Name: Does Input Have to Be "Comprehensible"?
Uploaded: 2025-09-19T15:53:05.000Z
Duration: 14 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So as a beginner learning Japanese, should you be immersing yourself with content which is comprehensible to you?

The imperative

Modal verbs - A2

So according to Steven Krashen's input hypothesis, you acquire language when basically you comprehend something which you previously couldn't.

So if I hold up a ball, a red ball, and say the English sentence, this is a red ball.

And let's say for example, you didn't know the English word ball, but you knew the rest of the sentence.

Then you can probably make the inference, oh, the word ball probably means ball.

And now you just, due to the extra context clue of me holding up the red ball, you're able to comprehend this sentence, comprehend that the word ball means ball, and then according to the input hypothesis, you'll be able to acquire it.

So acquisition is all about understanding things which you previously couldn't understand.

So now when we're thinking about, well, should you be immersing in content which you understand like 90 to 90 percent of already?

Or is it okay to immerse with content that you only understand 30, 40, 50 percent of?

When we're thinking about this question, we have to think about, well, which one will provide us with the most opportunities to comprehend things which we previously weren't able to comprehend?

Well, the reality is that I don't know and nobody really knows because there haven't been any sort of scientific studies conducted on this topic.

But I'm gonna talk to you about my speculations and my theories with this topic based off my own experience and my models of how language acquisition works.

So I actually don't think as a beginner of Japanese, this is different once you become like late intermediate to advanced, but as a beginner of Japanese, I don't think that it's actually any better to be understanding 90% versus say 30, 40 percent and it might actually be even more useful to have 30, 40 percent.

When I was learning Japanese for the entire period where I was a beginner, I pretty much exclusively immersed with content which was way above my level, you could say, right?

I was only understanding probably 10, 20, 30 percent in the beginning, later on like 50, 60, 70 percent.

For the first long while, I almost never understood a hundred percent because I was watching anime and dramas and Japanese movies, which I wanted to watch and I thought were cool.

I wasn't really thinking about was it gonna be too hard or not because everything was kind of too hard and I found that I made very rapid progress, right?

It didn't seem to be a problem that I was only understanding 20 or 30 percent.

That didn't seem to be a barrier that kept me from progressing and the reason why this is is because like for example, when I understood 30 percent of Japanese, you know, then there were certain sets of words and phrases which I had down pat.

Every single time I heard it, I knew what it meant.

Like, oh, gomen, konnichiwa, suimasen, like stuff like that.

Every time I heard it, I instantly understood it.

I had completely acquired it and my brain was very good at picking out those pieces of language from the whole and at any given point there was this new layer that was just beyond my cutting edge where I would start noticing these words or sentence structures, right?

Like one day I would notice some word like maybe like kaisetsu.

I would notice the word kaisetsu and then once I noticed it once I'd be like, oh, yeah, that kind of sounds familiar.

I feel like I've probably heard that before.

I'd start noticing it all the time like multiple times per day because I mean that's just how it works with the Bader-Meinhof phenomenon, right?

Once you notice things once then you just start noticing it all over the place.

You know, you're thinking about getting a certain type of car.

Suddenly you start seeing that car everywhere you go, even though you never noticed it before you thought about maybe buying that car.

And so once your brain unlocks a word and this would happen all the time, right?

Because your brain just starts noticing things.

Your brain is always starting to notice new language structures and patterns which are just beyond your cutting edge.

I would just notice words left and right all the time.

Every day there'd be three, four, five new words which I noticed for the first time that day.

And once I noticed them, I'd start noticing them all the time, multiple times per day usually.

And so it was inevitable that I learned the meaning of those words, right?

Eventually you just figure out what they mean or even if you don't wait until you actually figured out the context, you can just look it up once, get the meaning, and then you can't forget it because it just gets reinforced every time it comes up.

And so I had no trouble going from 30% to 31% and from 31% to 32% and it didn't matter that I was only at 30% and there was actually a majority that I wasn't understanding because I was constantly improving what I was understanding all the time.

And here's the thing with comprehensibility is that it's not a yes or no thing, right?

It's not like you 100% understood an entire sentence.

It's overall meaning, how the grammar works, what the individual vocab means, and you either understood it yes, or it was all gibberish to you, right?

You can understand the general gist of a sentence but not really know what some of the individual words mean or how the grammar is interacting.

You can understand half of a sentence and know, okay, this word, this part of the sentence means this.

This is happening grammatically, but not know the other half of the sentence, right?

And so even if you're only understanding 30% of like the overall language, there's still gonna be language that's on your cutting edge all around you all the time.

Like a few months ago when I was learning Chinese, I was just memorizing for like a few months and I was still at a very low level like only understanding 20-30%, but there was like almost something for my brain to do on almost every sentence because there was either one word in each sentence that sounded familiar and I was thinking, wait, what does that mean?

Or like some grammatical structure where I was like, oh wait, was that that structure I heard before?

So even though that I was only understanding 30% of the total whole, I was constantly bombarded with opportunities to learn new things.

What I mentioned at the beginning is how much opportunities are you being given to comprehend things which you weren't able to comprehend before.

So it's this idea that going from 30 to 31 is it's the same amount of progress as going from 95 to 96 and it's not necessarily harder to do.

It's actually in a sense easier to do because you're being bombarded with so much that you don't understand, right?

If you understand 98% of something and you don't only understand 2%, then you only are presented with the opportunity to learn that 2%.

And yes, it might be easier to learn that 2% because it's clearer what it means because everything surrounding the 2% is already clear.

But if you only understand 50%, then half of all you're listening to is stuff that's new to you and you have the potential to pick up.

So in a way, you have more opportunities to learn.

Like I said, it's not very hard to pick up things that are right beyond your cutting edge.

And so I think having the extra exposure to content you don't understand at the beginning stages might actually lead to you picking up more and more quickly.

Because when you think about it, babies who are learning their L1, they start out with 0% comprehension, right?

They're not understanding 98% filling in the 2%.

They understand nothing at the beginning and they slowly work their way up.

Given completely incomprehensible mostly adult input, right?

Like yeah, adults speak to babies and baby talk, but that's like 2% or less of all their input.

Most of their learning happens through hearing adult conversation.

And so the brain is kind of built, it has strategies built in to learn how to work its way up the comprehension hierarchy, right?

Your brain has the tools it needs to do that built in.

And because the unconscious mind, because you know language acquisition happens unconsciously.

That's what Steven Krashen tells us and what my experience tells me.

Your unconscious mind doesn't work in a strict linear fashion like your conscious mind does.

It can be working on multiple issues at once.

It can be working on multiple layers of abstraction at once.

And so at the very beginning, part of your brain could be working on phonetics and parsing the differences between little sounds.

Part of your brain could be dealing with what individual words mean.

Part of your brain could be dealing with the sentence structure.

And this could be happening simultaneously, right?

In a kind of parallel processing fashion.

Because we know that the brain does process things like many multiple things at the same time, like psychology tells us this.

And so like at the very beginning, right?

If you were only exposing yourself to what you already understood, like what would that be?

And you'd have such a limited range of input that all the other unconscious structures in your brain, which are equipped to decode full-on real language and and extract the underlying principles from that input, it's not going to get a chance to really activate if your input is so thin and easy, right?

So I think that you can work with your brain by replicating the process of first language acquisition, of basically doing what your brain was built to do, which is figure out how to swim while it's drowning, you could say.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Does Input Have to Be "Comprehensible"?

stuff

constantly

episode

conscious