This video is like gold in the world of linguistics. So much inefficient stuff being taught out there. The last 3 years, the Steve Krashen stuff has taken over the language learning community and, yeah, it's helped people understand that input is how we build up the language and it's gotten us away from those stupid text books that destroyed peoples motivation, so there has been good from Krashen, but we can see his methods are very incomplete and an oversimplification of how to efficiently learn languages

I did four months of pure input. I got to the point where I could watch the various KZfaq beginner content with good comprehension, but native content relied heavily on visuals and I have no hope of following an audiobook. In the last two months I've memorized 2,000 words and my comprehension has sky-rocketed; I've finished a novel knowing mostly what was going on, I can follow native content much better and, though still hard, there are times I can mostly follow audiobooks. I'm sure my four months of input made memorizing the vocab easier, but my enjoyment of the process in the last month has been miles better than all the previous ones combined. Do the work early to set the foundation, and then everything else becomes much more enjoyable.

Thank you, Mr Mikel! Perfect content. I am not exaggerating when I say your channel is the best out there on language learning. You deserve millions of views and subscribers. Straight to the point, no BS, super motivational. You help everyone believe they can learn a language fast. Because of your channel, I am serious again for learning German.

This channel is a Gold mine, really seeing eye to eye with you

With videos being impartial to CI it is nice to see someone who sees flaws in this method. Refreshing.

I just started learning german in janurary, I bought the refold anki deck, 1000 most common german words with example sentences and audio. Incredibly helpful. At first I listened to slow german podcasts, but I did get a bit bored, and sometimes it was too slow that by the time he got to the end of the sentense id have already forgotten what he said before lol. I listen to full speed german now, and while I definitely don't understand the recommended 80 percent for comp input, the more vocabulary I learn the easier I'm able to understanding things. It's really cool when I learn a word and then the next day see it a bunch of times in the wild. I kind of knew I'm not the person that just input would work for. I cannot memorise lyrics without actively memorising them. I can hear a song a million times, memorise the melody and tune, but not the lyrics.

Thank you Mikel! 100% agree!! I know they try to say comprehensible input method is more enjoyable but I really don’t think that’s true. I’d rather do what may seem like boring drills and derive joy from making fast progress than the snail’s pace of CI. The slow progress is too demotivating to be enjoyable.😒 For me anyway…

After being immersed in japanese for the past few days, I tried to speak to a native today and I think I did pretty well. we were talking pretty normally about easy to comprehend stuff, but I'm still proud I did this. However, the way I practice speaking is not deliberate. I do it by instinct. Before going to bed, I try to come up with scenarios where I can use the japanese I just learned and try to speak as if there was someone there. Doing so allows me to check for holes in my knowledge. I also do the sentence mining thing and review my words before and after waking up.

Hi Mike, excellent video as always. Can you do a video on shadowing, cons and pros, and also how to use it. Greetings From Madrid.

A major part of the reason why "relaxed CI" became very popular on YT, in addition to Kaufman was also the "Matt vs Japan" guy. His channel got popular on how he became extremely fluent in Japanese (very hard language) through watching hours of Anime daily, reading comic books and some Anki. He even created his method of Mass Immersion Approach, basically is, go full force, investing countless thousands of hours of input in your language some Anki and eventually you'll absorb it and it'll stick. No drills and studying type stuff, mostly become a listening addict. Because he started in High school and didn't have to work etc, he was able to pull it off, but it still took him years to get good and it was his ONLY language. I noticed that the more popular he became the more the CI stuff grew and then like 3 years ago, many videos were dedicated to this Mass Immersion CI (no study type stuff except some Anki drills). Of course, it's a decent approach, but it not too efficient and also, it must be annoying to listen to lots of anime and barely understand it, for the first 7 months. Now, things are unbalanced with that stuff. Your concepts balance things out well

Agreed

With regards to grammar. it depends on how close your language is to your target language. if I was to learn a new language then my first step would be to look at the grammar. What is the word order SOV? Then I would memorize all the pronouns and prepositions/articles or post-position/inflections. You can learn advanced grammar later but learning the Morphosyntactic Alignment is a must.

very nuanced take Mikel. I agree with most of what you said here and I have definitely included the exercises you suggest in your videos to my daily routines. Steve Kaufmann and you (lol) are coaches to keep me going. For people like you who can tackle on a language and grind it to get it to accent/tones perfection quickly thats ok. I am busy doing other stuff and trying to bump my lang skills quick enough to be able to communicate ideas is my goal. Not everyone goals nor availability is the same.

Well.... Thanks to Lingq and Steve approach I've been reaching solid conversational fluency (talk comfortably about any subjects even tho I forget a couple words sometimes) in 3 languages in the space of one year, practising an hour or two on each one. I'm high B2-C1 in Greek (started a year and a half ago), high B2-C1 in Spanish (started 9 months ago) and B2 in Italian (started 5 months ago) . So yes, his approach is definitely working, at least for me... Oh and by the way, I didn't focus on grammar at all. Με άλλα λόγια, λες μαλακίες

Comprehensible input plus massive motivation is probably enough to slowly learn a new lsnguage that is similar to the language you already know. Imagine just how hard it would be for a native English speaker to learn Chinese just using comprehensible input!

Actually, in my humble opinion, from what I think to have heard here, your approaches are not too different. I think heard him say he studies (by reading and repeating) vocabulary but never drills them. (Comprehensible input means at least 80% have to be familiar) I mainly appreciate S.K. for his love of language learning (and picking up culture through that) and his courage to to openly speak against the pursuit of perfectionissm, and starting a new language in an advanced age. (Sometimes done is better than perfect - this helps me getting out of the perfectionist trap) Regarding the accent, I once heard an italian quote which says that an accent shows that you are not a native in a certain language, but you managed to learn it. I prefer to be someboby who learned a language than to know it anyway. But I too think that "just listen to a language long enough and suddenly you'll be able to speak - but don't speak before having had at least 10000 hours of input." approach is a BIG waste of time. For Shadowing I must say, I seem to be doing it wrong. I prefer listening and repeating. I find this very hard in Korean and often frustrating but it pushes my comprehension. I tried shadowing for a while and I never knew I what I said matched what I heard. Any tips ont that are appreciated.

What's your favorite speaking/output practice? Do you need someone to correct your speech?

We need a mixture of this and that: input and output

CI maximalists often claim that CI is the "natural way" of learning. But that is not the whole truth. Think of a child that asks "what does this word mean?", or "why do people say it like this?", that's a simple form of vocab and grammar right there. I use a mix of maybe 80% Comprehensible input, 15% vocab study, and 5% grammar. When I listen to CI and hear a word that seems to be important, but that I don't understand, I "break the rules" and look it up. For me, this makes it way easier to understand the word the next time i hear it. But I don't do it too often, because that would break the flow of the CI part too much. As for the grammar, it's role is to still curiosity, "but why do we say like this", then it can be useful and give you some Aha-moments!

Do you think the dreaming Spanish method is very inefficient?

I've been suspicious about this approach for years but so many people swear by it.

It's how I've learnt German, flashcards and active learning got me absolutely nowhere.

As a native chinese speaker, I can say steve is having a great accent in Chinese and Japanese with very few mistakes. I’m not sure about other languages. Any native speaker wanna share about the thoughts?

Kaufman advocates C/I because that's what his product is for. His KZfaq content is essentially Infomercials for lingq. For the record, I really like Lingq, in fact i think its a great resource which should be a main pillar in language learning, but it's one of many, and without some form of conversation mixed in, is flawed as a stand alone method.

Under the Krashen approach, if you don't formally learn the language and its grammar then the *affective filter* can't take place effectively.

I also think grammar approaches have a bad reputation because of education. In the education system, they care about testing, not learning so they teach languages in a very inefficient manner so that they can test the student. It's cruel.

But that's exactly the problem, you can't speak without thinking unless you have lots of comprehensible input first. Speaking progress comes super rapidly and better with a pure input first approach.

What? Commons sense? But i want a cool sounding concept i can base my identity on and not common sense. 😢

I agree with everything except the "accent" part. You will always have an accent unless you've learned the language at a very very young age, and that's facts. Also, who gives a shet about the accent.

About Kaufmann, I hate when he "speaks Portuguese", he basically speaks bad Spanish and says it is Portuguese, my native language.

Your content is pure gold