1. I am very happy about that.
2. You will have read that I have been learning Spanish with comprehensible input for almost 2 years now.
3. It must be working!
I'll admit "almost two years" is a bit of an overstatement. I started seriously following a comprehensible input based learning method in October 2021. That's about one year and 6 months, if I can count.
Comprehensible input, for those who don't know, is a label for language learning resources that are mostly understandable (hence comprehensible) and specifically focused on listening and reading exercises (getting language input).
Specifically, I am using the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) approach, championed my Pablo Roman Humanes over at dreamingspanish.com
I can't speak highly enough of Pablo. He is my language learning guru, though he doesn't know this himself, since we've barely interacted. I emailed him a couple of times to tell him how great I thought dreaming Spanish was and pick his brains about ways of getting input for other languages, but that's about it.
I will briefly describe ALG, but I will also say Pablo does a much better job of it than me, and you should check out the explanation on the Dreaming Spanish website.
The theory of ALG is intuitive enough, though if you've studied languages academically in the past it can be quite the culture shock. At its heart though, it's the same method we all used to learn our mother tongues as children. You listen before you speak and you listen for a long time. With ALG, listening is the core exercise. The recommendation is to listen exclusively for as long as you can stomach it before starting to even read the language.
Personally I was targeting about 1000 hours of input before practicing speaking. It is very difficult to know if I have approached that because a lot of my listening is via YouTube videos, Netflix shows and audiobooks, and I haven't been tracking it in detail. I think I must be getting pretty close now though.
Listening so extensively before reading or speaking let's you build a model of the language in your head and get used to the sounds of it. Reading and speaking too early in the process, according to the theory, is damaging to the building of this internal model, because you won't have an intuitive understanding of what things should sound like and your brain will, unconsciously, fill in the blanks. This can lead to serious bad habits (e.g. with pronunciation) that are very tough to address later on.
As I said, I'm by no means an authority on ALG - I'm merely a student - but I can say that with the right resources, focusing on input without actively thinking about grammatical constructs and without worrying about whether you are getting things wrong has been quite liberating and at times, e.g. when listening to Memorias de Idhún in the original Spanish and actually understanding it, pretty awesome.
I'm still very much on the journey though. One day, when it's not so late and I'm not feeling guilty that I told Emma I'd be in bed soon but instead I've spent half an hour writing a blog post, I'll update with a bit more detail about how I've managed to build Spanish input into my daily routine and how ALG had been working for me in practice.
Fingers crossed in a few more years I'll be feeling fluent, but we will see, of course.
Long days and pleasant nights,
L
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