Is consuming material that's beyond your "comprehensible input" level ever BETTER than understanding what you consume?

[Khayyam]

When you finished your brutal Japanese book, did you find that most of the words and phrases in the book at least rang some kind of bell whenever you encountered them from that point on? Maybe you didn't instantly get them, but you thought "I know I've seen you before"? I find that "I know I've seen you before" combined with context is often enough to enable me to get them after just a few seconds.

And Re: doing a lot of reasonable/easy vs. a little bit of hard: IME with German, consuming (I hate that word but what else means both reading and listening?) a lot of material (also kinda hate that word) is indeed the fastest way to the summit, but I think that grinding so hard in the beginning, and spending so much time on each work, got me to a place where I could mass-input advanced stuff sooner than would have been the case otherwise. So, I likely spent less time mass-inputting than I would have with a gentler learning curve, but the mass-inputting I did was of higher quality.

[Iversen]

Paul Nation was reacting to the claim that had been floating around associated with comprehensible input that you only needed to understand 80% of the language for it to qualify as CI. (I don't believe this was anything Krashen said, but just a guideline that emerged from teachers with no real research behind it.)

And Nation did a good job in showing that at least those claimed 80% were nonsense - most readers would feel deeply uncomfortable if they didn't know 20% of the words in their texts - above 90% known headwords is more realistic. But it still doesn't indicate which percentage words you are prepared to either not know or just know at some fuzzy level (like: yes, that's probably some kind of flower rather than a sail or body part), and giving a fixed percentage is also not taking differing levels of patience into account. If I know that I'm studying and that I'm studying a weak language to boot then I don't expect to understand everyting. However if I'm studying intensively (where I in principle do want to understand everything) then my level of patience with unknown words is paradoxically lower than if I'm on holiday and just have bought a newspaper or a sci mag in the local vernacular - but I counter this by (if possible) working on a bilingual text and keeping my green grammar sheets and a real grammar and at least one dictionary within reach. Aye, I might even keep Google translate open to check irregular inflected forms which may not be easy to look up in a standard dictionary. The 98% may be realistic here, but not when I just read for fun. That being said, if I ran into ten unknown words in each line then it would also be too much.

On a more anecdotical level: I bought a Modern Greek textbook and an old, but good Langenscheidt dictionary near the end of my university time in 1980 or so, but never really got started. When I visited Rhodes in 2006 and Athens in 2007 I bought parallel guide books in Greek AND in some other language - so apparently I had already sensed back then that bilingual texts were the way to go. But I actually didn't start out using them right away, and when I did decide to learn Greek I didn't systematically use the fact that I had two parallel books (foolish me!). Nay, I started out translating a whole damned guide to Rhodes into Danish, and at that time MOST of the words were unknown to me. OK, I survived the ordeal and may even have learrnt something from it (even though I only invent my wordlist system a couple of years later), but today I follow the line that studying a text should be so easy that you should understand most of it - and the rest should be within reach after a peek into a translation and/or a dictionary. Or in other words: it should be 'comprehensible' in my personal un-Krashenite interpretation of the term.

[leosmith]

When you finished your brutal Japanese book, did you find that most of the words and phrases in the book at least rang some kind of bell whenever you encountered them from that point on?

Some would ring a bell, some wouldn't until I looked them up again. But the problem was that there was still about the same percentage of unknown words. Clearly, I needed to do a lot more reading.

[Cainntear]

I have been a huge fan of Dr.Brown's listening approach(his methodology allows me to develop good pronunciation) and also a huge fan of Dr Krashen's narrow reading. Narrow reading allows me to acquire repetitive words naturally. I pick up good parts from every method, for example, I even pick up a good part of L-R system. if I really love a book and really want to cement it deeply on a subconscious level, I choose this method.

This comment kind of does the usual thing of picking up an idea then waking step by step away from it.

You start talking about Krashen, who was explicitly talking about classroom teaching, not self-instruction. Krashen Talked about mayor reading in terms of set texts, and whether it was explicit it unspoken a teacher would be in a position to develop a rough feel for which books work and which don't have enough repetition.

But you're talking about just picking up books and going for it, and then you say this:

Language schools and publishers are a million dollar industry. Again you can not blame them I mean for example people who study languages as a profession they have to bring food as well on the table so dissecting the language is the best approach for them since they can evaluate the performance of each student through tests.

Are you placing the teaching profession in contrast to Krashen?
Krashen's thinking was highly fashionable at one point, particularly within the USA. Krashen's heyday was the 80s, just when schools were doing it their "language labs" (a previous educational fashion trend that wasn't really working). If the teaching profession ditched it, that kind of says a lot.

You're right that Krashenite stuff is hard to evaluate, but what's the point you're trying to make? I'm assuming that the implication is that it's teachers or schools being officious and (dare I say it) lazy and just ticking boxes, but there's absolutely more to it than that: it's schools acting in the interests of all pupils.
If you do something that's hard to evaluate as you go along, you won't know who is struggling with it until very late. In this case, if you believe in the acquisition-learning distinction and talk at the until they "acquire", you do not know whether they *are* acquiring, and you can only know whether they *have* acquired or not at the end. There is no reliable way to judge when intervention is required and what that intervention should be.
As a result,you've got to either justify abandoning the weaker learners as hopeless cases, or say that even if CI is the best thing for good learners, it's unusable for a mixed class.

Well actually, there's a third alternative: you continue to believe in the ideology and just try to make the lesson materials simpler and simpler until the weak students acquire, and before you've found that sweet spot you've already noticed that the string learners are bored out of their wits and have stopped paying attention. So if CI is right, the teachers have to make the impossible choice between only teaching the strong learners or only teaching the weak learners.

Krashen's thinking left schools because it was tried and find to be unworkable.

The self-learner cannot follow Krashen, because Krashen's talking about teaching.

Krashen's one of those things that was ditched because whether he's right or not in theory, there's no path to putting his ideas into practice.

[zac299]

I'm a printed-book diehard, and my solution (as I've probably mentioned an excessive number of times) is to first read (or just skim) a chapter while marking all the words I don't know, and then to make a list of translations of all those words, which I print out and refer to while rereading the chapter. I just read it over and over again while referring to my list, as many times as it takes until I don't need the list. I can have 30 new words per page, and this method works--it just takes longer, naturally.

I like the sounds of this method.

When you do this, is there a point of diminishing returns when you just decide to move onto totally new material and start again?

I'd imagine if you read, for example, a 100 page book for the first time, the amount of new words will be pretty high.

Going back, making a list of all new words at the end of reading, alphabetizing the new words, then setting about re-reading the book would be a great use of time the 2nd (And 3rd? 4th?) time through.

Have you noticed a pattern how many re-reads you typically do before you find it a to be a better ROI starting on a new book and repeating this process, compared to going through the book X more times?

[MorkTheFiddle]

.

Have you noticed a pattern how many re-reads you typically do before you find it a to be a better ROI starting on a new book and repeating this process, compared to going through the book X more times?

I can contribute a tiny bit of relevant data to your question.
Early on in trying to improve my comprehension of spoken French, I hit upon a volume of short stories by Anna Gavalda. I listened and read along to the stories. One of them--I don't remember now which one--I read and listened to at least 20 times. For me, when I try something like this, listening and reading over and over, it is an absolute MUST that I really, really enjoy the material.
Maybe not useful a prompt for you, but long forms don't work for me. Short stories, poems and songs (which are of course poems in and of themselves*) suit me far better.

*LyricsTraining (shout out to Serpent for this) is good for songs, as is Readlang (if it's still in business ).


Good luck and have fun with your project.

[Khayyam]

I'm a printed-book diehard, and my solution (as I've probably mentioned an excessive number of times) is to first read (or just skim) a chapter while marking all the words I don't know, and then to make a list of translations of all those words, which I print out and refer to while rereading the chapter. I just read it over and over again while referring to my list, as many times as it takes until I don't need the list. I can have 30 new words per page, and this method works--it just takes longer, naturally.

I like the sounds of this method.

When you do this, is there a point of diminishing returns when you just decide to move onto totally new material and start again?

I'd imagine if you read, for example, a 100 page book for the first time, the amount of new words will be pretty high.

Going back, making a list of all new words at the end of reading, alphabetizing the new words, then setting about re-reading the book would be a great use of time the 2nd (And 3rd? 4th?) time through.

Have you noticed a pattern how many re-reads you typically do before you find it a to be a better ROI starting on a new book and repeating this process, compared to going through the book X more times?

Personally, I don't think I'd ever make a new vocab list for an entire book at once--not even a book that was only 100 pages. (Unless it was very easy reading and there were only a few new words per page--that'd likely be manageable.) I'd still take it a chapter at a time--or if there were no chapters, I'd divide the book into logical sections myself and treat those as chapters.

I would never alphabetize my lists because 1) my vocab lists only include the translations, not the original words, and 2) I like the translations to appear in my lists in the same order in which the original words appear in the chapter I'm working on. This gives me the ability to scan ahead down the list so I can anticipate the stumbling-block words that are about to appear. This is especially useful if there are a bunch of stumbling-block words that come at me in quick succession. Before I reach them, I can scan ahead in my list of translations and read something like assembly-council, prohibition-interdict-forbiddance, eloquent-strenuous-studious (actual example from my Persian study today) and keep those concepts in my head as I brace myself for the cluster. It can also be useful to scan the entire list before I start reading. Just having a good idea of which words are in it, and in which order, is often enough to spare me having to look at the list while I'm reading. If a word comes up that obviously refers to some kind of guard or jailkeeper, and if I remember having seen the word constable in the list, then I likely don't need to look at it.

Re: diminishing returns: if I can effortlessly understand most everything in the audio recording while I'm walking around, doing chores, etc., then I consider it time to move on. I often go back and check sections that give me trouble, but I'm not aiming for absolute perfection.

I almost never read whole books multiple times; I just repeat each chapter until I've got it. A strategy that I used with German, and that I'll likely repeat with Persian, was to put each chapter of a novel through my meat grinder one at a time right up to the climax, and then go back and listen to the whole book from beginning to end uninterrupted and finally find out how it ends. Tormenting myself with curiosity like that was an effective way to sustain my interest.

I can't say that there's a typical number of repetitions before I'm ready to move on. Sometimes it's three, sometimes it's dozens.

[Khayyam]

.

Have you noticed a pattern how many re-reads you typically do before you find it a to be a better ROI starting on a new book and repeating this process, compared to going through the book X more times?

I can contribute a tiny bit of relevant data to your question.
Early on in trying to improve my comprehension of spoken French, I hit upon a volume of short stories by Anna Gavalda. I listened and read along to the stories. One of them--I don't remember now which one--I read and listened to at least 20 times. For me, when I try something like this, listening and reading over and over, it is an absolute MUST that I really, really enjoy the material.
Maybe not useful a prompt for you, but long forms don't work for me. Short stories, poems and songs (which are of course poems in and of themselves*) suit me far better.

*LyricsTraining (shout out to Serpent for this) is good for songs, as is Readlang (if it's still in business ).


Good luck and have fun with your project.

Oh yes, songs! I think learning songs in this way generally makes more sense than reading whole chapters of books when you're just starting. I started learning German with songs, and I learned quite a few before I moved on to books. The reason I'm not doing the same thing with Persian is that I've found Persian songs to be even more crammed with idioms than Persian in general. At least with prose, you tend to have a lot of non-idiomatic language surrounding the idioms to help you sort them out, but with songs it's often idiom-idiom-idiom. Sometimes I'll find myself staring at Persian lyrics and wondering if I'm looking at a standard Persian idiom, or some figure of speech that the lyricist came up with himself.

Re: the importance of enjoying the material: yes, absolutely. This could be seen as an argument for learning languages rather than just reading in your native language; you're encouraged to be careful and discriminating since you'll be spending so much more time on each work.

[Cainntear]

I almost never read whole books multiple times; I just repeat each chapter until I've got it. A strategy that I used with German, and that I'll likely repeat with Persian, was to put each chapter of a novel through my meat grinder one at a time right up to the climax, and then go back and listen to the whole book from beginning to end uninterrupted and finally find out how it ends. Tormenting myself with curiosity like that was an effective way to sustain my interest.

I did something similar with a Spanish TV series. I think I watched it about a third of the way through, then rewatched from the start when I was about a third of the way in, then again approximately two-thirds of the way through as things were ramping up. I was pleasantly surprised that I was picking out more of the language.

But also, there were things that were a bit subtle and passed me by on first viewing because of a lack of immediate relevance... but that just meant they were hints towards the series climax, and I caught most of them on second viewing, and the second viewing was right before the big series ending that the hints were pointing to, so it worked great.

[Iversen]

About rereading: I sometimes use my bilingual study texts as goodnight reading because 1) they are easier than new materials, 2) I get a repetition for free, 3) with bilingual study texts I don't have to look things up. But apart from my goodnight reading (which has to be effortless) I prefer reading or studying new things.

If I have worked hard on a text in a weak language I may repeat it as part of the first round, but then I do the reread/restudy after just a few sentences or a paragraph - not after I have read the whole book.

Because of this I would rarely reread a whole book, and if I did so so then it would only happen several years after the first run - and it would be for the sake of the content. For instance I recently reread a Romanian translation of Sach's Musicophilia because 1) the topic really interests me, 2) I like the way the author writes about concrete cases, 3) I have to keep my Romanian reading skills alive. And when I reread old popular science magazines I must also have read them at least once before - but that could twenty years ago. In other words I can't say that I typically reread things because I didn't understand them the first time. I try hard to understand things already during round one - and normally succeeds.

So to get an overview and to get a second glance at the new vocabulary a second round might be a good idea, but it would also be boring ...