The big revelation of the language-learning journey that I resumed in earnest last year was the concept of "comprehensible input".

From my previous language-learning experience, I instinctively knew some of this. But I hadn't understood the concept sufficiently to use it optimally.

The term was first coined by Stephen Krashen, and Jonty Yamisha has a quick explainer here.

What you're aiming to do is "acquire a language" (as opposed to "learn a language"). The process of acquisition involves exposure to large quantities of meaningful interaction and natural communication in your target language, on the principle that your subconscious will draw on that corpus of material to intuitively build knowledge. This is the way you learnt your first language, after all. You didn't sit there in your pram learning grammar rules, or working your way through banks of flashcards.

According to Krashen's Input Hypothesis, learners have the best chance of improving when they are using material that is one step ahead of their current level. So if you think of their current knowledge as "I", then the materials they draw on for the purposes of acquisition should ideally be "I+1", ie, just beyond their current abilities:

"Think of it as a Goldilocks Zone for language learning," Yamisha suggests. "When the input is too hard, students lose interest. When it’s too easy, they get bored, stalling their language learning progress. Language acquisition happens when students are exposed to 'I+1'."



There are a number of practitioners who draw on this kind of thinking. Olly Richards, for example, has developed a "story-learning" approach, which he outlines here.

His yardstick for I+1 is that you have to be able to follow the plot of the story you're reading, understanding at least 70% of the words you encounter. But your goal is simply to do that -- to focus on the plot, even if you're initially only getting the gist.

Don't stop to look up words. Rather, tolerate not understanding everything, and just focus on following the main storyline. This is SO important. Nothing kills reading quicker than constantly interrupting it to burrow in the dictionary (even if the dictionary is just a click away). If you can listen while you're reading, then that's even better, as listening activates different parts of the brain. Don't be in a hurry (kurangkan laju -- slow down -- as it says at the top of this post). Read a section, and then read it again (depending on your level in that language, you may need to read it just a couple of times, or several times). You add a different level of understanding each time.

Olly also has lots of helpful advice on learning vocabulary from stories (and indeed on almost every other aspect of language-learning).

The focus of all this, very clearly, is extensive reading and listening, the kind that brings you into contact with LOTS of words and phrases. You'll forget a ton of what you come across, but bit by bit the things you find you are often reading and/or hearing will stick.

Daniel, from the fabulously useful and well-provisioned Online Italian Club, has a very insightful analysis of how we learn new words through extensive reading, and also tips for building listening skills through extensive input. He is also worth reading on language-learning generally. His twice-weekly newsletter is always informative and motivational, and often very funny.

Just as a little side-note here, one of the offshoots of the whole comprehensible input idea was TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling). I've tried it using online sources, and I hate it... I find the little itsy-bitsy stories annoying (they're just not real stories), and the constant stream of dumb questions drives me crazy. Other people love it. Each to her own...



So how has a better understanding of the idea of comprehensible input changed the way I do language-learning?

-- I write fewer notes. One of my faults used to be to write lots and lots of notes on the language points I was learning, and never review them... Writing less means I'm more likely to review what I've written, and leaves more time for input. Depending on the material, I decide whether I want to deal with it extensively (listening for gist, and just noting the odd new phrase) or intensively (mining the piece for vocabulary, new expressions, grammar examples, etc). And I aim to do a lot more of the former than the latter.

-- I've largely (but not totally) moved from app-type exercises to the kind of materials that offer extensive comprehensible input. (There are one or two useful exceptions that I'll mention in a future post.)

-- Similarly, when selecting videos, I lean towards the channels that give me lots of material to listen to, rather than the ones that do the "five-ways-to-say-you're-sorry-in-Spanish" type of presentation (the time for the latter is when you suddenly realize you keep hearing people in your extensive-listening videos saying they're sorry in different ways, and you haven't quite figured out what the distinctions are).

-- I don't worry too much about speaking. Yet, anyway... Come the glorious day when I can see a real possibility of using a particular language, then I'll up the speaking component of my programme. In the meantime, I'm content to just amass vocabulary, and build passive skills. You have to remember that using this method also is intrinsically fun. I find out all sorts of things through these reading and listening activities. They're rewarding in themselves, not just as language-learning exercises.

-- If something is not working, or not fun, I stop doing it.

-- I regularly remind myself that "done is better than perfect"... A little is better than none. Just showing up is good already. 

So where do you get this material from?


The internet is a language chocolate shop...

There really are lots of things out there. Lots. It's a golden age for language-learning in many ways. So very different from my early years. The "bigger" languages -- the ones with more international clout -- are particularly well served.

The flip side is that you can waste a lot of time hunting through the various offerings.

I find All Language Resources extremely useful. They produce a weekly newsletter, and I've found most of my favourite materials courtesy of their efforts.

As this is already rather long, I'll save specific language sites for next time. But by way of a taster, this is the sort of thing I mean: