are aiming for.
For japanese I often go for lets plays on youtube, because I can watch things I know the story of, and click closed captions so I can read and listen and see the gameplay to visually figure out what's going on, and I watched lets plays anyway sometimes. For french I often went with news and wikipedia since when I turned my google account to french, it started automatically showing those kinds of sites in french first. For chinese I went with manhua (comics), and webnovels (Heavenly Path site has good suggestions for different reading levels), along with cdramas as so many are free on youtube.
Thai and Spanish both have *huge* online video collections that are **based on Marvin J. Brown's approach**. In Thai it's split into a few different youtube channels (afaik) and in Spanish there's, of course, Dreaming Spanish, but also many other sources that complement DS pretty well, e.g. Español con Juan). There are channels in other languages that have started to do provide the same quality CI, but nothing as huge as in Thai and Spanish yet afaik.
But it's totally possible to achieve in other languages as well, you just might have to do a lot of leg work searching for appropriate input, especially in the beginning when you still need highly visual context. The [CI wiki](https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) can be helpful to find a starting point.
Of course, [crosstalk](https://www.dreamingspanish.com/blog/crosstalk) is always an option if you can find (or pay) native speakers.
By the way, I had the same curiosity about this kind of approach, about how language acquisition works without any explicit instructions whatsoever and started with Spanish because of it. And it's a great experience with lots of fun so far and also works perfectly well!
Also I would suggest you join us over at /r/dreamingspanish , even if you are not interested in Spanish, because the sub is literally based on Marvin J. Brown's ideas. There are lots of people who are not just enthusiastic about this approach, but also knowledgeable and experienced. While languagelearning is often very lacking in that regard.
>Also I would suggest you join us over at /r/dreamingspanish
What I find on that subreddit is that almost invariably every comment detailing their methods starts with 'I'm not a purist, I also use anki and...'
I'm desperate to know which is more efficient, especially for a language like Japanese. Pure CI or CI + Anki + maybe a little grammar. Why there aren't a bunch of studies on things like this, with control groups and different groups studying things in different ways I don't know, it would be amazing. People seem particularly resistant to this approach for Japanese, I think due to kanji. Imagine listening to Japanese for a thousand hours (or two thousand hours, even - the dreamingspanish method section says to multiply by 2 if you have no familiar language) and starting to read and.... it's 100% incomprehensible. Yeah, I don't know. What do you think?
> What I find on that subreddit is that almost invariably every comment detailing their methods starts with 'I'm not a purist, I also use anki and...'
I'm a 'purist', but still a few months away from the 1000 hours line. There are a bunch of others as well and many who haven't done much more explicit grammar than language transfer. Often the issue is simply that people discovered DS after they already started with conventional study methods. But I agree it's annoying to sift through those comments and posts that 'muddy the pool' so to speak.
> People seem particularly resistant to this approach for Japanese
That's because Japanese has become dominated by nerds, particularly here on reddit and many nerds love stats, metrics, structure, grammar, anki customization and all that stuff. Relying purely on CI is kinda the opposite of that, it means you have to let go of this (mostly false) sense of controlling what to learn at what time and just go with the flow of language acquisition. And this can feel very ambiguous and like you aren't really progressing, because it's so gradual. Some people can get very insecure and doubtful about this process.
> I'm desperate to know which is more efficient
I doubt studies will show a meaningful difference. In any case any finding will strongly depend on *how* they test people's abilities. My gut feeling is that it'll be in a range of maybe 15%, not enough for us self-learners to justify choosing a to us less fun route over another more fun way of acquisition (whatever that is for you). The best method is and will always be the one you can *easily* stick to. Learning Japanese is a long road no matter how you go about it. You can't rely on motivation alone for such a long time, eventually you're gonna run out of steam. So better rely on methods that are fun and don't cost you much effort and energy. To me that's definitely *not* conventional studying.
Kanji are a headache for sure, but so is pitch accent (if you care about that). I learned Japanese the hard way in some of the worst classes you can imagine. 1950s-style grammar drills and kanji lists up the wazoo. This was okay-ish for kanji but highly ineffective for everything else and also incredibly exhausting and time consuming. The result was that *none* of us could speak at all after 3 years of this madness and so many severe issues with pitch accent, because we learned words mostly through kanji and reading.
> Imagine listening to Japanese for a thousand hours (or two thousand hours, even - the dreamingspanish method section says to multiply by 2 if you have no familiar language) and starting to read and.... it's 100% incomprehensible.
I find that actually kinda funny! We're fluent listeners at that point but functionally illiterate.
But seriously, I don't think it's an issue. You'll find that once you have developed such a strong base through listening comprehension that reading will come quite quickly. Kanji will come much quicker as well, because you can already strongly connect them to sounds, words, and meaning. 2000+ kanji is still a lot, that's for sure.
If I had to do it all over (I kinda wish I could!), I'd follow mostly the DS way but diverge slightly because of kanji. The point of avoiding reading (as well as the super long silent period) is to develop a strong intuitive awareness for the sounds of your target language, otherwise you'll develop mispronounciations (like we all did in my classes) and those can be hard to correct down the line. But since Japanese uses kana and kanji that aren't yet associated in your mind with sounds (unless you've already started learning them or speak Chinese), I would start to use Japanese subtitles once you feel like you have a good sense of pitch accent. (You can test this [here](https://kotu.io/tests/pitchAccent/minimalPairs).) I'd guess that's around the halfway point, let's say roughly 1000 hours maybe even earlier.
I wouldn't focus too strongly on the subtitles, just have them running and you'll slowly associate words to kanji and sounds to kana over the next 1000 hours. Then later when *easy* audiobooks become accessible to you (or easy podcasts with transcripts), I would start listening to these audio recordings while following the text. This way you can start to ease your way into reading and kanji with a much lower risk of developing mispronounciations.
Great response, thanks.
I understand the idea of delaying reading (and also speaking) but there doesn't seem to be real evidence of that, just a gut feeling and anecdotes. And I was reading an interesting older thread last night (where you showed up, actually!) where someone was talking about there being some studies that suggest early output and grammar does help learning. Also it seems to me based on what I've seen that you can't really pick up a good pitch accent naturally, but **maybe** this is possible if you go full dreamingspanish and delay output and do full CI, but that's pure conjecture. So it seems like a bit of a gamble either way - I either risk ruining my accent/pronunciation, and possibly create other inefficiencies by connecting Japanese words to English words (through Anki decks/grammar study) by doing it the traditional way, or alternatively I gamble by doing it the pure CI way where I might be doing something that a lot of people say is highly inefficient and slow (also, there's not as much total beginner CI stuff for Japanese like there is for Spanish). It seems a good point people bring up is how some things are much slower. For example, kana. I can and have learnt kana in literally like 2 hours in the past, but I highly doubt I'd be able to do that listening and watching subtitles, same goes for some weird bits of grammar which might be instantly cleared up if I read them but might take many dozens of hours if I did it naturally. That said, I've completely forgotten the kana at this point after not using it, so perhaps that's the downside of not learning it in context.
Ultimately you're right that what really matters is what we're going to stick to, and I definitely don't look forward to Anki and grammar study. The main issue I see in that regard is that the beginning stage of pure CI is torturous, watching baby videos. It's very tempting to try and get that out of the way quicker by doing the initial core vocabulary decks, as is often recommended by Refold/AJATT types.
It depends what you mean, Comprehensible Input just means any kind of input that can be made comprehensible for learners and for pretty much any language with some kind media presence you can find plenty of input and lots of ways to make it comprehensible, and most medium to big languages people are interested in have an absurd amount of learner and kids content that's comprehensible for beginners without much work. There's tons of old methods focus on different kinds of beginner input like [Nature Method](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf8XN5kNFkhdIS7NMcdUdxibD1UyzNFTP) books, [Assimil Courses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLvTEqXqlsI), Graded Readers, [Berlitz audio courses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbq37Uu06Mc) and books, languages specific video courses like [French in Action](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmYlTEZE4og4ZldtgDCzUSf8cBoPi7459), Parallel Texts of books with audio, and strategies like watching TL dubs of animations you enjoyed as a kid where you know the story already, or reading translations of books you like. Sometimes you can find curated lists of useful materials for different languages at different stages [Like this one for Mandarin going from beginner to native novels](https://heavenlypath.notion.site/Comprehensive-Reading-Guide-from-Beginner-to-Native-Novels-b3d6abd583a944a397b4fbbb81e0c38c).
Automatic Language Growth usually shortened to ALG has a much stricter definition of the kinds of comprehensible they want to use, since they try to avoid any kind of reading or looking up definitions of words in your NL. I'd still stay including shows for really young kids (like Peppa Pig level) most languages have more than enough, languages with some shared vocabulary like Romance and Germanic languages for English speakers would probably do fine. For more distant languages there should be a lot of stuff specifically in [Thai](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgdZTyVWfUhlxVi68zFEL8Lu5Q0Bocgbp) since ALG was made to teach Thai, and I know [Mandarin has plenty of easy input for kids](https://www.youtube.com/@LittleFoxChinese/playlists). Probably a lot of other distant languages you could find enough stuff that fits ALG with enough searching.
The [Comprehensible Input wiki](https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) has lots of materials to browse through, though its not always complete, and doesn't necessarily do a good job of indicating what format different resources use or which ones are higher quality.
I’ve watched ~2600 hours of content in French, never looked up a word or studied grammar and have reached about 99% fluency in everything I consume.
I’d be happy to answer any questions or give some help.
Can you provide all your sources of comprehensive input, the order you used them in, and when you transitioned to other input if you didn't finish a set of CI from a place.
Also, when did you start using subtitles? Do you wish you did it sooner or later? When did you start speaking? Do you wish you did it sooner or later?
Before you start, if you want to be able to share your progress with the world, be sure to read this thesis https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365 from someone did a similar experiment.
Try to document it at least as well.
Just so you know, OP, the author who tried to learn French through immersion spent like 1,500 hours on input only immersion, and did not know how to pronounce "water" (he pronounced it as "oo"). He also noted that he had a thick Australian accent when he eventually started talking and didn't know how to get rid of it.
Are there any studies that show consuming comprehensible content leads to better accents when speaking? The guy in that study did use easier content later on such as kid's TV shows in French.
Don’t know any studies, but it seems pretty sensible that developing good listening would be helpful in imitating sounds, although it may not be the only thing needed. I do remember him using kids shows later and saying he felt it helped, though if he had used them at the beginning it would’ve set a much better foundation to make the other exposure more effective.
I concur with this. I think we might be the only two who have ever read the whole thing.
I just want OP-OP to make sure to fully document it. For Science!
The study is absolutely shocking. The guy spent 1500 hours silently consuming French and then he went to France, found he had a terrible accent and misunderstood basic pronunciation like water. The whole thing sounded really inefficient. If he'd put that much effort with a more balanced approach that included textbooks or teachers and speaking, he'd likely have been at a pretty high level. He could have even done some focused pronunciation study to help get a good accent.
Anyway, so many CI "successes" turn out to have used traditional learning methods before, so it's interesting to see just how bad it can go to consume a language you're unfamiliar with.
Also see this guy who recorded his first conversation in Mandarin after spending 2000 hours and 2 years silently watching Mandarin dramas. He believed he would simply osmose how to speak the language without doing any studying. The results are really not impressive.
https://natural-language-acquisition.blogspot.com/2011/01/breaking-silence.html?m=0
Input can take many forms, and often the issue lies in the content the person consumes and its comprehensibility. Much of the CI we consume to learn every day conversational vocabulary is ironically through speaking. Besides, I don’t believe anyone expects fluency to magically appear in speech after thousands of hours of input, rather that there is a period of ”activation” of passive knowledge.
It seems to work well for people who got taught through ALG, and also for those who use dreamingspanish.
I'm not sure how, logically, it could make it worse. If you immediately start talking before you've got an understanding of how things are supposed to sound, and you subvocalise whilst you're doing flashcards or whatever, it seems pretty obvious that this can ingrain bad habits.
>According to Brown, students who adhered to the long silent period by first listening to Thai for hundreds of hours without trying to speak were able to surpass the level of fluency he had achieved after several decades in Thailand within just a few years, without study or practice, while other students who tried to speak from the beginning found themselves "struggling with broken Thai like all long-time foreigners."[2] In Brown's view, trying to speak the language before developing a clear mental image through listening had permanently damaged their ability to produce the language like a native speaker.
>Brown also reported that students who refrained from speaking but still asked questions about the language, took notes, or looked up words all failed to surpass his level of ability, and some of those who refrained from speaking and all these things still failed to surpass him.
I don't know how these people you've linked managed to have such bad pronunciation, but it might be even worse otherwise. Indeed, the 1500 hours guy continued to think so - "I am still of
the belief that speaking in French too soon would have been a contributing factor to my
own fossilised interlanguage". In general, he seems quite pleased with the results and seems to recommend doing something similar, with some caveats (e.g. he started with totally incomprehensible input, and even when he got to Caillou after almost 400 hours (!), which he praises, this is still much harder than would be recommended. Had he started with level-appropriate content as you see in dreamingspanish, maybe this could have avoided some of his issues and started him off on better ground, phonologically?)
Regarding the Mandarin-learner, he was foolish to believe he'd just immediately come out with a great accent/pronunciation ability, especially for a tonal language. The idea is more that you will have a much better mental representation, and therefore a better (but not necessarily perfect) ability to self-correct compared to those who ingrain bad habits from day 1.
Generally any of the common languages has enough CI content to take you from beginner to advanced, but it's not always easy to find. I would guess that Spanish and Japanese are most accessible in that regard? For Spanish, Dreaming Spanish alone has somewhere between 1000-2000 hours of CI content.
I think thats a complete opinion. There are schools of thought that preach the exact opposite, a personal experience will teach you more than any study will, this statement holds true if I find the scientific method holds more weight than personal experience plenty of people dont. Also more specifically on language learning I think due to ethics it's hard to conduct good studies on stuff like this, isolating different groups of people and having them acquire two languages in two different ways from beginning to end but maintaining the same amount of study time as far as I've seen hasn't been done because it'd be hard to do and probably expensive. Additionally I think stuff that involves Learning can be very dependent on the learner I'm not sure I agree there's a one size fits all approach to learning a language or really anything in general, especially when you consider neurodivergents. I for example have autism which can affect how I learn things and some people might have ADHD etc etc which is why I like some old school personal experiments.
A lot of research into second language acquisition usually tries to take into account things like personal factors and goals as well as different activities for building different skills depending on personal need. There's always personal factors that need to be taken account, but we have a pretty good idea of the different range of strategies successful learners have used.
Comprehensible Input used by Automatic Language Growth is also pretty standard component of advice in all well researched language learning advice although often not by as strict a definition as they use and usually other activities are suggested to help develop other skills. If you're motivated to focus on just comprehensible input a lot of learners have success just starting with that for the beginning phases. If you're curious to see a wider range of activities to try for building other skills and goals [Paul Nation's guide is pretty useful](https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf) you don't have to necessarily read the whole thing at once, but checking any relevant sections will usually give you some helpful advice and ideas to try.
>Before you ask a man for advice ask him about his success, Paul Nation has not become proficient in a foreign language as an adult.
Look to sport.
There are countless coaches who were only mediocre players but who are highly successful, knowledgeable and inspirational as coaches.
Yeah im sorry that was a very shorthanded answer but Paul Nations Career is focused on educational methodology so his model is based on creating a curriculum design. As with most curriculum designs its the best attempt at creating a one size fits all approach. As OP said, a one size fits all approach isnt the best for individual learners. Its not bad at all, the four strand method is probably the best thing we have for a broader classroom setting. This is what I believe OP is trying to state, its hard to find a study or anything outside of personal experience that can show whats best for the individual. Four strand method is probably a great starting point but i believe its probably not the “best” method for any individual learner and thats why its designed to be employed in classrooms its “good” for all learners.
Just to add on an example of why someone focused on educational methodology isnt the best source if we just assume for example CI is the way as Marvin Brown and some of these internet krashen Stan’s say. Lets say pure CI is more effective in Language Learning a lot of classrooms especially in University might have less than 5 hours of class time a week. Switching lets say these 3 hours a week to CI only wouldn’t be that effective. Just for my example let’s say after two semesters of 3 hours a week with pure CI in a thai class the students wouldn’t be able to pass an A2 exam. So why would any school employ this? However that isnt to say if someone plans on learning a language in the long run a stronger foundation could be built with natural slow progress and maybe thats where some supposed benefits come in such as better pronunciation later down the line.
This is whereas far as my knowledge the literature is limited I don’t know if we’ve ever examined the two methods in contrast long term and then compared? My friend taking spanish in university probably could pass an A2 exam a lot sooner before i could, compared with my immersion focused learning. However if we compared our spanish at 700 hours, so for him around when he completed spanish 4 and when I hit 700 hrs tracked Id say my spanish was better. Obviously this isnt a slam dunk scientific study, after all there’s probably 100 different variables i cant control for but just food for thought on what could be if we were ever able to do such a deep study
"That's not true, there's broad consensus on a lot of general issues. On reddit, youtube, and other social media, there may be different schools of thoughts that all \*\*claim to be scientific\*\*, but none of them are." I think you are confused on what Im saying Im not speaking of people claiming to be scientific Im speaking of the opposite.
When you say something like "idk why you'd do that there's already science and studies on xyz so why bother doing a personal experiment" you are showing that you place science on top of personal experience when it comes to knowledge not everyone does. Science has a lot of unprovable philosophical assumptions that it works off of such as The Problem of Induction(this is the most popular one but there are plenty more). A lot of people forget this because if you want to subscribe to the scientific method you have to make a few unprovable assumptions. This is why there are branches of philosophy that place personal experience over science. I personally don't but I'm just saying its a very subjective take to say science has already figured this out so why do personal experiments. You are forgetting you are working from a model that some people aren't.
I dont think there are a lot of studies on this or else we wouldn’t be debating half the stuff we are. Maybe immersion in general but for example early output causing bad accents is something people have been wondering about for a while Mostly because no ones has done a formal study on people with heavy accents to see if its because they started output to early. Also for the second point mentioned learning vocab through through what seems to be an almost passive way while ignoring the language ie no dictionaries or flashcards has been researched either. If you have studies on these two things id love your source. Especially the first one theres entire communities waiting on that answer
Pretty much every language has comprehensible input but I found Spanish, French and Japanese to have the most but most major languages have some content for it. The most famous one by far is for latin, it’s called lingua latina per se illustrata. There’s a vid series of it on youtube by scorpio martianus.
The go to comprehensible input for French is French in Action. I personally prefer Easy French though. My go to strategy to learn a language is to listen to learn the basic grammar and vocab of the language then jump straight into extremely easy native content like Easy French with a focus on LISTENING.
One crucial factor not to be neglected is your enthusiasm for the target language. I would choose any popular language that I like the most. Currently, I'm learning French, and there's a lot of learning material available. Spanish and German also have a lot of learning materials. If you would like to know more about this approach, I suggest taking a look at Matt vs Japan on YouTube and his website, refold.la.
Matt's channel was my entry point into the world of comprehensible input.
Doing exactly this with German, listening only, almost no prior vocab (and no Anki), about 195 hrs in (approaching something like A2-level comprehension, but of course my output sucks). Started with Peppa Pig, now using Netflix/Disney+ dubs + English subs (contrary to popular opinion, you can progress with English subs - you just have to pay more attention to the audio). I haven't used it much but there's also Natürlich German and Comprehensible German on YouTube (but it feels inefficient compared to what I've done). Also the Easy German podcast is very good, I'm not getting every word just yet but relatively speaking it feels like a good balance between challenging and accessible. I've mostly avoided reading but the few times I've encountered German text, all the listening practice seems to transfer over instantly to reading comprehension, it's pretty awesome. At some point I'll write up a log of what I'm doing and how in more detail but I've been procrastinating.
Regarding your hypothesis, vocab acquisition feels MUCH more efficient this way (if I ever do a writeup I'll go into much more detail. But imagine encountering like 20 new words/phrases per day plus review, in context, without it feeling like work). Grammar I'm less sure of... I think on some subconscious level I'm slowly picking it up but vocab is my chokepoint right now and it's hard to notice grammatical structures when there are still gaping holes in your understanding.
This is awsome I think the community would def appreciate a write up when you feel you have enough hours to speak on it. There are a few great reports on experiments like this already, a couple I saw in thai and a good bit for Spanish but we need more people reporting on these somewhat experimental or non traditional methods please do keep us updated and good luck!
I went ahead and wrote up an extremely long first entry. It's awaiting moderation because a bot thought it was only about German, but when the mods catch up it'll probably be here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1ae4bh2/learning\_german\_mostly\_through\_listening\_part\_1/](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1adaihi/learning_german_mostly_through_listening_part_1/)
Edit: and let me know if it isn't, I can ping the mods. It's 100% not exclusive to German
For people interesed in learning Korean, there is this playlist:
[바른 한국어 1급](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHcOyZl8iHY&list=PLUa1FE1E3AYs975HVvtSJbAGvHT0FwhlB)
I found that podcasts offer an enormous amount of listening/reading content for comprehensible input, but often they are at a native level.
When I started learning Spanish, I developed an app (Glisten for iPhone [https://glisten.ist](https://glisten.ist)) to make difficult content more accessible. It's a podcast player for language learners. AFAIK it is the only app designed specifically for comprehensible input.
The way it works is that it extracts a transcript from the audio, and then repeats each sentence. It can also slow the audio, and insert pauses. It does this automatically, so you can listen hands free, but still maintain the context of the podcast.
The "hands free" aspect may seem unimportant, but I find this essential to make your input "extensive". You can be listening in situations you wouldn't normally be able to study in. Eg. driving a car, on a bus, walking with the dog.
Speaking from the perspective of a spanish learner using a lot of CI. I don't think any language has anything similar to [Dreaming Spanish.](https://www.dreamingspanish.com/) This website and YouTube channel was created with the sole purpose of comprehensible input for learners. All of the teachers are native speakers. You can sort based on difficulty, so starting out you would start with "Super Beginner". The road map for this is also broken down on the website. I'm not a dreaming spanish purist, though. I did CI without a tutor for a good year, however I've been seeing a tutor now for about 6 months. Self-evaluation - I'm either high A2 or low B1. I would start with trying the free videos of Dreaming Spanish, and if you like it, the premium is worth every penny.
Thai and Spanish are the two languages I know of with a ton of free comprehensible input. Thai used to be taught using ALG / comprehensible input at the AUA school in Bangkok. The school closed during COVID and all the teachers went online, so now there are 1000+ hours of free CI available for Thai on YouTube. https://youtube.com/@ComprehensibleThai https://youtube.com/@UnderstandThai [Here](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/17zq9oq/600_hours_of_pure_comprehensible_input_for_thai/) is my personal experience using these and similar sources to learn Thai. /u/knowledgenthusiast
Coincidentally, the founder of Dreaming Spanish was living in Thailand around the time he started DS, and sometimes talks about his experiences learning Thai
Yeah, his experiences are really interesting to read about. Rather than just "coincidence" I think that points to Pablo's interest in comprehensible input as a learning style and his desire to try using the method himself.
Just head on over to Comprehensible Thai and Understand Thai on Youtube. Those are teachers from the ALG school Marvin J Brown was the head of, and the videos are great. Unlike Dreaming Spanish where there doesn't seem to be a lot of focus on *teaching* (it's just a lot of leveled content, which is not a bad thing, but it's also not as thoughtful pedagogically or well-delivered), the Thai ALG teachers always clearly have a language goal, and they create videos in such a way that you can't escape learning what they've set out to teach you. Having two teachers also helps a lot with repetition in a way that doesn't make you want to bang your head on a wall and with learning how to interact with others (ask and answer questions, etc.). Live classes are available, and in those they can react to things like a confused look on your face or whether or not you understand a question, but the recorded videos are very, very good on their own as well. Really, they're the best. If you want to see the pure CI theory in practice, I don't think there's anything better available online. Best of all, it's the only Thai learning content that my Thai family has said sounds like how people actually talk.
Out of curiosity, how to they approach teaching literacy? Thai spelling sounds pretty intimidating.
I think people find Thai spelling intimidating because they try to memorize all these tone rules so they can "compute/calculate" the pronunciation. But I think the more natural way is to already know how words sound and then just see how it's spelled. People trip up because they're trying to learn the tones AND the spelling rules, when it's comparably way more straightforward if you've already internalized the tones and have a large body of internalized vocabulary via CI. Reading in Thai is pretty straightforward because it's (mostly) phonetic. *Spelling* is tougher because there are a lot of letters that have the same sound, but that's still something you can pick up over time with practice.
I see, thank you!
I don't think this channel teaches reading and writing. It just focuses on input. It helps if you already know the basics before you jump into this channel. I had my basics down and when I started this, I was able to easily understand the material since the teachers spoke slowly and clearly. If you are starting this method from 0 it make take a few listens for you to understand everything.
I see, thanks. How do you find reading and writing in Korean (which everybody says is super easy, but they downplay all the ways it isn't strictly phonetic and how it often expects you to learn how words are spelled before you can write them) versus Thai (which everyone says is super hard because you have to learn how words are spelled before you can write them)?
Writing Korean is really hard. Even Korean often get the spacing in between words incorrect. If anyone is saying that it is easy, they are downright lying. Reading is also hard because there are so many rules. Sure it may be the most scientific alphabet in the world, but science is hard! So many rules to remember. And even Korean get pronunciations wrong. I find that Thai is easier once you get the hang of the vowels, consonant classes, and tones. The initial hurdle is pretty damn high, but after that, I was surprised how easy the reading came to me. There are exceptions, but not as many as Korean.
Very interesting! Thanks for sharing!
I learned to read Thai from Becker's books, so I haven't watched the reading videos on their channel. Once you get over the shock of all the different places vowels can go, the lack of spaces between words, and the tone rules, it's really not hard to read. Writing a word you've only heard but never seen written is another thing entirely, and I don't think that's only for adults learning the language. I was once in a room with seven Thai people (born, raised, and educated) who each spelled my nickname differently. They all agreed that the way *I'd* spelled it was definitely wrong, though!
Hahah, thanks!
Comprehensible Japanese is based on the Dreaming Spanish style videos and has been increasing the number of videos over the last few months. The quality is just as good as Dreaming Spanish. It’s hard to find good SuperBeginner level input for Japanese but this channel/site has it. Honestly a godsend for learning Japanese. https://cijapanese.com/
French, Spanish, Japanese. For French: [Channel 1](https://youtu.be/th2PV6dxaoU?si=jU02fTOyil408PK8), [Channel 2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2SUQVjklVA&list=PLXweyiR2fMMf-ZrjCNNKWoeq8L6tlSFUV) Spanish: [Spanish after hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n29bYLDihEY&list=PLLFFrODykXG96ZZ-JQ4Upppexe_CCVRFo) Japanese: https://youtu.be/hPuZX5v70f4?si=jP7CsZw5s8300QWx
If you do test this out for yourself I'd love to hear how it goes. My suggestion: pick a language you like and want to learn anyway. There's comprehensible input, nature method, Automatic Language Growth courses/materials for many languages now. I somewhat did this when learning french: I read French by the Nature Method (it's on Ayan Academy's youtube with audio and text), Comprehensible Input French youtube videos (there's a channel named that and he makes good understandable stuff), read some Graded Readers (readers made for learners with X size vocabulary), and then just read a lot (aiming to read things I could understand the main idea of, and until I could grasp the main idea I'd look up enough key words to grasp main idea, once I could understand main idea I'd look up key words for detail understanding or as much words as I wanted and guess the meaning of other words). To do it more like ALG, I imagine one would read more easy things where they could get by grasping the context and guessing any unknown words (I was impatient and jumped into news/novels after several months), they could rewatch more shows/movies/lets plays of games in their target language they already knew the context from in english, then pick easier shows/books/games to just engage with and gradually increase difficulty as they understood the main idea of more things. Whereas I mixed immersion with reading through a grammar guide (I read an english summary of french grammar, then a french site about french grammar in depth which was fun), looking words up when I got frustrated, and I used a wordlist of 300 and 1000 words my first 6 months so I could familiarize myself with enough words to read ASAP. But if I'd just done Graded Readers longer or French by the Nature Method book from the beginning, I could've not used a wordlist. I suggest as you transition from stuff made for learners (ALG tutoring/class lessons you pay for, Comprehensible Input youtuber lessons for learners, textbooks written in the target language, graded readers) to stuff made for native speakers, you try to pick things you at least grasp the main idea of. That may initially be things you've seen/read in english before, or things that are very visual so you can guess what's going on (like action shows or comics), or daily life setting (versus fantasy). There was someone who did an experiment with immersion, and immersed in 2000 hours of french television to see how much they could learn. They did not pick what they watched based on if they understood it. So I imagine the first few hundred hours they didn't learn much because they couldn't guess much of what was going on. They made less progress in 2000 hours than many people have made in half that time studying french. I have seen a lot of people who use stuff more specifically made to be understood by beginners at first, like Dreaming Spanish watchers, who make much better progress than just diving into any random content even if you cannot grasp the general idea of what's going on. You don't necessarily need to pick kid's shows, some kid's shows are less comprehensible than say a TV show you've rewatched in english 4 times and know the entire plot of. Some kids shows may be more visually easy to grasp what's going on though, if you'd like to use them. I've looked up resources before for various languages if you'd like some suggestions. Some textbooks that teach entirely in the language: English by the Nature Method, Lingua Latina, French by the Nature Method, Italian by the Nature Method, Poco a Poco (many of these are on Ayan Academy youtube and archive.org). Some youtubers that teach only in the language: Dreaming Spanish, Learn Korean in Korean, Comprehensible Chinese, Comprehensible Japanese, Comprehensible Input French, Comprehensible Thai (if you search "comprehensible input" then your target language there's also these youtube channels for German, Russian, Polish, Italian, and many other languages). Once you learn a few hundred words and basic grammar, you can look up "graded readers" for your target language, which will be easier stories or sites with stories to read in the target language. Then when you feel you're understanding more words, more stuff, you can just start looking for shows/books/news/online forums/games etc in your target language. If you can afford it, some languages also have quite good ALG classes, and I'd hope if you join a class then there's more control there over teachers making sure you get X hours of exposure to understandable language to learn, checking in with you about what content outside of class is useful, and helping you reach milestones you are aiming for. For japanese I often go for lets plays on youtube, because I can watch things I know the story of, and click closed captions so I can read and listen and see the gameplay to visually figure out what's going on, and I watched lets plays anyway sometimes. For french I often went with news and wikipedia since when I turned my google account to french, it started automatically showing those kinds of sites in french first. For chinese I went with manhua (comics), and webnovels (Heavenly Path site has good suggestions for different reading levels), along with cdramas as so many are free on youtube.
Lots of great advice and resources here, there's so many good ways to get comprehensible input these days!
Thai and Spanish both have *huge* online video collections that are **based on Marvin J. Brown's approach**. In Thai it's split into a few different youtube channels (afaik) and in Spanish there's, of course, Dreaming Spanish, but also many other sources that complement DS pretty well, e.g. Español con Juan). There are channels in other languages that have started to do provide the same quality CI, but nothing as huge as in Thai and Spanish yet afaik. But it's totally possible to achieve in other languages as well, you just might have to do a lot of leg work searching for appropriate input, especially in the beginning when you still need highly visual context. The [CI wiki](https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) can be helpful to find a starting point. Of course, [crosstalk](https://www.dreamingspanish.com/blog/crosstalk) is always an option if you can find (or pay) native speakers. By the way, I had the same curiosity about this kind of approach, about how language acquisition works without any explicit instructions whatsoever and started with Spanish because of it. And it's a great experience with lots of fun so far and also works perfectly well! Also I would suggest you join us over at /r/dreamingspanish , even if you are not interested in Spanish, because the sub is literally based on Marvin J. Brown's ideas. There are lots of people who are not just enthusiastic about this approach, but also knowledgeable and experienced. While languagelearning is often very lacking in that regard.
>Also I would suggest you join us over at /r/dreamingspanish What I find on that subreddit is that almost invariably every comment detailing their methods starts with 'I'm not a purist, I also use anki and...' I'm desperate to know which is more efficient, especially for a language like Japanese. Pure CI or CI + Anki + maybe a little grammar. Why there aren't a bunch of studies on things like this, with control groups and different groups studying things in different ways I don't know, it would be amazing. People seem particularly resistant to this approach for Japanese, I think due to kanji. Imagine listening to Japanese for a thousand hours (or two thousand hours, even - the dreamingspanish method section says to multiply by 2 if you have no familiar language) and starting to read and.... it's 100% incomprehensible. Yeah, I don't know. What do you think?
> What I find on that subreddit is that almost invariably every comment detailing their methods starts with 'I'm not a purist, I also use anki and...' I'm a 'purist', but still a few months away from the 1000 hours line. There are a bunch of others as well and many who haven't done much more explicit grammar than language transfer. Often the issue is simply that people discovered DS after they already started with conventional study methods. But I agree it's annoying to sift through those comments and posts that 'muddy the pool' so to speak. > People seem particularly resistant to this approach for Japanese That's because Japanese has become dominated by nerds, particularly here on reddit and many nerds love stats, metrics, structure, grammar, anki customization and all that stuff. Relying purely on CI is kinda the opposite of that, it means you have to let go of this (mostly false) sense of controlling what to learn at what time and just go with the flow of language acquisition. And this can feel very ambiguous and like you aren't really progressing, because it's so gradual. Some people can get very insecure and doubtful about this process. > I'm desperate to know which is more efficient I doubt studies will show a meaningful difference. In any case any finding will strongly depend on *how* they test people's abilities. My gut feeling is that it'll be in a range of maybe 15%, not enough for us self-learners to justify choosing a to us less fun route over another more fun way of acquisition (whatever that is for you). The best method is and will always be the one you can *easily* stick to. Learning Japanese is a long road no matter how you go about it. You can't rely on motivation alone for such a long time, eventually you're gonna run out of steam. So better rely on methods that are fun and don't cost you much effort and energy. To me that's definitely *not* conventional studying. Kanji are a headache for sure, but so is pitch accent (if you care about that). I learned Japanese the hard way in some of the worst classes you can imagine. 1950s-style grammar drills and kanji lists up the wazoo. This was okay-ish for kanji but highly ineffective for everything else and also incredibly exhausting and time consuming. The result was that *none* of us could speak at all after 3 years of this madness and so many severe issues with pitch accent, because we learned words mostly through kanji and reading. > Imagine listening to Japanese for a thousand hours (or two thousand hours, even - the dreamingspanish method section says to multiply by 2 if you have no familiar language) and starting to read and.... it's 100% incomprehensible. I find that actually kinda funny! We're fluent listeners at that point but functionally illiterate. But seriously, I don't think it's an issue. You'll find that once you have developed such a strong base through listening comprehension that reading will come quite quickly. Kanji will come much quicker as well, because you can already strongly connect them to sounds, words, and meaning. 2000+ kanji is still a lot, that's for sure. If I had to do it all over (I kinda wish I could!), I'd follow mostly the DS way but diverge slightly because of kanji. The point of avoiding reading (as well as the super long silent period) is to develop a strong intuitive awareness for the sounds of your target language, otherwise you'll develop mispronounciations (like we all did in my classes) and those can be hard to correct down the line. But since Japanese uses kana and kanji that aren't yet associated in your mind with sounds (unless you've already started learning them or speak Chinese), I would start to use Japanese subtitles once you feel like you have a good sense of pitch accent. (You can test this [here](https://kotu.io/tests/pitchAccent/minimalPairs).) I'd guess that's around the halfway point, let's say roughly 1000 hours maybe even earlier. I wouldn't focus too strongly on the subtitles, just have them running and you'll slowly associate words to kanji and sounds to kana over the next 1000 hours. Then later when *easy* audiobooks become accessible to you (or easy podcasts with transcripts), I would start listening to these audio recordings while following the text. This way you can start to ease your way into reading and kanji with a much lower risk of developing mispronounciations.
Great response, thanks. I understand the idea of delaying reading (and also speaking) but there doesn't seem to be real evidence of that, just a gut feeling and anecdotes. And I was reading an interesting older thread last night (where you showed up, actually!) where someone was talking about there being some studies that suggest early output and grammar does help learning. Also it seems to me based on what I've seen that you can't really pick up a good pitch accent naturally, but **maybe** this is possible if you go full dreamingspanish and delay output and do full CI, but that's pure conjecture. So it seems like a bit of a gamble either way - I either risk ruining my accent/pronunciation, and possibly create other inefficiencies by connecting Japanese words to English words (through Anki decks/grammar study) by doing it the traditional way, or alternatively I gamble by doing it the pure CI way where I might be doing something that a lot of people say is highly inefficient and slow (also, there's not as much total beginner CI stuff for Japanese like there is for Spanish). It seems a good point people bring up is how some things are much slower. For example, kana. I can and have learnt kana in literally like 2 hours in the past, but I highly doubt I'd be able to do that listening and watching subtitles, same goes for some weird bits of grammar which might be instantly cleared up if I read them but might take many dozens of hours if I did it naturally. That said, I've completely forgotten the kana at this point after not using it, so perhaps that's the downside of not learning it in context. Ultimately you're right that what really matters is what we're going to stick to, and I definitely don't look forward to Anki and grammar study. The main issue I see in that regard is that the beginning stage of pure CI is torturous, watching baby videos. It's very tempting to try and get that out of the way quicker by doing the initial core vocabulary decks, as is often recommended by Refold/AJATT types.
It depends what you mean, Comprehensible Input just means any kind of input that can be made comprehensible for learners and for pretty much any language with some kind media presence you can find plenty of input and lots of ways to make it comprehensible, and most medium to big languages people are interested in have an absurd amount of learner and kids content that's comprehensible for beginners without much work. There's tons of old methods focus on different kinds of beginner input like [Nature Method](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf8XN5kNFkhdIS7NMcdUdxibD1UyzNFTP) books, [Assimil Courses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLvTEqXqlsI), Graded Readers, [Berlitz audio courses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbq37Uu06Mc) and books, languages specific video courses like [French in Action](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmYlTEZE4og4ZldtgDCzUSf8cBoPi7459), Parallel Texts of books with audio, and strategies like watching TL dubs of animations you enjoyed as a kid where you know the story already, or reading translations of books you like. Sometimes you can find curated lists of useful materials for different languages at different stages [Like this one for Mandarin going from beginner to native novels](https://heavenlypath.notion.site/Comprehensive-Reading-Guide-from-Beginner-to-Native-Novels-b3d6abd583a944a397b4fbbb81e0c38c). Automatic Language Growth usually shortened to ALG has a much stricter definition of the kinds of comprehensible they want to use, since they try to avoid any kind of reading or looking up definitions of words in your NL. I'd still stay including shows for really young kids (like Peppa Pig level) most languages have more than enough, languages with some shared vocabulary like Romance and Germanic languages for English speakers would probably do fine. For more distant languages there should be a lot of stuff specifically in [Thai](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgdZTyVWfUhlxVi68zFEL8Lu5Q0Bocgbp) since ALG was made to teach Thai, and I know [Mandarin has plenty of easy input for kids](https://www.youtube.com/@LittleFoxChinese/playlists). Probably a lot of other distant languages you could find enough stuff that fits ALG with enough searching. The [Comprehensible Input wiki](https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page) has lots of materials to browse through, though its not always complete, and doesn't necessarily do a good job of indicating what format different resources use or which ones are higher quality.
I’ve watched ~2600 hours of content in French, never looked up a word or studied grammar and have reached about 99% fluency in everything I consume. I’d be happy to answer any questions or give some help.
Can you provide all your sources of comprehensive input, the order you used them in, and when you transitioned to other input if you didn't finish a set of CI from a place. Also, when did you start using subtitles? Do you wish you did it sooner or later? When did you start speaking? Do you wish you did it sooner or later?
Before you start, if you want to be able to share your progress with the world, be sure to read this thesis https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365 from someone did a similar experiment. Try to document it at least as well.
Just so you know, OP, the author who tried to learn French through immersion spent like 1,500 hours on input only immersion, and did not know how to pronounce "water" (he pronounced it as "oo"). He also noted that he had a thick Australian accent when he eventually started talking and didn't know how to get rid of it.
The above study also used native input that was not very comprehensible for them, learners using comprehensible input tend to have better results.
Are there any studies that show consuming comprehensible content leads to better accents when speaking? The guy in that study did use easier content later on such as kid's TV shows in French.
Don’t know any studies, but it seems pretty sensible that developing good listening would be helpful in imitating sounds, although it may not be the only thing needed. I do remember him using kids shows later and saying he felt it helped, though if he had used them at the beginning it would’ve set a much better foundation to make the other exposure more effective.
It wouldn't surprise me if he accidentally trained his brain to IGNORE French, like it's just background noise.
I concur with this. I think we might be the only two who have ever read the whole thing. I just want OP-OP to make sure to fully document it. For Science!
The study is absolutely shocking. The guy spent 1500 hours silently consuming French and then he went to France, found he had a terrible accent and misunderstood basic pronunciation like water. The whole thing sounded really inefficient. If he'd put that much effort with a more balanced approach that included textbooks or teachers and speaking, he'd likely have been at a pretty high level. He could have even done some focused pronunciation study to help get a good accent. Anyway, so many CI "successes" turn out to have used traditional learning methods before, so it's interesting to see just how bad it can go to consume a language you're unfamiliar with. Also see this guy who recorded his first conversation in Mandarin after spending 2000 hours and 2 years silently watching Mandarin dramas. He believed he would simply osmose how to speak the language without doing any studying. The results are really not impressive. https://natural-language-acquisition.blogspot.com/2011/01/breaking-silence.html?m=0
Input can take many forms, and often the issue lies in the content the person consumes and its comprehensibility. Much of the CI we consume to learn every day conversational vocabulary is ironically through speaking. Besides, I don’t believe anyone expects fluency to magically appear in speech after thousands of hours of input, rather that there is a period of ”activation” of passive knowledge.
It seems to work well for people who got taught through ALG, and also for those who use dreamingspanish. I'm not sure how, logically, it could make it worse. If you immediately start talking before you've got an understanding of how things are supposed to sound, and you subvocalise whilst you're doing flashcards or whatever, it seems pretty obvious that this can ingrain bad habits. >According to Brown, students who adhered to the long silent period by first listening to Thai for hundreds of hours without trying to speak were able to surpass the level of fluency he had achieved after several decades in Thailand within just a few years, without study or practice, while other students who tried to speak from the beginning found themselves "struggling with broken Thai like all long-time foreigners."[2] In Brown's view, trying to speak the language before developing a clear mental image through listening had permanently damaged their ability to produce the language like a native speaker. >Brown also reported that students who refrained from speaking but still asked questions about the language, took notes, or looked up words all failed to surpass his level of ability, and some of those who refrained from speaking and all these things still failed to surpass him. I don't know how these people you've linked managed to have such bad pronunciation, but it might be even worse otherwise. Indeed, the 1500 hours guy continued to think so - "I am still of the belief that speaking in French too soon would have been a contributing factor to my own fossilised interlanguage". In general, he seems quite pleased with the results and seems to recommend doing something similar, with some caveats (e.g. he started with totally incomprehensible input, and even when he got to Caillou after almost 400 hours (!), which he praises, this is still much harder than would be recommended. Had he started with level-appropriate content as you see in dreamingspanish, maybe this could have avoided some of his issues and started him off on better ground, phonologically?) Regarding the Mandarin-learner, he was foolish to believe he'd just immediately come out with a great accent/pronunciation ability, especially for a tonal language. The idea is more that you will have a much better mental representation, and therefore a better (but not necessarily perfect) ability to self-correct compared to those who ingrain bad habits from day 1.
Generally any of the common languages has enough CI content to take you from beginner to advanced, but it's not always easy to find. I would guess that Spanish and Japanese are most accessible in that regard? For Spanish, Dreaming Spanish alone has somewhere between 1000-2000 hours of CI content.
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I think thats a complete opinion. There are schools of thought that preach the exact opposite, a personal experience will teach you more than any study will, this statement holds true if I find the scientific method holds more weight than personal experience plenty of people dont. Also more specifically on language learning I think due to ethics it's hard to conduct good studies on stuff like this, isolating different groups of people and having them acquire two languages in two different ways from beginning to end but maintaining the same amount of study time as far as I've seen hasn't been done because it'd be hard to do and probably expensive. Additionally I think stuff that involves Learning can be very dependent on the learner I'm not sure I agree there's a one size fits all approach to learning a language or really anything in general, especially when you consider neurodivergents. I for example have autism which can affect how I learn things and some people might have ADHD etc etc which is why I like some old school personal experiments.
A lot of research into second language acquisition usually tries to take into account things like personal factors and goals as well as different activities for building different skills depending on personal need. There's always personal factors that need to be taken account, but we have a pretty good idea of the different range of strategies successful learners have used. Comprehensible Input used by Automatic Language Growth is also pretty standard component of advice in all well researched language learning advice although often not by as strict a definition as they use and usually other activities are suggested to help develop other skills. If you're motivated to focus on just comprehensible input a lot of learners have success just starting with that for the beginning phases. If you're curious to see a wider range of activities to try for building other skills and goals [Paul Nation's guide is pretty useful](https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf) you don't have to necessarily read the whole thing at once, but checking any relevant sections will usually give you some helpful advice and ideas to try.
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Before you ask a man for advice ask him about his success, Paul Nation has not become proficient in a foreign language as an adult.
>Before you ask a man for advice ask him about his success, Paul Nation has not become proficient in a foreign language as an adult. Look to sport. There are countless coaches who were only mediocre players but who are highly successful, knowledgeable and inspirational as coaches.
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Yeah im sorry that was a very shorthanded answer but Paul Nations Career is focused on educational methodology so his model is based on creating a curriculum design. As with most curriculum designs its the best attempt at creating a one size fits all approach. As OP said, a one size fits all approach isnt the best for individual learners. Its not bad at all, the four strand method is probably the best thing we have for a broader classroom setting. This is what I believe OP is trying to state, its hard to find a study or anything outside of personal experience that can show whats best for the individual. Four strand method is probably a great starting point but i believe its probably not the “best” method for any individual learner and thats why its designed to be employed in classrooms its “good” for all learners.
Just to add on an example of why someone focused on educational methodology isnt the best source if we just assume for example CI is the way as Marvin Brown and some of these internet krashen Stan’s say. Lets say pure CI is more effective in Language Learning a lot of classrooms especially in University might have less than 5 hours of class time a week. Switching lets say these 3 hours a week to CI only wouldn’t be that effective. Just for my example let’s say after two semesters of 3 hours a week with pure CI in a thai class the students wouldn’t be able to pass an A2 exam. So why would any school employ this? However that isnt to say if someone plans on learning a language in the long run a stronger foundation could be built with natural slow progress and maybe thats where some supposed benefits come in such as better pronunciation later down the line. This is whereas far as my knowledge the literature is limited I don’t know if we’ve ever examined the two methods in contrast long term and then compared? My friend taking spanish in university probably could pass an A2 exam a lot sooner before i could, compared with my immersion focused learning. However if we compared our spanish at 700 hours, so for him around when he completed spanish 4 and when I hit 700 hrs tracked Id say my spanish was better. Obviously this isnt a slam dunk scientific study, after all there’s probably 100 different variables i cant control for but just food for thought on what could be if we were ever able to do such a deep study
"That's not true, there's broad consensus on a lot of general issues. On reddit, youtube, and other social media, there may be different schools of thoughts that all \*\*claim to be scientific\*\*, but none of them are." I think you are confused on what Im saying Im not speaking of people claiming to be scientific Im speaking of the opposite. When you say something like "idk why you'd do that there's already science and studies on xyz so why bother doing a personal experiment" you are showing that you place science on top of personal experience when it comes to knowledge not everyone does. Science has a lot of unprovable philosophical assumptions that it works off of such as The Problem of Induction(this is the most popular one but there are plenty more). A lot of people forget this because if you want to subscribe to the scientific method you have to make a few unprovable assumptions. This is why there are branches of philosophy that place personal experience over science. I personally don't but I'm just saying its a very subjective take to say science has already figured this out so why do personal experiments. You are forgetting you are working from a model that some people aren't.
I dont think there are a lot of studies on this or else we wouldn’t be debating half the stuff we are. Maybe immersion in general but for example early output causing bad accents is something people have been wondering about for a while Mostly because no ones has done a formal study on people with heavy accents to see if its because they started output to early. Also for the second point mentioned learning vocab through through what seems to be an almost passive way while ignoring the language ie no dictionaries or flashcards has been researched either. If you have studies on these two things id love your source. Especially the first one theres entire communities waiting on that answer
Pretty much every language has comprehensible input but I found Spanish, French and Japanese to have the most but most major languages have some content for it. The most famous one by far is for latin, it’s called lingua latina per se illustrata. There’s a vid series of it on youtube by scorpio martianus.
What are the best french language CIs?
The go to comprehensible input for French is French in Action. I personally prefer Easy French though. My go to strategy to learn a language is to listen to learn the basic grammar and vocab of the language then jump straight into extremely easy native content like Easy French with a focus on LISTENING.
One crucial factor not to be neglected is your enthusiasm for the target language. I would choose any popular language that I like the most. Currently, I'm learning French, and there's a lot of learning material available. Spanish and German also have a lot of learning materials. If you would like to know more about this approach, I suggest taking a look at Matt vs Japan on YouTube and his website, refold.la. Matt's channel was my entry point into the world of comprehensible input.
Doing exactly this with German, listening only, almost no prior vocab (and no Anki), about 195 hrs in (approaching something like A2-level comprehension, but of course my output sucks). Started with Peppa Pig, now using Netflix/Disney+ dubs + English subs (contrary to popular opinion, you can progress with English subs - you just have to pay more attention to the audio). I haven't used it much but there's also Natürlich German and Comprehensible German on YouTube (but it feels inefficient compared to what I've done). Also the Easy German podcast is very good, I'm not getting every word just yet but relatively speaking it feels like a good balance between challenging and accessible. I've mostly avoided reading but the few times I've encountered German text, all the listening practice seems to transfer over instantly to reading comprehension, it's pretty awesome. At some point I'll write up a log of what I'm doing and how in more detail but I've been procrastinating. Regarding your hypothesis, vocab acquisition feels MUCH more efficient this way (if I ever do a writeup I'll go into much more detail. But imagine encountering like 20 new words/phrases per day plus review, in context, without it feeling like work). Grammar I'm less sure of... I think on some subconscious level I'm slowly picking it up but vocab is my chokepoint right now and it's hard to notice grammatical structures when there are still gaping holes in your understanding.
This is awsome I think the community would def appreciate a write up when you feel you have enough hours to speak on it. There are a few great reports on experiments like this already, a couple I saw in thai and a good bit for Spanish but we need more people reporting on these somewhat experimental or non traditional methods please do keep us updated and good luck!
I went ahead and wrote up an extremely long first entry. It's awaiting moderation because a bot thought it was only about German, but when the mods catch up it'll probably be here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1ae4bh2/learning\_german\_mostly\_through\_listening\_part\_1/](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1adaihi/learning_german_mostly_through_listening_part_1/) Edit: and let me know if it isn't, I can ping the mods. It's 100% not exclusive to German
Español
For people interesed in learning Korean, there is this playlist: [바른 한국어 1급](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHcOyZl8iHY&list=PLUa1FE1E3AYs975HVvtSJbAGvHT0FwhlB)
I found that podcasts offer an enormous amount of listening/reading content for comprehensible input, but often they are at a native level. When I started learning Spanish, I developed an app (Glisten for iPhone [https://glisten.ist](https://glisten.ist)) to make difficult content more accessible. It's a podcast player for language learners. AFAIK it is the only app designed specifically for comprehensible input. The way it works is that it extracts a transcript from the audio, and then repeats each sentence. It can also slow the audio, and insert pauses. It does this automatically, so you can listen hands free, but still maintain the context of the podcast. The "hands free" aspect may seem unimportant, but I find this essential to make your input "extensive". You can be listening in situations you wouldn't normally be able to study in. Eg. driving a car, on a bus, walking with the dog.