As a complete beginner that knows how to say 2-3 sentences, how do we get to the point where it's possible to comprehend these sources?
edit: To expand on this, every advice resource i've seen on the internet has said: "forget textbooks, you need comprehensible input!" which I agree with, but how can you begin learning the language to the point at which this is possible?
The difficulty you're facing is in this:
'Comprehensible input' is a grift. Everything I'm saying in this comment is to help you avoid the mistake I made – I listened to the grifters and wasted months stumbling my way through Mandarin and then Spanish and learned next-to-nothing. Don't fall for the grift. You already know why it's a grift:
It is highly unlikely that you will get there solely by 'comprehensible input' in the way that it is touted by internet polyglots and snake oil marketing. You need something to make the input comprehensible. Which means you need some form of scaffolding, especially at the start. And if you're using scaffolding, you are not doing 'comprehensible input' (CI). CI is not a method that autodidacts can start with (unless, maybe, you have years to dedicate and more patience than anyone I ever met).
CI was popularised by an academic called Stephen Krashen. He was rather specifically talking about face-to-face learning, where learners would have someone available to make the content comprehensible. He holds up his hand and says:
If you understood that message, you learned a bit of German. Good work! How do you replicate that when there's nobody to walk you through it? When there's nobody to point at a clementine and say, 'eine clementine'?
There are some methods, such as 'total physical response', used in classrooms and immersion schools that are designed to take their students through these steps. (If you pay someone enough and they know what they're doing, you can almost certainly scrap the face-to-face element and do this online, too – but where and how are you going to find that and pay for that?)
There are graded readers and a plethora of online courses aimed at reproducing the same thing. Much of this, however, is only in the written form. In fact, Krashen is also talking explicitly about 'extensive reading' as a way of getting your daily Vitamin CI. He explicitly argues that language learners should not try to speak 'until they are ready' (but gives no indication as to when someone is 'ready').
What the internet polyglots forget to mention is that you can't just pick up a book from zero and understand anything useful. Some of Krashen's subjects were immigrant children in the US learning English. They heard the language at school, they received English lessons, and they interacted with other kids and adults. Their CI came after learning the basics.
Krashen made an academic argument that has been misinterpreted and misapplied. There is some useful stuff in his work. But that work was never intended as a self-help guide for autodidacts studying languages with access to the internet in a country that doesn't speak the target language.
Please don't let this put you off. There is a way. And eventually, you can improve by using 'comprehensible input'. But, as you say, you need to learn quite a bit before you get there.
First off, you need to hear the sounds as early as possible. Otherwise, you will not understand natives and your pronunciation will almost certainly be off. You won't be able to guess Chinese tones. (I am assuming that you're not hearing impaired – this advice may not apply if you are.) So a text-only beginning is no use.
If you don't practice speaking, you won't speak; although you need to replicate a good accent, so you do have to listen first. And you need to know some words and the order to put them in, which again means some pre-study. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't wait for e.g. five years before you try to speak. Start trying early on.
If you don't understand any grammar, you won't know how to extract meaning from Chinese sentences. Neither will you be able to form meaningful Chinese sentences when you speak or write. And without sufficient vocabulary, you won't know what the sentences say even if you know the grammar. Likewise for constructing Chinese sentences.
(Now, you're lucky, because basic Chinese grammar is a breeze. It's subject-verb-object, like English. And it doesn't always matter if you switch it up a little bit. It's quite forgiving. The past tense is easier than in other languages, too – so far as I understand, you can say the same thing and just add the time frame, such as 'yesterday' or 'last year', etc. (There is also 'le' or 了, but I won't try to explain that in case I get it wrong – my Mandarin isn't great.))
I can summarise a couple of points now. You need to learn enough of the language in order that messages in Chinese make sense. This will allow you to consume the so-called holy grail 'comprehensible input' to improve. And remember, the point of all this, according to the acolytes, is to be end up 'fluent'. If that's your goal, you need to build up your skills in the four key areas:
The idea that studying only one or two of these (reading and/or listening, depending on the interpretation of Krashen) will make you fluent will result in a lot of frustration and wasted time – if you don't just give up.
How do you learn enough grammar and vocabulary to be able to listen, read, speak, and write? There are a couple of options.
Now, you might say, but redtea, so-and-so says that they learned Japanese or French or whatever through CI. Unfortunately, they're almost certainly lying or unaware that they're not being truthful. If you look into their backstory, you will almost certainly find that they e.g. studied a degree in the language before they perfected it through CI. Or maybe they 'learned English through CI' but forget to mention or downplay the fact that they were taught English in school.
Once you have learned some of the grammar, there is a way to 'cheat' the CI. It's called 'Listening-Reading'. You choose a familiar book, then you read it in English while listening to it in Chinese. (Really, you end up reading the 'next' sentence in English while the narrator is pausing between the sentences – there's a knack to it, and it's a lot easier than it sounds.) Ideally, you have a parallel text. With Chinese, you would ideally have three columns: English, pinyin, characters. You can use the Princeton book for listening-reading. Or something like Streetwise Chinese. (Subtitled movies don't count.) I wrote about the technique, here: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/401145.
[Edit: bilingual texts are also very good for this kind of thing but you want to make sure that you are not just guessing the pronunciation. So maybe leave them till you've listened to enough that you know what the words should sound like. Your (internal) pronunciation doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be based on what you've heard.]
This isn't to say that you can't do some enjoyable things in Chinese while you're studying the grammar or course. You can and you should. If you read a chapter in a grammar or course and then watch some TV or read some news, you will spot what you learn 'in the wild' and it will go in a lot better. But the 'comprehensible input' can only come after you have already learned something.
If you're interested, Paul Nation wrote a good guide, 'What you need to know to learn a foreign language (English)': https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications.
Edit: so many typos! Hopefully I caught them all. I also added a couple of other points in square brackets.
It also strikes me, reading back through this, that there's a dialectic going on. Maybe the issue with CI is not CI itself, but the way that it's sold, as something that can be isolated from explicit study.
I do think it's important to engage with native content. But as part of a more rounded approach, and something to increase as you go on. A bit of grammar, a bit of vocab, look for both in the wild. A bit more grammar, a bit more vocab, look for them and the first bit of grammar and vocab in the wild.
Paul Nation, btw, argues that you can start to do CI when you understand 98% of the text; and in the meantime, to use word lists to build that initial vocabulary the fastest (I imagine Anki is good for that if you like the software).
Eventually, you know enough grammar and vocab that you'll spot things in the wild that you don't fully understand but which you recognise. I've heard these called 'known-unkowns'. When you start to see them, you can work the other way round: engage with native content and then look up the known-unkowns in a grammar or dictionary. For me, this only works efficiently when I'm filling in a few gaps, but maybe people with better pattern recognition will find more use in this approach earlier on.
thank you! this was a great comment.
You're welcome. I hope I haven't put you off. One thing that I like to do before I'm advanced enough to go 'target language only' is watch shows in my target language (dubbed if it's originally in another language) with English subtitles. You just have to remember to focus on the audio otherwise you might blank it out. Or listen to music in the target language. I doubt you could learn the language this way, but it's more exposure, which is good. It helps tune my ear before reading. It's hard to keep up the intensity if it's just study and struggle. So try to think of some 'down time' activities that let you stay with the language.
Incredible post, I gave up on learning Chinese but I might try again thanks to that thread
This is really insightful, thank you.
You're welcome.
I noticed the odd way that online language learning experts called for CI but rarely talked about how to get there with only side comments on graded content. Especially the ones that profess no formal study or flash card use is needed to gain a foothold. There being a dialectic is probably the best way to think about this. CI seems like it's good in principle, but it would be useless if you can't find perfectly targeted content (which is hard to do before having a strong understanding). Incredibly put together post!
I'm still in the early stages for my own journey and am working primarily on gaining the vocab and grammar (reading the hanzi because I was being overly reliant on pinyin). I really need to work more on listening. I tried a tone listening test and failed spectacularly, and I thought I was doing ok.
Anki is great, but it's usefulness is limited. It's great for cramming words into the brain in a way that sticks well (hanzi, basic meaning, pronunciation, tone) but it's terrible at learning context without a lot of other work (sentence mining is apparently good, but similar to CI needs significant prior understanding of the language, and it's not trivial to undertake the work). I've found some really great decks to provide variety to the study, but Ive found having too many decks becomes daunting and stressful.
This is exactly how we were taught English. First day at school teacher just looked at the class, pointed at one of us and said "Come to the blackboard" while gesturing. "Take a chalk. Open the window.". Then we continued with textbooks that were all in English. I mean the books had no explanations in our native language. We were technically not allowed to speak our native language in the classroom but of course there were some exceptions if we really did not understand something. All in all I think it worked great.
This is a good post overall, but I want to push back on the idea that you don't get fluent through input. This applies to foreign and native language learning alike. What do the best writers do? They read a lot more than they write! It's impossible to become fluent in a foreign without input; it is not a grift.
For example, the usage of 了 does not have definitive usage rules for even simple cases like expressing completion. You simply have to get a lot of exposure to 了 in context after learning the basics of its usage to understand it.
You absolutely need it to solidify the grammar and vocabulary so that the language fits together in a cohesive way in your brain. The structure of the language needs to get into your head in order for you to actually use it and understand it in a natural way.
The reason speaking too much too early is discouraged is because can result in you learning to speak an interlanguage, where you're speaking your native language with different words. Of course, it's important to practice speaking at every stage, but you must be aware of the boundaries of what you actually know how to say.
this article on the illusion of advanced learning makes similar points about how you need to expand your breadth as you expand your depth in the language. I highly recommend the hacking chinese blog. There's tons of great free articles to help you improve your learning strategies.
I wasn't saying that you don't need input to get fluent. I am criticising the notion of 'comprehensible input' as advertised by 'Krashenites' and sold to enthusiastic language learners. CI is a grift.
The question is how to get to the point where you can get something/anything from input alone. So many 'autodidact' 'polyglots' on YouTube have a back catalog of videos telling you that they learn languages by exclusively watching and reading native materials from the beginning. Some have their own websites with the same advice. They're all lying.
The idea that input is needed is trite but it's pitched as a revelation. It's also sold as the only thing you need. Even native speakers need more than input. It takes native speakers 15+ years to learn their own language, with direct instruction from family and friends as well as grammar and vocabulary tuition in school. I'm a bit older than that and reasonably well educated and I still have to look things up and ask others to check my English. And that's after sufficient direct 'input', too.
That's a good point about 了. Nevertheless, a learner can rapidly increase the rate at which they will understand the finer subtitles of 了 with some explicit instruction. There is no benefit in guessing wrong for years until it all clicks. Or in watching videos hoping to figure out any single word when almost none of them make any sense at all.
This is likely true for the most common words in a wide range of languages. The most common words have hundreds of meanings each. Almost every other word, if not all of them, has several meanings. An example from Spanish is 'cabeza', meaning 'head'. Up until yesterday I only pictured a head on top of someone's shoulders when I read or heard that word. So when I read a sentence with 'cabeza nuclear tactical' I thought there were two options. One, someone had a tactical nuke for a head. Or two, someone got hit in the head with a tactical nuke. It took several passes for me to realise that in this context, it meant warhead. The tactical nuke itself was the 'head'. (I think!)
Rejecting explicit learning because words have multiple meanings that only make sense in context is in my view the wrong way to approach the problem. Anyone who has gone to the effort of learning their own native language may as well use it to give themselves a headstart. This works with regard to input, too, e.g. starting with international news rather than creative writing; because a big chunk of the vocab about international topics will be the same in every language (albeit written or pronounced differently). To be clear, I don't think you are advocating for ignoring some explicit instruction – only reiterating the need to do a bit of both. N which case you are not advocating for comprehensible 'input', even if you say 'input'.
I agree there are risks with freestyle speaking too early. There's fossilisation, too. Which is why it's important to practice speaking by copying from good examples. But the comprehensible input crowd advocate for not speaking at all until it just bubbles out with perfect structure and intonation. Maybe it would do that one day; but how long is a learner supposed to be willing to wait to find out that it takes a decade or never happens?