Everyone tells you to stay within your level, only read “comprehensible input,” nothing harder than i+1. I think that’s mostly wrong.
At the start, everything is noise. You don’t have a level yet. A beginner reader and an adult novel are the same wall of symbols you don’t understand. So the question isn’t “Which one is at my level?” nor is it. It’s “which wall do I actually want to climb?”
That’s the whole point: interest isn’t optional; it’s the driving force. The best method does nothing if you won’t do it, and you won’t do it if you’re bored. Grinding through baby content just teaches you to dread the language. Slogging through something you actually love makes the difficulty worth paying.
And you don’t need to understand a text for it to work on you. Keep reading, and the common words come back again and again until they stick on their own. You’re not memorising them they’re drilling themselves into you through sheer repetition.
So pick something you genuinely want to read, expect most of it to be fog, look up what you can, and keep going. Don’t wait to feel ready. The reading is what makes you ready.
Right now I have just started learning Russian as a native English speaker.
I have started to import some content from Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is unbelievably above my level (I have only 115 known words in Russian).
However, I am actually interested in his content, so me slogging through basically an entire page of yellow and blue words is far more bearable because I am actually interested in his writings.
And I know that as I keep reading and keep engaging with the language and doing more and more reading of things that are interesting to me, I know I will learn those words and keep improving.
When I first started importing shareable content into LingQ I was quite stumped as to what level to grade the content. (Beginner 1 - Advanced 2 etc). Words are just words, you want to know them all to understand as much as possible. I eventually settled on placing them in buckets based on the pace of the audio rather than the diversity of the vocabulary. After actually engaging with people and going about day to day life in Finnish I think I have a better understanding on how to grade the content.
Beginner - Intermediate content should be more or less the vocabulary that would be extremely beneficial to know when going about your day. Such as,
Beginner 1: Introducing yourself, asking basic questions, emotions, money etc.
Beginner 2: e.g. Items in a grocery store, speaking about the past/present/future, 1st person/3rd person etc.
Intermediate 2: Topic based, parts of the body, pet anatomy. Imagine you need to go to the doctor or take your dog to the vet. Something more rare but still important to know.
Advanced 1/2+ I think are more for personal preference and enjoyment. Things that will unlikely ever be a topic of conversation but that are interesting to you, laced with vocabulary that can make you sound more eloquent and native.
The last book I read was Kärkijoukkona Syvarille, a Finnish lieutenants perspective of the Continuation War. I learned a lot about their battle tactics and recent history and genuinely enjoyed reading it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really help me find the right thing to say when a pretty girl says ‘moi’ (hi).
You might be able to skip the basics for so long, but eventually you need to come back and grind your way through it.
You’re just essentially doing flashcards then, and not getting the benefit of reading. However, if that’s more motivating to you then flashcards, I guess it’s better than nothing. You’ll probably eventually switch over to comprehensible input at some point. I say this a person who did some flashcards and also did comprehensible input, and the CI was much more effective for a many different reasons that I won’t go into detail about here.
PS, Dostoevsky (in Russian) has a very confusing way of writing even if you know most of the words he’s using. If you’re starting with Dostoevsky then you’re basically committing yourself to learning very low frequency words before getting comfortable with the more common words.
You can also do both easy and hard stuff at the same time.
I read native books and also innerfrench podcast and graded readers.
I used to keep tarantula as a pet when young so I’m reading Araignées & Insectes: Identification, Comportements et Sécurité des Araignées, Fourmis, Abeilles, Guêpes, Coléoptères, Mantes, Scorpions (French Edition) .
If you mark words as 4 instead of 5 you can export your known word list take this and the Russian text you want to learn put in notebooklm and ask it to make you a short story using your known word list and 20% new words from what you want to learn.
After doing this for a while you will be able to jump into the text you actually want to read with no stress, all while maintaining an easy progression path that aligns perfectly with your goals. Once you get up to a decent word count you can also ask it to use grammar similar to the target text.
There are a wealth of tools available now your imagination is the limit.
As for learning the common essential words first, this depends highly on what your goals are. If you want to read Russian literature and don’t intend on living in Russia you don’t need to know how to ask where the toilet is.
My opinion based on personal experience is that the whole concept of Comprehensible Input is nonsense, or at least flawed, and can harm our learning. It was of course introduced by Professor Stephen Krashen, and he stated that we learn by consuming input at an N+1 level, where N is our current level, and +1 indicates a small step higher. People often interpret this as 5% or 10% unknown.
I find typical beginner input extraordinarily tedious. Years ago I started the Duolingo German course, and gave up. There’s only so many times one can repeat banal words and phrases before leaving teeth marks in the furniture. As someone said earlier, study what you enjoy.
I find unintelligible input, especially early on, beneficial. Study a graded text e.g. at A2, look up the words, read through and listen. Go to the next text, rinse and repeat. Go back to the first text, study it again, and so on. Gradually texts become easier, you start to see patterns, words stick. Play around with the sentences, create new ones, test yourself. Consuming largely unintelligible audio can be beneficial, you get to hear the sounds, and learn to recognise words you have studied, reinforcing the connections in your brain. Obviously you should only spend a moderate proportion of your time listening to such input.
My purely subjective view is that we should really be talking about graded input. Thus we study a text that is appropriate to our level in terms of grammar, vocabulary and sentence structure, with words repeated across texts, and techniques such as word families employed. We might not know most of the words, but with gradual exposure we learn them.
My experience with German, it may be different for other languages, is that the ministories are awful. The level was badly matched, and the stories were boring. I dislike the graded lessons, the level is often badly misjudged, vocabulary is not repeated across videos, and tricks such as word groups are not used. It is very amateurish. I recently watched a German A2 video only to find that it was challenging at my B1 level. Essentially it was created by someone with no training in language teaching, hence they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. It was very amateurish. Stephen Kaufmann and others regularly denigate language teachers, but unlike Kaufmann and others many teachers have a lifetime teaching and know what they are doing.
The advantage of a proper course is that it is designed by a group of people with teaching experience who can ensure that the content is correctly graded and optimised for learning.
If you are reading above your level, you will still be dealing with the basics … all the time. You will have no need to “come back” to them.
Of course, if one just reads military history or some such specialized topic, you probably won’t find the material suitable for talking to girls. I recommend fiction for an all-around language diet.
Yes! I put “interesting content” far above “i+1” content.
Maybe in the days of paper dictionaries and grammar books, when every unknown meant tedious, time-consuming thumbing through a book, “i+1” made sense.
But with computer assistance like LingQ and AI, lookups are so fast, I think it’s time to reassess the “i+1” doctrine.
One of the great polyglots of the 20th Century, Kato Lomb, emphasized motivation as the key to language learning. “She attributed her success to massive amounts of comprehensible input, mostly through recreational reading” – Kató Lomb - Wikipedia
It’s worked well for me. I’ve read close to 50 books in a little over three years, mostly adult mysteries and science fiction. There is still much I don’t know, but I can get the gist of most French I read.
I think this will vary a lot with your choice of language. If you are learning a language with overlap you can just push through with reading above your level.
That isn’t going to work with Thai, Chinese, Japanese, or other languages with a major shift from your native tongue.
There is always nuance, if you are learning a romance language and your native lounge is a romance language then push ahead, you will be able to struggle through. But when you shift language families, scripts, etc. You don’t get far outside of I+1. This is the reason Chinese and japanese are so notoriously difficult, it takes forever just to get to I+1, and until you do you are mired in boring easy content, or hit a wall. Or you ground out vocabulary before even starting to try and read.
“i+1” never made any sense as it is absolutely unclear how i is measured. It is just a mindless slogan that due to its use of mathematical notation appears scientifically.
i could be the amount of known words per sentence, so I would then use content with no more than one unknown word per sentence. But if I read a text with longer sentences, the amount of unknown words per sentence will naturally increase. Does this automatically make the text less comprehensible? Doesn’t it play a role what kind of word it is I am missing?
i could refer to the percentage of known words of the overall language. But even a native speaker usually only knows about 10% of the words of his mother tongue. So maybe not percentage, but permillage? So the amount of unknown words should not extent 0.001 of the overall words a language consists of. English has two to three times as many words as German as far as I know. So an english text can have more unknown words and still stays comprehensible compared to a similar german text?
i could refer to the language level. But then the question is, which norm you refer to. The CEFR? So someone who is an absolute beginner should stick to A1 material, if you are A1 you use A2 only and so on. But in that case Krashen could have just said so, so that everyone understands what the heck he is babbling about.
[Extend this list to whatever comes to your mind, as it doesn’t seem to bother anyone anyway]
Looking out of the window it appears to me that todays whether is i+1 compared to yesterday.
As an aside, I once worked alongside a Ukrainian who was quite aggressive. I once joked that she learnt how to use a gun at school. She replied in the affirmative, explaining that at school they were required to disassemble and reassemble an AK47.
The problem with Krashen is his incredibly simplistic and naive approach to language learning. We could have a text where the student understands every word, but understands little of the content. In French we have Le journal de bord meaning logbook. The student knowing each word but not knowing the phrase might assume it to refer to a newspaper on a boat. Similarly La feuille d’impots might be assumed to be a list of taxes rather than a tax return. And they might assume that Il a réussi a semer les poules means He succeeded in planting the chickens, whereas it means He succeeded in shaking off the police. So Krashen ignores both compound nouns and words with multiple meanings that can only be guessed from context.
I generally avoid using French slang, mainly because I will get it wrong as we have seen, and it would not be appropriate for a foreigner. We might in English say the pigs or the filth, both of which would be offensive and indicate a deep hatred for the police. The fuzz is probably dated, and peelers is surely antiquated.
+1=
