CI/Compelling or Comprehensible Input in Language Learning

CC subtitles available in: English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Russian and Italian.

I'd like to thank the volunteers who created this video's translations:

Sara
Gerrit
Sergey

The realization, thanks in large part to Stephen Krashen, that meaningful, comprehensible, and compelling input (CI) is the key to language learning success is changing how languages are taught. But how does it work, given that the new language is incomprehensible when we start?

0:00 What is comprehensible input?
2:12 When we start in a language nothing is comprehensible.
5:25 Learning vocabulary in a new language.
8:20 We need an assist when using comprehensible input.
10:02 My desired percentage of unknown words in a piece of langauge learning content.

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My Podcast:

#comprehensibleinupt #languages #polyglot

[Thelinguist]

What are your thoughts on using CI in language learning?


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Social Media

[LucaLampariello]

One of your best videos Steve! I wholeheartedly concur with everything you said =)

[tedcrowley]

Thanks. The approach "look it up, but forget it" works very well for me. After a few lookups, I recognize the word.

[HingYok]

I'm a beginner of Spanish and have found CI helpful for absolute beginners. There are lot of resources with CI for absolute beginners on YouTube, mostly with teachers telling stories or acting out dialogues in slow speed, as well as excessive amounts of pictures, body language, sometimes with props, to help students understand nearly everything they say. Some teachers also ask questions based on the contents and prompt students to answer them, making students use the sentence structures and vocabulary they just learned. That shows how languages can be fun!

[chadbailey]

Great video Steve! I’ve been watching so much native content in Russian lately, only recognizing like 10% of the words. I recently started watching Peppa Pig in Russian and found out I can understand almost 50% of that! It was amazing haha! So much more comprehensible. I felt like I was on vacation lol 😅. I see why it’s important to not be lost in ur content all the time

[McLartyFilms]

Excellent video as always. I always start my day with LingQ and a Spanish podcast. Thanks for all you are doing to help people cross language barriers and open doors to new worlds!

[Jotun]

"You need to see a word 8 times to have a 50% chance of remembering that word" - well now I feel way less bad about failing new anki vocab cards so often...

[tedcrowley]

I agree with all the ideas. For me, sub-titles help make speech "comprehensible"(not at beginner level, of course). From the sub-titles I know (roughly) the meaning of the sentence. Now what did they actually say? An idiom? Slang? Mumbling? Dialect? Normal speech? Sub-titles change 50% content to 85%, or (different language) 80% to 98%.

[BryanAJParry]

I love this man! I hope Steve lives forever. He's the best, a real phenomenon.

[ComprehensibleEnglish]

Another way of making language comprehensible and compelling, which so far hasn't really been developed, is content that uses lots of non-verbal communication alongside the spoken language to make it easy for beginners to understand the meaning from moment to moment. For example, on my channel I have many videos where I speak English while using drawings, gestures, props, and other visuals with almost everything I say to make it comprehensible. This way, even total beginners can watch, understand, and start to pick up English from them, no matter what language they speak and even if they can't read in any language.

[ShyGuyTravel]

The LingQ system makes content with 10-20% unknown words considerably more comprehensible because you can look up the direct translation instantly, you just click on the word and it’s there. The extended reading approach, where you already know the vast majority of words, is great for fluency and gives you a kick that you’re consuming all this content in a foreign language without interruption.

[theveganpolyglot]

I find that looking up words takes a lot of time away from what could be spend on getting more comprehensible input, so I tend to reserve it to the cases where I cannot refer the meaning from context after having heard a specific unknown word for the umpteenth time.

[juliusjohnson]

I like to use a personalized visual event or image that has happened to me in the past and then place those words, phrases, etc into that image or personalized event. I find that to be so fun. I use a separate image for each language for swahili and brazilian portuguese.

[IKEMENOsakaman]

I LOVE your old books collection!


...wait, is that just a wallpaper??

[bensomes]

It's such a great feeling when you can understand comprehensible and compelling input. For Finnish, I'm able to understand Harry Potter, knowing around 60-70% of what I read. It takes time though! A year and a half for me. I've followed exactly your advice in order to get to this stage, using more study-like videos, graded readers (for those learning Finnish, check out the selkokirjat and videos by Finnished and Finnish Language Nuggets for great CI). Now I'm full on hooked on Harry Potter, it's so great

[CaptainWumbo]

I like to focus on listening, reading the related text and looking things up once, but then listening to it later in the day and the next day by itself.

I think it's important not to get hung up on remembering every word you come across. I don't know about this 8 times rule and how it was researched, but I guess that some small percentage of words I'll remember with just one or two exposures, and the rest I will wait until they come up again naturally. This is the piece I think people who focus on SRS suffer with, they struggle to let cards they fail at fall out of rotation. I believe there is a best time to learn every word, and sometimes I'm just not at the right level to memorise the word for attorney general or whatever. Memorising every word only really matters for a test, your brain is good at filtering out words you don't need to know yet, people just have to trust it more.

[javierfernandoagudelogomez]

I´m doing something in microsoft office, particularly in Excel: The words i´ve read or i´ve listened to and i didn´t know them, i highlighted them and in the end of my input activity i write it down on one column of an Excel sheet, on other column i write the exact example that i´ve read or listened to, on other column i write the definition from LINGUEE, MERRIAM WEBSTER DICTIONARY or CAMBRIDGE LEARNERS DICTIONARY, and on other column i write examples from these dictionaries (everything with copy and paste in a short period of time). i review them with spaced repetition (1 day, 3 days, 7 days, two weeks, three weeks, one month, two months, three months). That´s the magic of "copy and paste", because doing this activity manually in a notebook is very complex

[jeanettekeegan]

Thank you. Your words give me encouragement!

[EFoxVN]

Thank you for another meaningful video.

[jailtongiraodasilva]

I agree with you about combining INPUT and STUDYING the flash cards .