Krashen and "Krashenite"

[Cainntear]

And my point here is that this is not "comprehensible input". As Le Baron and Iversen discuss above, comprehensible input is about selecting and producing material and spontaneous input targeted to be immediately understandable to the listener.

There has never been any support by academics for incomprehensible input, except as a means of "tuning in your ear", and even that is hypothetical, with no experimental basis.

Here is a pretty good explanation of how this work.

'Does Input Have to Be "Comprehensible"?'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeOmc1nRGG4

Sorry, but a link to a video isn't a discussion. If you want to tell me that you're not into comprehensible input, then say it, because the main thing I'd said was that this isn't comprehensible input, and that it isn't what Krashen proposes.

I also said no academics support it, and Matt is not an academic.

I'm not going to spend quarter of an our watching a video on the grounds of a post that doesn't tell me why I should.

[Dragon27]

Well, to put it very roughly, there's a spectrum between a totally incomprehensible and comprehensible input and you can slowly climb it even if you're consuming the content that is only partially comprehensible.
He also hypothesizes that it may be more advantageous due to having more opportunities to learn (unlike in the situation where you already understand almost everything). He is careful to name it only a hypothesis (a few times, actually) and not a proven fact, and that you might, hypothetically, learn faster if you understood 95+%, but it's hard to consistently obtain content with this perfect degree of comprehensibility (always adjusted to your current level) and you would spend more time choosing the perfect learning material, rather than just watching what you like.

[Saim]

Matt also applied a very intense study regimen alongside consuming "incomprehensible input" (tons of intensive reading and adding 10 words a day to Anki + actively studying Japanese monolingual dictionary definitions). I remember him saying he would do intensive reading sessions of 2+ hours even when he was just an advanced beginner, which is more than I've ever been able to stomach in languages like, say, Urdu.

I do wonder whether the incomprehensible input really helped him along all that much or if he just got the impression that it was helping because he was noticing lots of increases in comprehension from studying constantly.

In any case, even if there is some marginal benefit to incomprehensible input, it sounds like a frustrating and inefficient way to learn. I think gradually increasing the proportion of extensive activities over time as you get better at the language is a lot more practical.

EDIT: (He also never watched shows for young children, as far as I'm aware.)

[TopDog_IK]

Well, to put it very roughly, there's a spectrum between a totally incomprehensible and comprehensible input and you can slowly climb it even if you're consuming the content that is only partially comprehensible.
He also hypothesizes that it may be more advantageous due to having more opportunities to learn (unlike in the situation where you already understand almost everything). He is careful to name it only a hypothesis (a few times, actually) and not a proven fact, and that you might, hypothetically, learn faster if you understood 95+%, but it's hard to consistently obtain content with this perfect degree of comprehensibility (always adjusted to your current level) and you would spend more time choosing the perfect learning material, rather than just watching what you like.

My experience with difficult immersion input "above my level" mirrors Matt's description in that video. If you immerse with difficult shows that you find very compelling, there is always a layer of new words and patterns emerging that are +1 for your level, that you can acquire. You can think of a very difficult show like a giant onion... no matter how big the onion is, there are always layers to peel. I started with a mixture of easy, medium and hard shows, and this worked out perfectly for me.

[Cainntear]

Well, to put it very roughly, there's a spectrum between a totally incomprehensible and comprehensible input and you can slowly climb it even if you're consuming the content that is only partially comprehensible.
He also hypothesizes that it may be more advantageous due to having more opportunities to learn (unlike in the situation where you already understand almost everything). He is careful to name it only a hypothesis (a few times, actually) and not a proven fact, and that you might, hypothetically, learn faster if you understood 95+%, but it's hard to consistently obtain content with this perfect degree of comprehensibility (always adjusted to your current level) and you would spend more time choosing the perfect learning material, rather than just watching what you like.

So the key thing in there seems to be this: a learner can't identify comprehensible input for themselves, which brings us back to a confusion about Krashen I spoke about earlier -- people keep saying Krashen's about self-learners, not classrooms, but that's absolutely not the case. Pure CI needs a teacher to supply, select, control and modify input. Krashen's own demonstration of absolute beginners' CI is him talking directly to the room.

My experience with difficult immersion input "above my level" mirrors Matt's description in that video. If you immerse with difficult shows that you find very compelling, there is always a layer of new words and patterns emerging that are +1 for your level, that you can acquire. You can think of a very difficult show like a giant onion... no matter how big the onion is, there are always layers to peel. I started with a mixture of easy, medium and hard shows, and this worked out perfectly for me.

It sounds to me that what you're saying is that incomprehensible input has no value per se, but that if you watch enough of it, you might find some comprehensible input somewhere in the middle. For an absolute beginner, that could mean spending hours watching videos and only getting minutes of actual learning out of it.

You earlier tried to apply ALG's 800 hours claim to an acquisition-for-TV approach, but ALG's hours were not only actively involve the students (as discussed earlier) but are tuned and selected to (hopefully) be comprehensible to the learner. 800 hours of comprehensible input is very different of 800 hours of input, only x% of which is comprehensible.

There are more efficient ways to start which makes CI far more C when you get to it... and Matt himself clearly uses active study, so you are currently pointing at something that in no way supports your claim.

[tractor]

I'm midway through the Assimil Occitan textbook which I use as goodnight reading, and as usual I'm also doing textstudies based on articles from wikipedia, popular science and tourism articles and sometimes even news from the internet. The Occitan thing is special insofar that it has short texts that are full of idiomatic phrases and special words from the popular spoken language - but luckily with a French translation. It's the kind of language you would expect to find in a novel rather than a textbook, and I frankly think that I'm better served with my non fiction articles when it comes to learning. Idioms can be hilarious, and if you can remember them you might even be able to put them to use in the unlikely case that you were confronted with an native Occitan speaker - but if I got in that situation I would be more confortable using a more boring kind of style with lots of 'international' words in the hope that my interlocutor also would refrain from exploring the most arcane corners of his/her native language.

I haven't used Assimil Occitan, and it may be better or worse than the average Assimil course, but one of the reasons that I like Assimil, in general, is that they teach idioms and colloquial expressions. Idioms and informal speech are not confined to "the most arcane corners" of the language. They are used all the time by ordinary people doing everyday things: at home, between colleagues at work, at the pub, going shopping etc.

[elAmericanoTranquilo]

Dr. Paul Nation had some light-hearted fun with this controversy during a talk he gave at the Foreign Service Institute:

"The person who gave the greatest emphasis to this was Stephen Krashen... we are really indebted to him... Now, Steve thinks that this is the only thing you need. Well, I think he's a quarter right."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mA5jFBF0U&t=445s

[Iversen]

(...) one of the reasons that I like Assimil, in general, is that they teach idioms and colloquial expressions. Idioms and informal speech are not confined to "the most arcane corners" of the language. They are used all the time by ordinary people doing everyday things: at home, between colleagues at work, at the pub, going shopping etc.

And those are exactly the things I won't be doing in Occitan since it's a language that is kept secret from casual visitors to Southern France. I have never heard anybody speak Occitan there, only Standard France with more or less patois.

An analogy would be a textbook where all examples were drawn from quantum physics.

[s_allard]

Dr. Paul Nation had some light-hearted fun with this controversy during a talk he gave at the Foreign Service Institute:

"The person who gave the greatest emphasis to this was Stephen Krashen... we are really indebted to him... Now, Steve thinks that this is the only thing you need. Well, I think he's a quarter right."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mA5jFBF0U&t=445s

Thanks so much for the link to a great talk by Paul Nation. I love his work, and I think everybody should listen to this video instead of wasting their time rehashing Krashenism. It’s aimed at people teaching English as a foreign language but the principles can be applied to self-learning.

The key point in the talk is that there are multiple processes – called strands – and many techniques that can be used to teach or learn a language. Input, output, word cards, dictation, deliberate language study, extensive reading, etc., it’s all there.

[Stiv_MacRae]

Dr. Paul Nation had some light-hearted fun with this controversy during a talk he gave at the Foreign Service Institute:

"The person who gave the greatest emphasis to this was Stephen Krashen... we are really indebted to him... Now, Steve thinks that this is the only thing you need. Well, I think he's a quarter right."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mA5jFBF0U&t=445s

Thanks for posting this link. I had a thread in the Language Logs section wherein I described my attempt to put Krashenism into action. It failed miserably, and I abandoned the experiment. I intended to post a follow-up in which I outlined my newfound wisdom regarding how a language out to be learned. But, this talk by Dr. Nation pretty much covers everything I was going to say, so you saved me a lot of effort.