French via input training

[Stiv_MacRae]

I didn't set out to learn French. I just wanted to take a walk.

This post summarizes the "input" training method that I'm following for learning French that I referred to in my post in the "Krashen" thread.

I'm 72-years-old, and the centerpiece of my daily routine is a 1-hour walk. I got tired of listening to my own thoughts, so I thought, "why not French". I had a similar thought back in the 90s, when I had a long commute to and from work. I listened to a lot of French tapes and learned to say quite a few of things. I thought I'd do it again. I also thought that studying a second language would help keep my brain alive.

I'm not a complete beginner. Thirty years ago, I absorbed a Berlitz audio phrasebook, which consisted of the phrases you need to know when traveling. My pronunciation was good, but my comprehension was terrible. I could say a lot of things, but I understood almost nothing. I haven't used it in 20 years. I also completed two Paul Noble audiobooks, which explained how French is structured and how tenses are built. I do not, however, study grammar. I might generously have been described as Level A1 when I started my present program.

My current effort attempts to execute Steve Krashen's input hypothesis within the general guidance of polyglot, Steve Kaufmann. I read Krashen's 1982 book, and I've watched dozens of his YouTube presentations. I could give that presentation, myself, if I had to. I have watched as many Kaufmann videos as I can tolerate. I try to accommodate literally every little tip and trick the two of them have offered -- studying regularly; employing interesting material; utilizing both novelty and repetition; utilizing transcripts; utilizing both intensive and extensive reading; learning vocabulary in context; avoiding grammar; etc.

I got intrigued by a service called, "News in Slow French". That's not a good name. It really should be called "News in Clear French". It's not street French, which engenders its own set of issues. It's straight, middle-of-the-road, formal French the way a teacher would want you to use it. I thought I would use these French newscasts to get comfortable listening to the language and get up to speed on how Europeans are viewing world events.

The content for every 1-hour walk consists of 14 NISF stories at the "intermediate" level. Every day, one story is added and one is subtracted. Hence, it takes 14 days for a story to cycle thru the series. This cycling method satisfies Steve Kaufmann's recommendation for repetition and novelty. Cycling thru a story 14 times may seem like a lot, but it's completely consistent with Kaufmann's experience of listening to LingQ "mini stories" up to 50 times.

In order to comprehend the newscasts, I have to make them comprehensible. The content is at the B1-B2 level, which is about 5% above my current level of comprehension Hence, I spend a half-hour every day translating every new story after it enters the listening cycle. The first time I listen to a story, I will not have translated it. I do that to get a sense of whether my comprehension of raw material is improving. After that initial exposure, everything I listen to will have been translated.

My translations are fairly granular. People call this "intensive" reading. I want to know not only the individual words but the overall meaning of a particular passage. This is particularly important in French, which comes at you in smooth phrases rather than individual words. I also sort of enjoy seeing how French is engineered. This is as close as I come to studying grammar.

After the translation session, I devote a half-hour to reading a story out loud. The story I choose is one that is 7-days old, so I'm quite familiar with its content. The purpose of the oral reading is to smoothly speak the language is a manner intended to be understood. I liken this to what a musician does when he learns a new piece of music. There's a stage during which he's just learning the notes and playing them like a machine. Then there's a stage during which he's learning to express the music. That's what I'm doing when I read a French news story out loud. I'm expressing the meaning. This isn't output training because I'm speaking to my own ears and for my own comprehension.

Just translating the stories isn't enough. I learned that I have to read them, as well, in order to acquire the vocabulary. So, every morning before I go walking, I read thru the script. This takes as much time as actually listening to the material, because I want to hear the words in my head, not just read the English translation. This repeated reading satisfies Krashen's requirement to learn vocabulary in context, and it replaces traditional flashcard training.

So, every day is composed of 1 hour of reading, 1 hour of listening, 1/2 hour of translation and 1/2 hour of reading aloud. That's three hours, and it's the minimum daily package. To that I add two more optional pieces. The first is 1/2 hour reading France24. This is done at a high level and might be best described as "extensive" reading. I do not enjoy this, because I am generally frustrated by how little I understand. The second piece is a 1/2 hour spent watching a YouTube presentation of an InnerFrench podcast. I do this with French subtitles. Unlike reading France24, I really enjoy the InnerFrench podcasts.

If I were actually trying to learn French, I'd cut out the optional activities in my last paragraph and substitute some output activities. But I'm not trying to learn French. I just want to take a walk, listen to French and understand it.

I make no claims for the effectiveness of this program. Actually, my experience after 300 hours is that input training isn't very effective. I don't understand spoken French much better today than I did 300 hours ago. Will I continue? I don't know. My present process costs me well over 20 hours a week, which is a lot of time. I wanted to learn to understand spoken French, but I didn't expect to devote my life to it. To keep doing something, particularly something difficult, you need to have faith in the process as well as a sense of progress. I have a solid process, but even at my fairly high level of effort, progress is very slow.

[luke]

Very interesting post. Thank you for providing so much detail.

I also saw your other post, which was an unexpected bookend to this one. I'm one who tends to look for a tweak here and there rather than give up on what I've been doing.

I'm curious about several things:

Have you thought about cycling some of those old (30 day or 90 day) podcasts back into your rotation just to see how they feel?

Are there any words that have frustrated you because, "I hear that all the time and I've looked it up a few times, but it still eludes me"? For this sort of word, Anki may be helpful.

I understand you read aloud. Do you also shadow at times? Frequently?

Is the news interesting enough to keep your attention?

Looking forward to your future logs and participation on the Board.

[DaveAgain]

I make no claims for the effectiveness of this program. Actually, my experience after 300 hours is that input training isn't very effective. I don't understand spoken French much better today than I did 300 hours ago. Will I continue? I don't know. My present process costs me well over 20 hours a week, which is a lot of time. I wanted to learn to understand spoken French, but I didn't expect to devote my life to it. To keep doing something, particularly something difficult, you need to have faith in the process as well as a sense of progress. I have a solid process, but even at my fairly high level of effort, progress is very slow.

The activities you describe certainly sound like they ought be effective. I'll have faith for you!

If you join Mr Kaufmann's lingq.com website you could perhaps get some statistics demonstrating your progress, perhaps you'd appreciate that?

[Lawyer&Mom]

I took a different input based approach. I watched all 15 seasons of ER dubbed in French, around 250 hours. No transcripts, no repetition, just enjoying a TV show. (As much as I could. The first 50 or so hours were really rough. My comprehension leveled up every 50 hours or so.) I’m at around 575 hours now and I can listen to native podcasts, watch native movies and series without any problems. I don’t understand every word, but I can easily follow every conversation. Now I know you want something you can walk with, so a TV show might not work for you. (Those visual clues are so helpful at first!) Have you considered finding a podcast in an area of interest and just listening to it? It will take longer than you might think, but aim for 500 hours and you will be more than set.

[lusan]

I took a different input based approach. I watched all 15 seasons of ER dubbed in French, around 250 hours. No transcripts, no repetition, just enjoying a TV show. (As much as I could. The first 50 or so hours were really rough. My comprehension leveled up every 50 hours or so.) I’m at around 575 hours now and I can listen to native podcasts, watch native movies and series without any problems. I don’t understand every word, but I can easily follow every conversation. Now I know you want something you can walk with, so a TV show might not work for you. (Those visual clues are so helpful at first!) Have you considered finding a podcast in an area of interest and just listening to it? It will take longer than you might think, but aim for 500 hours and you will be more than set.

I did the same. It works.

[Stiv_MacRae]

Very interesting post. Thank you for providing so much detail.

I also saw your other post, which was an unexpected bookend to this one. I'm one who tends to look for a tweak here and there rather than give up on what I've been doing.

I'm curious about several things:

Have you thought about cycling some of those old (30 day or 90 day) podcasts back into your rotation just to see how they feel?

Are there any words that have frustrated you because, "I hear that all the time and I've looked it up a few times, but it still eludes me"? For this sort of word, Anki may be helpful.

I understand you read aloud. Do you also shadow at times? Frequently?

Is the news interesting enough to keep your attention?

Looking forward to your future logs and participation on the Board.

I haven't give up. I've just abandoned hope that input training is some kind of magic method.
I haven't recycled old material yet. Perhaps I should.
I'm totally frustrated looking up the same words time after time, but using Anki is a violation of principle.
I read aloud but never shadow. It's generally considered ineffective and is more about output than input.
Yes, French news holds my attention. Europeans appear to live in a very complex world.

[MorkTheFiddle]

What you have done is most impressive.
Reading your description of your method made me think right away about Luke and his methods. Have you read his log? If not, I suggest you have a look at it. His variations on what you do and his other methods might prove useful.
A variation on ANKI that is much more palatable to me than ANKI is Study Stack (though without the SRS element).
A free alternative to LingQ is LWT, though LWT is not so straightforward to install.

[Stiv_MacRae]

In my original post I described my "input" program for acquiring French and concluded by saying that it didn't work very well. What went wrong?

I think there are three possible explanations. The first is that perhaps I am just stupid, although Krashen says intelligence doesn't matter. I'm frequently accused of not being as smart as I think I am, so maybe that's it. I'm also old, but so are Krashen and Kaufmann. We could all have lunch together and not feel generationally out of place.

The second possibility is that Krashen is simply wrong. Perhaps his mistake was to apply pre-adolescent learning modalities to adults. Simply put, adults learn differently than children. There is a whole library of scientific literature on this topic, but Krashen appears to have dismissed it. A child's unstructured brain is a sponge that uncritically absorbs experience. The highly structured brain of an adult employs, and enjoys, more complex and comprehensive acquisition strategies. While children under the age of 10 may absorb their native language via comprehensible input, adults acquiring a second language do not, at least not as quickly. They can, however, employ many other methods unavailable to children.

This explanation is supported by the fact that NONE of the professional military and foreign service language academies, who aren't stupid and whose tens of thousands of annual graduates protect our lives, use Krashen's methods. Neither does Middlebury College. These academies rely on language structure, grammar, forced memorization and early speaking in an ultra-high-pressure environment. In fact, it would be hard to crank up the "affective filter" any higher than it is in the DLI program. Their methods may include comprehensible input, but they do not rely on comprehensible input.

The third explanation for my lack of progress is that I simply didn't give the process enough time. Three hundred hours over 15 weeks sounds like a lot, and it was. It felt like a part-time job. But perhaps the guidelines suggested by the various accrediting institutions are better applied to "learning" a language via study than to "acquiring" language via absorption. In his 1982 book, Krashen more or less supports this notion by suggesting that teachers grossly underestimate the amount of time that students should apply to language input. My experience suggests that the accrediting guidelines are off by at least a factor of 3 or 4. I now estimate that I would need to devote at least 1000 hours to my present program to become a semi-competent listener.

I'm inclined to believe that all three of these explanations are true. I think age and intelligence have an effect on language acquisition just like they do on learning to play the piano. I think that Krashen is somewhat wrong in ways others have already outlined. Finally, I definitely think that input learning takes a LOT of time, much more than commonly promoted. In fact, I'll bet many of my readers laughed when I suggested my 300-hour investment represented a lot of time. I'm laughing at my own naivety. After all, it took me 8-years to learn to speak English like an 8-year-old.

My recommendation to other people who want to follow the input path is to set aside a lot of time. You may ultimately reach your destination, but it's a long journey.

[Lawyer&Mom]

So how are you going to spend your next three hundred hours? Don’t give up now!

[uncertaingoblin]

On the other thread I criticized Krashen. Here I'm going to defend him a bit. I believe he prescribes what he does because he doesn't believe most people can tolerate any kind of language program or deliberate study, nor even looking up words as they read or watch a series. People like us are the outliers. Please forgive me for chaining off of your thread to ramble about my own thoughts for a minute.
To be perfectly honest I believe that the most valid method is the one that you actually do, because even if one method is more efficient than another, it seems to me that they all take a hell of a lot of time. Back in March 2021, I set off on tracking my reading time, stopping the clock each time I wasn't reading. When my experiment stopped in May 2021, I had accumulated 114 hours of reading. That's not 300, but, I distinctly remember imagining how much of a boost I thought I would get with another hundred hours, and how much I really ended up getting from it. It was the first major step to realizing just how long my goal is really going to take me. But I wasn't disappointed - that 114 hours made a noticeable difference. Ever since then it has been dawning on me more and more just how long this is going to take, but the beautiful thing is, the more I do it, the more I seem to love it. I cannot imagine ever going back to reading novels in English. I don't listen to anything in English either, well, unless it is language learning related. I am going to guess you are the same. At times I feel frustrated, like I just want to be able to read without looking anything up anymore. Maybe that's fair and part of the experience. I also feel like I wish I could understand more, yet, it appears I am constantly inching towards my goal. I believe we are driven insane by this, so to speak, because we love it. Perhaps the things we love drive us crazy. So maybe that's why Krashen doesn't really speak to us. In one video, (Maz Jobrani's Back to School interview, I believe it was) Maz mentions he wants to pick up Italian again, and that he plans on getting a dictionary to look up unknown words. Krashen cuts in - Don't do that - he says - it's too hard. You'll lose interest. Get lots of easy, interesting content to read. Don't look things up. - Well, that might be true for someone who doesn't want to learn a language.. in fact, I think it is true. But there's a problem - people who don't want to learn languages only really need to learn one language - English. I think his advice and strategies are built around this. People like us, as Krashen calls it - the lunatic fringe - don't really need this advice. I think most of us generally want to look up words, poke around with some grammar, for many of us our dream vacation is to be able to attend a semester at Middlebury. For most people, I think our idea of a good time is torture. To be totally transparent, right now I feel like I desire an easy or lazy way to study, but that's only after enthusiastically studying my TL for the past three years.
But I think we are here because we do want to learn languages, and sometimes, we feel frustrated by what we love. We look at Krashen and think it's nonsense, perhaps that is because it is nonsense from our perspectives, as language lovers. For regular non-English speaking Joe who likes to watch sports and just wants to get through his mandatory education, I bet Krashen is a godsend. Your post inspired me to ramble. I genuinely enjoyed reading it. You're a great writer, I must say. Most of all, I want you to know that I found what you said to be relatable, and it also reminded me that I'm not alone when I feel similarly to you.
My progress in French is slow too. French is also my target language, by the way. I guess I am trying to move away from thinking about where I want to progress to, and move more towards enjoying where I am with it in the moment. It's easier said than done of course, I mostly feel like I wish I was further along, but, it's a goal of mine now.