r/languagelearning • u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours • 8d ago
2 Years of Learning: Random Redditor’s Thoughts about Listening-Based Comprehensible Input Discussion
I’ve now been learning Thai through pure comprehensible input (specifically listening) for two years. I’ve written updates along the way about my progress. This is not a progress update, though I do intend to write another one in the nearish future.
Instead, this is a breakdown of some thoughts I have about listening-based comprehensible input: what it is, why I enjoy it, common misconceptions, and why I think almost every language learner should invest time into dedicated listening practice.
I’m not an expert and these are simply my opinions. Keep in mind that controlled research on language learning is hard, most research on language learning is relatively short-term with small sample sizes and study designs that make drawing broad conclusions difficult.
So in the absence of conclusive research, and mindful of the fact that everyone learns differently, I offer my anecdotal experience and largely unqualified opinions in the hopes that it helps guide others to whatever methods suit them best.
Summary of Questions Addressed Below
- What is comprehensible input?
- How does a pure comprehensible input approach work?
- What are the advantages of a comprehensible input approach?
- What is the point of a silent period?
- Does a silent period guarantee a shockingly good native accent?
- How can I maximize my chances of having a clear accent?
- Isn’t a pure input approach really slow?
- How can you get the sounds right if you can’t read?
- Can pure input really work? Don’t you need to study grammar?
- Can you really learn to speak just by listening a lot?
- How does output start to emerge after a lot of input and a silent period?
What is comprehensible input?
Comprehensible input refers to any input that is understandable to you. For beginners, this may be limited to learner-aimed comprehensible input made by teachers using simple speech and visual aids to communicate meaning (Spanish example here). For more advanced learners, this may mean native content from YouTube, Netflix, or other platforms. It may even mean crosstalk or conversation with natives.
It does NOT mean content that is incomprehensible to you. The content MUST be understandable. For videos with visual aids, I would suggest content that is 80%+ understandable.
Any learner can use comprehensible input. Some learners use a pure input approach (see below). Others mix it in alongside explicit/analytical study of their target language. I think the vast majority of learners would benefit enormously from doing a large amount of CI, even if they also enjoy more traditional methods.
Comprehensible input may mean listening or reading. I used a listening approach, and that is my sole experience with CI, so in general when I say “comprehensible input” below, I’m referring to listening-based input.
How does a pure comprehensible input approach (such as Automatic Language Growth or Dreaming Spanish) work?
I started from zero Thai two years ago (first update here). I watched learner-aimed content for many hundreds of hours. Some of this was YouTube content and some was live online lessons with teachers.
I avoided any kind of analytical study of the language. I did not use a textbook or flashcards. I didn't take notes. I did no explicit grammar study. I used no dictionaries, lookups, or translations. I adhered to an initial silent period, where I avoided speaking (other than very basic transactional phrases such as hello/yes/no/thanks when interacting with service workers).
For all my listening, Thai was used 100% of the time, with no explanations in English. Teachers used drawings, pictures, gestures, and other visual aids to communicate meaning. Over time, I naturally built the connections between the spoken speech and the implicit meaning. By 250 hours I was almost never translating into English. I just implicitly understood what was said.
The lessons evolve in difficulty over time: from relatively boring videos describing colors and clothing to personal anecdotes about life experiences to fairy tales to true crime spoilers to breakdowns of native media.
After about 1100 hours, I switched most of my input to native content. I also started mixing in some explicit speaking practice, though listening input remains 95% of my study even now.
What are the advantages of a comprehensible input approach?
It was more fun for me.
Everyone learns differently, but for me, this was much more fun than flashcards, grammar study, etc. The initial grind was tough, but by 100 hours in, I was listening to jokes and fairy tales in Thai. I continued to progress into hearing stories about my Thai teacher running an underground lottery in Bangkok, machinations of the Thai royal family, movie spoilers about classic Thai films, etc. It was a blast.
Now as an intermediate learner, I spend almost all my “study” time watching Thai YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, etc.
So if you’re the kind of person that has an aversion to rote memorization and analytical study, give comprehensible input a try! There’s a large and growing number of resources available for many languages.
It makes the language feel natural and emotionally resonant to me, not awkward or strangely outdated like textbook learning can sometimes be.
The idea is to make the learning process as close as possible to how you would interact with the language “in the wild”. You spend hundreds of hours actually listening to spoken speech. So my memories and experience with Thai is purely built on natives speaking to me and communicating with me. This is very different than my experience with Japanese, where I had hundreds of hours of grammar books, flashcards, and other rote study as my lived experience with the language.
Through listening, I’m building my natural and automatic intuition of the spoken speech in all its messy aspects. The connectedness of speech, the rhythm, the prosody, the slurring. There’s no unpleasant realization that my learning is divorced from how natives actually speak, because all my learning is from listening to how natives actually speak.
My time with Thai is never spent “computing/calculating/translating” the right answer and the language never feels like a math problem to me. I don’t have the emotional disconnect that most second language learners report; Thai feels just as emotive and immediate to me as English.
Related to above, I don’t feel strained when listening to and understanding Thai. I don't have the additional burden of "translating in my head" that many learners report.
I don’t feel additional mental burden listening to Thai. When I practice listening, I try to relax and follow along with the meaning of what’s being said. So this is my natural and automatic response to hearing Thai, versus a trained response to calculate and stress and translate.
I suspect the way I feel when listening to and speaking Thai would not be the same if I had spent hundreds of hours on analytical study of the language with flashcards, grammar, etc. I wanted my practice of Thai to be close to the way I would want to actually experience living/communicating in Thai.
I’ve built a good understanding of Thai culture and thinking.
I would argue that language is culture, and that understanding the culture is just as important as internalizing the semantics and patterns of the language.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to natives talk about their childhoods, favorite movies, contemporary politics, religion, ceremonies, traditions, etc. You could learn some of these things in English, but being able to do it simultaneously with language practice makes for fantastic synergy.
Knowing about ill-advised submarine purchases, expensive watch loans from connected friends, passing cursed food gifts between your legs, famous singers running the length of Thailand, etc make it easier for me to follow everything from conversations with friends to meme videos. And to laugh along at the right time and be “in” on the cultural jokes.
What is the point of a silent period?
I had a silent period of about 1100 hours. I think doing so (and continuing to do listening as 95% of my practice even now) is helping me a build a good “ear” for Thai. Not just the sounds/phonemes of the language, but also the rhythm and the implicit patterns (grammar) of speech.
The analogy I always think about is archery. A lot of input helped me clearly see the target and better understand what adjustments I need to make to hit the bullseye. I still need practice speaking to hit it, but it’s way better for me than shooting blind.
Some people get feedback from native speakers to fix their accent. I think a certain kind of person will put in that effort and find the right native (such as a professional tutor) who is good at providing useful feedback.
But for me, if I'm trying to hit a bullseye, I would much rather be able to see the target myself and where my arrow's hitting, versus shooting blindfolded and asking someone else to tell me what adjustments to make to my aim.
Natives who don't have phonetics training aren't necessarily very good at providing feedback, especially if you're getting a ton of things wrong. With Thai, beginners worry about tones a lot, but from what I've seen, beginners get everything wrong: the consonants, the vowel sounds, the vowel length, etc.
That's a lot to unpack, especially for natives who may expect you to kind of suck at speaking and will be happy if you're even remotely in the right ballpark (as is often the case with Thai where foreigners get lots of praise for even badly garbled phrases).
Does a silent period guarantee a shockingly good native accent?
Unequivocally: no. It is NOT a guarantee.
I’ve seen silent period adherents with really great accents and some with okay accents. The latter were understandable, but definitely had strong markers of their native tongue when they spoke Thai.
I’ve also seen traditional learners with great accents, so avoiding a silent period absolutely doesn’t mean you’ll destroy any chances of having great results when you speak. A silent period isn't practical for every situation or every learner. And some people derive so much pleasure and joy and motivation from speaking that being "forced" to be silent would be incredibly discouraging. Loss of motivation or habit is the most detrimental thing to anyone's language journey.
That being said, I think a silent period can be VERY helpful and is one thing you can choose to do that helps maximize your chances of having a good result. I’ve met many “speak from day one” style Thai learners who have incomprehensible accents or accents that are very taxing to understand. Some have spent 5+ years learning Thai and still struggle to be understood by natives.
I can only imagine how discouraging this would feel. In contrast, my accent is clear and I’m happy with how it’s developing so far. I am not going to be “shocking” any natives, but natives have an easy time understanding me.
I don’t feel I have a naturally good ear for languages, so I very much feel the silent period was a huge help in my case. Which transitions nicely to…
How can I maximize my chances of having a clear accent that’s pleasant to listen to and with minimal burden on native listeners?
I think the following “starting” factors help people get a great accent. Things that either aren’t in your control or would require a lot of training that I wouldn’t consider language learning.
A good ear. Either “genetically” or through some kind of training, such as music.
A gift for imitation and mimicry. People who naturally pick up the regional accents and verbal tics of the social groups they’re in, people who are natural performers, or those with acting training/experience.
The ability to mentally/emotionally “take on” the persona of someone from your target language’s culture. If you “feel” more like a native, then I think that actually goes a long way to adjusting your speech, gestures, body language, etc to be more native-like.
Age. Being younger is enormously helpful in terms of picking up accents and novel phonemes.
Knowing a language with similar phonemes, especially if that language was acquired from a young age or to a near-native ability.
I think the following factors are things you can actively work on to help you get a great accent.
Using a silent period to develop a strong ear for how things should sound before you start speaking.
Listening a lot to native speech, even if/after you do other kinds of study or start speaking.
Shadowing and/or chorusing practice, where you try to speak along with or directly after native speech. I use the Matt vs Japan shadowing setup.
Getting dedicated correction of your accent from a native, especially an accent coach or someone with explicit phonetics training. This is something I plan to do this year.
I think the following factors are things that could potentially make it harder to develop a good accent. Again, none of the following guarantee a “bad” result, but I think they require use of the previous “good” factors to overcome.
Speaking a lot before you have a good ear for the language. I think it’s easy to build mental habits and muscle memory of making the wrong sounds. It would be like practicing hundreds of hours in archery blindfolded. You’re thinking you’re hitting the bullseye but really you’re consistently missing the target completely. Later when the blindfold comes off, you’ll have to undo any bad habits you built up missing the mark.
Reading a lot before you’ve internalized the sound and rhythm of the language. I’ve talked about this at length before, but basically similar reasons to (1), you don’t want to build hundreds of hours of practice with an internal mental model of the language that’s wildly different than how natives actually speak.
Doing a lot of conversation practice with other learners or listening to a lot of content from foreign speakers. I firmly believe that input is the food that eventually builds your output muscles. It's what builds your mental model of how your target language should sound. When you learn a language as a child, you listen to and mimic the adults around you, and eventually you sound like the adults around you. This is how regional native accents form. If you surround yourself with foreign speakers, then you're more likely to sound foreign, and you will likely be harder to understand than if you had modeled your speech after natives.
Isn’t this really slow? I don’t want to waste time when I could do it faster.
Maybe? But learning a language will be a very long journey, no matter what methods I use. I think most beginners really underestimate how vast an undertaking language acquisition is. I want to maximize my chances of making the whole journey, so I chose a method that I personally find fun.
And I’m not even convinced it’s actually slower. If it is, I think it’s a difference of maybe 15-20%.
This FSI learner took 1300 hours to learn Spanish. The Dreaming Spanish timeline for competent fluency is 1500 hours, which is very similar.
FSI estimates it to take 2200 hours to learn Thai and they use every trick in the book to try to grind out competent speakers as fast as possible. There’s also some anecdotal reports from FSI learners that the timelines they claim aren’t exactly accurate, and that the most successful learners are the ones who continue to diligently study in the months and years after the initial program.
Having spoken to many foreigners who learned Thai, I think a realistic timeline for strong B2-level fluency is usually 3 or more years.
I’ve only met one person who learned in a significantly shorter timeframe and he went straight into the deep end, moving to a part of Thailand with no English speakers and living/working completely in Thai. After a year of that, he considered himself fluent. I have no way to verify what his level was at the time, but his level now (5 years later) is extremely high.
In contrast, I’ve met many foreigners who have been learning for MANY years, who are still far from fluent.
My uneducated guess about the timeframe to become fluent in Thai is that it will take most people around 3000 hours. I think this is about how long it will take me. I would not be able to do even 1000 hours of textbooks and Anki flashcards, but I know I will easily be able to continue binging media and chatting with natives.
I also think people underestimate the benefits and time-saving you get from practicing with actual native speech from day 1 and avoiding outdated or excessively formal textbook learning, as well as the efficiency of learning about the language and culture simultaneously.
How can you get the sounds right if you can’t read?
My question would be: how do you know you’re getting the sounds right if you’re mainly reading? For example, learning the Thai script doesn’t automatically unlock the sounds, any more than learning the Latin alphabet automatically unlocks the sounds of English or Spanish or post-colonial Swahili.
Scribbles on a page do not magically contain sounds. They are “pointers” to what is (hopefully) an accurate mental model you’ve internalized of how the language should sound. If you have not internalized the sounds, then you’re simply pointing to approximations of your target language largely derived from the sounds of your native tongue. And I think truly internalizing the sounds takes hundreds of hours of dedicated practice, listening to a wide variety of native speakers in a wide variety of situations.
I’ve met many language learners who are literate but have poor to totally incomprehensible accents. There are many Thai people who are reasonably literate in English but mostly unable to understand or speak. And similarly, there are many foreigners who learned Thai primarily through reading but have much weaker listening/speaking skills.
See here for a compilation of threads from learners of all kinds of languages who went reading-heavy but struggle to understand spoken speech.
Literacy is an important part of learning a language and I’m endeavoring to learn to read and write now. But in my opinion, it is neither a prerequisite nor sufficient on its own to truly acquire the sounds of a language.
I think you get good at what you practice. Reading may support your other skills, but if you want to get good at listening and internalizing the sounds of the language, I think you’ll have to invest a lot of time in listening.
Can pure input really work? Don’t you need to study grammar?
At this point, I think there are enough recent examples of competent speakers who learned without explicit grammar study to demonstrate it’s possible to learn without explicit analytical study/dissection of your target language.
- Thai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z7ofWmh9VA
- Thai: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiOM0N51YT0
- Thai (Pablo of Dreaming Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXRjjIJnQcU
- Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y0ChbKD3eo
- 2000 hours Spanish (speaking at end):
- https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1cwfyet/2000_hours_of_input_with_video_joining_the/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYdgd0eTorQ
- 1500 hours Spanish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq4EQx3AuHg
- 1800 hours of Spanish (including 200 hours of speaking practice): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0RolcTTN-Y
- 5000 hours of English (from Portuguese): https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1dveqe4/update_over_5000_hours_of_comprehensible_input/
By far the most successful programs that can understand and produce language are Large Language Models, which are built around massive input. In contrast, nobody has ever built a similarly successful program using only grammatical rules and word definitions. (See this video for more about this concept, as well as what grammar is and isn't.)
If grammar and analysis/dissection of your TL is interesting to you, helps you engage with the language more, etc then go for it! I think every learner is different. What’s important is we find the things that work for each of us.
But for me personally, there’s no question that input is mandatory to reach fluency, whereas grammar is optional.
We could discuss whether explicit grammar study accelerates learning, but that’s a totally different question than if such study is required. To me, the answer to the former is “depends on the learner” and for the latter it’s a clear “no”.
Can you really learn to speak just by listening a lot?
My view on input and output practice:
You can get very far on pure input, but it will still require some amount of output practice to get to fluency. Progress for me feels very natural. It's a gradual process of building up from single words to short phrases to simple sentences, etc. As I continue to put in hours, more and more words are spontaneously/automatically there, without me needing to "compute" anything
I've spoken with several learners who went through a very long period of pure comprehensible input (1000+ hours). When they then switched to practicing output (with native speakers) they improved quite rapidly. Not in 100s of hours, but in 10s of hours.
Receptive bilinguals demonstrate an extreme of how the heavy input to output curve works. I recently observed the growth of a friend of mine who's a receptive bilingual in Thai. He grew up hearing Thai all the time but almost never spoke and felt very uncomfortable speaking. He recently made a conscious decision to try speaking more and went on a trip to a province where he was forced to not use English.
Basically the one trip was a huge trigger. He was there a week then came back. A month after that, he was very comfortable with speaking, in a way he hadn't been his whole life.
Folks on /r/dreamingspanish report similarly quick progress once they start output practice. For the most part, I think people's output skill will naturally lag their input level by about 1 notch. Those are people's results when they post CEFR/ILR/etc results. So for example, if their listening grade was B2, then their speaking grade tended to be B1.
How does output start to emerge after a lot of input and a silent period?
Especially if I spend a day heavily immersed in Thai (such as when I do 5+ hours of listening to content) then Thai starts spontaneously coming to mind much more often. There’ll be situations where the Thai word or phrase comes to mind first and then if I want to produce the English, I’ll actually have to stop and do an extra step to retrieve it.
I’ve talked about the progression of output before:
1) Words would spontaneously appear in my head in response to things happening around me. Ex: my friend would bite into a lime, make a face, and the word for "sour" would pop into my head.
2) As I listened to my TL and followed along with a story/conversation, my brain would offer up words it was expecting to hear next. For example if someone was talking about getting ready in the morning, the words for "shower" or "breakfast" might pop into my head. Basically, trying to autocomplete.
3) My first spontaneous sentence was a correction. Someone asked me if I was looking for a Thai language book and I corrected them and said "Chinese language book." I think corrections are common for early spontaneous sentences because you're basically given a valid sentence and just have to negate it or make a small adjustment to make it right.
4) The next stage after this was to spontaneously produce short phrases of up to a few words and then from there into longer sentences. As I take more input in, my faculty with speech continuously develops. I'm still far from fluent, but since the progression has felt quite natural so far, I assume the trajectory will continue along these same lines.
I find I need relatively little dedicated output practice to improve. It feels more like all the input is building a better, stronger, more natural sense of Thai in my head. Then when there’s a need to speak, it flows out more easily and automatically than the last time.
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u/Mars-Bar-Attack 8d ago
That was one of the most in-depth posts I have read on Reddit, and boy, am I glad I did. There is so much helpful information, and it has given me cause for some serious contemplation. I am very familiar with CI. I'm learning Spanish that way, mainly on Dreaming Spanish, and I know this approach works as long as we engage with the content; otherwise, it's easy to zone out, and you learn almost nothing.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
Finding interesting, engaging content is maybe one of the hardest things about a pure input approach. That's something I'll talk about in more detail in my next personal progress update.
Thanks for reading.
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u/Exciting-Owl5212 8d ago
Yep I went with many hundreds of hours Mandarin Chinese CI, and then when that ran dry I learned to read characters and watched tv dramas. It really does work even with a mixed approach of ALG and refold. Things are going very smooth now. Maybe 100 hours of speaking practice and it’s already enough for most things. Cheers
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
That sounds amazing! If you ever feel like sharing your experience, I'd love to read about it.
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u/Exciting-Owl5212 7d ago
I then I can do that at some point. I think the main differences is that I think “reading” is ok as long as you have audio (delaying any reading becomes a lot more difficult with the number of homophones in mandarin), but I do think that reading without audio isn’t great. Flashcards are ok as long as it’s audio on front, and liberally suspend cards you don’t understand via low leech limit) And since the CI isn’t as well structured after lower intermediate, starting with native media is more important. I don’t have exact hour count but I’d say after about 600h it’s already time to start trying to learn from tv shows, which are by far the best source of cultural and language growth “cascades” as Marvin brown would put it
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u/Traditional-Train-17 8d ago
First, how'd you make such a long post without Reddit giving you server errors? heh. Does that to me every time I have more than 8 bullet points...
A good ear. Either “genetically” or through some kind of training, such as music.
Welp, that's excludes me. I'm hearing impaired. This is actually something I'm curious about with CI - does having a hearing loss and/or learning disability affect things? Sure, my hearing aids help out, but it's still not 100%. I still can't hear different tones (like, sí and si sound the same to me, especially if spoken quickly, or like ejercicio. I saw a video somewhere saying there's 3 different ways to pronounce it and it means different things, like exercise, or a military drill). Other issues are that I can't tell the different between some letters, or sounds drop off at the end of words. Mumbling is also an issue, too.
This FSI learner took 1300 hours to learn Spanish. The Dreaming Spanish timeline for competent fluency is 1500 hours, which is very similar.
I have 1700 hours in Dreaming Spanish, but I feel a little be behind other people. Then again, some do have prior experience with Spanish. (I don't buy that "Oh, I took 3 years and forgot it all" argument - I had 4 months of Spanish 35 years ago, and after 10 hours of DS, it started coming back to me. Even words that were similar to what I learned in 2 1/2 years of French.).
I've also just started to get some of what would be considered B1 level grammar (like "have/had eaten", or "would have done..."). I think I'd still struggle to figure out when to use these in speaking. This grammar structure did first start to click around 1400 hours, but it's only been in the last 50 hours where it's starting to click.
How can you get the sounds right if you can’t read?
Here's the interesting thing about this with me... This actually was the case. I'm hearing impaired. I wasn't diagnosed with a hearing loss until I was 5 (back in 1982 - most teachers thought I was just hyperactive and didn't want to listen.), and I was in an infant-development program at 18 months. I was 2 1/2 before I spoke my first word. One of the first things they did was teach me to read, between the ages of 2 and 3. I also picked up sign language, and was able to learn a few words by having someone speak loudly and clearly. In my speech therapy classes, facial expressions and sound representations were hand drawn for me to imitate (imagine a few narrow 1-line rectangles with slashes in them going across the line of a paper, with lines coming out one end to represent the sound, and the length of the rectangle being the length of the sound).
I also had notebooks that my mom would make (the teacher recommended this) that had a familiar scene (i.e., me at the store, or in my yard). It would be a photo, or something hand drawn (my mom is good at this) and a few short sentences. So, the picture, text, sign language and speaking all helped to convey the message that I was hearing (or, as much as I could). Even then, the listening was in a "controlled environment" - no background music or noise, and one-on-one.
I think because of this (and also a bit genetics), I do find analyzing the language and looking at grammar, fun and interesting. I do still look at closed captioning, otherwise I'll mishear words or syllables and cement the wrong pronunciation anyway. If there's one thing I'd probably do differently with CI, is reading a bit earlier than 600 hours (maybe 150 hours at the earliest, and even then, simple A1 level books, and maybe 300 hours at the latest). I do feel like my listening is maybe equivalent to C1 at best, or B2.1 and speaking would be A2, only because I'm not 100% confident in intermediate grammar, but I think I'm starting to get there.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
This is actually something I'm curious about with CI - does having a hearing loss and/or learning disability affect things?
I have to imagine that both those factors would make learning to listen to your TL harder, regardless of what methods you're using to learn.
Even traditional learners will, at some point, have to work with some form of comprehensible input to build listening skills (if their goal is to converse with native speakers or watch/listen to native media). If you can't hear as well, that must make it more difficult.
I have 1700 hours in Dreaming Spanish, but I feel a little be behind other people.
If you're just a little behind with both auditory and learning issues, then "a little behind" sounds great!
So, the picture, text, sign language and speaking all helped to convey the message that I was hearing (or, as much as I could).
This whole story sounds really fascinating to me. It sounds like "learner-aimed comprehensible input" on steroids, including visual aids specifically to help with the shape and diagram of the sounds that you might be missing because of your hearing impairment.
The linking of experience with learned words sounds really similar to the Growing Participator Approach, which heavily uses comprehensible input, but with a shorter silent period than recommended by either AUA (the old CI-based school in Bangkok that closed a few years back) or Dreaming Spanish. Students in that program have access to lesson recordings and pictures from each lesson (where they have activities similar to Simon Says and other children's games with the teachers 100% in the target language).
Have you done a learning report/update? I would love to see what your journey has been like given the challenges you're facing.
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u/Traditional-Train-17 8d ago
I've done several progress reports over on the DreamingSpanish subreddit. You can click on my name, then click posts to see some of the updates (they'll be things like "1500 hours", "1000 hours", "600 hours", etc.).
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u/Traditional-Train-17 8d ago edited 8d ago
To add some thoughts on my thought process when learning a language and how my learning disabilities affects thing. I just came across an example in the last hour after making this post. This is basically my thought pattern, and probably a glimpse into my analytical nature -
I was watching an "Hola Spanish" video on Hay vs. Habia vs. Hubo (I had partially searched this earlier today, trying to reinforce "habia"). Watching the video reminded me of what I hated the most about grammar (I love grammar, BTW, especially looking at grammar charts), and that's the terminology. It's like learning a language to learn a language. "Imperfect? Why is it imperfect? What did it do to not be perfect?", or "preterite. What's this? Some Latin word? I have no idea what this means or what it does.". I searched on DSGlish (it's like Youglish, but for Dreaming Spanish) for "hubo", and found Pablo talking about a protest when he was young (using the word "hubo") and thought "Why not habia?").
I kind of got the video, but asked ChatGPT (in Spanish to clarify). So, I prompted the difference between Cuando era pequeña, había un gran circo en la ciudad." o "Cuando era pequeña, hubo un gran circo en la ciudad." (personal example). What made it clear to me was:
- Usa había para describir algo continuo o habitual. (i.e., Use "habia" for something... habitual)
- Usa hubo para señalar algo puntual o excepcional.
My brain was then like, "Ohhh!!! "Habi" is in both "habia" and "habitual"! "Habi" is the root word!". "Hubo" is more like "had been at one time". To use my example sentence, my preferred comprehensible context clues would be "When I was young, there had been a circus at one time in my city.". (This is also why Google Translate is bad. It will translate it to "habia", and not "hubo", completely missing the context)
Basically, my brain needs that extra context clue. This is something I struggled with when I was in school, especially when the teacher was talking fast. It was like my brain lags behind in comprehension. According to the DSGlish site, the word "hubo" was encountered 200 times (in free videos), but my brain just never caught onto it for the past 1700 hours (I've been trying to do more of a 'purist approach').
Another thing I like to do with grammar is look down the column of a grammar chart and say, "Ok, what situations/dialogs would I use this conjugation in?". For example, "I have eaten/You have eaten/he has eaten/we have eaten", and make a story/dialog around that, or use that as a topic, like "things that were bought for Christmas". Then it's, "Oh, I bought this, and my sister bought that, and we bought this other thing. They bought this for us". So, it's sort of a tactile-learning (another learning style "flavor").
To further add on my learning disabilities. I do think there may be some auditory perception disorder. Autism also runs in my dad's side of the family, so this is a possibility, too (at least high functioning). This might be why I need just a bit more direct context clues than auditory clues. (my dad and I always want to be told something specifically, not a vague description. i.e., if we're told to look for something that's blue, it's blue, not teal (what the person actually wanted), not seafoam green, not slategray. It has to be literally medium blue.).
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u/TamaBoxeo 7d ago
I just want to say your point about large language models is actually quite profound and it surprises me I don’t hear people talk about this more. We have developed the most accurate translation tools on the planet and they are developed based off of just large amounts of input yet, people are still very skeptical of non grammar approaches to language learning.
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u/Vortexx1988 N🇺🇲|C1🇧🇷|A2🇲🇽|A1🇮🇹🇻🇦 8d ago edited 8d ago
While I know that some people have had success with it, learning entirely by input with a long silent period just isn't for me. I don't want to have to wait that long before saying my first words. That being said, you're by far the most rational and down to earth proponent of this style of learning that I've encountered here, and I have a great deal of respect for you and what you've accomplished so far with Thai.
Most of the people here who promote input only are quite radical, believing that it's impossible to have a good accent if you speak at all before at least several hundred hours of listening, and that doing so permanently and irreparably "damages" your brain's language acquisition capabilities. They almost make it seem like a cult.
As you have said, this isn't true, it's not black and white. The very first thing I do when learning a language is studying its phonology, and learning the common mistakes learners make. I find it much easier to strive for good pronunciation early on, rather than trying to fix bad habits later. Whenever I learn a new word, I look up the IPA transcription of the word, listen to a recording of a native speaker, then I record myself and compare it to the native speaker. I'm a big proponent of shadowing, that is, repeating aloud what you hear. My issue is finding the balance between input and output. I could definitely use more input, but the majority of comprehensible input content creators are so adamant on remaining silent that I find it off-putting.
Anyway, thank you for your great posts!
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
The "permanent damage" evangelists here are really terrible and I wish their kind of hostility would be against the sub rules.
I often feel like I'm putting a lot of effort into letting people know pure input can be a great option with a lot of advantages and drawbacks that (I feel) are overstated. Then they come in and start yelling at people and give the method a terrible reputation. It's incredibly frustrating.
I've blocked a couple of them because they're SO unpleasant to interact with, and this is coming from a major proponent of CI.
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u/AppropriatePut3142 🇬🇧 Nat | 🇨🇳 Int | 🇪🇦 Beg 7d ago edited 7d ago
It really funny that /r/dreamingspanish is one of the few subreddits full of completely normal people, while most of the ALG advocates on this sub are so... particular.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago
Yeah, /r/dreamingspanish gets a lot of hate, but it's a subreddit with a really encouraging culture. People there are willing to put forward detailed learning self-reports and videos/audio of their results to guide other learners and give realistic expectations.
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u/Visual-Woodpecker642 🇺🇸 7d ago
I agree that speaking early ruins your accent is not inherently true, and i believe it happens often in traditional methods where people are learning from text not audio. The reason I don't think speak early is because its not necessary. As we listen, we can say more things. Personally, I don't feel like talking until I can understand at a high-intermediate or advanced level.
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u/Vortexx1988 N🇺🇲|C1🇧🇷|A2🇲🇽|A1🇮🇹🇻🇦 7d ago
I agree that starting out with learning by text without audio will likely lead to bad pronunciation habits. Speaking early might not be necessary if you don't have any urgency to do so. If you need to speak the language at work or have family that speak the language, I can imagine it's a lot harder to wait that long to start speaking.
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u/ana_bortion 8d ago
I always look forward to your updates! Even though I'm not a CI purist, I've still found many aspects of the approach quite helpful. I'm always skeptical of the benefits of a "silent period," but I might try it out with Latin just for fun; it's not like I have an urgent need to speak it lol.
I only wish CI was available for more languages, especially at the intermediate level. Even fairly popular languages often don't have the 1000+ hours needed for fluency (though I imagine I'd probably feel comfortable making the jump to native content earlier than that for something FSI category 1.) For less popular languages, I'm genuinely not even sure how I'd make the leap from a textbook to native content.
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u/RyanSmallwood 7d ago
There’s lots of ways to find input for most moderate size language (anything you can find a good amount of media on the internet for). You can repeat whatever beginner input you have to get more mileage out of it, use familiar media you’ve been through before in your native language or an L2 to make it more comprehensible. Parallel texts with audio can also be a way to get into more difficult texts earlier on.
The old FSI and DLI courses can also have the silences automatically removed and used as beginner input and they cover some languages that might otherwise be tricky to find resources for.
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u/ana_bortion 7d ago
These are all great ideas, but some of them are anathema to an ALG purist, would be my point. Even though imo they're all informed by the best of CI principles! But it requires a sort of flexibility that I never see from the people who scold people for using subtitles, for speaking early, for using input that's less than 90% comprehensible and therefore not CI (I don't often see people being super didactic about this one, to be fair), for reading too early(?), etc.
CI at its best is a principle broadly informing how you approach learning a language (as you and OP demonstrate beautifully), rather than an ironclad ban on potentially helpful resources. Which isn't to say that an input only approach can't be highly effective, it's just sometimes impractical.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago edited 7d ago
Thanks for the kind words.
Is Latin a spoken language? If not, I imagine the entire learning process would be "silent". 😂
As far as the benefits of a silent period, I personally believe my accent would not be as sharp and clear if I had not adhered to it. Usual caveats about lack of research, anecdotal evidence, success bias, etc.
I think I lack many/most of the other potential advantages I listed as far as acquiring a clear accent, so it felt more necessary in my case.
Although I said I had seen traditional learners with very clear accents, I do think that accent is essentially the #1 struggle for typical Western learners of Thai. The majority of learners I've talked to have complained about it as the biggest obstacle and talked about how they struggle to be understood by natives.
I think the traditional learners with clear Thai accents are those who put in a ton of work into their accent or people with some of the potential learning advantages I talked about (naturally good ear, talent at mimicry, etc).
In contrast, after doing nothing but listening for ~1000 hours, my speech was immediately clear and understandable to natives. I didn't have to put in any special effort to be understandable. So to me that demonstrates that a silent period can be very advantageous for the right person, even if it's not right for everybody.
An anecdote I didn't share above but plan to talk about in my next update. When I first started speaking around 1100-1200 hours, by far the most common response I got from Thai people was, "Why is your accent so clear?" (spoken in Thai)
Now at 1500ish hours, the most common response I get is... nothing. People just respond to me in Thai and don't comment at all about my accent or Thai ability. I didn't explicitly work on my output during that time (didn't bother to do shadowing or anything else). I just got more input and my speech got better.
So again, a silent period isn't right for everyone, but for learners like myself, I think there are potentially big upsides.
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u/ana_bortion 7d ago
Latin is a spoken language! Not a native or day to day language for anyone in 2025, but even now there's plenty of audio content on youtube, conferences where people speak Latin together, and of course, the Catholic Church (I've attended a few Latin masses.) Even people who are mostly interested in reading Latin find it helpful to be able to speak it and understand it orally; otherwise they tend to just be translating in their head. Plus what is a language without being able to feel its poetry?
I'm fine with other people learning how they want, mostly the people who say "if you started speaking early you're forever doomed" make me roll my eyes (you didn't do this because you're not a weird cultist.) I do think speaking is best paired with someone who can correct your major phonetic errors, though luckily I've found entrenched errors are easier to fix than I might've expected.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago
The "permanent damage" evangelists here are really terrible and I wish their kind of hostility would be against the sub rules.
I often feel like I'm putting a lot of effort into letting people know pure input can be a great option with a lot of advantages and drawbacks that (I feel) are overstated. Then they come in and start yelling at people and give the method a terrible reputation. It's incredibly frustrating.
I've blocked a couple of them because they're SO unpleasant to interact with, and this is coming from a major proponent of CI.
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u/ana_bortion 7d ago
If it's any comfort I think positive advocacy for CI outweighs the shrill evangelists (except maybe in Japanese learning communities 😬) Within the French learning community both here and on youtube I've encountered lots of support for CI and almost no jerks, and even on this subreddit there's more people like you than like them.
I'm still curious what the hardcore "only my way works" crowd would suggest to someone learning a language with little to no comprehensible input content. Are those languages just unlearnable?
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u/Snoo-88741 7d ago
If more people talked about ALG like you do, I'd feel a lot more positive about the approach. A good, balanced analysis that shows it as one option among many that can work well for many people.
Personally, my approach is to do a mix of basically everything that I find fun, and comprehensible input is part of that.
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u/Joylime 8d ago
Thanks for your balanced report that is honest without evangelizing :D
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
Thanks for reading! I think a little humility with language learning is important. Everyone learns differently and I don't believe there is a single method that works best for every single person.
I just want people to understand that a pure input approach is a great option for languages with sufficient resources for it. In my experience, there are a lot of advantages and I feel the drawbacks are not necessarily as severe as some people think.
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u/Joylime 8d ago
I tend to agree with you. I get really impatient with the evangelizers partially because they turn people off to what is fundamentally a very important insight
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
Yes, sometimes I feel like they undo any interest/goodwill for CI I might be building by trying to offer my anecdotal experiences. Very frustrating. It's so discouraging that I wish it was against languagelearning rules to be so adamant and hostile.
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u/galaxyrocker English N | Gaeilge TEG B2 | Français 7d ago
It's so discouraging that I wish it was against languagelearning rules to be so adamant and hostile.
We tried to soft enforce stuff with our post a few months back about not being dogmatic, but sadly it went over some people's heads. We've taken to banning more frequently if the people are being hostile about it. There's one frequent poster who kept calling people 'academic vermin' and talking about how CI would 'permanently damage' you; they've been banned twice, temporarily, and if they keep it up it'll be permanent. Please report any you see being hostile, we're trying to work on it and make the place nicer!
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago
Great to hear, thank you for all your hard work moderating. Handling a subreddit this size is a monumental task.
I think I have that poster blocked, so I unfortunately won't be able to report them, but I'll report others who exhibit similar behavior.
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u/galaxyrocker English N | Gaeilge TEG B2 | Français 8d ago
This is what I love most about OP's reports. He's honest, admits he's seen traditional learners do well with stuff and CI people not do as well as often proclaimed. He acknowledges why people might want to speak sooner, or do other stuff sooner, without telling them it'll permanently damage them.
Which is all much better evangelisation than a lot of the "CI cultists" do in the end.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
Thank you, I try to approach things from a balanced perspective. There simply isn't well-controlled and broad research on language learning methods like these; I think running such a study would be logistically and financially challenging. And I firmly believe everyone learns differently.
Which is all much better evangelisation than a lot of the "CI cultists" do in the end.
I've personally blocked a couple posters here who were yelling at everyone that CI is the only way. It's just too unpleasant to interact with them - and that's coming from a guy who loves comprehensible input.
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u/permanent_echobox 8d ago
This was fantastic. I'm about 760 hours into Dreaming Spanish, so I know the process works but I found this very insightful and wanted to thank you for taking the time to be so descriptive of your experience.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago
Appreciate the kind words.
I found myself answering the same questions about CI in many threads and I've also had some thoughts I haven't had the opportunity to share elsewhere. So I thought it would be nice to have them compiled all in one place for future reference.
Thanks for reading and good luck with Dreaming Spanish!
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u/Party_Economics_620 7d ago
Congratulations! Great post. For me, discovering CI changed everything. I'm learning Polish. There aren't many materials in this language - I currently mainly use LingoPut plus a few YouTube channels. Fortunately, more and more resources are becoming available.
It has completely transformed my learning experience, and I'm starting to "feel" the grammar and sentence structures. Previously, when trying to learn traditionally from textbooks, I couldn't memorize all the endings/rules.
I definitely recommend everyone give this method a chance. There's a website called Comprehensible Input Wiki where you can find materials for many languages.
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u/acanthis_hornemanni 🇵🇱 native 🇬🇧 fluent 🇮🇹 okay? 🇷🇺 ?? 7d ago
Thanks for the post, I think I needed some extra motivation to get back to trying to pick up Russian that way (thankfully even though Russian and Polish aren't, as a whole, mutually intelligible, they are similar enough that I don't find it necessary to grind the most basic content directed at zero level learners bc I think I would've died of boredom haha).
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u/_briceedelman_ 8d ago
Congrats on your progress! Definitely different from my typical approach but it goes to show how diverse brains can be in skill acquisition
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u/BasedOnAir 8d ago edited 8d ago
If I know literally zero Spanish and wanted to use this technique, how would I start? You say CI has to be comprehensible. But I know zero. How do I begin?
Also how do you log your hours to know how much you’ve spent?
Can you tell us your “logistics” of doing this? How did you find the material, how do you keep track of the material, how do you plan your daily listening, how do you log what you’ve done, are there any extra activities you do if there are hiccups, what hiccups might there be, what’s in your notebooks, etc. like how are browser bookmarks organized and the other basics to get the job done
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 8d ago edited 8d ago
For Spanish, there are abundant free resources to take you from absolute beginner to consuming native media. Playlists there are organized by level. Just follow along the playlists.
https://www.youtube.com/@DreamingSpanish
I explained in the post above how beginner lessons use visual aids to communicate meaning. Please read those sections ("What is comprehensible input?" and "How does a pure comprehensible input approach work?") in detail.
I just log using a spreadsheet, nothing fancy. I don't have notebooks. I used YouTube channels with learner-aimed content.
I suggest reading my previous updates if you want more details, I linked above, but copying for convenience:
For Spanish specifically, there's a subreddit called /r/dreamingspanish. I suggest checking out the FAQ and doing a search for any questions you have.
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u/Wanderlust-4-West 7d ago
Dreaming Spanish website handles most of the logistics: sorting input by difficulty, tracking the time. r/dreamingspanish is the community to share experience and ask questions, and also additional materials like podcasts, other YT channels and reading, also sorted by difficulty. And also notify you about interesting stuff around learning, like channels by content creators: some have quite a following.
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u/Little-Parking1034 8d ago
It is strange to think there are people who believe you must study grammar to learn a language. I teach high school English and although all my students speak native level English very few have any grammar knowledge at all. Grammar didn't even exist until the grammarians 1,000 years ago invented it. Homer wrote the greatest literature to ever exist without a single inclination as to what grammar even is.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago
Grammar didn't even exist until the grammarians 1,000 years ago invented it
I would rephrase this to say that analytical dissection of grammar didn't exist before, and that grammar as we know it are not a fixed set of rules.
I think of grammar as written in textbooks as imperfect descriptions of how natives use language, based on observation. As languages change and evolve over time, these descriptions become less and less accurate.
Even as snapshots, they're limited because human communication is fuzzy and messy. It's not like math where there's a single easily derived and verifiable answer; our brains are constructing language based on feeling and intuition, not calculating sums.
I really like this video on this topic, which may challenge some prescriptivist assumptions about grammar (such as that there is one absolute source of truth or correct answer about how a language "works").
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u/atheista 8d ago
As adult learners it's really common to want to know "why." Understanding grammar makes it much easier for me to recognise patterns in the language, because I know why those patterns are occurring. I was floundering in German for a year until I decided to knuckle down on the grammar, then suddenly I shot forward. Everything seemed so random to me until I understood the "why."
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u/ana_bortion 7d ago
Grammar absolutely exists whether it's formally studied or not. Every native speaker of English understands the structure of the language even if they can't explain it and don't know what a "gerund" is. If they didn't, everyone would be throwing words together in different ways and we wouldn't be able to understand each other's gobbledygook. With comprehensible input, you just pick up on the grammar implicitly rather than learning the names of different verb tenses.
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u/Loves_His_Bong 🏴 N, 🇩🇪 B2.1, 🇪🇸 A2, 🇨🇳 HSK2 8d ago
You teach English but don’t cover grammar?
Homer didn’t write anything actually.
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago
Not the person you're replying to, but in the US at least, analytical grammar classes are really rare. English usually covers things like literature, essays, formal writing.
For formal writing, that's more about what constructions are acceptable or standard in formal contexts or in specific mediums (almost "cultural norms" for formal situations).
I'm of the opinion that grammar are not "rules" but are imperfect descriptions of the patterns of how natives communicate. When "rules" are enforced, it's because the social/cultural context dictates it (such as newspaper writing or research papers).
Basically, prescriptivism vs descriptivism.
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u/sciencemusiclanguage 7d ago
I’ve had six years of high school and college Spanish and then took about four years off. I’m returning to it now. I’m super interested in CI and downloaded dreaming Spanish but I’m curious to see how it will work for me when I had so much formal learning before. I lost a lot of vocab so I’m starting with beginner content again to fill the gaps. Interested if you have thoughts!
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago
I would say just go through the Dreaming Spanish videos! Since you have prior experience, try hopping around the playlists a bit to see if there's a sweet spot where you understand a lot and it's engaging but not too difficult.
Hop over on /r/dreamingspanish to check out more Spanish-specific testimonials and search there for any questions you might have.
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u/RobbysSummerHouse 7d ago
Call me cynical but how do you know these comprehensible input methods aren’t just ploys to get you to watch countless hours of YouTube videos or something to make money? I mean, think about it, it’s the easiest business model ever. You just produce random content in various levels of your language and package it as CI.
I’m still biased towards an all-around approach that includes textbook, speaking, flash cards, and input (tv shows, videos, etc)
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u/whosdamike 🇹🇭: 1500 hours 7d ago edited 7d ago
Call me cynical but how do you know these comprehensible input methods aren’t just ploys
Dreaming Spanish is trying to be a business and makes no bones about it. That doesn't mean the method isn't really effective. Just because Duolingo unethically addicts people to a useless learning methodology doesn't mean every language learning product out there is the same.
There are numerous testimonials of people who have successfully learned Spanish via Dreaming Spanish. You can watch videos of people speaking Spanish who learned with it; I linked numerous examples in my post above.
For Comprehensible Thai, it's explicitly run as a nonprofit and the guy who made it sunk a lot of his own money into paying teachers to produce content.
He legally cannot make money off it because he lives in Thailand on a visa that doesn't allow running a business. He's an American who ordained as a Buddhist monk and he started the channel as an act of merit to expose more people to the Thai language and culture.
In general, CI is such a small niche, there are far better ways to exploit people and make money than producing CI. Producing good and engaging CI is high effort and very low reward.
The "shocking natives" videos get millions of views; most Comprehensible Thai videos don't crack 5k.
textbook, speaking, flash cards, and input (tv shows, videos, etc)
I hate to break it to you, but textbook publishers and TV shows are also out to make money. 🙃
I dislike capitalism as much as the next guy, but simply because something is trying to make a profit doesn't automatically make it ineffective or evil.
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u/Wanderlust-4-West 7d ago
I am not OP, but I tried CI on easier language (Spanish) and I can experience the difference after just 100 hours or so: being able to understand Spanish, after failing to learn it with several other methods.
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u/RayS1952 8d ago
Great read. I learned French via more traditional methods to a B2/C1 level (just a guesstimate) many years ago and more recently decided to try Spanish exclusively via CI. I'm definitely a fan of CI. As an experiment I did 10 hours of CI Thai. I had read of course that it's much easier to learn a language related to one you know well and Spanish has certainly been pretty easy, at least so far. Even knowing that Thai wouldn't be as easy didn't prepare me for the experience. To say I was shocked would not be putting it too strongly. I was totally out of my depth. Very humbling! I will probably go back to it once I'm getting my Spanish input fully from native content and when I do it will be via CI.