How much should I understand something for it to be worth it?

[iguanamon]

There's a big difference between incomprehensible input and partially comprehensible input.
Anyway, I'm curious where you can find a "well prepared progression" of material, especially for free online.

I found almost everything I needed for a "well prepared progression" of material, for free when I was actively learning Haitian Creole. Some of that material you have to make yourself. See my post at the Haitian Creole Study Group for some ideas. It should be easier to do this for bigger languages.

[sporedandroid]

I mainly am studying from courses and find other ways to make input comprehensible. I hardly spend any time on listening to the radio.

[Serpent]

Depends on the type of content and on what exactly you understand. Are you learning Spanish and understanding 20% well? Are there some entire sentences you understand? Is it 20% with or without "cheating"? (visuals, parallel texts, popup dictionaries) Is the rest totally incomprehensible or are there many familiar words but you struggle to get the overall meaning? Does repetition help you understand better? Do the 20% make sense pragmatically?

Also, see this post about listening from the beginning.

[sporedandroid]

Depends on the type of content and on what exactly you understand. Are you learning Spanish and understanding 20% well? Are there some entire sentences you understand? Is it 20% with or without "cheating"? (visuals, parallel texts, popup dictionaries) Is the rest totally incomprehensible or are there many familiar words but you struggle to get the overall meaning? Does repetition help you understand better? Do the 20% make sense pragmatically?

Also, see this post about listening from the beginning.

I’d say 20% is a low estimate of what I can understand for Hebrew radio without cheating. Maybe less if the vocabulary or accent is weird. Sometimes I’ll understand 40% of the words, but it won’t quite make sense yet. On subs2srs it’s common for me to know the majority of the words or all the words, but it won’t make sense to me. Sometimes I’ll feel like I know what a radio show is about and almost follow the gist. I can understand entire phrases if they’re common phrases used in conversation. So I’ll understand radio better if it’s chatty than one long monologue.

[golyplot]

Wow, this thread sure got hostile in a hurry. Anyway, I figured I should clarify my views a bit.

First off, I'm not trying to say that anything you have to pay for is worthless, but rather that there are tradeoffs and limitations. To pick an extreme example, I'm sure that the most efficient way to learn is to go to an intensive immersion camp with 1:1 tutoring from an experienced teacher. But that's not feasible in most cases.

Apart from the obvious factor of cost, another limiting factor is effort. Studying textbooks, doing intensive exercises, etc. takes a lot of effort, which is a limited resource. Duolingo is relatively dumbed down and gamified, but I'd still go crazy if I did it for more than half an hour. The reason I favor watching TV as a study method so much is because it doesn't take any effort and is generally fun to do. It is leisure, not work. It may be less efficient than active study in terms of time, but the trick is that there is no tradeoff because the amount of effortful work you can do in a day is limited anyway.

Second, I am not saying that you should deliberately torture yourself. The ideal practice material is something that you A) enjoy and B) mostly understand. But that is easier said than done, and you have to work with what you have. Apart from that, it's hard to know what a show will be like until after you've started watching it, though there are principles you can follow (children's shows are easier than adult shows and dubs are easier than native material, so you should focus on those, especially when starting out). At any rate, I'm aghast at the idea that something isn't worth watching at all if you can't understand every nuance of every line of dialog.

Apart from that, comprehension is largely subjective anyway. 20% can mean different things to different people (or even the same person depending on their mood). Sometimes you'll be happy that you can follow most of the plot points and other times, you'll be unhappy that you didn't fully understand every line of dialog.

[sirgregory]

I will note that, a couple of years ago, Professor Arguelles posted two videos on YouTube on "reading" wherein he demonstrated that a level of compression of 90% was insufficient to grasping all of the essential information. Step-by-step, he showed how increments of 2% in comprehension revealed additional information and that a level of 98% comprehension was required for full comprehension.

I just watched some videos where he discusses this. I took his main point to be that you need surprisingly high comprehension (98%) to read literature straight through without any sort of crutch. At 95%, you might feel like it's going okay for the first few pages or chapters. However, over the course of a lengthy book, he says you will inevitably get lost. Hence, below 98% it's best to use some sort of crutch. Parallel texts, read translation first, dictionaries, etc. Or easier material.

[sirgregory]

I mainly am studying from courses and find other ways to make input comprehensible. I hardly spend any time on listening to the radio.

With written texts, if something is way too hard, you can take your time, look up words, etc. (intensive reading). But that isn't really feasible with the radio. This makes it of limited use in the early stages, aside from giving you a feel for the language and how it sounds. And it's hard to really pay attention for more than a minute to two unless you understand it pretty well. I prefer TV and movies over pure audio because you have the visual cues and can add subtitles.

[Serpent]

Again, this depends on the language. The Romance languages are never completely opaque for an English speaker. The Germanic languages love combining basic roots, so when you come across a word several times you may eventually deconstruct it.

As for Prof Argüelles, note that his focus is on fully appreciating the literature in the original. Even in L1 we need dictionaries and footnotes for that (unless you're reading a modern "trashy" book where you already know all the cultural references - something that's frowned upon while it's still current but will be seen as cute and quirky later when it won't be so easy to understand).

[golyplot]

With written texts, if something is way too hard, you can take your time, look up words, etc. (intensive reading). But that isn't really feasible with the radio. This makes it of limited use in the early stages, aside from giving you a feel for the language and how it sounds. And it's hard to really pay attention for more than a minute to two unless you understand it pretty well. I prefer TV and movies over pure audio because you have the visual cues and can add subtitles.

The flipside of this is that TV forces you to just go with the flow and try to understand as best you can. With reading, the temptation is to look up every word. I think there's a place for both.

[sporedandroid]

With written texts, if something is way too hard, you can take your time, look up words, etc. (intensive reading). But that isn't really feasible with the radio. This makes it of limited use in the early stages, aside from giving you a feel for the language and how it sounds. And it's hard to really pay attention for more than a minute to two unless you understand it pretty well. I prefer TV and movies over pure audio because you have the visual cues and can add subtitles.

The flipside of this is that TV forces you to just go with the flow and try to understand as best you can. With reading, the temptation is to look up every word. I think there's a place for both.

When I’m able to look at a written transcript closely I realize how much unknown words distract me. I also might just be finding certain sentences too complicated. So even if I know most of the words I won’t understand it.