Ezy Ryder wrote:... discussion on comprehensible input, vocabulary, and grammar...
Sorry for not explicitly quoting parts of your post. I'm not really sure how to reply in part to anything you've said, so I think maybe replying to the whole is better.
I first off want to clarify that I'm not saying that the 95% input has failed to help me learn Korean. I have progressed and I believe if I continue with the same paradigm, I will continue to learn and progress.
More to the point is that my time is very limited. 1 hr a day (roughly) is not a lot of time for language learning. So I really want to ensure I get the most out of the time I spend because it may well be the difference between being able to hold a conversation in x years time versus x * 2 years time. The savings in calendar days drive my desire to make the most of my time.
To put it succinctly: This is about whether I could have made more progress in the past 300+ hours if I had spent my time differently.
I am very taken aback by your suggestion that I should know 10000+ words. I don't even think it would have been humanly possible for me to achieve this in the time I've spent! Maybe if all I did with my time was study flashcards. So clearly we're not quite on the same page at some level for either the meaning of 'known', or 'word'.
First off my estimate is really just a 'best guess'. I have absolutely no way to know or measure it, but I've chosen a conservative range because I think language learners have a tendency to overestimate their skills.
My definition of 'word' is exclusively the base form of it only. So for Korean the unconjugated (or dictionary form) of a verb would count as a single item. I am excluding all the various grammatical principles which might transform it in some way. Similarly for nouns - the pluralization of them is a very simple and fixed rule so I don't include the pluralized form of the noun in my vocabulary estimation.
My definition for 'known' is that I should be able to immediately recognize and understand a word in its written form. So you could show that word to me without any context on a piece of paper and I would know at least one meaning for it. My recollection of its meaning should be fairly close to immediate because a text comprising of only known words to me should be something I can freely read, spending very little mental energy trying to remember definitions for words.
So this being said, if I were to expect myself to know 10000 words it would mean:
Every day during my 1 hour split between reading/listening and looking up grammar, I'll know 27 new words such that I can immediately recognize them. If this _is_ where I should be, I would expect that (grammar not withstanding) I'd be able to freely read a novel by now and that seems a little too incredible.
Now you do mention the i+1 Comprehensible Input. A year ago when I discovered Steve Kaufmann, he mentioned Krashen whom I then looked up and watched various lectures given by him. So it's not a definition I'm unfamiliar with.
It makes a lot of sense. I entirely agree - in part when I look back at the difference between how well I did in English during my school years and how poorly I did in Afrikaans, it wasn't just that I was reading in English. It was that I was working through text I largely understood. Understanding the meaning of what is being written being the important part (I think).
For example I read The Hobbit at an early age and the language was a little beyond me but I understood the meaning and followed the story. However I also used to read The Hardy Boys - perhaps not at the same age I read The Hobbit but I dont recall. What I do recall is that the books were pretty easy for me to read and thats in part why I enjoyed them so much. However one book kept talking about them going to the 'island' and I read it every time as "is land". I finished that book and the last few chapters were very confusing. They were talking a lot about this "is land" place and it made little sense. Just that one word did a lot of damage to my ability to follow the story.
So I've stopped searching for the holy grail of "i+1" because I feel the definition is very nebulous and more specifically this content does not exist in large quantities for the beginner learner. I think it applies very much to the intermediate learner and this is why Krashen mentions (in the 3 or 4 talks I've watched of his) examples of students free-reading story books. It kind of implies they are already passed the beginner level and this is where they have opened up a large volume of potential material to themselves which more or less can be shoe-horned into an "i+1" definition.
You may be correct that the material I have used is not ideal. I have, however, bought the TTMIK beginner material with translations. I have worked through it numerous times over the year. Similarly I've gone through all the beginner material I can find on LingQ. I have also worked through many of the TTMIK Iyagi ("natural conversation" series). Some of them read very easily to me and some of them I can even listen to and have large sections where I understand everything they are saying.
The easy way I've tested how well I understand the text is by translating sections of it and then comparing with the English translations (which I bought some of from TTMIK for this purpose).
So you are right that I need comprehensible input. You may be right that I should try find input which is more comprehensible than that which I am working with. However I don't think the difference would be as marked as if I had incorporated more output into my language learning. Or at least this is my conclusion after looking back and taking everything into consideration.