Textbooks are too boring, you don’t have the time or money to commit to a class, and a certain app with an owl logo isn’t getting you anywhere. 

There has to be a better way.

What about comprehensible input? It sounds like magic, or too good to be true. You just consume content, and learn the language through osmosis? The most annoying learner you know insists they learned their target language just by watching tv, but you’ve tried that, and the dialogue just sounds like gibberish. What’s the problem? 

Well, that was input, but it wasn’t comprehensible.

What is comprehensible input (CI)?

CI is input (like a video, podcast, or book) that’s just a little harder than what you already understand. So, for a beginner, a tv show is definitely not CI. CI would be something closer to a video of a person pointing to an apple while saying “apple”. Even if you knew zero words of the language, not even the word for apple, you would still be able to understand what they were saying. And as you practice and become more advanced, you’ll be able to understand more complex material. 

How do I know if the content I’m consuming is CI?

Here are a couple questions I find useful to ask myself:

Can I follow the plot?

If you’re, for instance, watching a movie, this could be literal, but the idea can also be applied to other forms of content. If you’re listening to a conversation, can you tell where each person agrees and disagrees with the other? If you’re reading an essay, could you summarize the key points? 

Basically, do you get the gist?

And beyond that,

How does it make me feel?

Do I feel proud that I can understand as much as I do? Or do I feel frustrated that I don’t understand enough?

If consuming content in your target language makes you feel good, you’re getting positive reinforcement to continue learning. But if it makes you feel bad, you’re gonna want to give up. 

For further reading on the theory of how and why CI works, I would recommend starting with Stephen Krashen’s Input Hypothesis, but for the purposes of this blog post, I think you’ve got the idea! 

But does it really work?

Here’s where my experience comes in! In October 2022, my only other instruction in Spanish having been a single-semester beginner class in college four years prior, I began consuming Spanish CI. A lot. By ‘a lot’, I mean…

800+ hours to date.

Yeah. Why would I do this to myself? Well,

It’s really fun!

But (looking at you, 800h),

It takes a really long time to get good.

Was all that time at least worth it? What have I gotten in return for all my hard work? Does CI really work?!

Let’s look at it through the lens of the four language skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing.

What can I do after 800 hours of CI?

Listening

• Understand podcasts (fiction and nonfiction), YouTube videos, tv shows (made for kids and adults), movies, and audiobooks. Without any subtitles. 
• Understand announcements (like at the airport).
• Tell very quickly if someone is speaking Spanish, even if they’re far away or the words are unintelligible.
• Understand what people say in person (sometimes).
  • I think practicing with a non-judgmental tutor will help a lot because sometimes it’s not that I don’t understand what’s being said, it’s that I get anxious and blank out.
  • Understanding how people actually speak casually, not in front of a camera or microphone, is my biggest weakness. It’s objectively easier to understand someone who’s speaking like an announcer, but I also just haven’t practiced casual conversation! You get good at what you practice, and since I’m hesitant to speak, I miss out on getting in-person conversational input. I haven’t tried crosstalk yet!

Reading

• Read Goodreads reviews, YouTube comments, blog posts, and warning signs.
• Read 6 books (so far) totaling ~1500 pages, took my reading pace from two paragraphs per session before getting fatigued to five pages, and found a reading flow state that I can enter sometimes (where I don’t even feel like I’m reading!).
• I was also able to vault over graded readers and children’s books and go straight to regular adult books. It wasn’t painless, but it wasn’t exactly hard either, just tiring. And it was definitely less frustrating than if I had been forced to read uninteresting content because it was the only thing I could understand.
  • Spanish spelling is very phonetic, which helps a lot because it’s easy to recognize a written word that you’ve only heard aloud before, or guess how a new word that you’ve only seen written is pronounced.

• Delaying learning how to read until you’ve reached a certain number of CI hours (although no one quite agrees on what the magic number is) is a hot topic right now, so I’ll put in my two cents. 
• The basic idea is if you’ve spent enough time listening, you’ll have a good understanding of how things are pronounced and won’t pronounce everything wrong in your head when you start reading. I haven’t had enough feedback on my pronunciation yet to be able to comment on it, but delaying reading worked well for me by virtue of making it easy to start when I finally decided to (after around 550h of listening). 
• In my opinion, audiobooks are harder to understand than paper books or ebooks, so if you’re delaying reading but understand audiobooks well, I think you’ll probably be just fine starting to read! I had two and a half audiobooks under my belt before I picked up my first ebook, and I actually got mad because reading was SO MUCH EASIER than understanding an audiobook! 🤦‍♀️

Speaking

• Choke out simple sentences if pressed. 😂
  • Pronunciation is a big issue for me. Everyone acts like r and rr are so easy, but they’re not. Somebody tell me I’m not alone in this.
  • I really lack confidence because I have almost no hours of practice here, and I feel like even with 800h of CI, I’m still lacking in grammar knowledge. 

Writing

• Write simple sentences, although a lot of the time words fail me for the ideas I want to express.
• Circling back to grammar, when consuming CI – especially audio – it’s so, so easy for your brain to skate by on understanding something without being able to explain the grammar at work.
  • Reading is helping me a lot with this because there are fewer context clues to go by (e.g. voice changes when someone else is speaking, tone shifts, body language). Reading is sink or swim – if you don’t understand the grammar, you can’t even tell who’s speaking. 
  • However, I don’t think I’ll get to conversational fluency without a little grammar study!

On that note,

What are the pros and cons of a CI-heavy approach?

The pros

• It’s low effort (I’m lazy)
  • You can’t get any more low effort than turning your entire language learning practice into a spectator sport!
• Multitasking potential
  • You won’t really be able to multitask when you’re a complete beginner since you’ll need visual support to understand, but once you get into comfortable beginner territory (after about the first hundred hours or so for me), you can listen to audio without any visuals. This is where the fun begins. Listen to podcasts while you’re doing mindless tasks like cleaning, commuting, or taking a walk. Free entertainment while you’re doing stuff you already needed to do!
• Meaningful context
  • Even in complete beginner content, the teacher should still be using full, grammatically correct sentences. So, far from learning new vocabulary words in isolation, you’re learning how they’re used to construct sentences and experiencing realistic grammar usage.
• Cultural insight
  • I’ve learned so many interesting things in my hundreds of hours of listening to native Spanish speakers (and reading their work)! The internet is a bottomless well of content, and being able to understand another language broadens your horizons considerably. Politics, literature, nature, sports, fashion – whatever you’re interested in, there’s content available!
  • Plus, you get the adrenaline rush of consuming content that hasn’t been translated into your native language. Books you never would’ve read, podcasts you never would’ve listened to, comments and conversations and threads and controversies and, and…I’m getting a little too excited here, let me calm down real quick.
  • And memes. There are memes.
    • Hey, even if I don’t feel confident addressing my friends in Spanish, I can still spam them with Spanish memes!
• Easy to track progress
  • You just keep track of one number – hours – and watch it go up!
    • I let Goodreads keep track of my pages read with a special shelf for Spanish language.
• Cost-effective
  • I spend most of my time on YouTube and podcast apps these days. My library card also gets heavy use.
• Low barrier to entry – this is for you, shy people!
  • Language learning is associated with nerve-racking tasks like speaking one-on-one with strangers or in front of a class. But if you decide to dive straight into CI instead, you can delay social interaction and instead spend quality time with your laptop!
  • However, this is actually a con as well, which brings me to…

The cons

• Yeah, it can be pretty solitary.
  • Real talk, languages are meant for connecting with other people, and with CI you’re gonna go deep into parasocial town. You will think of your language teachers (and content creators you watch a lot. Because you will watch them. A Lot.) as people you know. But they’re not! They’re actually strangers!! I’m fine, I’m fine. Mostly.
• Noticeable progress is measured in dozens of hours.
  • It takes me AT LEAST 20h to notice a difference in listening comprehension. And that’s in newbie gains! As you get more advanced, progress becomes less noticeable, and it takes closer to 50h to notice a difference.
  • A difference in reading speed? Hundreds of pages. 
• Searching for CI at your level can be frustrating.
  • Making the leap from content made for learners to content made for native speakers is particularly challenging, especially when you can’t yet understand the content you’re really interested in. I almost lost my mind when I first tried to start watching tv shows and had to keep stopping after the pilot because they weren’t comprehensible for me yet.

Bottom line,

The best method is the one you’ll actually do. 

That’s what makes CI a great method for me. We clicked, I kept at it, and it’s taken me a long way from where I started! But, not all the way to conversational fluency, which is a big goal of mine.

So,

What’s next for me?

More CI (lol) 

What can I say, I’m still in love with it! It’s so fun too, I wouldn’t want to quit even if it did ‘maximize efficiency’ or something. And I don’t think it does! You won’t catch me grinding any conjugation tables (yawn), so it’s really no contest.

Getting a tutor (or three) 

After I get more listening and reading practice in, of course! Hehe~ 

1000h of listening and 10 books read sounds like a good place to aim for before finding someone – someone I’m paying not to laugh at me – to practice pronunciation, conversation, and writing exercises with. I’m also planning a trip to Spain for extra pressure, making those initial 6-9 months of tutoring count!

I’m going to look for Mexican Spanish teachers because that’s what most of my friends speak, and it’s common for where I live. (And don’t tell anyone, but I’m shaky on vosotros 👀) 

Asking Spanish-speaking friends to practice speaking with me 🙈

Yeah, I’m really nervous, but my friends are nice! There’s no reason to be so worried.

A pen pal?

Finding a language exchange pen pal partner would be so cool! Maybe a native Spanish speaker who was learning English so we could write to each other in our target languages and send back corrections along with the reply? Hit me up?? (Just kidding haha, unless???)

*

Convinced? Do you need some CI in your life?

You can find a lot of great recommendations just by looking up keywords like: 

• Comprehensible input 
• Spanish (or insert your target language) learners content
• Beginner (or intermediate or advanced)
  • Or you can go even more granular by asking for things like “complete beginner” or “lower intermediate”.
  • OR if you know that your level roughly corresponds to a level of an official certification exam, for example DELE Spanish, you can search for A2, B1, etc.
• Podcasts/shows/YouTube channels/books/audiobooks/movies/news (whatever you’re looking for!)
  • Tip: try typing your search terms in the target language.
• Reddit (you can find a lot of recommendations here! Just take everything you read with a grain of salt)

Fair warning, a lot of content is free, but some – especially beginner level content made by language teachers – is paid. You’ll need to decide how much money (if any) is worth putting towards CI. If you do decide to look into paid content, make sure to start with free tiers or free trials to test if it would be worthwhile for you. I had good experiences with Dreaming Spanish when I was starting out. (This is not a paid ad, I just like them!)

And of course, go check out some of my native Spanish content recommendations! No learner’s content here, we die like men.

Happy language learning! You’ve got this!!