Crosstalk is awesome if you have a partner who "gets it". When someone is patient, intelligent and engaging it's very immersive. The fact it's face to face, social norms keep you focused, and you really can pick up a lot of language. The problem is that you waste time looking for partners, explaining what it is, and then constantly reminding them to only use their native language. When you finally get into it, you soon realise most people are just not very good at moderating language or communicating in a way that facilitates implicit learning.
That’s why I created a Crosstalk group on Facebyuk (I think the largest of its kind on the internet at the moment) for finding partners who already want to learn this way. Saves on time to have an experienced and focused crosstalk partner for sure. Crosstalk Language Exchange Network in the Groups area.
I like people exploring each of these tools. We're all different enough that generally there is no one way, but having people mark out the edges of efficiency will allow better use of each method as one part of a whole. Like, CI does seem to have place in helping a learner develop the ear for the language, it just needs to be remembered that it's one tool of many.
Just noticed I'm getting both fat and bald lol... Guess it's high time I get off my fat ass and start a physical grind :D Discord: discord.gg/tPbQTtU2Zt
I'm really happy you're gonna learn Spanish! I've been learning it for over a year and picked up Chinese too. Great work! Because of Esperanto, Spanish will be pretty easy and fun I think. The worst will be grammar.
A much more fun variation on CI is playing video games in a related language. When I did this with French, I really didn't know what I was doing, I just wanted to justify playing video games after work. The amount of shared words between French and English is staggering. So I've played through Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, the Witcher series and a bunch of shooters in the language. Fallout was particularly effective because it has all these real world objects you can loot. Obviously, it has to be games that have a lot of fully dubbed dialogues and you can't just skip them. Yeah, CI is ineffective, but in the process you link the words directly to the meaning which makes the vocab really stick. It's better than just watching because it's immersive, interactive and task based, you actually need to understand the instructions for some quests. That was a great time, actually. But I wouldn't do it with this method alone if I had to do it all over, I'd definitely pair it with the audio sentence card method, it's just too insanely effective. Really looking forward to your Chinese let's play channel, that would probably convince a lot of people how powerful these cards are.
Thanks! Yeah, I'm looking forward to starting the channel. Gonna start with some vlogs first on that channel before I get into the lets plays as I want to ease myself into it :D
It's that unemployed guy who lives in Thailand that writes essay comments on language learning reddits every day talking about how he dedicates several hours a day to listening to Thai and taking lessons with private tutors
My personal take is that CI is it is really only effective after maybe A2 going into B1. My reasoning is that by the time you get to B1 you know 50% of the basic words that make up most sentences and you can learn the rest in a 'passive' way. I also believe that it's not the most time effective method but least exhausting.
Well, I'll keep everyone posted on my progress as the years tick by so we can get a better insight. Probably will do videos every 100 hours or so depending on if anything of value to say.
I will say that I was doing a mix of actual Spanish studying for grammar and targeted vocab and all that, as well as CI for only about 150-200 hours before I started playing games in Spanish and looking up words I saw more than 3 times. (Skyrim in Spanish and actually reading the books in there for example, which are advanced but short) I think I agree with you in that it is a really inefficient method. Spanish has the same alphabet and it sounds like how it's read, plus the vocab similarities to English, so my man should be reading and speaking in Spanish by now, albeit with lots of mistakes, and be comprehensible to natives. I've only been doing Spanish for 14 months, doing only an hour or two a day, and some days were only 10 minutes, and I can talk to my neighbors who don't speak English and push my way through a game completely in Spanish that I haven't played in English before.
Yes, the total hours may be more using only CI but the actual days could be similar. For example, I don’t think many people could do focused active study for 4 hours a day but they could easily watch 4 hours of CI. With that said I think a mix of both is best especially early on.
Pablo didn't use pure CI on Japanese, though he did for Thai and currently is for Mandarin, and also for Italian (though honestly, he already spoke French, Catalan and Spanish - Italian is almost free at that point). His Japanese was a somewhat mixed approach, very heavy input (12+ hours a day for 6 months) but he did use some looking up and used Remembering the Kanji to memorize kanji. He actually recommends Remembering the Kanji in more than one video (he even has a presentation on it somewhere, not on DS, saw it on my RUclips recommended for some reason), which to me at least implies he's aware pure CI doesn't work for everything or at least isn't optimal for everything.
Yes, he did it for Japanese and this reinforced my belief that you'd need a lot more time for a language that is very different. He spoke about it here: ruclips.net/video/UhZHznN5JPs/видео.html Basically, he did 16 hours a day for 2 years. Which would be between 10-11k hours.
Another to review. The Key to becoming ADVANCED in multiple areas. (In Japanese/English) Now I understand why you wanted to do Spanish next. One thing that would be very useful for the audience would be keeping track of how many new words vs. how many cognates you encounter. I would also toss in false friends because they are what keep you honest and looking words up. Since most don't know Esperanto, focus as best you can on English cognates. To me that is the source of the myth of CI.
I'll add the video to the list. It might be hard to track this because realistically there's a lot of English cognates and an insane amount of Esperanto ones. But also there's many that exist in English but are rare words but are common in Esperanto. But I'll write down anything interesting. Only done 4 hours so far.
@@Evildea The numbers only add authority. Just by being conscious of the problem, you should form an impression of the percentages. I agree, an educated person will far more cognates than a poorly read person.
Thanks to the resources for learning Spanish I already started posting to your discord yesterday, you'll have far better than Dreaming Spanish available to get it done.
Pure CI is a tricky thing, its difficult to say how effective it is as its not an exact science. My wife learned Hindi entirely through CI, zero study, no reading, in 2 years, but I think she is gifted when it comes to languages in general. She speaks 6, 1 of those she also learned solely by speaking to people. I struggle, and I'm hoping I can break through soon (been learning Spanish for a year through various methods). I don't feel that pure CI would work for me, but I guess the only way I could test that theory is to potentially waste 3-4 years doing it, which I'm not willing to risk if I could spend another 1-2 years in more effective methods.
Out of curiosity, does she speak any related languages to Hindi? Learning it in 2 years through CI is crazy fast. I didn't even know there was any good CI material for Hindi.
@@Evildea Long story so I'll try and keep it brief, but basically she's like a human language learning experiment as she's been through most methods. She grew up speaking Tshangla which is spoken by very few people and isn't even written, and not closely related to any other language she knows. She then went to school and learned Dzongkha and English through traditional classroom learning. While at school she learned Nepali and Kurtoep just by speaking to other kids, and then finally when TV became a thing in the late 90s early 2000s she learned Hindi by watching TV as it onlly showed Indian TV at the time. (Nepali is the closest language to Hindi but still has a lot of differences). The Hindi will have been reinforced later on as she went to India after, but she could already understand and speak it by then.
I guess my final question is did this all happen sub 16 years old? As children’s brains are rapidly developing at that age and usually absorb something like 16 words a day. For adults it’s a lot harder but possible as our brains don’t develop at the same rate.
@@Evildea all except Hindi were below 16, Hindi was around 18-20. She hasn't learned another language since, but she's contemplating Japanese (we're in our 40s now). The Hindi was also kind of unintentional too which is crazy to me, I do wonder if we try too hard sometimes, or get in our own heads too much (those struggling). She wasn't making a focused effort to learn the language, she was just watching TV.
@ No problem. I was just curious as it’s rare people have time to learn that many languages as adults. Also learning languages is a good idea when we’re in our 40s etc because it exercises the brain which protects it against alzheimer's later on
As a part of my English immersion I watch a video in English, where the guy speaks about the other guy who speaks English, about the Dreaming Spanish, which i also use a little bit, to slowly learn ( create foundation ) Spanish😂
Yeah, I'd only recommend Dreaming Spanish to two kinds of people: one, people who have no idea about learning languages and are taking a class, and that's all the language exposure they get - and 2, my friend Dan whose parents are Spanish, whose parents were condescendingly told to stop speaking Spanish to him when he was four because he was mixing up his languages. Dan has a busy full time job, no time or energy for study, a bunch of words just from having Spanish spoken around him as a child (and as an older child and adult, just not enough for him to actually learn it). I bet he wouldn't even need the super beginner videos, he'd be sailing right thru to beginner and swiftly to intermediate and then as soon as he could exchange some phrases with his parents he'd be off to the races.
Sounds like Dan had a hard life. Funnily enough in my most recent video I share how my mum was told not to speak German with me when I was growing up so I never learned German.
I heard of someone who learned Korean with pure CI. They only used k-dramas and no learner content. It took 2500 hours to understand most of her input.
I went to learn from DS and found the advanced videos were too easy for me. I guess I missed the opportunity. I went through RUclips videos grinding using subtitles and Google translate. There was a guy I saw recently that had 2000 hours of DS and his accent was amazing
That seems to be the main selling point that you acquire a very natural accent. I'm actually curious to see if that works for me because I struggle with the trilled R sound.
@@Evildea Allegedly it's that once you can "hear" how the sound is supposed to work, you can just do it. Whether or not that's true - that's what others do but I'm interested if that's what you make it to as well!
@@DenzelDestruction Well I’ll keep everyone posted on my progress. If this can solve my trilled R issues it will definitely open up a lot more languages for me :D
@@Evildea I have spent years listening to music from Latin America. There was a period of about three years where I only listened to music from Latin America and nothing else, but I had no intention at that point of learning Spanish. I just loved the music. I bring this up because I'm now a Spanish speaker, and I've been told by a number of Spanish speakers that my accent is very good. A woman from Barranquilla, Colombia actually told me that I sounded like a Colombian. I still make some mistakes, and my Spanish is by no means perfect, but I get complimented on my accent all the time. So there is no doubt in my mind that listening to thousands of hours of content in Spanish will (or at least can) greatly improve your accent.
So the dubbing thing is interesting. On the negative side there's veeery little western media dubbed into VN. Mostly Chinese and Korean gets dubbed into VN. On the plus side what is out there is free to find if you ask in VN. The weird part is I was trying to watch some Disney movies on Disney+, since simpler language, I already know the context. No VN dubs, but they do exist. Not the crumby person reading the script over the English version, but professionally done. And it makes sense 100 million people, it's worth the $$$, but it's not on their site. Sorry just complaining.
It might be the same with Chinese where the dubs exist just not on these streaming platforms... I really want to watch Starship troopers in Chinese cause I've memorised that movie in English!
I think once you find a method that you like it’s hard to switch. My CI method going way back is just to read books you read and loved in your own language but translated into another language. Too much Harry Potter will burn you out so hopefully you can find other options. Or hopefully I can find other options rather 😂. I tried Dreaming Spanish and it’s ok but I’d rather read a book. It’s easier to learn new words if you can see it written down. And the content is ok on dreaming Spanish but not as good as a good novel in my opinion.
Yeah, but sometimes I just want to watch a movie I've seen in English that I love again in Chinese so I can better understand and just be generally nostalgic :)
Isle of Tenerife, Spain, Africa. I'm loving these videos, and I enjoy your frank, direct, while still pleasantly laid back attitude. But,. . . . . .but. . . . . .please don't encourage the recent horrible trend in English of replacing words with letters. We've gone to the trouble of learning the words. Please stop now requiring we also learn a ton of series of letters which puzzlingly represent words. For example, I understand the words "in my humble opinion". But now most people have stopped using them, forcing me to learn what for me is a non-intuitive "I.M.H.O." If there's one thing English doesn't need it's more acronyms, what we used to call abbreviations. If you want to talk about "comprehensible input", please just say the words, rather than yet another pair of letters for us to have to learn off, memory space I'd prefer to be allowed to use for actual words, not letters. Please keep up the excellent work, but using words, not yet more letters for us to learn new sequences of. Best wishes, Patchy.
Friend, good stuff on channel One request. It's much easier to understand clear American accent for me. I really love younger Chuck Norris accent. Can you now make videos speaking in Chuck Norris accent? More foreigners will understand and love this clear American accent since it's what we learn. Can you please speak Chuck Norris way in videos? You are actor too so i know its soo easy for you, right?
@Evildea yes! Please do Chuck. And, I know you understand that American accent is preferable for foreigners because it has most global presence and Chuck Norris style is like a smooth cowboy, hero. Because you actor, I know you can easily do. At least try Please. Have a very wonderful day
I’m using DS and have been on and off. One of the best Spanish resources ever invented but I also fell off of the idea of using it exclusively. Other than the inefficiency I can also only watch so much whiteboard and sock puppet videos lol
Pure CI is basically just immersing in the language at a level which is like 90% understanding to learn the rest in context. So watching videos, playing video games, graded readers are all ways to use pure CI methods of learning. But Anki and grammar study isn't. A big part of Refold's strategy is to use CI but it's not the same as Dreaming Spanish which doesn't do Anki, grammar study, etc...
I speak ok spanish and understand basically everything and I can tell you some people that used DS speak hellah good spanish. Hwoever at the same time you can find people with 2-5k hours speaking bad spanish.
I was watching some guy in his almost 2000 hour update and his speaking/grammar was tragic for that amount of commitment. At one point he didn't recall the word for door so said "dora" 😂
The fact that you’re considering dedicating time to this indicates you’ve got an open mind. I’ve commented a number of times as an experienced pure CI learner. If you follow through: you will have your understanding of language learning changed. Treat it different than the other languages. There’s a bit of a beginner’s mind, Zen thing that’s needed with effort and letting go which is the biggest learning curve for this approach. The challenge is paying attention to a mystery without trying to “hold” onto it. It’s pretty difficult, but I think did decently my first go (some kind of strange adult aged person on the internet can learn this way, it happened). I think children’s biggest advantage is paradoxically their inability to “try to understand”. I’m convinced by my experience that of many others that this neutral, communication focused attitude (no direct focus on language for at least a few thousand hours if possible) ultimately leads to the best global outcomes for most (a fact for L1 and I’m claiming for an L2 as well).
how many hours do you have in Spanish? I think pure CI is the way to go if you want the best chance at the best possible accent but that’s over a very long period of time. Otherwise I think there is a bit too much fear mongering in the ALG community
@ 4 years/2000+ hours. Yes, I think you’re right. I’ve gotten many compliments on my pronunciation by natives, but I think that a select few comments I’ve received from natives I know well convinced me this is the way to learn shockingly well (time considerations aside) in an exceedingly comfortable manner.
The ALG attitude is because of the historical moment for the science of language acquisition. It’s still early in its conscious adoption as a way of learning and the attitude contra is almost as strong as it is ubiquitous.
@@jordendarrett1725I think obtaining a good accent doesn’t come down to your method rather your desire to have one. People that have “bad” accents simply don’t care to improve it in many cases.
I used Dreaming Spanish premium for around a year and a half during the UK lockdown in 2020. I probably spent just over a 1000 hours on it. That's about 2 hours per day. I wasn't a beginner when I started but intermediate and I knew at least 2000 words, maybe 2500. That's approximately the 300 hours level in Dreaming Spanish. That means my actual final hours would be something like 1300 (300 + 1000). The Dreaming Spanish method consists mainly of watching videos. You get good at what you do so you get very good at listening to Spanish, but I wouldn't say I was all that great at understanding street level conversation. You need to do something more active like dictation to get really good at listening. That forces you to focus on every tiny sound. You don't get very good at speaking mainly because you need to practise speaking to get good at it and Dreaming Spanish doesn't encourage you to speak until very late on and it doesn't give you any speaking exercises anyway. So my speaking didn't improve at all and I certainly wasn't conversationally fluent like the roadmap says for 1000 hours. Personally, I would not recommend Dreaming Spanish. It is too passive and laid back a method. There is far too much input and not enough output. You must actively study a language or your progress will be very slow and you must actually use it as well like you do with your native language. Just listening to videos doesn't cut it.
Thanks for the extensive write up! I agree that I don’t think it will have any magical effect on speaking but I’m looking for something lazy to do on the side since the vast majority of my effort is directed at Chinese so I’ll give it a go and see what I think. But what you state here is exactly what I suspect will happen.
Interesting you are applying your linguistic resources to access Spanish. This could be utilised mire widely. I agree about the need for a study. You'd need volunteers to either agree to a suboptimal learning method or self sort for method - students do sometimes have strong preferences about their learning, so coukd be a basis for a short term study. Dropout rates would be very instructive.
I took Spanish in high school. Contrary to what most people say, I found it effective. It's not like I was fluent, but I could speak it to an extent. 10 years after high school, without having tried at all to maintain my Spanish, I found myself talking to someone who turned out to only speak Spanish. Although I had completely forgotten the preterite conjugations, most of my Spanish was still there, and I was easily able to have a simple conversation with him. I would need a lot more speaking practice to become fluent. Even Steve Kaufman, one of the biggest proponents of comprehensible input, says that to speak well, you have to speak a lot. But my biggest weakness is not speaking, but rather listening comprehension. Not having the internet in high school, I had almost no listening practice. But this is where comprehensible input seemed to shine. I'd just watch a bunch of stuff, and since I can understand the subtitles, I could focus on developing an ear for the language. Unfortunately, it didn't help my listening comprehension very much. I can understand people who deliberately speak for learners to understand them, but I can't understand when I overhear native speakers talking. Comprehensible input isn't really any time investment for me, because I'm just watching shows that I'd otherwise be watching in English. And it's fun and easy. Not very effective in my case, but I can't think of anything that would be better at this point.
You might want to turn off the subtitles as they're probably pulling distracting you from focussed listening and thus not really improving your listening.
Comprehensible Input is not a method or methodology. Its a theory. The theory does not actually describe the practice of CI. Dreaming Spanish is a method based off CI. Input that is comprehendable, is also not CI. Again, CI is a theory, that among other ideas states we don't learn languages we acquire them, etc, etc. Its pretty well known and established by now by linguists that CI theory is false. Of course like anything you will still get some advocates for it. Thus, any method marketing itself as "CI" should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
@@twodyport8080 I’d say to be fair now days it’s also become a method / methodology. Dreaming Spanish isn’t the only one that has turned the idea of the theory into a methodology. It’s one of those cases now where the word has two meanings. I’m making more and more videos on language learning so I figured I might as well actually learn a language using this method so when people ask me about it I can speak from a position of extensive experience.
"Of course like anything you will still get some advocates for it." Yeah, just like any time CI is mentioned, you have people like yourself who are advocates against it. It has not been proven false. Let's see what we get when we type that into Google. Oh, hey, what do you know? "No, the "comprehensible input" theory of language learning, primarily associated with linguist Stephen Krashen, has not been definitively proven false in linguistics; in fact, a significant body of research supports the idea that exposure to understandable language input plays a crucial role in language acquisition, although there are limitations and ongoing debates about its full scope and application."
Dreaming Spanish is based on ALG which the creator said he learned Thai in Thailand with their method. All things considered ALG is based on learning a foreign language in that country of its origin. Which is quite different than learning a foreign language in a country that has a different language. This is unless you have a strong community of speakers of that language located around you to help you get the feedback and usage your need to enhance your speaking and learning of the language. With the ci crowd and various incarnations of their ideas ajatt, mia, alg and even refold I would take everything regarding their ideals with a grain of salt especially when it gets the extremist sects of no study, no grammar and no vocab circles. Not to mention, the sects of it can only be fun and engaging content like as if life is only fun and engaging. Or nothing can be too anxiety inducing because that impedes learning too regarding certain sects. The evil of textbooks and traditional classroom learning is automatically the devil with a lot of these groups as well. Learning can also cycle different methodologies in and out. So, a grand scope of things not just the extreme of ci and traditional learning crowds is possibly a better middle ground between contrasting ideas.
@@Evildeano the original commenter is right. CI is a theory on how humans learn languages. It’s simply how languages are learned. It’s not a method, but there are different methods for implementing CI. All language that goes in your head is input, whether it’s comprensible is another story. So yea it’s not a method it’s just a theory on how humans learn/acquire language and there’s lots of different ways you can implement CI. Dreaming spanish is one, simply reading a book is another. Sentence mining is another one.
Do you have a citation for saying CI is false because every linguist I’ve spoken to about it says its a useful way of learning languages and many people thrive with it. Maybe it doesn’t work for everyone very well but saying it’s false is a stretch.
The bit about crosstalk being a waste of time is just misinformed crap again though, as is the stuff about it being too slow. It’s the exact opposite. It’s likely the fastest way to acquire a language and my claim is the results are globally better for most people (just a fact for L1). So if its slower than learning, it’s because you get more fluency in the same amount of time. Comprehensibility is an important factor for the rate of acquisition. This is something I experience 3 or 4 years ago with DS. You will clearly “see” the difference (on the scale of months) in your progress if you go from difficult to easy material.
I think you misunderstood me. I said I don't enjoy cross talk and game my reasons. I didn't say people shouldn't do it. That's why I asked those people who do a lot of Crosstalk to give their feedback for those who are interested. I think you're being too radical in your claims. Have you learned other languages not using this method to do a fair comparison? In any case, I'll be posting my experiences here using the method. As you know I don't hide anything and I often piss off everyone by pointing out the good and bad in every method. So wait out for those videos.
@ I’m definitely not being too radical with my claims as they’ve been lived & tested for years. Yes, I did the traditional school approach as well as other styles (flash card, etc.) for different languages. I will say this: the reason folks drop those traditional approaches is cause they’re generally boring and unsatisfying. It can drive a wedge of procrastination between you and doing your language sessions. Pure CI is the opposite. You are in intimate contact with the language the whole time and because your comprehension is the strongest thing: it’s kind of baked into the thing that it’s easy to stick to for a long time (not the case with MOST people copying out a Larousse pocket grammar book as “practice”). It’s fun. I can explore all my interests, learn in multiple subjects in many languages using Khan Academy, read the news everyday in Spanish, go to any store or restaurant and eavesdrop, chat and/or mingle if I’m feeling up to it, etc. All my college Russian: I remember about 5 words. The comparison is stark and brutal for me. That’s why I go on about this stuff.
I meant too radical in the claim that it's the fastest method. I know 1k hours of Chinese CI doesn't compete against 1k hours of active study. For me it is very important to be able to speak this language in a reasonable timeframe. I'd need probably 3-5k hours to reach that using this method. But Spanish is different, I can take my time with it and the idea of a perfect accent is interesting so I'm going to test it. If anything, proponents of pure CI should focus on the claim of "chill, relax, and learn" and "get a perfect accent" but not on "fastest method". That would be false advertising and most people I've spoken to who have done this method have been realistic about that. Every method has pros and cons. No method is perfect. One should choose the method based on the objective.
@ it’s the fastest AND best FOR most people. No misunderstanding. Perfectly clear in writing that a few times here. I think you’re overestimating the time you’d need for Chinese, Thai, etc. if the material is almost always at your level (idealized as i+1). I don’t have experience with that (unless you count 20 hours of Mandarin CI) for those languages just yet, so I won’t back it as strongly.
As an assuie let me say, i understand him perfectly well. But, i have heard this "Aussies speak so fast" from non native english speakers who learned American English.
Crosstalk is awesome if you have a partner who "gets it". When someone is patient, intelligent and engaging it's very immersive. The fact it's face to face, social norms keep you focused, and you really can pick up a lot of language.
The problem is that you waste time looking for partners, explaining what it is, and then constantly reminding them to only use their native language. When you finally get into it, you soon realise most people are just not very good at moderating language or communicating in a way that facilitates implicit learning.
That’s why I created a Crosstalk group on Facebyuk (I think the largest of its kind on the internet at the moment) for finding partners who already want to learn this way. Saves on time to have an experienced and focused crosstalk partner for sure.
Crosstalk Language Exchange Network in the Groups area.
That makes sense. I'm going to pin your comment for others interested in crosstalk.
I like people exploring each of these tools. We're all different enough that generally there is no one way, but having people mark out the edges of efficiency will allow better use of each method as one part of a whole. Like, CI does seem to have place in helping a learner develop the ear for the language, it just needs to be remembered that it's one tool of many.
Yes, I'm not dogmatic and happy to explore different methods.
Just noticed I'm getting both fat and bald lol... Guess it's high time I get off my fat ass and start a physical grind :D
Discord: discord.gg/tPbQTtU2Zt
Dreaming Spanish currently has 6144 videos (5118 premium). Duration: 1250h 57m.
Even better!!!
I'm really happy you're gonna learn Spanish! I've been learning it for over a year and picked up Chinese too. Great work! Because of Esperanto, Spanish will be pretty easy and fun I think. The worst will be grammar.
Yay
A much more fun variation on CI is playing video games in a related language. When I did this with French, I really didn't know what I was doing, I just wanted to justify playing video games after work. The amount of shared words between French and English is staggering. So I've played through Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout, the Witcher series and a bunch of shooters in the language. Fallout was particularly effective because it has all these real world objects you can loot. Obviously, it has to be games that have a lot of fully dubbed dialogues and you can't just skip them. Yeah, CI is ineffective, but in the process you link the words directly to the meaning which makes the vocab really stick. It's better than just watching because it's immersive, interactive and task based, you actually need to understand the instructions for some quests. That was a great time, actually. But I wouldn't do it with this method alone if I had to do it all over, I'd definitely pair it with the audio sentence card method, it's just too insanely effective. Really looking forward to your Chinese let's play channel, that would probably convince a lot of people how powerful these cards are.
Thanks! Yeah, I'm looking forward to starting the channel. Gonna start with some vlogs first on that channel before I get into the lets plays as I want to ease myself into it :D
18:32 who's this person you're talking about? I'm learning Thai aswell and i'm curios to know who he is. 😊
Pablo from dreaming spanish. He’s the creator of the channel
I don't think it's Pablo. It's this guy:
www.reddit.com/r/learnthai/comments/1cyunxo/1000_hours_of_pure_comprehensible_input_for_thai/
@@Evildea Thanks, I'll check out the post :D
It's that unemployed guy who lives in Thailand that writes essay comments on language learning reddits every day talking about how he dedicates several hours a day to listening to Thai and taking lessons with private tutors
My personal take is that CI is it is really only effective after maybe A2 going into B1. My reasoning is that by the time you get to B1 you know 50% of the basic words that make up most sentences and you can learn the rest in a 'passive' way. I also believe that it's not the most time effective method but least exhausting.
Well, I'll keep everyone posted on my progress as the years tick by so we can get a better insight. Probably will do videos every 100 hours or so depending on if anything of value to say.
I will say that I was doing a mix of actual Spanish studying for grammar and targeted vocab and all that, as well as CI for only about 150-200 hours before I started playing games in Spanish and looking up words I saw more than 3 times. (Skyrim in Spanish and actually reading the books in there for example, which are advanced but short)
I think I agree with you in that it is a really inefficient method. Spanish has the same alphabet and it sounds like how it's read, plus the vocab similarities to English, so my man should be reading and speaking in Spanish by now, albeit with lots of mistakes, and be comprehensible to natives. I've only been doing Spanish for 14 months, doing only an hour or two a day, and some days were only 10 minutes, and I can talk to my neighbors who don't speak English and push my way through a game completely in Spanish that I haven't played in English before.
That's awesome. Cause I'm gonna do this lazy man mode for sure. 1 hour a day maybe more on the weekends.
Yes, the total hours may be more using only CI but the actual days could be similar. For example, I don’t think many people could do focused active study for 4 hours a day but they could easily watch 4 hours of CI. With that said I think a mix of both is best especially early on.
I agree a mix of both is definitely the best strategy.
The creator of Dreaming Spanish used pure CI to learn Thai and I believe Japanese as well.
Pablo didn't use pure CI on Japanese, though he did for Thai and currently is for Mandarin, and also for Italian (though honestly, he already spoke French, Catalan and Spanish - Italian is almost free at that point). His Japanese was a somewhat mixed approach, very heavy input (12+ hours a day for 6 months) but he did use some looking up and used Remembering the Kanji to memorize kanji.
He actually recommends Remembering the Kanji in more than one video (he even has a presentation on it somewhere, not on DS, saw it on my RUclips recommended for some reason), which to me at least implies he's aware pure CI doesn't work for everything or at least isn't optimal for everything.
Yes, he did it for Japanese and this reinforced my belief that you'd need a lot more time for a language that is very different. He spoke about it here:
ruclips.net/video/UhZHznN5JPs/видео.html
Basically, he did 16 hours a day for 2 years. Which would be between 10-11k hours.
It seems to me that if you're not that interested in learning Spanish then your motivation will be lacking which is a key element of success
Motivation is fleeting. Best way to learn something is to set a goal and grind :)
Another to review. The Key to becoming ADVANCED in multiple areas. (In Japanese/English)
Now I understand why you wanted to do Spanish next. One thing that would be very useful for the audience would be keeping track of how many new words vs. how many cognates you encounter. I would also toss in false friends because they are what keep you honest and looking words up. Since most don't know Esperanto, focus as best you can on English cognates. To me that is the source of the myth of CI.
I'll add the video to the list.
It might be hard to track this because realistically there's a lot of English cognates and an insane amount of Esperanto ones. But also there's many that exist in English but are rare words but are common in Esperanto. But I'll write down anything interesting. Only done 4 hours so far.
@@Evildea The numbers only add authority. Just by being conscious of the problem, you should form an impression of the percentages. I agree, an educated person will far more cognates than a poorly read person.
Thanks to the resources for learning Spanish I already started posting to your discord yesterday, you'll have far better than Dreaming Spanish available to get it done.
Thanks!
Pure CI is a tricky thing, its difficult to say how effective it is as its not an exact science. My wife learned Hindi entirely through CI, zero study, no reading, in 2 years, but I think she is gifted when it comes to languages in general. She speaks 6, 1 of those she also learned solely by speaking to people. I struggle, and I'm hoping I can break through soon (been learning Spanish for a year through various methods). I don't feel that pure CI would work for me, but I guess the only way I could test that theory is to potentially waste 3-4 years doing it, which I'm not willing to risk if I could spend another 1-2 years in more effective methods.
Out of curiosity, does she speak any related languages to Hindi? Learning it in 2 years through CI is crazy fast. I didn't even know there was any good CI material for Hindi.
@@Evildea Long story so I'll try and keep it brief, but basically she's like a human language learning experiment as she's been through most methods. She grew up speaking Tshangla which is spoken by very few people and isn't even written, and not closely related to any other language she knows. She then went to school and learned Dzongkha and English through traditional classroom learning. While at school she learned Nepali and Kurtoep just by speaking to other kids, and then finally when TV became a thing in the late 90s early 2000s she learned Hindi by watching TV as it onlly showed Indian TV at the time. (Nepali is the closest language to Hindi but still has a lot of differences). The Hindi will have been reinforced later on as she went to India after, but she could already understand and speak it by then.
I guess my final question is did this all happen sub 16 years old? As children’s brains are rapidly developing at that age and usually absorb something like 16 words a day. For adults it’s a lot harder but possible as our brains don’t develop at the same rate.
@@Evildea all except Hindi were below 16, Hindi was around 18-20. She hasn't learned another language since, but she's contemplating Japanese (we're in our 40s now). The Hindi was also kind of unintentional too which is crazy to me, I do wonder if we try too hard sometimes, or get in our own heads too much (those struggling). She wasn't making a focused effort to learn the language, she was just watching TV.
@ No problem. I was just curious as it’s rare people have time to learn that many languages as adults. Also learning languages is a good idea when we’re in our 40s etc because it exercises the brain which protects it against alzheimer's later on
As a part of my English immersion I watch a video in English, where the guy speaks about the other guy who speaks English, about the Dreaming Spanish, which i also use a little bit, to slowly learn ( create foundation ) Spanish😂
You’re just super efficient haha
Yeah, I'd only recommend Dreaming Spanish to two kinds of people: one, people who have no idea about learning languages and are taking a class, and that's all the language exposure they get - and 2, my friend Dan whose parents are Spanish, whose parents were condescendingly told to stop speaking Spanish to him when he was four because he was mixing up his languages.
Dan has a busy full time job, no time or energy for study, a bunch of words just from having Spanish spoken around him as a child (and as an older child and adult, just not enough for him to actually learn it). I bet he wouldn't even need the super beginner videos, he'd be sailing right thru to beginner and swiftly to intermediate and then as soon as he could exchange some phrases with his parents he'd be off to the races.
Sounds like Dan had a hard life. Funnily enough in my most recent video I share how my mum was told not to speak German with me when I was growing up so I never learned German.
I heard of someone who learned Korean with pure CI. They only used k-dramas and no learner content. It took 2500 hours to understand most of her input.
Oh interesting. Would love to know more.
Who was it?
I went to learn from DS and found the advanced videos were too easy for me. I guess I missed the opportunity. I went through RUclips videos grinding using subtitles and Google translate.
There was a guy I saw recently that had 2000 hours of DS and his accent was amazing
That seems to be the main selling point that you acquire a very natural accent. I'm actually curious to see if that works for me because I struggle with the trilled R sound.
@@Evildea Allegedly it's that once you can "hear" how the sound is supposed to work, you can just do it. Whether or not that's true - that's what others do but I'm interested if that's what you make it to as well!
@@DenzelDestruction Well I’ll keep everyone posted on my progress. If this can solve my trilled R issues it will definitely open up a lot more languages for me :D
@@Evildea I have spent years listening to music from Latin America. There was a period of about three years where I only listened to music from Latin America and nothing else, but I had no intention at that point of learning Spanish. I just loved the music. I bring this up because I'm now a Spanish speaker, and I've been told by a number of Spanish speakers that my accent is very good. A woman from Barranquilla, Colombia actually told me that I sounded like a Colombian. I still make some mistakes, and my Spanish is by no means perfect, but I get complimented on my accent all the time. So there is no doubt in my mind that listening to thousands of hours of content in Spanish will (or at least can) greatly improve your accent.
So the dubbing thing is interesting. On the negative side there's veeery little western media dubbed into VN. Mostly Chinese and Korean gets dubbed into VN. On the plus side what is out there is free to find if you ask in VN. The weird part is I was trying to watch some Disney movies on Disney+, since simpler language, I already know the context. No VN dubs, but they do exist. Not the crumby person reading the script over the English version, but professionally done. And it makes sense 100 million people, it's worth the $$$, but it's not on their site. Sorry just complaining.
It might be the same with Chinese where the dubs exist just not on these streaming platforms... I really want to watch Starship troopers in Chinese cause I've memorised that movie in English!
I think once you find a method that you like it’s hard to switch. My CI method going way back is just to read books you read and loved in your own language but translated into another language. Too much Harry Potter will burn you out so hopefully you can find other options. Or hopefully I can find other options rather 😂. I tried Dreaming Spanish and it’s ok but I’d rather read a book. It’s easier to learn new words if you can see it written down. And the content is ok on dreaming Spanish but not as good as a good novel in my opinion.
That's kind of true for me. But I'm always that guy who is like "What if I try just oooooone more. Maybe it will be better" haha
There are a lot of chinese movies and tv shows as well as china having its own form of anime which is 动画, plus Taiwanese cinema is very high quality.
Yeah, but sometimes I just want to watch a movie I've seen in English that I love again in Chinese so I can better understand and just be generally nostalgic :)
Isle of Tenerife,
Spain,
Africa.
I'm loving these videos, and I enjoy your frank, direct, while still pleasantly laid back attitude.
But,. . .
. . .but. . .
. . .please don't encourage the recent horrible trend in English of replacing words with letters.
We've gone to the trouble of learning the words.
Please stop now requiring we also learn a ton of series of letters which puzzlingly represent words.
For example, I understand the words "in my humble opinion".
But now most people have stopped using them, forcing me to learn what for me is a non-intuitive "I.M.H.O."
If there's one thing English doesn't need it's more acronyms, what we used to call abbreviations.
If you want to talk about "comprehensible input", please just say the words, rather than yet another pair of letters for us to have to learn off, memory space I'd prefer to be allowed to use for actual words, not letters.
Please keep up the excellent work, but using words, not yet more letters for us to learn new sequences of.
Best wishes,
Patchy.
Sure, I didn’t think about that. I’ll avoid acronyms in the future :)
Which acronyms were used?
Just CI, right
Friend, good stuff on channel
One request. It's much easier to understand clear American accent for me. I really love younger Chuck Norris accent. Can you now make videos speaking in Chuck Norris accent? More foreigners will understand and love this clear American accent since it's what we learn. Can you please speak Chuck Norris way in videos? You are actor too so i know its soo easy for you, right?
That would be very inauthentic and I'd probably be mocked for it. But I'll see what I can do haha.
@Evildea yes! Please do Chuck. And, I know you understand that American accent is preferable for foreigners because it has most global presence and Chuck Norris style is like a smooth cowboy, hero.
Because you actor, I know you can easily do. At least try Please.
Have a very wonderful day
I’m using DS and have been on and off. One of the best Spanish resources ever invented but I also fell off of the idea of using it exclusively. Other than the inefficiency I can also only watch so much whiteboard and sock puppet videos lol
Haha, yeah, I didn't find the sock puppet videos very interesting either >.
Why is Refold not Pure CI?
Because you do grammar study, sentence mining, etc... Pure CI doesn't do any of that.
@ so pure ci is just watching videos, where as refold is anki, videos, graded readers and also podcasts and also taking your time on grammar?
Pure CI is basically just immersing in the language at a level which is like 90% understanding to learn the rest in context. So watching videos, playing video games, graded readers are all ways to use pure CI methods of learning. But Anki and grammar study isn't. A big part of Refold's strategy is to use CI but it's not the same as Dreaming Spanish which doesn't do Anki, grammar study, etc...
@@Evildea if you are just passively just watching these videos, it wont work. reading a graded reader may work but i am not sure
Well, that’s why I’m doing it as a side project. So I can slowly test it over the coming years and give you guys insights.
Come to San Francisco and English, Spanish, and Chinese would be the most useful languages you could know 😂
Oh haha, I guess I have a reason to go there now :D
I think you want to demonstrate you are the best.
I’m definitely not the best haha. There are people way more capable than me out there. I’m just sharing my experiences.
You know what they say, it's Spanish or vanish.
Spanish is just badly spoken Esperanto :p
@Evildea That's why the Esperanto in the ILoveLanguages’ video sounds bad /half joking
Haha
I speak ok spanish and understand basically everything and I can tell you some people that used DS speak hellah good spanish.
Hwoever at the same time you can find people with 2-5k hours speaking bad spanish.
Interesting. Is there someone making videos after 2k hours? I haven't seen any.
I was watching some guy in his almost 2000 hour update and his speaking/grammar was tragic for that amount of commitment. At one point he didn't recall the word for door so said "dora" 😂
Man that’s painful >.
The fact that you’re considering dedicating time to this indicates you’ve got an open mind.
I’ve commented a number of times as an experienced pure CI learner. If you follow through: you will have your understanding of language learning changed. Treat it different than the other languages.
There’s a bit of a beginner’s mind, Zen thing that’s needed with effort and letting go which is the biggest learning curve for this approach. The challenge is paying attention to a mystery without trying to “hold” onto it. It’s pretty difficult, but I think did decently my first go (some kind of strange adult aged person on the internet can learn this way, it happened). I think children’s biggest advantage is paradoxically their inability to “try to understand”.
I’m convinced by my experience that of many others that this neutral, communication focused attitude (no direct focus on language for at least a few thousand hours if possible) ultimately leads to the best global outcomes for most (a fact for L1 and I’m claiming for an L2 as well).
how many hours do you have in Spanish? I think pure CI is the way to go if you want the best chance at the best possible accent but that’s over a very long period of time. Otherwise I think there is a bit too much fear mongering in the ALG community
@ 4 years/2000+ hours. Yes, I think you’re right. I’ve gotten many compliments on my pronunciation by natives, but I think that a select few comments I’ve received from natives I know well convinced me this is the way to learn shockingly well (time considerations aside) in an exceedingly comfortable manner.
The ALG attitude is because of the historical moment for the science of language acquisition. It’s still early in its conscious adoption as a way of learning and the attitude contra is almost as strong as it is ubiquitous.
Yes, I plan to do it for Spanish. I'll keep everyone posted on progress.
@@jordendarrett1725I think obtaining a good accent doesn’t come down to your method rather your desire to have one. People that have “bad” accents simply don’t care to improve it in many cases.
I used Dreaming Spanish premium for around a year and a half during the UK lockdown in 2020. I probably spent just over a 1000 hours on it. That's about 2 hours per day. I wasn't a beginner when I started but intermediate and I knew at least 2000 words, maybe 2500. That's approximately the 300 hours level in Dreaming Spanish. That means my actual final hours would be something like 1300 (300 + 1000). The Dreaming Spanish method consists mainly of watching videos. You get good at what you do so you get very good at listening to Spanish, but I wouldn't say I was all that great at understanding street level conversation. You need to do something more active like dictation to get really good at listening. That forces you to focus on every tiny sound. You don't get very good at speaking mainly because you need to practise speaking to get good at it and Dreaming Spanish doesn't encourage you to speak until very late on and it doesn't give you any speaking exercises anyway. So my speaking didn't improve at all and I certainly wasn't conversationally fluent like the roadmap says for 1000 hours.
Personally, I would not recommend Dreaming Spanish. It is too passive and laid back a method. There is far too much input and not enough output. You must actively study a language or your progress will be very slow and you must actually use it as well like you do with your native language. Just listening to videos doesn't cut it.
Thanks for the extensive write up! I agree that I don’t think it will have any magical effect on speaking but I’m looking for something lazy to do on the side since the vast majority of my effort is directed at Chinese so I’ll give it a go and see what I think. But what you state here is exactly what I suspect will happen.
Interesting you are applying your linguistic resources to access Spanish. This could be utilised mire widely.
I agree about the need for a study. You'd need volunteers to either agree to a suboptimal learning method or self sort for method - students do sometimes have strong preferences about their learning, so coukd be a basis for a short term study. Dropout rates would be very instructive.
I so want to see that study >.
DS insists that you only listen to DS. I use Dreaming Spanish but not exclusively. Why do all these various methods have to be so pedantic?
Because if you only listen to them you’ll only buy from them.
I took Spanish in high school. Contrary to what most people say, I found it effective. It's not like I was fluent, but I could speak it to an extent.
10 years after high school, without having tried at all to maintain my Spanish, I found myself talking to someone who turned out to only speak Spanish. Although I had completely forgotten the preterite conjugations, most of my Spanish was still there, and I was easily able to have a simple conversation with him.
I would need a lot more speaking practice to become fluent. Even Steve Kaufman, one of the biggest proponents of comprehensible input, says that to speak well, you have to speak a lot. But my biggest weakness is not speaking, but rather listening comprehension. Not having the internet in high school, I had almost no listening practice.
But this is where comprehensible input seemed to shine. I'd just watch a bunch of stuff, and since I can understand the subtitles, I could focus on developing an ear for the language. Unfortunately, it didn't help my listening comprehension very much. I can understand people who deliberately speak for learners to understand them, but I can't understand when I overhear native speakers talking.
Comprehensible input isn't really any time investment for me, because I'm just watching shows that I'd otherwise be watching in English. And it's fun and easy. Not very effective in my case, but I can't think of anything that would be better at this point.
You might want to turn off the subtitles as they're probably pulling distracting you from focussed listening and thus not really improving your listening.
Thai is a good language for doing this because as a ton of videos
I did think about Thai. But I'm still healing from the trauma of Chinese so I think I deserve something easier for a while haha
Hola
Hola :P
Comprehensible Input is not a method or methodology. Its a theory. The theory does not actually describe the practice of CI.
Dreaming Spanish is a method based off CI.
Input that is comprehendable, is also not CI. Again, CI is a theory, that among other ideas states we don't learn languages we acquire them, etc, etc.
Its pretty well known and established by now by linguists that CI theory is false. Of course like anything you will still get some advocates for it.
Thus, any method marketing itself as "CI" should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
@@twodyport8080 I’d say to be fair now days it’s also become a method / methodology. Dreaming Spanish isn’t the only one that has turned the idea of the theory into a methodology. It’s one of those cases now where the word has two meanings.
I’m making more and more videos on language learning so I figured I might as well actually learn a language using this method so when people ask me about it I can speak from a position of extensive experience.
"Of course like anything you will still get some advocates for it." Yeah, just like any time CI is mentioned, you have people like yourself who are advocates against it. It has not been proven false. Let's see what we get when we type that into Google. Oh, hey, what do you know?
"No, the "comprehensible input" theory of language learning, primarily associated with linguist Stephen Krashen, has not been definitively proven false in linguistics; in fact, a significant body of research supports the idea that exposure to understandable language input plays a crucial role in language acquisition, although there are limitations and ongoing debates about its full scope and application."
Dreaming Spanish is based on ALG which the creator said he learned Thai in Thailand with their method. All things considered ALG is based on learning a foreign language in that country of its origin. Which is quite different than learning a foreign language in a country that has a different language. This is unless you have a strong community of speakers of that language located around you to help you get the feedback and usage your need to enhance your speaking and learning of the language. With the ci crowd and various incarnations of their ideas ajatt, mia, alg and even refold I would take everything regarding their ideals with a grain of salt especially when it gets the extremist sects of no study, no grammar and no vocab circles. Not to mention, the sects of it can only be fun and engaging content like as if life is only fun and engaging. Or nothing can be too anxiety inducing because that impedes learning too regarding certain sects. The evil of textbooks and traditional classroom learning is automatically the devil with a lot of these groups as well. Learning can also cycle different methodologies in and out. So, a grand scope of things not just the extreme of ci and traditional learning crowds is possibly a better middle ground between contrasting ideas.
@@Evildeano the original commenter is right. CI is a theory on how humans learn languages. It’s simply how languages are learned. It’s not a method, but there are different methods for implementing CI. All language that goes in your head is input, whether it’s comprensible is another story. So yea it’s not a method it’s just a theory on how humans learn/acquire language and there’s lots of different ways you can implement CI. Dreaming spanish is one, simply reading a book is another. Sentence mining is another one.
Do you have a citation for saying CI is false because every linguist I’ve spoken to about it says its a useful way of learning languages and many people thrive with it. Maybe it doesn’t work for everyone very well but saying it’s false is a stretch.
The bit about crosstalk being a waste of time is just misinformed crap again though, as is the stuff about it being too slow.
It’s the exact opposite. It’s likely the fastest way to acquire a language and my claim is the results are globally better for most people (just a fact for L1). So if its slower than learning, it’s because you get more fluency in the same amount of time.
Comprehensibility is an important factor for the rate of acquisition. This is something I experience 3 or 4 years ago with DS. You will clearly “see” the difference (on the scale of months) in your progress if you go from difficult to easy material.
I think you misunderstood me. I said I don't enjoy cross talk and game my reasons. I didn't say people shouldn't do it. That's why I asked those people who do a lot of Crosstalk to give their feedback for those who are interested.
I think you're being too radical in your claims. Have you learned other languages not using this method to do a fair comparison?
In any case, I'll be posting my experiences here using the method. As you know I don't hide anything and I often piss off everyone by pointing out the good and bad in every method. So wait out for those videos.
@ I’m definitely not being too radical with my claims as they’ve been lived & tested for years. Yes, I did the traditional school approach as well as other styles (flash card, etc.) for different languages. I will say this: the reason folks drop those traditional approaches is cause they’re generally boring and unsatisfying. It can drive a wedge of procrastination between you and doing your language sessions. Pure CI is the opposite. You are in intimate contact with the language the whole time and because your comprehension is the strongest thing: it’s kind of baked into the thing that it’s easy to stick to for a long time (not the case with MOST people copying out a Larousse pocket grammar book as “practice”). It’s fun. I can explore all my interests, learn in multiple subjects in many languages using Khan Academy, read the news everyday in Spanish, go to any store or restaurant and eavesdrop, chat and/or mingle if I’m feeling up to it, etc.
All my college Russian: I remember about 5 words. The comparison is stark and brutal for me. That’s why I go on about this stuff.
I meant too radical in the claim that it's the fastest method. I know 1k hours of Chinese CI doesn't compete against 1k hours of active study. For me it is very important to be able to speak this language in a reasonable timeframe. I'd need probably 3-5k hours to reach that using this method. But Spanish is different, I can take my time with it and the idea of a perfect accent is interesting so I'm going to test it. If anything, proponents of pure CI should focus on the claim of "chill, relax, and learn" and "get a perfect accent" but not on "fastest method". That would be false advertising and most people I've spoken to who have done this method have been realistic about that. Every method has pros and cons. No method is perfect. One should choose the method based on the objective.
@ it’s the fastest AND best FOR most people. No misunderstanding. Perfectly clear in writing that a few times here. I think you’re overestimating the time you’d need for Chinese, Thai, etc. if the material is almost always at your level (idealized as i+1). I don’t have experience with that (unless you count 20 hours of Mandarin CI) for those languages just yet, so I won’t back it as strongly.
It's hard to understand you. You speak too fast, sorry.
Really? Sorry, you can slow down the video using the playback speed feature. Are you a non-native?
the vid has auto subtitles you can just flick those on
As an assuie let me say, i understand him perfectly well. But, i have heard this "Aussies speak so fast" from non native english speakers who learned American English.
Is English your first language? For an au accent this is pretty slow from what I've heard