. By "traditional" I mean: grammar-first, words memorization (any explicit vocabulary study, no matter if one uses word lists or looks up new words and tries to remember them), using translation as a means of understanding a TL. The first years of learning English I used the latter two excessively. I looked up every word I didn't know or had even a slightest doubt of the meaning, and I translated words and sentences in my head because translation was the only way I knew to understand a foreign language. The only reason why I skipped the "grammar-first" was because I'd tried it before and those attempts had never lasted long. But still I had that conception of the importance of learning grammar explicitly, so I decided to at least skim the rules. Even though I forgot almost all of them later, and during the first four years hardly would be able to recall the names of the tenses, it wasn't like I started knowing nothing about the English grammar. With French I started almost from zero - in the beginning I knew such grammar constructions as "ne ... pas", "rien", "personne", and that was it. Back to the experiment and "my beliefs". As I said in the post above I don't find learning through input to be really slower than what I call traditional approaches. At the same time I assume that my vocabulary size in French may be smaller than the one I had in Englsih after a year of learning the language. It's hard to tell though since I don't have the numbers, it's just an assumption. But no matter what the numbers might be the main difference between my French and my one-year-old English vocabulary is the quality of the knowledge. Back then with English if I knew a word that meant that I propbably knew its dictionary definition, I knew it in the form of "English word - Russian translation". Nominally I might have known more English words back then but my knowledge of the French words I know is deeper. Now if I know a word I really know it, I've seen it in different contexts, I know different meanings of that words, etc. Because often to learn a word from input you need to encounter it several times. And I don't really need to memorize words, I just remember them. Sometimes I memorize a whole phrase, if I've heard it in a series, for instance, and only later on, when I see it written somewhere I'll learn the words it consists of. In one of my earlier posts I described the process of figuring out the meaning of new words. But that's just the conscious part of the process, I can't really explain how it happens when there are not so many known words, or no visual clues like when I'm reading a book. The idea behind learning a language from video content is simple: you see a picture, hear words, contect them, and draw a conclusion. But it seems to be just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and mostly the acquisition of new words happens subconsciously because I don't know how else I can explain what happened to me when I started reading my first French book. At first all I saw was a page full of words I didn't know or couldn't recognized because of the crazy spelling. Pronouns, probably, were the only words I could understand. I guess, if it weren't an experiment I would stop right then, but because I was doing it for the experiment's sake I continued. I just kept reading trying to figure out what was going on in the book. As I said before I knew the plot but only superficially. I knew it from an Italian mini-series that now seems to me to be rather an adaptation of a French mini-series (a rather loose one), and not an adaptation of the book. Besides, a book is a book, meaning there are lots of descriptions of places, weather, characters, also thoughts of those characters, their backstories, etc. So, all I could do in the beginning was just to read a text I didn't understand page after page. That was how my French reading started, and now I can trick the Dialang test into believing that I'm C1 in Reading
. At some point I just started to understand more, and then more, and more. Sometimes, I think after reading about a half of the book, I would read a sentence, about ~ 7 words long or so, in which I knew maybe two words but could understand every word I saw. I don't how and why that happened, it just did. The only explanation I have is that I'd seen the words before and actually knew them but only subconsciously. ...
As they say - to be continued...
but for the series I watched I was using Google translate instead. And I played with Anki for a while. Both times I would strain my ears trying to make out individual words to check their meaning in a dictionary (Google translate). Time would pass and I would learn almost nothing. With French it was almost literally nothing, maybe I learned a phrase of two but usually I just relied on cognates between French and English. After all, I was just dabbling in French. Eventually I gave up and striked out French from my list of the languages I'd like to learn. With Italian it was different; even though it had to take second place after English I was more serious about learning Italian than when I was toying with French. Yet, I wasn't learning much. My first break through happened when I watched an Italian mini-series with Russian subtitles. About four months later I decied to make an experiment of not-using dictionaries or anything of the kind for three months. That was when I found out that the meaning of almost any word could be learned from context. I think that three-months experiment was the first step to this French-without-textbooks-and-dictionaries one. What I wanted to say by writing all this is that I had to change the way I viewed language learning to eventually get some positive results. 
. According to many of those critical period theories at that time I had not yet reached the age when children lose their "sponge" ability. For quite a long time I thought that that grammar-translation method they used to teach us in school was the only way, or at least the only right way to learn a language. One of the goals I had for this experiment was getting rid of that traditional approach oriented view on the language learning process.