Useful info about CI methods?

[bombobuffoon]

Do you have any useful information about CIMs? What advantages/disadvantages do they have over other methods?

I have come to the conclusion that I+1 = 0

CI seems to be just another fanatical dogma. I succeeded after a couple of Super Challenges, but I didn't pick things that were I+1, I read and watched anything I could get my hands on, after having done lots of textbooks and lessons. I also did hundreds, if not thousands of language exchanges. So no silent period for me!

I tried learning for over 3 years with a great portion of it set aside for CI. Indeed as part of that I tried paid CI courses. I won't blame CI for my failure to learn a language, however what I would say is; I tried the listening and silent period thingy and found that to date I am more or less in the same position then when I started, except that if I was speaking I may at least have been able to at least do something.

I have seen vlogs of some people doing Dreaming Spanish, and yes it appears they can speak somewhat at least after 2000 hours. I have no evidence of this whatsoever for Finnish.

Now maybe I have just been doing CI wrong. This is probably the case as if I had been doing CI correctly it would have worked (or is this a case of no true Scotsman?). Unfortunately there appears to be no clear nor agreed method behind CI apart from the "learning takes place when messages are understood". Maybe someone could enlighten me.

[Slowpoke]

I already elaborated here. By "these recent CIMs" I meant "Dreaming Spanish and various copycats" not ALG. I assumed if everyone was using the term CI, it must include reading now too. Otherwise they'd call it the Audio Input Only method or something like that.

So I re-read the post and it seems more to me like you have an axe grind against Dreaming Spanish. I'm also not sure why you'd assume they mean reading if you're familiar with Dreaming Spanish and are referring to it. I mean right from the start, you're saying "CI is not a method" but looking for "Useful info about CI methods" so I'm not sure what to take from this other than you're deeming it not a valid way to learn a language. Please correct me if I'm misreading!

I didn't see any evidence that the results they posit are fake, because to be fair I'm not sure how you would prove a negative, but a quick look at the subreddit has lots of people sharing their success - people who are speaking and living in Spanish without having had to study grammar. If I were to say why the Dreaming Spanish method is good, it's because it has a high rate of success in that lots of people follow through, people enjoy their time and are less likely to quit, and they have made language learning more accessible. Not everyone is necessarily in a race to start speaking a language - especially today with streaming and YouTube. Not every method needs to be acceptable for everyone - I personally am not doing this for German, and did not do it for French and Korean. I think it's great that there are people who are so excited about the way they've been learning and want to share it with others.

[leosmith]

So I re-read the post and it seems more to me like you have an axe grind against Dreaming Spanish. I'm also not sure why you'd assume they mean reading if you're familiar with Dreaming Spanish and are referring to it.

I only have an axe to grind with certain claims being made; I listed them in my OP. In my defense, I also listed the benefits, which overlap with what you said below. I did not claim to be familiar with Dreaming Spanish when I made the post; now I understand that it does not include reading. I’m familiar with ALG, and when I saw so many people throwing around the term CI these days, I assumed Dreaming Spanish and other copycat sites must be using reading too. I guess I was assuming they are a sort of hybrid ALG which includes reading, which makes no sense now that I think of it. I was wrong.

I mean right from the start, you're saying "CI is not a method" but looking for "Useful info about CI methods" so I'm not sure what to take from this other than you're deeming it not a valid way to learn a language. Please correct me if I'm misreading!

You are misreading. I’m against calling CI a method because the term "comprehensible input" is already used for something else very specific in language learning – input that can be comprehended. So I want people to say CIM, Dreaming in Spanish, ALG, or something like that…not just CI. I’m not saying it’s an invalid way of learning a language; I’m saying it’s an invalid name for a language learning method.

[emk]

I have seen vlogs of some people doing Dreaming Spanish, and yes it appears they can speak somewhat at least after 2000 hours. I have no evidence of this whatsoever for Finnish.

If an English speaker studying Spanish can only "speak somewhat" after 2,000 hours, they have been horribly failed by their learning technique. After 2,000 hours of Spanish, a student should be able to do college-level reading, write essays, and carry on fairly complex conversations. At that point, you should definitely be able to work professionally at your job in Spanish.

I tried learning for over 3 years with a great portion of it set aside for CI. Indeed as part of that I tried paid CI courses. I won't blame CI for my failure to learn a language, however what I would say is; I tried the listening and silent period thingy and found that to date I am more or less in the same position then when I started, except that if I was speaking I may at least have been able to at least do something.

Yeah, this gets back to what I was saying about "shadowing." Alexander Arguelles is an amazing polyglot. He relies very heavily on a specific technique, which involves listening to audio in his target language and simultaneously speaking along with the text. He swears by it—and he has the results to back it up. But I can't shadow, not even in English. I can't vocally echo what my ears are hearing in real time like that.

Similarly, Iversen has a technique he calls "listening like a bloodhound." If I understand it correctly, this involves paying very careful attention to the sounds—the syllables, the word breaks, etc—without directly trying to concentrate on the meaning. And when he does this (at the right stage in the process), apparently the meaning of the words pops into his head. And I tried this with French. But French has zillions of silent letters, a whole pile of unfamiliar vowels, and a complex system of "liaison" where previously-silent sounds appear on the next word. I tried to "listen like a bloodhound", and it was basicaly useless. I wound up going the long way around. I read so much French, including graphic novels full of dialog, that I could already half-predict what people were saying in French anyways. And once I had a very robust model of French conversation, listening got easier.

This isn't to say that there's anything wrong with "shadowing" or "listening like a bloodhound". After all, I'm not even in the same league as Alexander Arguelles or Iversen. But those particular techniques either relied on a trick that I was unusually bad at, or weren't addressed to the actual problems I'm facing.

Now, personally, I can learn from comprehensible input. But I adjust my approach constantly, to make sure that learning is actually occurring. Spanish I could just dive into. Egyptian required heavy interlinear glosses in the beginning. And with each language I've learned, I've paid more and more attention to little details. Which pronoun was used in that expression? What are these -aba- forms? Apparently this Egyptian preposition has to agree with the noun it "modifies"? And so on. I may not be studying any more than the bare necessity of grammar, but I'm paying a lot of attention to details.

And so if someone tried to imitate my log step-by-step, they might fail to benefit, much like how I fail to benefit from "shadowing." Maybe my personal technique relies on something I'm doing unconsciously. Or maybe if I were struggling with some specific aspect, I'd change my approach. Like, I never did any audio-lingual drills for French, because I hate them with the burning fire of a thousand suns—but I also had daily access to hours of French conversation. Maybe for Spanish conversation, I'll do some kind of drills.

Now maybe I have just been doing CI wrong. This is probably the case as if I had been doing CI correctly it would have worked (or is this a case of no true Scotsman?). Unfortunately there appears to be no clear nor agreed method behind CI apart from the "learning takes place when messages are understood". Maybe someone could enlighten me.

My mental model of language learning is that there are 100 good ways to learn a language, and 900 bad ways. In a situation like this, the ideal approach is something like:

1. Only take advice from people who have reached at least B1 or B2. Otherwise, sheer random chance suggests you'll wind up pursuing one of the 900 bad ways to learn a language.
2. Out of the 100 good ways to learn a language, the only things that really matter are personal taste, and whether a particular method helps you with a specific weakness.
3. So go look at several successful polyglots, and take whichever approach sounds most fun.
4. But if you get stuck for more than 30 hours of study, go find another successful polyglot, and try a different technique which seems promising.

Almost any popular language-learning fad of the last 200 years works well for somebody. Or else it would never have become a fad. The trick is knowing when things aren't working, and trying something else. And that's where a lot of dogmatic movements fail. They try to funnel everyone into just 1 out of the 100 good methods, and they ignore the struggles of students who would be better served by some of the other 99.

So whatever you were doing with CI wasn't serving you well. The best move in a situation like that is to ask successful learners for advice, and to try something different.

[bombobuffoon]

I have seen vlogs of some people doing Dreaming Spanish, and yes it appears they can speak somewhat at least after 2000 hours. I have no evidence of this whatsoever for Finnish.

If an English speaker studying Spanish can only "speak somewhat" after 2,000 hours, they have been horribly failed by their learning technique. After 2,000 hours of Spanish, a student should be able to do college-level reading, write essays, and carry on fairly complex conversations. At that point, you should definitely be able to work professionally at your job in Spanish.

I tried learning for over 3 years with a great portion of it set aside for CI. Indeed as part of that I tried paid CI courses. I won't blame CI for my failure to learn a language, however what I would say is; I tried the listening and silent period thingy and found that to date I am more or less in the same position then when I started, except that if I was speaking I may at least have been able to at least do something.

Yeah, this gets back to what I was saying about "shadowing." Alexander Arguelles is an amazing polyglot. He relies very heavily on a specific technique, which involves listening to audio in his target language and simultaneously speaking along with the text. He swears by it—and he has the results to back it up. But I can't shadow, not even in English. I can't vocally echo what my ears are hearing in real time like that.

Similarly, Iversen has a technique he calls "listening like a bloodhound." If I understand it correctly, this involves paying very careful attention to the sounds—the syllables, the word breaks, etc—without directly trying to concentrate on the meaning. And when he does this (at the right stage in the process), apparently the meaning of the words pops into his head. And I tried this with French. But French has zillions of silent letters, a whole pile of unfamiliar vowels, and a complex system of "liaison" where previously-silent sounds appear on the next word. I tried to "listen like a bloodhound", and it was basicaly useless. I wound up going the long way around. I read so much French, including graphic novels full of dialog, that I could already half-predict what people were saying in French anyways. And once I had a very robust model of French conversation, listening got easier.

This isn't to say that there's anything wrong with "shadowing" or "listening like a bloodhound". After all, I'm not even in the same league as Alexander Arguelles or Iversen. But those particular techniques either relied on a trick that I was unusually bad at, or weren't addressed to the actual problems I'm facing.

Now, personally, I can learn from comprehensible input. But I adjust my approach constantly, to make sure that learning is actually occurring. Spanish I could just dive into. Egyptian required heavy interlinear glosses in the beginning. And with each language I've learned, I've paid more and more attention to little details. Which pronoun was used in that expression? What are these -aba- forms? Apparently this Egyptian preposition has to agree with the noun it "modifies"? And so on. I may not be studying any more than the bare necessity of grammar, but I'm paying a lot of attention to details.

And so if someone tried to imitate my log step-by-step, they might fail to benefit, much like how I fail to benefit from "shadowing." Maybe my personal technique relies on something I'm doing unconsciously. Or maybe if I were struggling with some specific aspect, I'd change my approach. Like, I never did any audio-lingual drills for French, because I hate them with the burning fire of a thousand suns—but I also had daily access to hours of French conversation. Maybe for Spanish conversation, I'll do some kind of drills.

Now maybe I have just been doing CI wrong. This is probably the case as if I had been doing CI correctly it would have worked (or is this a case of no true Scotsman?). Unfortunately there appears to be no clear nor agreed method behind CI apart from the "learning takes place when messages are understood". Maybe someone could enlighten me.

My mental model of language learning is that there are 100 good ways to learn a language, and 900 bad ways. In a situation like this, the ideal approach is something like:

1. Only take advice from people who have reached at least B1 or B2. Otherwise, sheer random chance suggests you'll wind up pursuing one of the 900 bad ways to learn a language.
2. Out of the 100 good ways to learn a language, the only things that really matter are personal taste, and whether a particular method helps you with a specific weakness.
3. So go look at several successful polyglots, and take whichever approach sounds most fun.
4. But if you get stuck for more than 30 hours of study, go find another successful polyglot, and try a different technique which seems promising.

Almost any popular language-learning fad of the last 200 years works well for somebody. Or else it would never have become a fad. The trick is knowing when things aren't working, and trying something else. And that's where a lot of dogmatic movements fail. They try to funnel everyone into just 1 out of the 100 good methods, and they ignore the struggles of students who would be better served by some of the other 99.

So whatever you were doing with CI wasn't serving you well. The best move in a situation like that is to ask successful learners for advice, and to try something different.

I am not short of advice or methods, the opposite is the problem. Finding what works and how to tailor it is more whats difficult.

Rather I was asking more of a rhetorical question, am I doing CI wrong, or am I actually doing it right and its just really slow? Of course, who can tell? I consider CI to be learning by listening. The problem (in part) with CI is that its so slow its difficult to tell or measure if it works at all.

Now my reading on the other hand comes along in leaps and bounds. I don't even have to measure it, I can tell I am progressing. Its just easy to read though I don't need any special techniques, everything works. I can keep bashing away with great endurance until a breakthrough comes. Listening on the other hand, is very difficult and fatiguing. I feel the way forward is not CI (though I will still do a lot of CI) but transcribing.

I have tried shadowing but like you I just can't do it. I will keep trying because I like the idea. I have sort of settled for a repeat back form of shadowing which maybe eventually will become shadowing.

[Iversen]

1. I do not insist on "purity" of any sort. In my favorite diagram, the first step is "cheating." Bilingual texts, pantomime, actually looking things up—absolutely anything is fair game, if it allows me to decipher and understand some text.
2. But the goal is to reach the point where I do understand stuff, so that I can "consolidate" it through sheer repetition and make it automatic.
3. Output needs to be practiced separately, though there's no harm in putting it off for a couple of months. Longer than that, and it's too easy to ignore lots of interesting details that I should be "noticing."
4. I do allow myself bits of grammar study. But I usually do it in a ridiculously lackadaisical fashion.

I almost agree with this, but with a few differences.

No.1 is just perfect as it is - that's what I do when I study a text (=intensive study). 'Studying' hard is actually cheating in every possible way you can imagine.
No.2 is covered by my reference to extensive activities - except that I do use repetition during my intensive study sessions and don't think that it is worth trying to do extensive input activities before you almost can understand your materials (let's call it "i+1" or comprehensible input )
No.4: Grammar needs to be practiced separately, and it should definitely not be put off for months. But the purpose of doing grammar studies in parallel with 1 & 2 is that you can remember what you have learned and use it for 1 and 2 - and you should not expect to learn all the details from day 1. Get an overview, but focus on the most useful parts.
No.3: Output needs to be practiced separately, though there's no harm in putting it off for a couple of months. Longer than that, and it's too easy not only to ignore, but actually to forget lots of interesting details which you could have consolidated by using them while you still remembered them.

Concerning French and the fair use of bloodhounds: the purpose of this exercise is primarily to allow you to hear what ACTUALLY is being said instead of trying to guess what it means. That means that you in French will hear a lot of 'word collocations' that start with l' alone or le or la or les, but still pronounced as if they belong to one long word. Fine, that's essentially also what you meet when you try to hear typical endings in any inflected language- recurring small things. But If you at least can hear THAT kind of structure then you are better off than a person who hears French for the first time and thinks that it sounds like the gurgling of a semiplugged drain. And when somebody tells you about pronoms atones (unstressed pronouns) you'll know what it is you have heard, and next time you hear those l-things as possible pronouns.

My own experience with for instance the Slavic languages or Greek was that I couldn't even hear that the endless stream of sounds consisted of words. I solved that problem by focussing on the parsing process itself instead on wild guesswork about the meaning (thinking precludes listening). But for instance you might have read about personal pronouns before you try to hear them in real speech, and knowing a few common words would also be practical. And at some point you can obviously permit yourself to let the raw-bottom listening glide below the surface and focus on the meaning - as most language teachers expect you to do from the beginning.

[emk]

Rather I was asking more of a rhetorical question, am I doing CI wrong, or am I actually doing it right and its just really slow? Of course, who can tell? I consider CI to be learning by listening. The problem (in part) with CI is that its so slow its difficult to tell or measure if it works at all.

At the very least, if you spend 30 working on a given type of content (say, a CI course or a TV show), you should be able to rewind 30 hours, start over, and see clear progress. If the old material doesn't get easier after 30 days of studying for 1 hour/day, something has gone very wrong, and it's time to change strategy. Or at least that's my experience.

A common pattern is what Krashen called "narrow listening". The idea is that you pick a single source of audio, on a single topic, with fairly clear speech. (This is what I'm using Avatar for in Spanish.) And you work on that specific audio for a while. After you do this, well, maybe you can only understand Avatar, and even then, you'll understand the episodes you studied better than new episodes. But then you could pick up a second series, or read a big fat book. Now you have two examples of narrow input. Do this a few times over, and it starts to generalize. But there should at least be "narrow" progress visible the whole time.

Listening is just brutal in general. Understanding full speed speech between two natives who know each other well is one of the last skills most people pick up. Even people who've spent 5 years studying grammar in class get wrecked the first time they try to watch native TV. Dragging compehension up from A2 to C1 is a giant project, and one which definitely benefits from input. But still, if you can't point back and say, "Well, at least I've gotten better at this book/series/TV show/newspaper" after 30 hours of work, it's time to be very suspicious.

I almost agree with this, but with a few differences.

I'm always fascinated about how you and I often use methods which look massively different on the surface, but which appear more similar when looked at in detail.

No.2 is covered by my reference to extensive activities - except that I do use repetition during my intensive study sessions and don't think that it is worth trying to do extensive input activities before you almost can understand it (let's call it "i+1" or comprehensible input)

All things being equal, I agree that it's most agreeable and productive to work with things that require me to do a few seconds of deciphering, but which are otherwise readable. But I honestly can't stand most graded readers. And I've found that even quite difficult books (relative to my level) often become pretty readable after 500 pages or so.

So sometimes, I'm in favor of going "full steam ahead." Sometimes this means making a bilingual text using Bertalign plus some custom code. In the past, this once meant "reading" a book where I was only getting the gist.

But given a choice between wading through a book that's far above my level, or watching an interesting nature documentary series that I can understand if I pay close attention? I'm going to go with the easier option.

No.4: Grammar needs to be practiced separately, and it should definitely not be put off for months. But the purpose of doing grammar studies in parallel with 1 & 2 is that you can remember what you have learned and use it for 1 and 2 - and you should not expect to learn everything from day 1.

I actually suspect that my little laminated grammar sheet is very similar to the ones you produce by hand. And yours gives you the advantage of having copied it all out. But it's great to have a bunch of dense tables showing inflections, plus some notes pointing out various common surprises and curiosities. And it's possible to go quite far using grammar that fits on a couple of dense pages.

But then there are things like the Egyptian verb, where trying to do a formal grammatic analysis is going to ensnare me in endless complications. The academics have been fighting over Egyptian verbs for many decades now, with the two camps known as the Standard Theory and the verbalist or "No-So-Standard Theory". The verbalists have definitely taken the upper hand since the 80s, but the remaining Standard Theory supporters apparently aren't out of the fight yet. But what I can do is learn how Egyptian verbs are inflected, and see lots of examples in context, and try to get a feel for when which forms are used.

Concerning French and the use of bloodhounds: the purpose of this exercise is primarily to allow you to hear what ACTUALLY is being said instead of trying to guess what it means. That means that you in French will hear a lot of 'word collocations' that start with l' alone or le or la or les, but still pronounced as if they belong to one long word. Fine, that's essentially also what you meet when you try to hear typical endings in any inflected language- recurring small things. But If you at least can hear THAT kind of structure then you are better off than a person who hears French for the first time and thinks that it sounds like the gurgling of a semiplugged drain. And when somebody telsl you about pronoms atones (unstressed pronouns) you'll know what it is you have heard.

I will need to puzzle over this more—I'm finding Spanish listening to be a very different experience than French listening, strictly on a practical level.

[Slowpoke]

I only have an axe to grind with certain claims being made; I listed them in my OP. In my defense, I also listed the benefits, which overlap with what you said below. I did not claim to be familiar with Dreaming Spanish when I made the post; now I understand that it does not include reading. I’m familiar with ALG, and when I saw so many people throwing around the term CI these days, I assumed Dreaming Spanish and other copycat sites must be using reading too. I guess I was assuming they are a sort of hybrid ALG which includes reading, which makes no sense now that I think of it. I was wrong.

I mean right from the start, you're saying "CI is not a method" but looking for "Useful info about CI methods" so I'm not sure what to take from this other than you're deeming it not a valid way to learn a language. Please correct me if I'm misreading!

You are misreading. I’m against calling CI a method because the term "comprehensible input" is already used for something else very specific in language learning – input that can be comprehended. So I want people to say CIM, Dreaming in Spanish, ALG, or something like that…not just CI. I’m not saying it’s an invalid way of learning a language; I’m saying it’s an invalid name for a language learning method.

For part 1 - again I’m confused. There are tons of people on the subreddit who have never studied grammar explicitly. They said that it didn’t take long to get comfortable with speaking. I don’t get how these are fake benefits if they’re speaking Spanish. Although if you mean that they are understating/not telling the whole story re: grammar I’d be very interested because that is soooo common with every language learners take hahaha

For part 2 - Ahh, I see what you mean. I had actually never heard of someone doing this before your post about it, hence my confusion lol, but I would totally agree that just comprehensible input shouldn’t be called a method. It’s just the fun part

[Cainntear]

I actually have my favorite little diagram that tries to explain what I'm doing:



I have a longer explanation in my log, but basically, my goal at each step is to find some trick—any trick—which allows me to understand some bit of "input" in the target language. And then I repeat that moment of comprehension until it becomes almost automatic. The repetition may take the form of reviewing the original input, or of consuming large amounts of similar input.

This is part of the problem with Krashen's thinking.

He keeps saying "this doesn't work, that doesn't work, only comprehensible input works" and then "anything works if it makes input comprehensible", which is a total cop-out. Learning the language makes input comprehensible... but we're not allowed to do anything that he calls "learning" because "we don't learn languages -- we acquire them". He can't lose an argument because there's never any clear goalposts, and he just keeps telling you they're somewhere else every time you kick the ball.

I do look up grammar. Occasionally. In strictly limited doses.

Yes, but the grammar book is significantly smaller than the dictionary. Grammar should be a minority of study time, if you're doing it right. If the grammar takes up lots of your time, it's not a good grammar book.

But I have a 6-page laminated grammar summary, and I've recently started learning the conjugation tables of common verbs using this handy Anki deck. And the grammar study review is useful, though—like Assimil—I tend to delay it until well after I've seen the form in context. There's no reason why I can't start by watching Spanish TV, and then later circle back and learn to properly conjugate ser.

I learned Spanish without deliberately learning conjugation tables -- my ability to construct a conjugation table for a regular verb comes from me knowing what a conjugation table is (from my French and Italian study) and knowing what the individual conjugations are.

There isn't a simple choice between "input" and "tables" -- I learned my conjugations through the Michel Thomas course. That was very heavy on L1 use, and every exercise was translation EN->ES.

But my larger point was that we've been remixing a small number of familiar ideas in simple combinations for generations now. Each becomes a popular fad, typically because it successfully addresses the weaknesses of the preceding fad. But the new fad introduces weaknesses of its own, and so the cycle continues.

Ah but the latest cycle of the system is TOTALLY DIFFERENT because [insert minor change here before publishing -- ed]!!!
</sarcasm>

Well, for Spanish, I was literally watching TV with partial comprehension before I actually started properly learning my conjugation tables. My approach may not have been "pure", but it was extremely heavily biased towards comprehensible input.

But again, you already knew the concept of conjugation tables, and you already had the shape of them in your head from French. You therefore weren't baffled by seemingly random changes of the word. You didn't really need much grammar instruction because you already had the shape of the grammar in your head and just needed to fill in the boxes. Most people learning most languages aren't that lucky -- they need to identify the boxes as they go.

Yes, and this is where many enthusiastic reformers fail—they discover a method which works for themselves, but which isn't actually reproducible for a broad population of students.

It isn't reproducible because they haven't identified what the "method" genuinely is -- they are focusing on (my favourite term these days) the superficial activities, but they can't identify the strategies they use to acutally complete the activity.

I absolutely believe that "10,000 sentences" worked for Khatzumoto personally.

As do I, but I don't believe he accurately described what he did with them.

I mean, can you imagine if someone was to say "to master the Rubik's Cube, you just need to spend 1000 hours practicing with one -- that's all I did." What is he not saying? He's not saying how to practice, and obviously spending 1000 doing and undoing the same motions won't teach you how to solve a Rubik's Cube; and similarly no-one with a mass exposure method ever tells you in detail all the things they did to play around with the content.

For example, I recall the story of one poor woman who just completely failed to understand the ideas that Spanish verbs needed to be conjugated. She'd just stick random forms of verbs into her sentences—sometimes the infinitive, sometimes a different form. If I were responsible for teaching her, I would reach straight for some grammatical worksheets or some FSI drills, and I would use them to try to explain the ideas of "person" and "number". Whatever is going on with her isn't going to be fixed by piling on more input.

But you're going from one extreme to the other, and Krashen's Input Hypothesis was a response to problems of what came before him -- i.e. New Key/Army Method.

The FSI drills were grammar abstracted too far away from communicative meaning, and Krashen went to the opposite extreme: sentences relying on communicative meaning with no focus on forms. Swinging between extremes might work for a minority, but finding middle ground is likely to work for more people.

That was one of the greatest strengths of MT: he used sentences with a lot of communicative meaning in exercises deliberately practicing particular grammatical rules and patterns. The grammar rule was learnt as a way of expressing ideas that you want to express.

What is more meaningful to you:
I want it, but I don't have it.
or
The polar bear ate the salmon.
..?

All that said, I do lean heavily towards input.

But as others have tried to say... who doesn't?
There can't be many successful learners who haven't consumed a lot of input, and very often I see people talking up CI because they do more media consumption than formal study. And they keep asserting that they *believe* that the formal study was unnecessary or otherwise unimportant.

[bombobuffoon]

Rather I was asking more of a rhetorical question, am I doing CI wrong, or am I actually doing it right and its just really slow? Of course, who can tell? I consider CI to be learning by listening. The problem (in part) with CI is that its so slow its difficult to tell or measure if it works at all.

At the very least, if you spend 30 working on a given type of content (say, a CI course or a TV show), you should be able to rewind 30 hours, start over, and see clear progress. If the old material doesn't get easier after 30 days of studying for 1 hour/day, something has gone very wrong, and it's time to change strategy. Or at least that's my experience.

A common pattern is what Krashen called "narrow listening". The idea is that you pick a single source of audio, on a single topic, with fairly clear speech. (This is what I'm using Avatar for in Spanish.) And you work on that specific audio for a while. After you do this, well, maybe you can only understand Avatar, and even then, you'll understand the episodes you studied better than new episodes. But then you could pick up a second series, or read a big fat book. Now you have two examples of narrow input. Do this a few times over, and it starts to generalize. But there should at least be "narrow" progress visible the whole time.

Listening is just brutal in general. Understanding full speed speech between two natives who know each other well is one of the last skills most people pick up. Even people who've spent 5 years studying grammar in class get wrecked the first time they try to watch native TV. Dragging compehension up from A2 to C1 is a giant project, and one which definitely benefits from input. But still, if you can't point back and say, "Well, at least I've gotten better at this book/series/TV show/newspaper" after 30 hours of work, it's time to be very suspicious.

Interesting regarding "narrow listening". Although I am not confident you can count understanding what you have listened to multiple times over as progress.

Indeed this "narrow listening" has been somewhat of a problem. In January I worked all month on one 15 minute piece from CI course. I can understand the whole piece to about 90% comprehension. Of course I completely memorized the piece after a month, but is that progress...surely no.

I can't just take that 15 minutes and transfer that to a TV show on a similar topic. However I can understand some of the same narrators material across other pieces, yes, but I cannot transfer this outside that sphere. I have worked through several of these pieces, and have yet to realize any transferable knowledge.

This leads me to conclude whats happening is the opposite of generalisation..specialisation. My brain is learning to understand the narrators voice, the narrators speech patterns, the way the narrator tends to phrase language.

Now I am sure I have gained something generally useful from that 15 minute piece, however maybe its just one or two words, used in a certain conjugation. That could be the only gain. As you say Listening is damn tough but for a month of investment that's really not great gains.

This is not just the case with that one narrator. I have found that watching TV series or films I get very good at understanding those shows. But a new show that I am not used to, will seem impossibly difficult at first. I often need a few months to get used to a new show.

Now, sometimes now and again I definitely can pinpoint words (or concepts) that have leapt across the boundary on that show to another. Indeed I can even identify where I picked the word up from. That is generalization. But its a lot less than expected. Its not a quick process that I can gauge generalization progress. Generalisation is progress....specialisation is nearly just...memorisation.