Comprehensible Input Is All You Need To Learn a Language
No seriously. We really do naturally pick up languages.
My journey with CI (comprehensible input) began when I was a teenager in the 2010s when I stumbled on a video of Stephen Krashen explaining the input hypothesis. His thoughts and video on language acquisition are something anybody interested in language learning would benefit from.
After failing to learn Japanese for years as a preteen, the ideas Krashen put forth immediately clicked. His examples within the video using pure CI to teach a language, really drove the point home. If this short talk and demonstration isn’t enough to convince you that CI works, you could also see the folks who used it, what their results are, and how effortless the process was.
Arguably the best way to make up your mind about comprehensible input, is to experience it for yourself. There is quite a time committment and buy in though before you actually see results due to the sheer number of hours it takes to learn a language. This is where the series “O Pilin E Toki Pona” is a godsend. This series teaches you a tiny language called Toki Pona using only CI. The process feels like magic, and the experience lets you overcome the biggest hurdle when using only CI, and that’s the belief that it actually works. Watching your brain effortlessly acquire a language really solidifies this though, as you actually are watching it happen.
A side note on Toki Pona: this is a constructed language, in other words an entirely made up language. The language has extremely few words (under 200!) and a very simple gramar. This is what allows the series “O Pilin E Toki Pona” to be so effective because in a short amount of time you are able to experience the growth that would take much longer with a normal, natural language.
Comprehensible input is intuitive. Afterall, we all say “they picked up” the language. CI just gives you the necessary input to “pick it up”. For years, I was convinced of this, but struggled with not knowing how to actually do this or how long it would take. I needed a roadmap. There was also barely any discourse on it that I could find. An organization called Dreaming Spanish created a roadmap based on their actual experience of using only CI to acquire and help others acquire languages. It was the last piece I needed.
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The DS (Dreaming Spanish) roadmap provided real expectations and tangible results to look for at each stage in the language acquisition journey. With all of the success stories from the DS discord and YouTube, I decided it was time to take things seriously mid last year. I began tracking my input time using the iPhone app Habit So far I’m up to 400+ tracked hours, with a daily streak of 170 days. If you’d like to do the same and only have Android, I recommend using the app: Loop Habit Tracker. Loop is open source, and in my opinion a little better because it gives you more data.
The way my process works is at the end of a session or day of listening to CI through podcasts or YouTube videos I just tally up the videos or podcasts I consumed rounding down on their minutes. For example I have a lot of podcast episodes downloaded in Hindi. After listening to a few episodes throughout the day I’ll check and see how long I’ve listened for. This usually just takes a minute or two, so if I listened to two 21 minute episodes and one 44 minute episode, I’ll just count this as 85 minutes of input. I’ll add that to my listening amount for today, and then delete those episodes from my downloads so that I can keep track of what I listened to the next day. Alternatively, I would do basically the same thing after watching a few episodes of TV in Hindi on YouTube or Netflix. I would just check my watch history and then add up the videos I watched usually rounding down. It’s ok if the amount of time is rough and not perfect. The goal is consistency, not perfection.