You’ve probably seen this demonstration before. Someone takes a perfectly normal sentence and replaces a percentage of its words with gibberish. First 5%. Then 10%. Then 20%. The point is to show that even losing a seemingly small percentage of a text can make it really, really hard to understand.

Take this sentence:

“After a long day of work, she sat by the window, watching the city lights flicker on one by one while thinking about everything that had quietly changed.”

Now here it is with roughly 20% of the words replaced with nonsense:

“After a long day of opcof, she sat by the runlob, watching the city bralpz flicker on one by one while modavove about ouvovglap that had quietly muglubu.”

Can you understand that? Sort of. But it’s rough. You’re guessing. The sentence has holes in it and your brain is scrambling to fill them in.

And this is where the argument usually lands: See? 80% comprehension isn’t enough. You need 95% or higher to actually understand something.

If that were true, it would be devastating for language learners. Think about what that means for a beginner who’s understanding maybe 60% to 70% of what they hear. If 80% isn’t enough, what hope do they have? Should they just stop listening until they’ve memorized enough vocabulary to hit 95%?

I don’t think so. And I think the reason people draw that conclusion is because the experiment itself is wrong. Not wrong in its execution, but wrong in what it’s modeling.

The Hidden Assumption No One Questions

Look at the experiment again. Notice the assumption baked into it: understanding 80% of a sentence is modeled as understanding 80% of the sentence’s words. The remaining 20% are treated as completely unknown, total blanks, pure gibberish.

But that assumption is never tested. It’s just… accepted. And I think it’s fundamentally wrong.

This model treats word knowledge as binary. You either know a word or you don’t. It’s a 0% or 100% proposition. And if you don’t know it, it might as well be static.

I would push back hard on that idea. We don’t learn words one by one, flipping them from “unknown” to “known” like light switches. That’s an incredibly rigid way to think about language acquisition. Every word you know, you know to a lesser or greater degree.

Think about the word “melancholic” in English. Most people know it. But how many could explain precisely how it differs from “sad”? Or “wistful”? Or “somber”? You know the word, but you know it on a spectrum. You’ve acquired a percentage of its full meaning.

And this is so much more obviously true when learning a foreign language, because you get taken back to how you were as a kid, when every word you heard was completely new. You didn’t learn them in binary. You absorbed them gradually, encounter by encounter, each exposure adding a little more clarity.

Fog, Not Holes

So if words aren’t learned as all-or-nothing, then the gibberish model doesn’t reflect reality. When your comprehension drops, the ambiguity doesn’t punch holes in the sentence. It doesn’t delete specific words and leave the rest perfectly clear.

What actually happens is the ambiguity spreads. It distributes itself across the whole idea. Every word gets a little hazier. The meaning doesn’t have gaps. It has fog.

To me, 80% comprehension of that same sentence doesn’t look like this:

“After a long day of opcof, she sat by the runlob, watching the city bralpz flicker on one by one while modavove about ouvovglap that had quietly muglubu.”

It looks like this:

“After a day of work, she was by the window, watching lights turn on while thinking about things that had changed.”

No gibberish. No holes. Every word is still there, just softer, less precise, less certain. “A long day” became “a day.” “Sat by the window” became “was by the window.” “City lights flicker on one by one” became “lights turn on.” “Everything that had quietly changed” became “things that had changed.”

The whole idea dims together. And when you read it that way, 80% suddenly looks very comprehensible.

What This Looks Like at Every Level

To really drive this home, here’s the same sentence at several comprehension levels. Watch how the meaning doesn’t lose individual words. It loses clarity, evenly, across the whole idea.

100% — Perfect Clarity

“After a long day of work, she sat by the window, watching the city lights flicker on one by one while thinking about everything that had quietly changed.”

Every detail, crystal clear. Zero ambiguity. You could repeat this back word for word.

90% — Near-Perfect

“After a long day of work, she sat by the window, watching the city lights flicker on while thinking about everything that had softly changed.”

One or two minor details are slightly soft. “One by one” is gone. “Quietly” became “softly.” But the full picture is completely intact.

80% — Strong Understanding

“After a day of work, she was by the window, watching lights turn on while thinking about things that had changed.”

The main idea and most details are there. A few specifics are vague, but nothing is missing. The meaning is all present, just slightly soft around the edges.

70% — Comfortable Understanding

“After some kind of tiring day, she was by the window, watching lights while thinking about things that changed.”

You got the main idea. The finer points are unclear, but you could explain the gist. This is the sweet spot for comprehensible input.

60% — Mostly Following

“After a tiring time, a woman was somewhere, looking at lights, and she was thinking about change.”

The broad strokes are there but the scene is losing its shape. The connections between ideas are getting loose.

50% — Partial Understanding

“A woman was tired and she was somewhere, looking at something and thinking about something.”

A few key elements, but they aren’t connecting into a coherent picture anymore.

40% — Getting the Gist

“A woman was tired and looking at something.”

Barely enough to have a vague sense of the subject.

30% and below — Isolated fragments. “A woman and lights.” Then eventually, noise.

Notice what didn’t happen at any of those levels. No words turned to gibberish. No part of the sentence became a black hole. The whole thing just gradually, evenly, softened. And even at 50%, you still have something. You know a woman was tired and somewhere. That’s not nothing. That’s a foothold.

From Words to Ideas

I didn’t always believe this. When I started learning Spanish, I thought words were binary. I’d hear a sentence and mentally check off each word: know it, know it, don’t know it, know it, don’t know it. And every unknown word felt like a failure, a gap in the sentence I couldn’t bridge.

But as the content got faster, something shifted. I lost the ability to process sentences word by word. I had to stop translating in my head. And when I did, I realized I was starting to focus on something bigger: ideas.

This is where the magic happens. When you stop fixating on individual words and start listening for meaning, you gain access to a whole set of tools that your brain already uses in your native language.

Anticipation. In your first language, you’re not waiting for every word to arrive before you understand a sentence. You’re constantly predicting what comes next. You do this so naturally you don’t even notice it. That’s why I can remove words from a sentence and you can still perfectly understand what I’m ________. Your brain filled in “saying” before you even got to the blank.

Context. You’re not just processing a sentence in isolation. You’re using everything you’ve heard up to that point, the whole paragraph, the whole conversation, the topic, the speaker’s tone, the situation. All of that narrows down what a sentence could mean, even when individual words are fuzzy.

Shared roots and patterns. Languages aren’t random. They have prefixes, suffixes, roots that point you in the right direction. And for languages closer to your own, a huge number of words share roots with words you already know. A native English speaker doesn’t have to think much to understand exacto, normal, or importante in Spanish. That familiarity isn’t 100% understanding, but it’s not 0% either. It’s somewhere in between. It’s a percentage.

Visual and tonal cues. Beginner content often comes with visual aids. Presenters gesture, point, show images. Podcasts and audiobooks carry meaning in tone of voice, in pacing, in emphasis. All of this creates a baseline understanding every time you encounter something unfamiliar.

When I listen to Harry Potter on Audible in Spanish, there is no word I hear for which I don’t have at least some clue of what it means. Sometimes the message might be dulled. I might miss some texture. But the big picture very rarely gets completely obscured. That is what 80% comprehension actually feels like. Not a sentence full of holes. A sentence seen through fog.

The Hidden Barrier

And this brings me to what I think is the most underappreciated challenge in language learning. It’s not grammar. It’s not vocabulary. It’s not even finding good content.

It’s learning to be comfortable with ambiguity.

That’s a skill most of us lose as adults. In everyday life, we’re trained to avoid confusion. We’re taught that not understanding something means we’ve failed, or that we need to stop and fix it immediately. We look up the word. We rewind the video. We pause and translate. Anything to eliminate the discomfort of not knowing.

But here’s the thing: we all had this skill once. As kids, we were born into the world knowing absolutely nothing. We spent years surrounded by speech we didn’t fully understand, and it didn’t bother us. We didn’t demand clarity. We didn’t refuse to engage until we understood every word. We simply accepted that we wouldn’t understand 100% of basically anything, and we kept listening anyway.

As adults learning a new language, we have to rebuild that tolerance. We’re re-entering a completely unknown environment, and we have to retrain ourselves to stay engaged when things are unclear, to keep listening even when meaning feels incomplete.

There is no other skill like language learning where you start with so few puzzle pieces and yet are expected to make sense of the whole picture. At the beginning, you’re forced to operate without clarity, without feedback, without certainty. And learning only works if you’re willing to stay in that state long enough for meaning to take shape.

The Real Question

So the next time you finish a video or a podcast in your target language and you’re trying to gauge how much you understood, don’t ask yourself “how many words did I know?”

Ask yourself: “How clearly did I follow the message?”

Could you explain what happened to someone else? Even roughly? Even in broad strokes? Then you understood something. And that something is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s how languages have been learned for thousands of years, long before anyone invented flashcards or grammar tables.

You have to be okay hearing a sentence at 100% while only experiencing its meaning at 60%. Because that 60% is not a failure. It’s a foothold. And the next time you hear that same word, that same structure, that same idea, it’ll be 62%. Then 65%. Then 70%. Until one day it’s 100% and you won’t really remember a time when it wasn’t.

That’s how understanding actually works. Not word by word. Not all at once. But gradually, unevenly, and then you realize — oh man, I’m here.

This article is a combination of a YouTube video I made on this topic and a comprehension demonstration in the Lengualytics handbook to help users rate their content.

I learned Spanish because I was dating a girl from Argentina who spoke no English. It took me about 6 months to be able to start having fluid, comfortable conversations with her.

We still talked before that, but I would not describe it as fluid.

I’d always been curious about language learning but when I learned this time I got serious. And in this article, I’m going to tell you the most important thing I learned in this time period.

No one can teach you Spanish.

Let Me Explain

Let me be precise about what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying teachers can’t help you on your journey.
I’m definitely not saying people who make Spanish content online are wasting your time.

I am saying that Spanish is not something that a person can sit you down at a desk and teach you in the traditional sense.

In Juan’s Words

On my Spanish learning journey, I fell in love with a Spanish content creator named Juan of Español con Juan.

Juan is an actual in-real-life Spanish teacher. And he told this story on his podcast that I couldn’t find, but in it he says:

“I could always tell what students were going to learn Spanish and what students weren’t based on one question. If they asked ‘can you help me learn Spanish?’ they would learn more often than not, but if they asked ‘can you teach me Spanish?’ I knew they wouldn’t learn.”

Something along the lines of that…
It’s not a direct quote.
I couldn’t find the clip🥲.

But Why?

Understanding native speakers speaking Spanish is not a question of how many translations of words or grammar rules you have memorized. A language isn’t a checklist of facts that, once completed, unlocks speaking and understanding.

This makes language learning totally distinct from learning your capitals in history class, for instance.

In history class, you learn the capitals of all 50 states.
You use flashcards.
And after enough studying, eventually you can recall all fifty.

Or in math class, you learn formulas — same idea.
You learn long division.
And every time I give you two big numbers, you can always divide them.

A teacher can sit you down and teach you the capitals.
A teacher can teach you math formulas.
But a teacher cannot sit you down and give you a list of facts and rules that will allow you to converse naturally with native Spanish speakers.

Imagine if knowing your capitals meant being able to recite them in seconds, without pause, on the spot, in any order.

Imagine if knowing a math formula meant being able to apply it without a pen and paper, without even thinking for a second in your head.

That would be more like language learning. Except there would be thousands of math formulas and tens of thousands of capitals.

Spanish is Huge — Like All Languages

It’s messy.
There are tens of thousands of words.
And endless variations.

And when you’re having a real conversation, you don’t have time to think about any of it.

Understanding has to happen automatically. At a level below conscious thought. In a way that simply learning about the language and how to translate the language, just doesn’t reach.

So then: how do you get to that level of understanding?

The How

From taking in massive amounts of authentic Spanish at a level you understand. Not once or twice, but enough times that your brain stops thinking about the language and starts processing it automatically — like you do in English.

And that’s something that no one can teach you. No one can take hundreds of hours of Spanish and jam it into your brain. It’s something you need to do yourself.

You Already Did It — In Your Native Language

Before you learned anything about grammar or the proper way to speak English in a classroom, you could already communicate with your parents, you could already communicate with friends. Learning about English as a subject might have sharpened you, helped you understand certain things, but this was all after you already reached a high level of fluency.

What this means for you is it’s not necessary to have a conscious understanding of every grammar rule or have a one to one translation for every Spanish word to a word in English for you to speak and understand a language.

If I write in English:
“I go to the store yesterday” and “I went to the store yesterday”
Instantly one of those sounds wrong and one sounds right.
Or if I said:
“I am more smarter than him” and “I am much smarter than him”
Again — you instantly feel one of those sounds off. And yet you probably couldn’t explain to me a specific grammar rule I broke — at least not without thinking for a bit.

This is because you’ve internalized how English is supposed to sound — you’ve acquired so much English you can hear when something’s off without even knowing why.

No teacher taught you how to do that. No teacher could teach you how to do that. And that applies the same to your second language.

My Story

At the beginning, I tried to learn Spanish the traditional way. I made a bunch of flashcards for direct and indirect object pronouns.

I used the verb dar — “to give.” I wrote cards like me lo diste, te lo di, across different tenses and with different pronouns. And I practiced them. A lot.

And there are a lot of these, it isn’t like you learn a few and you’re done. There’s probably thousands of variations. The tense of the verb, the gender of the noun, the person you’re giving it to, do you use se or le? So it’s not like this was simple.

I realized something after about a week of studying these for an hour a day. I wasn’t getting any better at understanding them in real situations. Every time I heard them, I had to consciously translate what I was hearing and that would distract me from hearing anything else while I did the translating in my head.

And if I wanted to use them myself, I had to pause and think. It wasn’t fluid and it wasn’t natural.

What I eventually realized was that I was training myself to insert a conscious translation step every time those pronouns appeared.

When I switched to more input based learning, I eventually began to hear them and instantly know what they meant. But it wasn’t like I waved a magic wand and immediately understood — it took a long, long, long time. I’m not saying it was fast, but it was the only way I was able to understand and use them without thinking.

By spending time listening to the language at a level I understood.

Even today, there are still some cases I probably wouldn’t get instantly.

But when you learn through input, there’s always context. And over time, you start to catch on. Patterns repeat. Meaning becomes clear. That’s acquisition.

Conclusion

If you take away one thing from this, it’s that you don’t need any special sauce to start learning the language you want to learn.

All you need is content in Spanish at a level you understand.

And if you’re looking for content like that, check out my website Lengualytics where you can find comprehensible input content from all over the internet. You can also track your progress and join a growing community of language learners to support you and encourage you on this long, long, long journey of learning a language.

My name’s Nick and after two years of acquiring Spanish I find myself able to speak and understand it very well. I used to use flashcards, and now I do not.

If you like flashcards
If flashcards are working for you
that’s fine.

I’m not here to argue with you.

You should do what you feel is working. But, if you’re like me and you were never 100% sold on flashcards, this article will give you all the reasons I think they’re a bad idea.

The Problems

Flashcards, in my experience, don’t actually train you to understand authentic content in your target language. They miss three crucial features of language learning: real-time understanding, context, and emotional impact.

Let’s talk first about real-time understanding.

The reason you can get a perfect score on a flashcard deck, but you freeze when you hear those same words in a sentence is that memorizing a translation is not the same as acquiring a word.

If listening to your target language requires a constant process of word-by-word translation, which flashcards train you to do, you’ll end up missing the broader message.

This is why listening to your target language after doing flashcards can feel like being attacked by words. It’s just impossible to listen and translate at the same time.

To truly understand in real-time, you need to instantly get the meaning of words in your target language without the conscious translation step. Flashcards teach you the opposite.

Flashcards train you to miss the forest for the trees. To think that the end goal of listening to your target language is to recognize the most individual words, not to actually focus on understanding the idea of what’s being said.

Because when using flashcards, there is no idea. That’s because there is no context. Which brings us to the second issue with flashcards.

No Context

Language always has context. In sentences, some words are almost always found with certain other words. This is why you can often fill in the _____ when I’m speaking and you don’t have to rely on hearing every ____.

Flashcards don’t teach you these patterns. They teach you to isolate words instead of anticipating them. But in real conversations, your brain relies heavily on context. This is why you might often feel like you can answer someone’s question before they’re even done asking it.

When we learn in context, we learn to anticipate. Not just based on surrounding words, but also the topics we’re listening to, the expressions and gestures of the person we’re watching, and the rhythm of how people speak.

When you subtract all this away, and you just learn isolated words, it almost becomes shocking when we finally hear full sentences.

It’s like we’ve spent hours studying individual Lego pieces, but we’ve never seen them actually put together.

And when they are put together, they transform. The individual pieces disappear into something bigger: a spaceship, a castle, a dragon. That’s what happens with language in context. Words stop being isolated bits of data — and start becoming meaning. And meaning is the actual point of language.

Speaking of meaning, the final issue with flashcards that I’ll talk about here is the lack of emotional impact.

Where’s the emotion?

We tend to remember what’s important to us and forget what isn’t. This is super relevant when we talk about flashcards. If we just learn words because we think we’re supposed to, and we never actually encounter those words when consuming content or having conversations, they tend to not stick in our minds.

The words we remember most are words that mean something to us, that we hear in real life, that we use in real life.

Our minds like to connect words to moments that were important to us. When we use flashcards, we completely strip all the emotionality and personal meaning words could have to us.

As a thought experiment, do you think you’re more likely to remember the word for kiss if you read it one hundred times on a flashcard, or if a girl you met aboard asks you ‘si quieres un beso’?

I personally experience this all the time (not women abroad asking me if I want to kiss). The words I remember with the most clarity are the words I care most about. And flashcards simply don’t make you care about the words you’re learning.

Well, then what does?

I have a very simple rule that everything in life seems to follow, and it’s this: if you want to get good at something; do that thing.

If you want to get good at understanding people speak a foreign language, listen to people speaking a foreign language. If you want to get good at flashcards, do flashcards.

I understand people are going to say,
“but I need flashcards because people speak too fast!”

And that’s totally fair. It’s very hard for new learners, and even advanced learners, to understand native speakers speaking normally.

That’s why we have videos specifically made for people who are learning languages. They are called comprehensible input videos, and they’re designed to be watched by people who’ve never watched a single video in another language in their whole lives.

That’s the alternative to flashcards and listening to people explain languages to you in English: getting massive amounts of authentic input in the language you want to learn at a level you understand.

Conclusion

If this article made sense to you, if you’ve felt this same way when you cram flashcards, check out my video guide on how to learn a language through the input method.

And if you’re looking for comprehensible input content, check out my website Lengualytics, where you’ll find tons of comprehensible input content for all levels in all of the most popular languages. As well as a community of learners looking to encourage and support each other on the long journey of learning a language.

Define Crosstalk

Crosstalking is when two people who speak different languages have a conversation where each person speaks their own native language. It’s an option when you have a friend or speaking partner who is trying to learn your native language while you are trying to learn theirs. So not everyone can do it, but if you can, you should really take advantage of it — it’s the gold standard for input based language learning.

The Ultimate Goal

The goal of language learning is to take in so much input from the language you’re learning that your brain can construct the grammar and vocabulary of the language simply through pattern recognition. This is the only way we can experience a second language like we do our first.

If we only consciously learn grammar rules and translate what we hear of our target language through the filter of our native language, we don’t get that deep understanding of how the target language functions.

For instance, when someone says “I’ve lived in Florida for three years”, our brains tell us that sounds correct. But if I say “I live in Florida three years”, without any conscious thought we just “know” that sounds wrong. We feel it. We don’t know the exact rule, we just know something’s off because of how much experience our brains have listening to English.

We need massive amounts of input from our target language to achieve this level of deep understanding. And most of the time we can get that from watching YouTube videos and other internet content. But Crosstalking is almost always superior to content online.

Why Superior?

Humans are innately social, and simply interacting with another person puts us into a level of focus and comfort that even the most compelling comprehensible input content can struggle to create.

As I’ve said in previous articles, anxiety and boredom states can affect how much input we can take in. Our minds have a fixed amount of bandwidth, and when we are anxiously monitoring ourselves, or bored to the point of daydreaming, we can miss the input we’re receiving.

These types of mental states arise somewhat often when we are watching comprehensible input content online, but when we crosstalk these states are far less common.

If you’ve ever caught yourself watching something in another language and momentarily forgot it wasn’t your native language, crosstalk is the most consistent way to tap into that flow state.

The Comfort of Crosstalk

And the fact that we don’t need to worry about the pressure of speaking a different language, means we eliminate all fears associated with making mistakes and the mental strain associated with having to speak a foreign language.

If both speakers had to speak in the languages in which they were less comfortable, the conversation would feel much more constrained and forced. Without that requirement, the conversation is usually as natural as a conversation between two speakers of the same language.

The other great thing about crosstalk is that both speakers get input at the same time. Without it, you’re stuck going back and forth between languages — speaking in one language for a while, then switching to the other so both people get practice.

That can be clunky, unnatural, and often derails the flow of conversation. Instead of staying immersed, you’re constantly shifting gears just to keep things “fair.” Crosstalk eliminates that problem entirely — both people stay comfortable, both get input, and the conversation never loses momentum.

When Does Crosstalk Work Best?

When both language learners are at similar levels.

If one person becomes significantly stronger in the other’s language, the balance can break. The more advanced speaker may start defaulting to their weaker language just to keep the conversation moving — but that defeats the entire purpose of crosstalk. Instead of mutual input, it turns into one-way practice.

This kind of imbalance can be especially tricky in couples who are trying to learn each other’s languages. When one partner pulls too far ahead, the dynamic often shifts permanently. The stronger speaker gets all the input, while the weaker partner stops progressing. Over time, the couple naturally defaults to one language — and only one person ends up truly learning the other’s (this I know from experience).

(This article was written using the transcript from my video series “Learn a Language with Comprehensible Input” on YouTube)

A lot of people get confused about what it really takes to learn a language because of the misleading language learning content that tend to dominate YouTube and social media.

Shocking the natives

You’ve probably seen the “shocking the natives” videos: someone gets tutored for two weeks in a language they’ve never spoken, then strolls through a foreign city acting as if they’ve suddenly become conversational. But this isn’t language learning — it’s choreography. It’s someone pre-planning exactly what they’ll need to say and predicting the likely responses of the people they talk to.

If I know precisely what I’m going to say — and roughly what you’ll say back — I don’t need fluency. I just need a handful of stock phrases and the ability to listen for a couple of key words. Add a bit of clever editing and perfectly correct subtitles, and the performance looks like magic. But once you understand how the trick is done, the illusion disappears.

Super secret methods

You’ve also probably seen the “buy my course to get fluent in a month” style of content. The goal of this content is to make you believe that there is some secret shortcut you can use to learn languages faster. Or that the only way to learn a language is through a very specific series of steps. Once you’re sold by the presenter, they reveal that the special sauce is behind a paywall on their website.

Both these types of content sew confusion in new learners — that fluency is something you unlock through a trick, a hack, or a hidden technique behind a paywall.

But this is classic overpromising for the purpose of marketing. Most of the time people who make this content do actually speak a second language, so they garner authority. But is the way they learned their second language actually how they’re telling you that you need to learn yours?

Most of the time, if you listen to their stories, you will get a completely different picture of how they actually learned their second language. Maybe they went to college in the country where their second language was spoken for years before they became fluent. Or maybe they’re married to a speaker of their second language.

What you usually don’t hear is that they hurdled over other language learners and learned their target language by buying online courses that got them fluent in a month.

So how did they actually learn their target languages?

The same way everyone learns a second language — and the same way we learned our first: by getting massive amounts of understandable input from native speakers speaking it to us.

Getting massive amounts of input in your target language is not something that can be faked. If you’re serious about learning, you have to understand the non-negotiable time commitment that comes with it.

Language learning is not a conscious exercise of memorization of words and grammar rules. A language is too large and too complex to be something you recall like facts about history or your times tables. It needs to be acquired by the deepest channels of your brain so that you can understand and produce the language like second nature. No amount of filling in the blanks, recitations of sentences, or any online course can replace the hundreds of hours it takes to acquire a language. And anybody who is telling you otherwise can’t promise you fluency, they can only promise the appearance of fluency.

And if all you want is the appearance for fluency, then comprehensible input is not for you. There are much faster ways of demonstrating use of your target language than actually learning it, as shown by content creators.

But, if you are actually interested in truly understanding and producing the language you want to learn, then I want to give you a realistic time estimate for what that will look like.

How long will it take?

The most authoritative resource we have on how long it actually takes to learn a language is the Dreaming Spanish roadmap. Not just because it was developed using data from actual comprehensible input based language schools, but also because of the libraries of testimonials that you can find on Reddit affirming its efficacy. With it, we can roughly predict where most comprehensible input learners will be as they progress in their language learning journeys.

For additional context, the U.S. Foreign Service Institute groups languages into difficulty categories based on how long it takes native English speakers to reach working proficiency. The Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian are all considered Category 1 — the easiest group.

That means the Dreaming Spanish roadmap — originally built around Spanish — should broadly apply to many of the most popular languages English speakers are trying to learn. To save time, in this video we will only be discussing the roadmap for Category 1 languages. I will dedicate a different video to explaining how we can adjust the roadmap for more difficult languages.

The Dreaming Spanish roadmap’s final Level is Level 7, and that level is described as native-like or the ability to use the language effectively for all practical purposes. To reach this level, it will take you 1500 hours of comprehensible input listening.

But don’t let that large number scare you. Language acquisition takes a long time, but even just by Level 3, which is marked at 150 hours of listening, you’ll already be understanding topics that are adapted for learners. And by level 4 at 300 hours, you’ll be understanding native speakers speaking to you patiently.

For many of you, these numbers may sound high, but that’s simply how long it takes to build an internal, intuitive system of a new language in your brain — one that actually lets you understand and speak without translating in your head.

Now think about what it would actually feel like to understand a native speaker speaking to you patiently — without translating word for word, understanding without conscious thinking. That might feel so far off that you can’t even imagine it. But that’s what 300 hours of input looks like on the Dreaming Spanish roadmap. And the reality is, you could reach that level in less than a year with just one hour or input a day. For most people, that timeline probably sounds refreshingly realistic. And for the right person — someone who’s ready to put in the time — it’s not just realistic, it sounds doable.

It’s far more likely that the people selling this idea aren’t talking about real fluency at all. They’re not talking about building an internal system to understand and produce the language — they’re talking about getting your crudely fluent with memorization.

Finally, whereas reaching fluency in one month is almost impossible, could you reach that low-fluency benchmark in three or six months?

That’s much more realistic. Two hours a day for five months will get you there. Three to four hours a day could get you there even faster. But that kind of progress only comes if you’re consistent. If you give an hour of your attention, you get one hour close to fluency.

And if you’re the kind of person who can put in that time, then yes — getting fluent fast is doable. I got to 300 hours in 4 months with the system, and i was right on track with the roadmap. But again, it wasn’t like I did an online course for an hour a day, I gave 3–4 hours of my attention every day to Spanish videos for 4 months.

If you’re ready to start your journey, sign up for free on my website Lengualytics to start finding content and tracking your hours watching it. Your journey will be long so it’s important you can find the internet’s highest quality comprehensible input content and you have a place to track your progress.

(This article was written using the transcript from my video series “Learn a Language with Comprehensible Input” on YouTube)

Speaking is fluid and spontaneous. It’s the effortless expression of meaning, it’s not the result of rehearsing lines, calculating grammar, or translating word by word. It’s the kind of automatic, natural speech you use every day as a native speaker, where your thoughts flow straight into words without conscious construction.

But that kind of speaking is only possible when you have a deep, internal understanding of the language you’re speaking in. When you’re first starting out learning a language, you don’t have that yet, so “speaking” from day one isn’t truly speaking at all. It’s closer to parroting.

Parrots can mimic the sounds of human speech, but they don’t actually understand the language. And that’s basically what happens when beginners are pushed to “speak” before they understand anything. It’s imitation without comprehension.

Parroting isn’t all bad. It has its uses. If you’re traveling abroad and need a few survival phrases, or if you have a partner who doesn’t speak your language and you need some token words to communicate, memorizing lines can absolutely be helpful. But that’s not acquisition, it’s just short-term utility. It doesn’t build the internal system that lets you actually speak a language.

Input vs Output

When you hear and understand a language, that’s input, and input is where acquisition happens. Speaking is output. Output doesn’t build the system; it can only use whatever system already exists. When you try to speak before you’ve had enough input, you’re drawing from a pattern bank that isn’t there yet. That’s why early speaking feels so limited or forced.

Speaking early is like trying to paint with an empty palette — the brush is there, but you don’t have any colors to work with yet.

Speaking to early can set you back

When you try to produce a language that you don’t yet understand, you reach for what seems workable. That might mean you try and translate directly from your native language, you might make some educated guesses about what feels natural to you, or you might try to construct a phrase or sentence based on what you consciously know about the grammar and vocab — like trying to build a puzzle. But that opens you up to errors. And if you repeat errors enough, they start to feel normal.

That’s how fossilization happens. Fossilization is when the mistakes you make in a language become automatic. You repeat them so many times that your brain locks them in as if they were correct, and they become very hard to unlearn.

In other words, early speaking doesn’t just fail to build the system — it can accidentally build the wrong system.

Pronunciation

And the same thing happens with pronunciation. Every language has unique sounds. Even sounds that might be similar to sounds in your native language are probably a bit different. When you’re new to a language it’s very hard to distinguish these new sounds. If you try to speak too early, you end up producing sounds that feel right to you, but they’re only approximations of the actual sounds of the language. And just like with grammar and phrasing, if you repeat those early approximations often enough, they start to feel correct to you and they turn into mispronunciations.

But once you’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours listening to input in your target language the brain starts to pick up on distinctions you couldn’t perceive before. You start noticing subtle differences in pitch, rhythm, length, or articulation that were completely invisible at the beginning. That’s the natural process of attuning your ear to a new sound system.

If you speak too early, you’re locking in pronunciations before your ear is ready. You’re building muscle memory around guesses. Pronunciation follows the same rule as everything else: good pronunciation emerges from consuming input in your target language.

A surprising thing is how your brain will naturally pick up on pronunciation differences simply by watching the mouth of the presenter. And you’ll notice later, when you are ready to speak, that you naturally copy those muscle movements out of instinct. Again, something that would only come from hundreds of input hours.

So when do you start speaking?

For most people, speaking isn’t something you force — it’s something that naturally starts to emerge later in your comprehensible input journey. For easier languages like Spanish, French, or German, this often happens somewhere around the 600–1000 hour mark. You might catch yourself thinking in common phrases from your target language, or if someone interrupts a listening session with a question, you might find yourself having to catch yourself from responding in the wrong language. Those little bursts of automatic language are the first signs that your brain has finally built enough of the system to start producing real speech.

But you shouldn’t feel pressured to speak at this stage. As a general rule, the longer you wait, the better your speaking will be. Input does the heavy lifting, and speaking eventually emerges on its own — whether you force it or not. Most learners don’t have time to wait 1000 hours before they speak, and that’s completely fine; you can speak earlier if you want to.

Even if you only wait 150 hours before speaking, you’ll already be speaking far more smoothly than traditional learners — who often end up with unnatural rhythms, awkward phrasing, and pronunciation patterns borrowed from their native language.

Trust me, I’ve seen this.

Of course, for some people, speaking early is a necessity. Maybe you live in the country, you have a partner who speaks the language, or your job requires basic communication. In those situations, the best approach is to speak like a child — stay within what you actually understand, use simple words and simple grammar, and don’t obsess over perfection. Your speaking will always reflect the amount of input you’ve had, and no amount of speaking practice can replace the hundreds of hours your brain needs to acquire a language. So speak when you need to, keep it simple, and be patient. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can speak your way to fluency.

A small caveat

Some languages use sounds that are physically difficult to make — rolled R’s, that mediterranean throaty sound you hear in the semitic languages and in Spanish from Spain. Input will train your ear to hear these correctly, but producing them sometimes requires a bit of focused practice. You don’t need to drill them from day one, I would recommend you give yourself some time to digest the sounds.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying that practicing pronunciation is a waste of time. I’m also not saying accent coaches or speaking teachers are a waste of time. I’m only saying that they don’t build your fluency, they for sure will help you with your pronunciation.

Most learners will always keep some accent, and that’s completely normal. As long as people can understand you well, then I wouldn’t obsess over it. Investing in a near-native accent can be super time intensive and that’s something that the average learner probably won’t need if they plan to use the language mostly for day to day purposes.

If you’re using the comprehensible input method to acquire languages, you need to track your progress. Language acquisition is an ultra-marathon and if you don’t track your progress, you will have no way of knowing where you really are in your journey. To do that, I recommend checking out Lengualytics. It’s a website I built to track your input, find new content, and keep you motivated as you acquire your target language.

(This article was written using the transcript from my video series “Learn a Language with Comprehensible Input” on YouTube)

For anyone coming from traditional learning, comprehensible input can feel shocking. The idea that you just listen to input to learn a language seems too simple to be real, and it’s natural to wonder where the grammar drills and vocab lists went. But the truth is, doing things like thinking about grammar and looking up words too often when listening to your target language can actually hurt you in journey to fluency.

Traditional learning treats grammar like the foundation. Like the way you learn a language is by learning all the rules, and then applying them consciously when you listen and speak. But with comprehensible input, grammar is not the foundation. It’s the result.

How we really learn grammar

Your brain is a pattern-recognizing machine, and when you expose it to enough understandable messages, it automatically builds a mental model of the grammar without you ever consciously thinking about it. This is why native speakers — including kids — including you — never seriously studied grammar yet speak their native language perfectly.

When we acquire a language through comprehensible input we focus on the meaning of the content instead of every little detail of the language. Therefore, we often don’t need to know the grammar to understand the message.

The meaning of most sentences, especially in the beginning, is carried mostly by the nouns and the verbs. If you hear “the boy ate the cake,” you don’t need to know verb endings, cases, or conjugation to understand who did the eating. Boys eat things; cakes get eaten.

Grammar usually just adds precision, but the basic meaning is already obvious from the words themselves.

This means that to begin understanding meaning in a language we don’t need an extensive knowledge of the grammar. So, understanding the grammar isn’t a prerequisite to begin consuming input — and actually sometimes it can end up getting in the way.

How grammar gets in the way

Stopping to think about grammar interrupts the flow. The moment you shift from understanding what’s being said to analyzing how it’s being said, you leave the language itself and slip into a kind of “school mode.” Suddenly the sentence isn’t a message anymore: it’s a puzzle.

You’re trying to work it out in your head like an equation, instead of simply understanding someone’s meaning. And once it turns into a puzzle, everything becomes slower, harder, and completely disconnected from the way we naturally acquire language.

And this becomes a trap, because beginner content is usually slow enough that you can get away with focusing on grammar. But as soon as you move into more natural and fast content — that approach falls apart. You won’t have time to consciously think through grammar, and you’ll suddenly realize you were relying on analysis instead of acquisition.

The people who cling to grammar early on often feel completely unable to move to the intermediate stage, when really it’s just that their strategy doesn’t scale.

Conscious thinking can’t keep up with real language; only acquisition can.

And looking up words?

Here the rule is simple: look up a word only when it’s necessary to understand the message — not as a homework assignment. Comprehensible input isn’t a game where you’re supposed to catch every new word like Pokémon and then flashcard them one by one.

If you’re watching something and one key word is blocking the entire meaning, look it up. No harm. But if you stop every time you hear something unfamiliar, you fall right back into that academic mode where the language becomes analysis instead of understanding.

And the problem with looking up every word is that languages don’t map cleanly onto each other. A single word can have several meanings, and a dictionary definition rarely matches the sense being used in the moment. Words are not learned in isolation — they’re learned in relation to other words, through patterns, frequency, and context.

That’s why input is more powerful than memorization: it teaches you not just “this word equals that,” but how common certain words are and how certain words are usually used together.

An example from Spanish

A great example of this is the Spanish verb llevar. If you look it up, the dictionary might tell you it means “to wear.” So now you walk around with that English translation in your head. But then you hear someone say “llevar una canasta de pan,” and suddenly people are “wearing a basket of bread”? Then you hear “llevar a alguien al aeropuerto” — wear someone to the airport? Then “llevo tres años aquí” — I wear three years here? The literal translation collapses immediately.

That’s because llevar doesn’t map cleanly to a single English word. You only understand it by seeing it used in lots of different real contexts. Comprehensible input teaches you the range of the word — the patterns and the situations it appears in — until eventually you just intuitively know what llevar means in each context without ever thinking of an equivalent in your native language.

Learning words in pieces

Traditional learning tries to teach you words one by one: here’s the word, here’s the definition, memorize it. But with comprehensible input, you acquire words in small pieces over time through patterns and context — not memorization. Take the word “apple.” The first time you hear it, maybe it comes in a list with banana, orange, and pear. Your brain instantly notices the pattern: these are all fruits, so “apple” must belong to the same category. Later you hear “a red apple,” which adds another clue — color. Then you hear a story about an apple tree, and you connect it to something that grows on trees.

None of these exposures teach you the full meaning, but each one gives your brain another piece of the puzzle. You’re not studying or translating, you’re recognizing patterns naturally. And eventually you just realize you know the word “apple,” automatically, without ever having learned it the traditional way.

If you do find yourself lost watching content and feeling like you’re just not understanding the words, that most likely means the content is too hard for you and you should lower the difficulty. As a general rule you should understand 80% of the words — the vast majority.

Conclusion

And as a final tip, if you do look up a word, it’s often better to look up an image rather than the translation into your native language. That way you keep the meaning tied directly to the sound of the word in the target language, instead of forcing everything through your native language first.

Finally, If you want to track your progress and get visual representations of your comprehension growing, check out Lengualytics. It’s a website I built to track your input, find new content, and keep you motivated as you become more fluent everyday.

(This article was written using the transcript from my video series “Learn a Language with Comprehensible Input” on YouTube)

You might not think the content you choose to watch when you’re consuming comprehensible input is that important — as long as you can understand it and it’s in your target language…

right?

But how much you enjoy what you’re watching can have a huge impact on how effective the input is at improving your fluency. In this video, I’m going to explain why that is and how your emotions or mental state can either accelerate or block your progress.

Even when listening to perfectly comprehensible content

There’s still something standing between you and the language you’re trying to acquire, almost like a filter that decides how much of it actually gets through. That filter is you. It’s your emotional and mental state.

When you’re watching content that genuinely engages you, that mental filter opens up and the language flows in naturally. But when the content doesn’t engage you, that filter narrows, and less of what you hear actually gets through.

The Anxiety State

Sometimes that filter tightens due to an anxiety state, where your mind becomes overactive. Like when you’re constantly analyzing instead of following the message. When the content isn’t engaging enough, your brain becomes hyper-aware of the process and you start monitoring your own comprehension and worrying whether you’re understanding it or if it’s “working.” When you catch yourself analyzing instead of enjoying, it’s a sign you need either more interesting content or less pressure to keep that filter open.

To expand a little here, this isn’t always about the content itself. Sometimes we slip into performance mode because we’re conditioned by traditional learning. We feel like we should be “doing it right,” proving we understand, or measuring our progress in real time. That pressure can trigger the same anxiety state and give you the sense that you need to monitor every moment of comprehension instead of letting the language wash over you. I just wanted to add that aside because I find that this is very common in people new to the method. Keep in mind: you’re not performing for anyone and that no one is watching or grading you when you listen to content.

The Boredom State

Other times, that filter is tightened not due to an anxiety state, but instead: a boredom state — where your mind under-engages, you drift into daydreaming, and the meaning quietly slips past you. Instead of over-analyzing, you disconnect: your attention wanders, motivation drops, and you find yourself watching the content without really being there. If the content you’re watching just isn’t interesting to you at all, it’s likely you’ll slip into the same state you might have found yourself in during a boring math class in high school.

In both cases, whether anxiety state or boredom state, you’re focusing on internal narration and lacking conscious attention which, at its worst, can make listening to input almost useless. Like the input is background noise that your brain tunes out. Everyone falls into this sometimes; it’s natural. But most of the time, these states don’t come out of nowhere; they often happen when the content just isn’t engaging you.

That’s why picking the right content matters so much. The best input isn’t just understandable — it’s compelling. That’s what opens that filter wide.

The Ideal State

When you’re watching something that genuinely holds your attention — something that makes you curious or pulls you into a story — your focus locks in and that mental filter can disintegrate. Or in other words compelling content gets you out of your own way. You stop thinking about the language itself and start reacting to the meaning. In the most ideal state, you’ll forget you’re even listening to a foreign language. That’s how you know that filter is completely down — like when you’re watching a movie in the theatre and you’re so immersed that you almost forget you’re there. This doesn’t mean compelling content will always get you to that point, but it’s the goal you should be shooting for.

So because our mental state affects how much of the language actually gets through, finding the kind of content that truly engages us isn’t just a “nice to have” — it’s a requirement.

And the type of content that gets us into that state is different for everyone. What works depends entirely on what holds your attention; the things that keep someone else engaged might leave your mind wandering.

There is no list!

Another mindset we have to let go of is the idea that someone can just hand us a list of what to watch like there’s one universal set of videos that is ideal for everyone. That comes from traditional learning, where everyone follows the same syllabus and is whipped along at the same pace. But language acquisition doesn’t work like that. It’s personal. The best “curriculum” is the one that keeps you interested enough to keep coming back.

Research has shown that learners who self-select their content progress faster — even when the material is technically less comprehensible, because their brains stay more engaged. So the ability to take initiative, explore, and trust your own curiosity is going to be an indispensable skill in your input journey.

You can think of comprehensible input as the minimum necessity to acquire the language, but compelling input is like the accelerator.

So, if there is any cheat code to learning faster than others, it’s to spend time seeking out content that really engages you, so when you’re acquiring your language, that filter is as open as possible.

The best place you can go to find all the top comprehensible input content from all corners of the internet is my website Lengualytics. You’ll find tons of creators and videos of all different difficulties that you can filter and sort through easily.

(This article was written using the transcript from my video series “Learn a Language with Comprehensible Input” on YouTube)

When listening to comprehensible input is trying to analyze the language and translate in their heads as they listen. It’s very important to fight this urge and to simply try and pay close attention to the meaning of what the presenter is trying to say and not the language itself.

In the beginning stages, it’s completely natural to feel uncomfortable when you’re consuming input in your target language. Our brains don’t like dealing with the uncertainty and ambiguity of listening to content outside our native language — there will always be things you don’t understand, no matter how slowly they’re spoken or how many visuals are provided. And if you’re the kind of person who likes to take notes and catch every detail, this can feel especially frustrating. You’ll need to get comfortable with not understanding everything and learn to trust that your brain is still picking up patterns beneath the surface — even if you can’t consciously feel it happening.

As an absolute beginner, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to understand anything except common nouns, verbs, and phrases. You should not be worried if you’re not getting the connecting words. You don’t need to understand the exact structure, tense, or any of the language’s mechanics for you to build your fluency.

I want to repeat this point in another way, because it’s probably the most misunderstood part of comprehensible input.

You’re not watching to understand the language; you’re watching to understand the message. The topic of the video — whether it’s food, culture, sports, or anything else — should be your only focus.

Translating in your head

Translating in your head is a big hurdle so I want to dedicate a section here to talking about it. Almost everyone struggles with it at first. It’s something you might need to consciously turn off. It’s true, if you translate in your head in the beginning stages of comprehensible input, you will be able to understand more. But it will hurt you as you continue learning.

Translating in your head pulls your attention away from the message and forces you to process the language through your native one. Because languages don’t line up perfectly, that extra mental step creates a barrier between sound and meaning — the exact opposite of what comprehensible input is meant to achieve. As you progress, this habit becomes even more limiting. Once the content gets faster and more natural, translation simply can’t keep up.

But remember — you’re human. No matter how hard you try, translation will still slip in sometimes, and that’s okay. Don’t obsess over it. See it as a habit you’re gradually retraining, not a flaw. You’ve listened to tens of thousands of hours of your native language; your brain naturally defaults to it. Rewiring that takes time.

Signs of progress

In the beginning, progress will feel slow and uncertain, again that is natural. The biggest sign that you’re progressing in the absolute beginner stage is that you are following the message better and better. If you feel you understand what the presenter is communicating better and better, then you are making progress.

Here are some concrete signs of that happening.

You’ll start to understand common intros and outros intuitively — phrases you’ve heard repeated many times will begin to feel automatic. Then, you’ll notice that individual nouns, verbs, and everyday expressions stand out clearly. Over time, these pieces begin to connect into small chunks of meaning — short sentences or ideas that you grasp instantly without translation.

When I say chunks of meaning, I mean short groups of words that your brain understands as a single unit, not as individual words. For example, when someone is learning English through input, the phrase “how are you?” might not make perfect sense if they translate it exactly word by word — but as a whole, it carries one clear idea. In the same way, you’ll start recognizing small phrases in your target language as complete thoughts rather than breaking them down piece by piece. This is a super common occurrence and is a concrete sign you’re progressing.

As you move into the higher beginner or intermediate stages, you might start predicting what the presenter will say next. That’s a sign your brain is internalizing the rhythm and structure of the language. Because most languages use a small set of common words in normal daily conversation, and because beginner content is slow, your brain starts anticipating what comes next. This is when you begin to understand the language as it’s naturally spoken in simple contexts. And it’s when many learners start feeling truly confident in the process.

Finally, If you want to track your own progress as you start applying comprehensible input, check out Lengualytics. It’s a website I built to help you visually track your progress and find content at your level while you acquire your next language.

(This article was written using the transcript from my video series “Learn a Language with Comprehensible Input” on YouTube)

You’re here because you are interested in learning a language, but you don’t know where to start. In school, you were probably taught that learning a language consists of memorizing vocabulary, grammar rules, and sentence structures. But, you also probably noticed that not many people, or even zero people, who got good grades in those language classes actually ended up being able to speak or understand the language that they were learning.

Why is that?

That’s because traditional language education is built on a theory that simply doesn’t match how the human brain actually learns languages. Schools teach languages like something that needs to be consciously memorized, but can you really learn a language to the level of how you speak your native language just by memorization? Recently, language learning researchers, polyglots, and serious language learners like me are all saying no. And that’s because of a theory of language learning that was discovered in the 70s and championed by the famous Dr. Stephen Krashen called comprehensible input. Let me tell you about what the theory says.

Comprehensible input theory is a theory of language learning that posits that the only way to acquire a language is by consuming input from a language you understand.

Think about how children learn their first language. No one sits them down with grammar charts or flashcards. They simply listen to people speaking around them. At first, they only understand a few words. Then phrases. Then whole sentences. And before long, they’re speaking fluently — without ever consciously studying the language. That’s what comprehensible input is built on: the brain acquires language automatically when it understands messages in that language.

In traditional learning, the idea is that the way to learn a language is by learning about it consciously. Learning all the rules, learning all the vocab, and practicing speaking it. The problem is that the conscious mind can only handle small bits of information at once. You can memorize hundreds of rules, but you can’t recall them fast enough to form sentences in real time or understand people speaking to you in real time. On top of that, you’ll notice that every language has exceptions to rules, and most people in the real world don’t speak like people in classrooms anyway.

As an example…

Let me ask you, when you’re listening to this now, are you conscious of what tense I’m speaking in? Is your brain consciously thinking ‘oh he’s in the present tense, oh now we’re in the past tense’? Of course not. You’re not stopping to remember vocabulary lists or checking if the word order in my sentences is correct — you’re just understanding the meaning instantly. In that way, you’ve already learned a language, and comprehensible input theory is simply positing that the way you already learned a language, is the only way it’s possible to.

But you’ve probably heard that only kids can really learn languages. That’s not true. The reason it looks that way is because children are constantly surrounded by meaningful input in the language they’re meant to learn. Every day, people talk to them at their level in simple sentences, with clear context, using constant repetition.

The entire world is built around comprehensible input when you’re a child.

When an adult moves to a foreign country, it’s a completely different story. They might spend most of their time working, speaking their native language, or listening to things far above their level. So, it’s not that adults can’t learn, it’s that they rarely get the same kind of constant, understandable input that children do.

And because adults don’t get that same kind of input, they fall back on what they do know: studying. We’ve been trained to think that learning a language should feel like preparing for a test: memorizing vocabulary lists, drilling grammar rules, and filling in blanks on worksheets. And a lot of adults feel much more comfortable with this method. It’s a lot less comfortable to be told that there isn’t a strict, step-by-step formula for learning a language; that there’s no guaranteed sequence of lessons or drills that will make you fluent. It just takes a lot of input. You learn by spending time with the language, not by mastering a preplanned syllabus.

So, what kind of input actually helps?

It’s not enough to just surround yourself with noise. For input to work, it has to be comprehensible — but that doesn’t necessarily mean you understand every word or grammar rule. It means you understand the message. You can follow what’s happening, even if you can’t consciously explain why the words mean what they mean.

If I started speaking Spanish to you at full speed, you’d be lost almost immediately. But now imagine I stop, lift my hand, and hold it out in front of us. I point to it clearly. I look at you, give you a second, and then say slowly — “Esta es…”
A pause.
You see me pointing again.
“Esta…” (this)
“es…” (is)

Then I finish the sentence:
“…mi mano.”
My hand.

I repeat it, with the same gesture: “Esta es mi mano.”
You can match each sound to something in front of you.
You hear esta as I point.
You hear mano as I show my hand.
Nothing is abstract. Nothing needs translating. The meaning builds itself because every word is tied to something you can literally see. And even if you’ve never studied Spanish before, you understand the sentence purely through the combination of sound, gesture, and context.

That’s the heart of comprehensible input. The words only start to make sense once your brain can directly connect them to meaning.

So, if you take one thing away from this article, it’s that language isn’t something you study — it’s something you absorb. The more you understand messages in a language, the more your brain slowly builds fluency unconsciously. That’s why, in comprehensible input theory, we don’t call it language learning, we call it language acquisition. Because language isn’t something you consciously learn, it’s something you unconsciously acquire.

If you are interested in trying out the comprehensible input method, you will need a place to find content and track your hours. I recommend heading over to my website Lengualytics. It’s a tool I built to help you visually track your progress and find content at the absolute beginner level while you learn a language with comprehensible input.