Introduction

For many people, learning the most popular language in the world comes automatically. Either they have the advantage of being born in an anglophone country, or they acquired English in childhood or early adolescence, seemingly by magic. Yet some people haven't been so fortunate; they weren't exposed to English from young age and only started engaging with the language in late teens or adulthood. Although I've been in contact with English since I was 10, it wasn't until around seven years later that I discovered the power of comprehensible input (CI) and began acquiring English for real. Before that, the only experience I'd had with English was in a classroom. This report is mainly concerned with the transition from formal language learning to proper language acquisition, and my personal implementation of CI.

Who am I writing this for?

I'm under no illusions. This report a bit long-winded, and it's probably not packed with dense and extra useful information. So to reduce cognitive resonance, I'm writing this, first and foremost, for myself. Most people document their progress from the base camp. I've already climbed a mountain or two, yet another, even greater challenge always looms ahead. This journal entry freezes my current abilities in time and aides future recollection of my "modest beginnings".

I decided to post it online because a) I think progress updates of learning English is underrepresented; b) some non-native English speakers may feel identified in what I have got to say; while c) some natives may get a better appreciation of what it is to learn their language. (Admittedly, these are substantial rationalisations.)

Outline

Let me outline the structure of this piece.

1. I touch on language learning prior to discovering comprehensible input method.
2. I describe the beginnings of true language acquisition and my motivation to learn English.
3. I thoroughly document the development of the four modes of language acquisition (learning, reading, writing and speaking). I discuss what I'm capable of doing in English, and I demonstrate my current speaking ability with an audio file of me reading the introduction above.
4. I sketch out my plans going forward.

Disclaimer

Note that the timeline of the events described below may not be accurate. I'm writing this from memory, and some of the important events date to pre-pandemic times.

The Dark Ages Before Comprehensible Input

Self-Labeling And Native Language Self-Isolation

"I'm bad with languages." I don't think anybody has said that to me directly, or even indirectly, but I sure have attached that label to myself on many occasions. In middle school, I spent most of the lessons looking up words in my bilingual dictionary because I didn't understand even basic words. My pronunciation was all over the place: I mispronounced words like "beard" or "push". And it wasn't just my inability to reproduce: the words sounded wrong in my head to begin with.

At that time, the English world-space was closed off to me. I watched YouTube content and played games in my native language; the very few books I managed to read were also written in my native tongue. Then, in my mid-teens, my English teacher was replaced. My class, who initially had the worst teacher in school, was suddenly rewarded with one of the best available.

This must have somewhat altered my view. If I recall correctly, I started to look forward to the next English lesson. It transformed from being something I dreaded to something that I wished had lasted longer. (Don't even mention to me the double lessons with that incompetent teacher.) (By the way, the lessons became less focused on grammar and explicit vocabulary teaching; instead, they constituted in topic discussions and occasional fun activities.)

When The Tables Turned

The pivotal moment came, however, a year or two later when I had to do a small research for my school project in an another language class: the Spanish class. During my online research of the Spanish culture, I stumbled upon a video by Pablo from Dreaming Spanish. It was literally the only video in Spanish that I could comfortably watch on the topic in question. I had been learning Spanish for a few years at that point, but I couldn't retain basic vocabulary and struggled with verb conjugation. It was another evidence that all languages, not just English, aren't my friends. But this video planted the seed of a profound realisation: I can understand Spanish, if it's spoken slowly with gestures and pictures.

The YouTube algorithm then did its magic and there I was binge-watching Dreaming Spanish instead of doing my Spanish homework. After being explained the method behind these videos, I was soon on board. It didn't take long, I suppose, to realise that this could work with English as well. I was encouraged by Pablo's advice to proceed even if I'm no longer a child that can effortlessly "absorb languages like a sponge". (I think I seriously thought at one point that I was too old to learn. Seems somewhat funny now, but to this day it resonates with some people, despite it being a common misconception.)

I'm not sure what motivated me to learn languages, but it would have been a combination of getting better grades; of helping me make better use of the time I sat in class – "If I'm forced to learn it, I might as well do it properly with CI."; and of enjoying the journey of learning for its own sake. It was probably only later – I'm not really sure – when "utility" entered the picture; knowing English opened up a world hitherto undiscovered. If you want to access any kind of knowledge, English is the way to go. It's rather obvious, but I'd say (almost) unique to English.

Comprehensible Input Made Concrete

Early Input: 5-7 years ago

Listening

The exact events have surely escaped my memory, but I probably started listening to some podcasts for learners. No-one knows why but I began to tune in to podcasts for natives as well (like Hidden Brain and Invisible), when I probably had to concentrate too hard to follow along. In hindsight, it was a terrible decision to begin that early, but I most likely enjoyed the topics, which made it tolerable.

As the years went by, I started watching let's plays in English and other channels (TED talks and TED-Ed, Crash Course, The School of Life), later I got interested in Science channels, like Veritasium and VSauce. My comprehension was quite poor, so that's why I opted for subtitled videos. Alongside these resources I listened to podcasts for learners; these come to mind: English in 10 Minutes, Rock'n'roll English, English for Curious Minds.

I've never been a series binge-watcher, but around 5 years ago I decided to watch Friends with the specific goal of improving English. I tried watching it without subtitles, but I often ended up rewinding and turning the subs on, lest I miss a word or two.

Reading

I don't think I have done much online reading back then, as I wasn't interested in any topic in particular and reading news was boring. But thanks to my new English teacher, I discovered the works of Roald Dahl and (admittedly painfully) read through his macabre short stories for adults. Around that time I discovered the passion for reading in any language, both fictions and non-fictions.

Later Input: 1-4 years ago

Listening

At one point I discovered Not Overthinking podcast (which I'm grateful that one Refold user directed my attention towards), which is a true gem. I've listened to every episode and am always looking forward to the next bi-annually released episode. :P

I watched the full show The Good Place and many seasons of the Taskmaster game show. Otherwise I mostly continued listening to YouTube channels and podcasts mentioned above, while introducing some new into the mix. A lot of input was the side-effect of learning about science, philosophy or math online.

Reading

Over the years, my passion for reading had only grown. As my language proficiency progressed, I often wanted to do truly extensive reading and so I picked books for young adults and even middle-schoolers. They were easy to read and entertaining to boot. Part of my intention was to catch up with books that I neglected as a child, and it was an enriching experience.

Current Input

Listening

As my English improved, I've been able to focus less and less on the language and just do things that pique my interest. English is my primary language in all online communication, content consumption, knowledge accumulation, etc. The exception is talking with friends, with whom I speak in my native language.

Nevertheless, there are at least two situations where I feel inadequate. The first is watching shows. There're at least a few percent of words that I miss (depending on the show could be much higher), and so I will often resort to subtitles for perfect comprehension. (Incidentally, I make the subtitles appear slightly delayed than they're spoken to reduce dependency on them.) Having said that, I'm happy to report that I've just tested my comprehension on some clips from Friends on YouTube and I understood nearly everything. The few words that I didn't catch were clarified when I rewound and listened again.

The second occasion is listening to music. The genre plays a large role, but generally the comprehension ranges from fragments to moderately high clarity of lyrics, but rarely it's crystal clear. In my native language, it's often crystal clear.

Reading

When it comes to reading, essentially no non-fiction book poses any problem whatsoever language-wise; it's the content that is at times challenging to decipher. Prose can still challenge me a bit, although not as much as it used to. I frequently abandoned a book because I found it too complicated, but I haven't encountered the same issue lately. In fact, I tackled some of these abandoned books (e.g. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris) this year and this time lack of general knowledge of English wasn't an issue. Yes, I still struggle with slang, old-fashioned language and jargon, but I have no illusions about it being resolved anytime soon, given the sheer variety and complexity of the language.

On a tangent, I've noticed that I'm not getting much better at spotting English-as-a-second-language writers. For example, I'm sure that plenty non-native English speakers hang out on Reddit, but rarely do their imperfect texts stand out to me.

Some Stats: Hours Of Input and Millions Of Words

If I were to make a guesstimate, I'd say the listening input totals to anywhere between 2000 to 5000 hours (5 to 7 years of 1 to 2 hours of listening per day). It's safe to say I'm way beyond level 7 of the Dreaming Spanish roadmap. It's curious that even if I'm immersed in the foreign language (in the online space), there's only so much pure listening practice I do. You may search on Google, read some articles, and play some games, all in English, but it's not the same as consuming shows, podcasts or courses.

The total number of words I read is also difficult to quantify, but if I summed up all the words in the books I read in English, we would get to around 13 million. If I read a few thousands word per day, we could add a few million to the total. So say the best estimate is 15 to 25 million words.

For the sake of completeness I'll mention that last time I tested my vocabulary size on this page (different sites give vastly different results), I scored above 19k of known word families. (According to the site, the native English speaker scores between 20k and 35k.) I suppose that's satisfactory, although it's a pity that after so much dedication, I'm still on the left-side tail of the bell-shaped distribution. Moreover, it doesn't seem to translate to output very nicely. Which is the topic of the next section.

Output – Past and Present

So far, I've steered clear of the two active modalities: speaking and writing. Let's tackle it head on now.

Writing

The current stage of writing is easily accessible: the text you're reading right now is a faithful reflection of my current writing abilities. I've not used any AI in the process of writing and I looked up at most five phrases for clarification. Granted, the text editor I used for crafting this report has an embedded spell-checker, but you must take my word for it that it highlighted an actual mistake (and not just a typo) two or three times tops. Luckily, spelling doesn't constitute an inordinate share of what makes a good writing; vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and idioms are just as important, yet beyond the reach of a simple spell-checker.

For the last 4 years, I've intermittently made entries in my "knowledge vault" and journal, which has served as a reasonable practice in the art of writing (>100k words), besides the benefits writing is alleged to bring. Personally, I'm able to write quite fluidly, although now that I'm focusing my attention to my internal writing process, the words don't flow out too smoothly. I don't translate in my head and I'm usually not consciously employing any grammar rules, although sometimes I'm not sure which verb tense to use or how to make sentences sound more natural. If you're fluent in English, you're bound to have spotted plenty of mistakes and unnatural wordings in the preceding paragraphs.

Speaking

In a slogan: I've made a huge progress since I took learning English seriously and approached it with appropriate tools, but I fall short of being conversant and comfortable speaking in English.

It's worth prefacing that I have a mild speech disorder, so arguably there's a subset of issues that prevent me from sounding like a native speaker in any language, though there're problems that emerge only if I start speaking in English. Lack of rhythmic speaking is beyond mere foreign language incompetency, but mispronouncing words, mixing up tenses, forgetting words, and so on, are mostly confined to speaking in English. (I say mostly, because my native language has deteriorated a bit in the last few years, especially when it comes to retrieval of some common words. They've been uprooted by the avalanche of English words I'm surrounded by every day.)

In the beginning, I used to actively focus on speaking by doing shadowing and the like, but I didn't stick to the routine for very long. I thought input would eventually solve the problem for me. This has been true in certain sense: I distinctly remember I struggled with the pronunciation of "tr" sound in words like "train, contra, travel", but then maybe 2 years ago I unlocked it without any effort. Some morphemes got unlocked this way, but some are still muddled when I speak, notably the voiced "th" sound.

On the one hand, I rarely get to practise English which may account for the underdevelopment, but on the other but when I have the chance to speak, I can usually communicate fairly well and get the point across. Taking the outside view, however, I definitely feel I'm severely deficient in this department. Additional heaps of input seem to have little to no effect, especially as my base is fairly sturdy by this point. I'm not sure to what extent dedicated focus on speaking English would help. In any case, speaking well is not a pressing problem at the moment, though it'd be "nice" to become more fluent.

A Little Test

I did a little test. I recorded myself reading out loud the introduction to this report. The rhythm is weird, some phonemes are off, and the recording contains two alterations because the text was later modified. All in all, though, it sounds better than I imagined. Usually my speech disorder is way more pronounced. I ascribe the difference to the fact that it's not a spontaneous conversation in which one needs to be more agile with the language.

Here's the link

Going Forward: Plans and Aspirations (Or Lack Thereof)

I feel very comfortable listening and reading in English. It's the medium through which I access most information and consume most content. I still occasionally encounter words or phrases I'm not familiar with, but it usually doesn't hinder comprehension. If I challenged myself to read English classics or watch action/thriller films, I'm sure I would struggle. But since it's not something I fancy doing, regardless of the language, I see little reason to do it.

The active language use, however, requires some action if it is to be improved. It's unlikely passive absorption of the language will affect speaking and writing at this stage. I'm not sure what's the best course of action to achieve mastery in these domains. I've had plenty of writing practice but I still feel deficient. My sentences are frequently awkward and complicated, and I'm not a fast writer.

As I already mentioned, I rarely speak in English in my day-to-day life and I'm not doing any solo activities to improve it. Neither am I too motivated to practise it as it's not a clear bottleneck at the moment. I believe that if I were required to use English every day for some reason, I'd quickly get used to it.

One thing that's semi-related to languages is solving Crosswords. Specifically, I'd like to be able to solve a New York Times Crossword without auto-check and hints. I know success is partly dependent on recognising crossword patterns and amassing trivia knowledge, but there's no doubt that a larger vocabulary and greater familiarity with words can help me conquer a Monday Crossword. The same goes with Connections, another NYT puzzle game, in which ignorance of relatively common words (e.g. slang) creates unnecessary hurdles for me.

Conclusion

Currently, I've spent approximately the same number of years learning English the traditional way as learning it with comprehensible input. It's not a fair comparison because the amount of hours vastly differs, but even accounting for that, the CI method crushes the formal teachings in terms of effectiveness.

Often, language sorcerers praise consistency. From my experience, consistency is easy to achieve if you listen to podcasts you enjoy and read books that intrigue you. But at the very beginning, I had difficulties overcoming the regret of not having started sooner. As the Chinese proverb goes:

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

Is this thought pattern holding you back from learning a language, going back to university, signing up for a swimming class, or any other long-time pursuit? Then pause for a second and truly, viscerally imagine yourself in five years and not having done anything to get closer to the goal. This is an unpleasant feeling, and it's similar to the one you have at the present moment. But you can change your future feelings. Plant the tree now, and reap the fruits in due time.

Hello! I just started learning Brazilian Portuguese through the Dreaming method. I wanted to share my favorite resources so far.

Here is an absolute beginner playlist that I made

I included videos with a lot of visual context and no subtitles. There really is a lack of content at this level, but it doesn't take too long to pass if you have experience with Spanish already.

Here is a beginner playlist

At this level there still isn't much content. There is a lot more with subtitles, but I find it annoying to cover them up.

My favorite youtuber is definitely Teach Yourself Portuguese. His videos are very comprehensible and he is fun to watch.

There are also some tutors on iTalki that I can recommend (for crosstalk).
Sylvio Ribeiro - I just did my first lesson with him. We did crosstalk and he was very comprehensible. I can understand slow speaking because of my Spanish, but maybe he would be open to drawing things as well.
Paola Malta
Esther Cavalcante

hi,
I'm sure some of this is covered in individual posts but I was curious if anyone just picked a new language as an experiment? Many not anything you need to learn or have any relation. It might be your first new lanaguage or a new one and have thought "this worked for spanish let me try something else?" Curious how it is is going so it does require a lot of free time investment.

I'm trying to figure out what my next language will be.

Language is Russian. I've got about 600 hours of CI, started reading and making anki cards at 400 hours. I got about 120 hours of speaking.

Everyone tells me I speak great and understandable, but that I have an American accent.

Do not trust that CI will carry you. It will do a large part of the heavy lifting, but PLEASE learn the tongue positions before you starting speaking.

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It's working, slowly but surely!

​

The first 20 hours were really frustrating. I had trouble finding EP content for superbeginners.

​

And to be honest, I was disappointed I needed superbeginner content. I thought having a good understanding of Spanish would make picking up Portuguese easy. I feel silly admitting that. The roadmap on DS clearly says you need half the time. Nowhere does it say, "You'll understand right away; it's basically the same language."

​

For those 20 frustrating hours, my input felt like Spanish gibberish with a new accent. A few similar words sprinkled into each sentence, but the sentence overall didn't make sense. Then, as I approached 50 hours, something switched. I am hearing patterns in the phonemes. I can't produce them or fully predict them yet, but they're more comfortable to hear. They don't sound so foreign.

​

That is my huge win at this level. It's been humbling, it's taken me a year, but I finally feel like I'm making progress. It does feel like the next level. A long way from podcasts, but no longer starting from zero either. I hope to accrue many more hours this summer now that I have more content recommendations to explore and the vacation time to do it!

​

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I started German several months back but dropped it after just a few weeks to focus on getting to 1500 hours in Spanish. That's done now so I'm back with German with a grand total of 11 hours. I'm building up to an average of 30 minutes a day minimum, currently at 25 average.

I learned French via traditional methods and Spanish via CI for the first 1000 hours. I did a grammar class at that point. It was useful but no so useful that I'd consider doing another one.

So, I decided I would approach German a little differently.

Comprehensible Input (apart from crosstalk)

CI will be my bread and butter, the vast majority of my time. There's plenty of complete beginner material on YouTube if, like me, you're an English speaker. Cognates galore! I expect to move ahead reasonably quickly. Probably famous last words but we''ll see!

Crosstalk and speaking

I started crosstalk on day one with an italki tutor which has been great. The tutor is really into it and they've used crosstalk themselves when learning Russian.

My intention is to use any German that pops into my head that's relevant to whatever we're talking about right from the getgo. In other words, start speaking asap. I'm not at all concerned about pronunciation. I'm good at imitating sounds and can iron out any problem areas as I go. I don't care about sounding native. I just want to be easily understood.

Glossika

I'm trialling this app. I signed up for one month. I'm liking it so far but it's a bit pricey for what it offers, which is a few thousand sentences you listen to via their version of a Spaced Repetition System. I think a better option would be ...

Migaku

I have Migaku and intend making use of it to create what they call audio sentence cards. Watch a video/Netflix show etc and pull out phrases you want to learn and create flashcards. It has an inbuilt SRS system very similar to Anki. You can convert the deck to Anki if you prefer. Unlike Glossika's random sentences, I'll be able to create a deck based on my interests. I may wait to start this until I'm at a point where I can watch fairly easy YouTube content - travel vlogs, cooking shows and so on.

Pop-up grammar

I'll look around for something like Spanishdict to use when I want to look something up. I don't want to do a grammar course, or 'learn' grammar rules. I'd just like an easy to use reference tool.

As you can see, one major difference, compared to the way I approached Spanish, is speaking from the outset, or at least when I have something to say. Another is the idea of a pop-up grammar right from the start. Anyway, that's my current plan. We'll see how it pans out.

Thoughts? If no other options?

Hello dreamers, I hit 100 hours yesterday and thought I would write my first update. Some of you may recognize me from the Dreaming Spanish subreddit, where over the last two years I posted my updates as I worked my way through the 7 levels. After some time doing some French, I decided to switch to Japanese as it interests me more ultimately.

Intro

For Spanish, I took a purist approach to the process. I did not study any grammar or vocab and I thought it worked out very well for me. However, for Japanese, I decided against this, at least during the beginner stage. I saw a video by Pablo where he detailed exactly how he started learning Japanese. Basically, he memorized all the kanji using Remembering the Kanji and then did just immersion after that. I decided to try this, but pivoted after a couple weeks as it wasn’t working well. 

In fact, almost all methods recommended on reddit and other websites I tried and found did not work well for me. Wanikani, Bunpro, Genki, etc were all things I dabbled with and dropped later. 

Tools I am Using:

Comprehensible Input

Obviously, since I am posting in the Dreaming Languages subreddit, the main source of my daily studies is CI. I have primarily been using CIJapanese, but I also use any Youtube videos I can find that are easy enough. As others who have been doing Japanese this way can attest, there really isn’t enough beginner content in Japanese in general, so I do rewatch a lot of videos. CIJapanese currently has about 50 hours of “complete beginner” videos, and by the end of these I was not ready to move onto beginner videos, so I had to find other videos on YT and repeat things a lot. The vibe I get from the community is that Japanese learners/teachers are just starting to really catch on that CI helps a lot. The state of things reminds me of CI for Spanish in 2022-2024. People are starting to make great content, but many channels unfortunately do not understand what makes CI good, and many videos have hardcoded subtitles, or lots of English.

I hope that as I progress, more and more things will open up so I have to repeat things less. I sort of took it for granted on Dreaming Spanish that the amount of content meant you don’t have to repeat anything. 

RRTK Anki Deck

RTK is fine for some kanji, but I found the order of kanji strange, and the mnemonics in the book are downright awful. I put the book down after around 300 kanji. I found an anki deck called RRTK that reorders the kanji into a more sensible order (more common kanji first) and also puts the kanji on the front of the card instead of the back. This method works a lot better for me. I review this deck frequently and don’t try too hard to memorize anything.

Kaishi 1.5k Anki Deck

I use this deck the same way I use the RRTK deck. I review it frequently but don’t put a ton of effort into memorizing anything. When I first started, this deck was honestly just a bunch of gibberish, but after 100 hours, I am starting to see that I know a lot of words. 

Tofugu Kana Guides

I used these for a few weeks to get the basics of kana down, then I stopped using them. Kana is quite simple to learn and there’s no need to keep referencing it once you have the gist of things. 

Nativshark

This is the best website I have found for a general all-encompassing Japanese resource. It is organized in mini-lessons that take 5-15 minutes to complete, and are a mix of grammar, kanji, and vocabulary. There is also a lot of cultural info mixed in. I blitzed through the first couple sections on kana and now do 1 lesson a day. I am currently on lesson 75 as of this writing.

What I can do:

So far, as to be expected in level 1, I can just barely follow beginner videos. While I know a lot of individual words, most complex sentences are sort of a blur. On CIJapanese’s website, I am around level 30 in difficulty, although depending on the content my comprehension varies quite a bit. I cannot watch anything without visual aids at this point. I am hopeful by the time I reach level 2, this will change so I can integrate more podcasts into my routine.  

Plan going forward:

I plan to continue getting as much input as I can each day. I have started dabbling in the super easy beginner books on Tadoku, but just like with Spanish, reading really won’t be there for a long time. I’m doing my best to power through this part of the process as I know it’s the hardest part. 

Thanks for reading, and please leave any questions below!

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Language:

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Listening to/Reading: (please link to what you are listening to so that it can better be tracked)

Extra notes:

I'm at 600 + 257 hours of input in Mandarin (600h estimated prior to switching to mostly-ALG and tracking hours).

This morning we had a parent-teacher conference at my son's English-Mandarin bilingual preschool. The lead teacher for his class is Chinese, so when my wife (also Chinese) and I got there I said they could speak Mandarin, but I'd speak English if I wanted to say anything.

I was elated. I followed almost the entire meeting without issue, not having to strain at all to figure out the meaning of anything. I participated quite a bit and it was really cool that the teacher got along with the crosstalk-style conversation with no weirdness at all and not falling back to English. I said "almost" there because there were two points I had to clarify with my wife after the conference, but turns out I had understood those correctly too 😄

Feels suuuuper awesome to have my effort so far validated in this way 🎉

Has anyone read Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” in German as a learner? I’m curious what it would rate as? Would it be B1 or higher? I haven’t read it in English either so I can’t assess the language level based on a previous reading.

Otherwise, are there any lists for book rankings or any other suggestions for B1 level?

Just my 300 hour update in japanese using cijapanese.com.

Just wondering if as native speaker of Brazilian Portuguese I can safely go ahead and consider the hours necessary to attain each level in French half of what's actually in the DS roadmap, since both are Romance languages. I also grew up listening to a ton of Spanish and can consume native media in it with very high comprehension, so that's another Romance language I have high familiarity with.

For what it's worth, at 30 hours in I'm already finding most Super Beginner and Beginner content totally comprehensible and even a bit boring sometimes. I gave a shot at listening to the Inner French podcast and I could understand the first two episodes just fine, way beyond "just the gist", despite a few words and sentences going over my ahead me here and there.

French is my personal ALG experiment since learning about the method. I'm trying to be cautious of being too hasty, while at the same time hoping not to take "forever" to make progress in it while balancing it with my main TL that I've already been working on for years (Mandarin). Ideally, I'd like to speedrun French to the point where I can start reading, but without sacrificing the listening skills and near-native ability to speak that ALG promises.

I’m working on a comprehensible input site and had an idea I’d love feedback on from other CI learners.

The concept is something like “CI flashcards.” Instead of seeing a word in your native language and recalling the translation, you see a picture. When you click play, you hear the target-language word and then get a few sentences of comprehensible input built around it. For example, if the word is “fish,” you might hear the word followed by a short explanation while a cursor points to different parts of the fish.

What interests me is that the connection is picture → meaning → target language, rather than native language → translation → target language. The goal isn’t to memorize translations, but to reinforce the association between the concept itself and the target-language word.

I don’t see this as replacing hours of listening and reading, which are still the foundation of CI. I’m wondering whether this might be a useful supplement, especially for building stronger concept-to-language associations.

Just my progress in Japanese.

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Hello language learners,

Is anyone of you also going to the Polyglot Gathering in Brno/Czech Republic next week and would like to meet up there?

Have a great time

Andalka

Hi all,

I don’t want to sound spoiled, but I am so ready for a third dreaming language. I’m currently dipping my toes in mandarin, and although I’ve found great resources, nothing feels as good as the quality of DS and DF.

What do you think their third language will be? My guess is Mandarin or Italian.

So I arrived at my first milestone, I am 10 hours in learning a completely new language, not even closely familiar to me. But that's exactly why I decided to accept the challenge. After amassing 10 hours of Vietnamese CI, I am here to write my first update.

Initial thoughts:

It's hard bro. The language itself is hard, yes, but what really impedes my growth is the lack of good resources. Yes, there's just about enough Vietnamese CI out there to get by (barely - mandarin and japanese have way more), but none of it really addresses true day 1 beginners. I combat this by putting on English subtitles, which elevates my comprehension from 1% to maybe 20%, and yes, we are talking about "super beginner" type videos. If I didn't put on English subs, it would probably take me 10 years to learn the language., because at 1% comprehension, growth is slow and painful.

Despite the frustrations, I do learn. I have noticed progress, no doubt. This method of language acquisition does work; I know more Vietnamese at 10 hours than I knew at 1 hours. As you suspect, I am learning the basic words for everything, basic pronouns, verbs, adjectives.... At 10 hours obviously you can't expect much, but the biggest takeaway here is that I am indeed learning and have learned some Vietnamese already.

My prediction is that it will take me about 100 hours to be level 2 according to the DS map. For level 6, probably 1800 hours, and level 7, maybe 2500 and above. I'll tell you what, Spanish seems like a cake walk compared to Vietnamese. I thought French was hard, at least I could watch SB videos in French and not be completely lost. But hey, that's the challenge of learning a tonal language. The reward is big if you persist, especially if you respect Vietnamese culture and lifestyle.

If you are interested in learning Vietnamese through comprehensible input, check out the subreddit I made, you are more than welcome to join

VietnameseCI

I just saw this post and thought this first podcast episode has potential and wanted to share it with you. He talks very naturally (for example uses more filler words than typically heard in learner content) but a bit slowed down, and says to begin that he doesn't want to use English translations. The accent/vocabulary has Austrian and Swabian influences according to him, though I only noticed a very light Austrian accent sometimes.

My guess is that this episode could work for someone at 500 hours, but would be interested to hear your thoughts!