@martin_romangette You aren’t the first person to make this argument here, and you won’t be the last. I see very few if any subscribers here actually advocating for a CI-only approach. I certainly don’t. I do see it on other sites sometimes, like Reddit – but those advocates are usually shot down pretty quickly unless you’re visiting /r/DreamingSpanish, or other CI-only subs.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you are reacting to this post made a bit before your own:
If you go to the linked blog post:
It says in part:
Does CI Mean You Never Need to Speak or Study Grammar?
This is where a lot of people get confused — or frustrated with CI advocates.
The answer is no, CI doesn’t mean you abandon output entirely. What it does mean is that speaking before you’ve absorbed enough input is often frustrating and counterproductive. You don’t have much to draw from. But once you’ve accumulated enough reading and listening, speaking tends to come more naturally — because you’ve heard and read so much of the language that patterns have already formed.
Steve Kaufmann, who speaks over 20 languages and co-founded LingQ, has written and spoken extensively about this. His view: focus on input heavily early on, and speaking takes care of itself once you’ve built the foundation. That doesn’t mean never speaking — it means front-loading input.
Grammar is a similar story. CI and grammar study aren’t opposites. Grammar explanations can help you notice patterns you’re already seeing in your input. Think of grammar as a map and CI as the territory. The map can help you navigate, but you still have to walk the terrain.
Common Mistakes When Using Comprehensible Input
Treating it as entirely passive. Extensive listening during your commute is great. But if that’s your only learning activity, you’ll progress slowly. Active engagement — reading the transcript, looking up words, reviewing vocabulary — accelerates the process significantly.
Avoiding grammar entirely. Some CI enthusiasts overcorrect and dismiss grammar completely. Don’t. A basic understanding of grammatical structure helps you notice what’s happening in your input. It doesn’t need to be the focus, but ignoring it entirely is its own mistake.
That blog post also links to this older blog post, which was made by Steve Kaufmann, the co-founder of LingQ:
In the post Steve points out:
I strongly agree with Stephen Krashen. Massive amounts of comprehensible input is the key to language acquisition. This doesn’t mean that there is no need for output (speaking and writing) or that there’s no value in consulting a grammar guide from time to time. We don’t need to overthink this. We simply need to understand that the bulk of our learning time as language learners should be spent on listening and reading, as this is what will build our vocabulary and sense of intuition with the language.
Having taken the time to read them, I agree with the messages of both blog posts. Comprehensible input has served me very well over the years, as has studying grammar and vocabulary to help me understand what I’m reading and watching/listening to. That in turn helps me with writing and speaking, though those are different skills.