CI works - don't let a single soul tell you it doesn't

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Like a lot of others here, I began my CI journey with Spanish (namely Dreaming Spanish) - this was back in late 2021 I believe. I didn’t have that huge of an interest in language learning in general at the time, but my girlfriend of years grew up in Honduras and I figured it’d be an amazing way to connect with her on a deeper level to begin learning on my own! No huge end goal in mind, just getting to a point where I could understand it, and maybe have a conversation one day.

I picked up some books with tips on the language, short story books for beginners, books with exercises, etc. - but wow, this was rough lol, not fun at all. Language-learning apps were mostly a waste of time as well.

Discovered CI and Dreaming Spanish somehow, and something about it was just so addicting. Learning more about how it worked as I kind of went along, SEEING IT WITH MY OWN TWO EYES (ears?) that it worked as I soaked in new words without thinking too much consciously about it, could apply them in real life, intuitively picking up sentence structures and knowing if something “felt” right or wrong if I was thinking or trying to say something.

I took 3 years of Spanish in high school and I learned more Spanish in like 30 days with consistent CI than I ever did through traditional study. Truly a revelation for me.

That being said, I continued on through the different levels (no grammar study or anything) and eventually got to the point where I would just watch stuff on YouTube for natives that I was into, racking up hours that way. Watching movies in Spanish here and there - getting hooked on Survivor Mexico and watching it religiously with my gf, as well as other ridiculous reality shows. Wasn’t even about learning anymore, it was just another part of me, if that makes sense.

I don’t speak all that often to be honest (again, never a big end goal for me), but when I do, I always get compliments on my accent and it’s never that difficult to get an idea across. Took a trip to Spain, could order food with no issues, talk to people no problem, and appreciated the trip that much more deeply.

My girlfriend’s parents speak Spanish or Spanglish most of the time, and I never ever feel left out of conversations. I can eavesdrop on conversations in public places lol, I can codeswitch if I ever need to communicate something more privately in public. It’s been really fun and funny and one of the most rewarding things I ever decided to do in my adult life - and I look forward to doing it all again with Japanese, and seeing what adventures it’ll take me on!

It’ll be way harder and take way more time, I imagine, but who cares. I look forward to taking on the written language once I’ve built up enough listening comprehension, should be interesting :slight_smile: I have a trip to Japan planned for mid-October this year, so hopefully I can fit in as many hours as I can by then to get that much more out of it as well.

With CI as a basis (started with CIJ 2 weeks ago, and we’re already at 20+ hours, let’s go!!), I know I can’t go wrong. The only issue with CI is that more people don’t know about it. We’ll get there though :wink:

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I’m glad it works. I’m combining the CI with textbook studying. Hopefully the studying isn’t a waste of time compared to just getting more CI.

Do you know how much input hours you had when you started watching native videos on Youtube and movies? What was the amount of comprehension? I noticed you said you didn’t do any grammar studying, did you have to look up words? How many hours of input did you have when you went on your trip?

Sorry about all the questions, just really excited about being able to learn languages. I just want to know how much time I should expect to put in. I imagine it’ll be hundreds/thousands of hours for me to learn Japanese.

Thanks for telling your success story, I feel motivated again! :smiley:

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Hey! I think people put too much stake into grammar study and memorization honestly (especially the Japanese-learning community for some reason, from what I’ve gleaned so far - Anki, etc.). I think it can definitely be helpful to use grammar study to quicken along or strengthen your CI listening skills, but the true focus should be on the input I would say.

English to Spanish is honestly quite a different experience from English to Japanese so far, so I don’t expect the number of hours to be comparable at all. For English to Spanish, it probably took me until around 350 hours to start thinking about YouTube videos for natives. I didn’t get most everything talked about at first obviously, but as long as you recognize like 50-60% of words, you can use context clues to figure out the rest. And if it’s too uncomfortable, don’t think too much, just move onto a diff video that you can enjoy. It’s hard to put a number on the actual level of comprehension I had at around this point though - every piece of content you consume tends to be so different. But once you’re able to start watching YouTube, it’s kind of game over. It’s so easy to rack up hours that way.

I would definitely look up some words here and there (not too often at all), just to get a better sense of what I was hearing and put things in context. Like if I would hear a word or phrase over and over and I still didn’t really know what it meant, it just saved time to look it up and move on with my life lol.

One thing I found interesting was that movies and TV were quite a bit harder than YouTube at that point, to be honest. I think it’s because YouTube videos are usually more focused on a specific topic rather than jumping around to different topics at random like TV and movies tend to do. You have to have a really strong base in the language to be able to jump around like that I would say.

Another thing I learned is that TV tends to be better for learning than movies (of course if you love movies, definitely do that) - this is because TV shows tend to have way more dialogue than movies, so you’re effectively getting way more input.

As for my trip to Spain, I probably had around 600-650 hours at that point? I kind of stopped tracking things once I could start having a bit more fun in the language, to be honest. And that’s the goal isn’t it? :slight_smile:

Excited to hear from you again once we get a bit deeper in the process!