HomeLearn JapaneseThere’s a lot of talk about comprehensible input to help with learning. For those of you who have done this method, do you think it’s effective, and how long did it take you, personally, to get to that point?
There’s a lot of talk about comprehensible input to help with learning. For those of you who have done this method, do you think it’s effective, and how long did it take you, personally, to get to that point?
A lot of people seem to think that “comprehensible input” means just immersion. “Comprehensible” means you can understand it. If you can’t understand it, it’s not comprehensible input. Comprehensible input is input that you can enjoy without needing to use a dictionary. (That doesn’t mean you’ll understand every single word without needing to use a dictionary, but you should be able to follow at least the gist of what’s going on.)
It took me about three years of studying Japanese before I could start to understand native content in a relaxing manner. However, that doesn’t mean you have to study Japanese for three years before starting to use comprehensible input! The key is that you have to find comprehensible input that’s at your level, either by using graded readers, or by getting input from a teacher or a conversation partner who can talk at your level. (Conversation counts as comprehensible input – at least, your conversation partner’s side counts as comprehensible input. Methods like [TPRS Storytelling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling) are really useful in the beginning because they rely on far less output from the learner.)
It’s hard to say in exact hours, but something around 500 hours of learning and 100 hours of reading. At that point I felt that I can read anything I want and that the whole process is like reading in native language, but slightly slower and with a dictionary usage.
Maybe it’s not the most time efficient method, there are many researches that found out ~0.25 words/minute acquisition value (and 2/3 we forget after a month), so it’s something between 5-15 words/hour, but it’s definitely the most fun/comfortable to learn, because you do something you always do in native language, but in Japanese instead.
And if you don’t have much of free time daily, then it’s possible to tweak a bit.
What I did seems a little unorthodox (I’ve not seen anyone mention it) but I found it very convenient to learn from “reliable” sources with bilingual sentence pairs. (caveat, I did my undergrad in linguistics, and that’s how linguistics literature presents stuff: original language + grammar gloss + translation – so what I had to figure out when studying Japanese using bilingual sentence pairs were the grammar glosses) I like it because it’s time-efficient, I can pull up something to read whenever I have pockets of spare time.
This was a huge source of comprehensible input for me since the beginning up til now (gonna be two years soon). I started with Tae Kim’s guide, a bit of imabi, some Kodansha guide books, and then online EN-JP dictionaries with example sentences. In the beginning I was acquiring basic grammar systematically so that I could “fill in the glosses” properly (I’m still acquiring grammar, but not systematically now, I just look up things I encounter.)
I also did attempt to read native texts on and off: navigate some websites, read some instruction manuals, product packaging, manga, stories, news, anime, radio, etc. That’s conventional wisdom on the internet, right? But very often this was tiring because of the amount of dictionary and looking-up-grammar work. Because I’m lazy, I’m happy to try stuff, but also to give up when they’re too hard and fall back on doing “easy” things (like bilingual sentence pairs). I think having a range of “light” to “heavy” activities is good. On my laziest days, I just watch anime with English subs. It’s supposedly almost useless, but hey that’s all I have energy for sometimes. And slowly, my reading and listening did get better. I think a lot of time spent consuming input was looking up vocabulary and grammar. It’s not simply “read” or “listen”. It’s a lot of “study”-type work, active decoding, in the beginning. (Or maybe I’m doing it wrong, heh!)
I wish I could give you my “stats” but I’m very disorganised at this sort of thing. Plus I’m demographically an outlier… I’m in my 40s already, Mandarin is one of my native languages, etc. But, very vaguely, “after about two years of earnest study”, I now read stories for primary schoolers looking up a couple of things per page, understand NHK Web Easy news looking up things once every few articles. When I want to “study hard” I tackle grown-up news or easy literature with a dictionary, like last week, Murakami’s 「夜中の汽笛について」was quite manageable. Listening is tough for me, anime is a mixed bag, depending on genre, but still always far more intelligible than adult talk radio (I know what the topic is, catch fragments of ideas, that’s all).
3 comments
It’s effective, but it’s often misunderstood.
A lot of people seem to think that “comprehensible input” means just immersion. “Comprehensible” means you can understand it. If you can’t understand it, it’s not comprehensible input. Comprehensible input is input that you can enjoy without needing to use a dictionary. (That doesn’t mean you’ll understand every single word without needing to use a dictionary, but you should be able to follow at least the gist of what’s going on.)
It took me about three years of studying Japanese before I could start to understand native content in a relaxing manner. However, that doesn’t mean you have to study Japanese for three years before starting to use comprehensible input! The key is that you have to find comprehensible input that’s at your level, either by using graded readers, or by getting input from a teacher or a conversation partner who can talk at your level. (Conversation counts as comprehensible input – at least, your conversation partner’s side counts as comprehensible input. Methods like [TPRS Storytelling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling) are really useful in the beginning because they rely on far less output from the learner.)
It’s hard to say in exact hours, but something around 500 hours of learning and 100 hours of reading. At that point I felt that I can read anything I want and that the whole process is like reading in native language, but slightly slower and with a dictionary usage.
Maybe it’s not the most time efficient method, there are many researches that found out ~0.25 words/minute acquisition value (and 2/3 we forget after a month), so it’s something between 5-15 words/hour, but it’s definitely the most fun/comfortable to learn, because you do something you always do in native language, but in Japanese instead.
And if you don’t have much of free time daily, then it’s possible to tweak a bit.
What I did seems a little unorthodox (I’ve not seen anyone mention it) but I found it very convenient to learn from “reliable” sources with bilingual sentence pairs. (caveat, I did my undergrad in linguistics, and that’s how linguistics literature presents stuff: original language + grammar gloss + translation – so what I had to figure out when studying Japanese using bilingual sentence pairs were the grammar glosses) I like it because it’s time-efficient, I can pull up something to read whenever I have pockets of spare time.
This was a huge source of comprehensible input for me since the beginning up til now (gonna be two years soon). I started with Tae Kim’s guide, a bit of imabi, some Kodansha guide books, and then online EN-JP dictionaries with example sentences. In the beginning I was acquiring basic grammar systematically so that I could “fill in the glosses” properly (I’m still acquiring grammar, but not systematically now, I just look up things I encounter.)
I also did attempt to read native texts on and off: navigate some websites, read some instruction manuals, product packaging, manga, stories, news, anime, radio, etc. That’s conventional wisdom on the internet, right? But very often this was tiring because of the amount of dictionary and looking-up-grammar work. Because I’m lazy, I’m happy to try stuff, but also to give up when they’re too hard and fall back on doing “easy” things (like bilingual sentence pairs). I think having a range of “light” to “heavy” activities is good. On my laziest days, I just watch anime with English subs. It’s supposedly almost useless, but hey that’s all I have energy for sometimes. And slowly, my reading and listening did get better. I think a lot of time spent consuming input was looking up vocabulary and grammar. It’s not simply “read” or “listen”. It’s a lot of “study”-type work, active decoding, in the beginning. (Or maybe I’m doing it wrong, heh!)
I wish I could give you my “stats” but I’m very disorganised at this sort of thing. Plus I’m demographically an outlier… I’m in my 40s already, Mandarin is one of my native languages, etc. But, very vaguely, “after about two years of earnest study”, I now read stories for primary schoolers looking up a couple of things per page, understand NHK Web Easy news looking up things once every few articles. When I want to “study hard” I tackle grown-up news or easy literature with a dictionary, like last week, Murakami’s 「夜中の汽笛について」was quite manageable. Listening is tough for me, anime is a mixed bag, depending on genre, but still always far more intelligible than adult talk radio (I know what the topic is, catch fragments of ideas, that’s all).