This is an update to my previous posts:
Initial post at 120 hours
Update at 250 hours
TL;DR of earlier updates:
American splitting time between Bangkok and the US. Mostly monolingual previously (studied Japanese for a couple years), started to seriously look at learning Thai in December 2022.
I'm using a pure comprehensible input approach. No grammar, no books, no flashcards, no Thai-to-English translations, no dictionary lookup, etc. I am delaying speaking, reading and writing until many hundreds of hours later (after I have developed a good "ear" and intuition for Thai).
All I do is watch comprehensible input by Thai teachers. Everything is 100% in Thai, initially supplemented with drawings, gestures, and pictures to aid understanding.
At my level, visual aids are pretty rare and explanation of words I don't know are almost entirely verbal. There are exceptions, such as when describing specific people or places I'm unfamiliar with, or for particularly challenging words.
Prerequisite Disclaimer
This is a report of my personal experience using pure comprehensible input. This is not an attack on you if you enjoy explicit grammar study, flashcards, vocabulary, learning podcasts, Duolingo, etc. I am not going to break into your house and burn your textbooks.
I'm just sharing my experience with a learning style that I'm enjoying and that I've been able to stick with. I'm excited to talk about something that's working for me, personally, and hoping that my post can give insight to other learners interested in comprehensible input as a learning method.
I think everyone has different learning styles, and while we may be on different journeys, we're all aiming for similar destinations as far as being able to use and live with our TLs. Language learners are as diverse and unique as the languages and cultures we're studying, and I'm happy to celebrate our diversity in learning styles.
I hope we all achieve our goals, even if we're on different paths!
With that said, on to the update.
Learning Summary of Past 6 Months
So I've done an additional 350 hours since the last update. I meant to update sooner, but I've been super busy with life obligations. My work life became significantly busier and I had to travel a great deal. By the end of this month (November 2023) I'll have done three roundtrips between the US and Thailand. I'll also have done multiple flights around the US, bouncing between California, Washington, Colorado and New York.
I'm currently working through the intermediate playlist on Comprehensible Thai and watching both intermediate and advanced videos on Understand Thai.
I'm taking a lot of live CI lessons from multiple sources. My favorite is Khroo Ying of Understand Thai. As I often say in other comments, she's hands down my favorite teacher. Where 6 months ago, I was understanding about 70% of her Intermediate live lessons, I now understand 95%. We do a lot of one-on-one lessons as well and I would say the level of lessons has gone up since I first started taking them; she talks faster and more freely than when I first started the intermediate level.
ALG World had shut down previously but they're back now; I'm taking lessons with both Khroo Ang and Khroo Home. I'm also taking lessons with AUR Thai.
I would say the ALG World intermediate lessons are the easiest. Khroo Ying has a sort of magic ability to adjust perfectly to my level, so she's typically a sweet spot of challenging but very understandable.
The hardest lessons are with AUR Thai, though that may be because I only started taking lessons from them recently. I think I need to get used to the teachers. They also talk about things like Buddhist traditions more, which requires a lot of vocabulary I'm not familiar with. Another factor: they have two levels, "beginner" and "intermediate & advanced". I attend the latter courses, and the other learners are for the most part quite advanced, so I think they pull their punches less than (for example) ALG World where the skillset in the intermediate level is more mixed.
All my work and travel made it harder to be consistent. I had a presentation at a major industry conference that required a lot of preparation and I also had to travel from Bangkok to the US to Bangkok and back to the US. In the first half of 2023, I was averaging 2 hours a day. For July through September, I averaged less than 90 minutes a day.
That was a tough period for me, especially roughly ~330-380 hours. On top of the work and travel, I had a lot of trouble transitioning into the B4 playlist of Comprehensible Thai. I think it was the most "experimental" of the playlists I've worked through so far. The difficulty of the lessons was less of a consistently smooth upward curve, so I would have one video that was trivially easy (90%+ comprehension) followed by a couple videos that I was barely getting 50% understanding out of. I also wasn't able to do as many live lessons, since ALG World had shut down and Khroo Ying had scheduled a break in classes.
The organizer of the Comprehensible Thai channel has also shuffled the order of the beginner playlists and added a large number of lessons from B1 up to Lower Intermediate, so I think the transition to intermediate will be significantly easier for future learners. For me it was rocky.
Around 400 hours, things became smoother again. The Comprehensible Thai videos became easier to understand and I was able to switch into the intermediate videos. I also watched more from Understand Thai, both the free material as well as prerecorded lessons from Khroo Ying (100 baht per hour versus the 167 baht an hour she charges for live lessons). And Khroo Ying came back from her holiday, so I was able to do live lessons with her again.
I basically had a one month break from work for November. I'm also back in Bangkok this month, so I decided to heavily load up on live lessons. I'm taking about 30 live lessons a week, each one 50-55 minutes. Altogether I'm averaging 4.5 hours of active/focused input a day (5-6 hours on weekdays and 2-3 hours each weekend day).
I'm also doing significant chunks of more passive or less comprehensible listening. I'll put on Comprehensible Thai audio when I'm working out at the gym or commuting on the BTS (local Bangkok train). I'm not 100% paying attention but I just kind of have it on.
After my live lessons finish each day, I'll often spend some downtime either actively or passively watching Kuroko's Basketball dubbed in Thai. I'm watching 2 to 3 episodes of that a day, sometimes more actively and sometimes passively. More on that below.
Comprehension Ability
So using the Dreaming Spanish Roadmap as a guide, I am currently at the very start of Level 4. This is after increasing the hours required for each level by x2, which is the recommendation when learning a tonal language as an English speaker.
Supposedly this means I can understand a native speaker who's patient and adjusts their language to match. I'm not so sure about this as I haven't tried to interact with any natives speaking pure Thai (aside from my teachers obviously). I will say that my interactions with Thai service workers have gotten smoother, because I can actually understand their questions and requests.
I used to watch Kuroko's Basketball a lot about ten years ago, when I was trying to learn Japanese. Back then I would watch it over and over with both Japanese audio and Japanese subtitles. So I know the story really well. My understanding in Thai now is significantly better than when I tried to watch this earlier on, like around 120 hours. At 120 hours, I could catch individual words. Now (when watching with full attention) I'm catching tons of words and short phrases of a few words all the time. Almost every minute, I comprehend one or two full sentences. Sometimes there will be an exchange of several sentences between two characters that I comprehend at 80% or better.
Something kind of interesting is that around 470 hours, I tried watching a Kuroko episode and thinking that it didn't feel like my comprehension had improved much compared to 250 hours. But then I tried again at 510 hours and it felt qualitatively better. Before, watching an episode felt really boring and like a slog, because I was understanding so little. I would hear a lot of individual words I understood, but the overall meaning was elusive. Then I tried again at 510 hours, and suddenly I was understanding a lot more, more short phrases, and just enough full sentences that it feels rewarding and fun to watch.
Before I might have caught a phrase like "I think the same." Now I'll hear the same line and I'll hear the more complete "I think the same: I don't want to lose." Catching full sentences used to be something that happened sometimes, but now it feels much more regular. Now I think I catch 1-2 full sentences a minute.
Something else different is that even the words I don't understand sound clearer. As in, the individual sounds are much more distinct and it feels like I can better recall what the sounds were, even though I don't comprehend the meaning.
The differences are roughly as follows:
~250-470 hours:
Catching individual words constantly.
Catching full sentences sometimes, maybe a handful of times an episode.
Words I don't recognize sound blurry.
Watching episodes feels kind of boring / like a chore.
More recently:
Catching short phrases of 2-3 words constantly.
Catching full sentences more, about 1-2 times a minute.
Words I don't recognize sound sharper and I can more clearly recognize the sounds in my head, even if I don't get the meaning.
Watching episodes feels enjoyable.
That's celebrating the improvements, but overall watching the anime is still way less comprehensible than my intermediate lessons. It's hard to assign a value but I would guess my listening comprehension of any given episode is no more than 25%.
Since my comprehension is low and I don't always pay full attention, I'm not tracking anime hours (or passive listening) toward my total. I am tracking this time separately but less strictly - more estimated time whereas I track my dedicated study time to the minute.
Subjective Experience
Stating the obvious here: my comprehension is way better now than at 250 hours, I can listen more easily about a wide variety of topics, and listening feels really natural now. I virtually never translate in my head. When I do understand Thai, such as during an extended lesson with one of my teachers, it feels highly intuitive and directly connected to meaning rather than ever stepping through English first.
I do feel tired if I have a day where I have six hours of lessons, but I think that's expected. I definitely think I'm way less tired than I was when I used to drill kanji and mined sentences for Japanese; there's no way I could have done that for six hours in a sitting.
As I said in my previous update, it's definitely up-and-down. But I feel more certain than ever that any problems I'm having will resolve with enough input. If I understand less one day since I'm tired, it's okay. I'll do what I can, take a break if I need to, and I know that if I just keep listening, then a day where things "click" and feel right will be just around the corner.
My comprehension is definitely uneven based on both the speaker and the subject matter.
My understanding with Khroo Ying is very high, for example. She can speak with me quite quickly, I would say at "medium/typical native speed" and I follow with no problems, even as our discussions meander through a wide variety of topics over the course of an hour (as it would during natural conversation). This is because a good chunk of my hours have been either through her channel, her videos on Comprehensible Thai, or with live lessons from her.
In contrast, I struggle more listening to the teachers at AUR Thai, not necessarily because they're speaking faster or using more difficult language. I think they have a tendency toward different word choice and I'm also not as used to their rhythm and speech. I also notice I struggle a lot with lessons that go heavily into Buddhism and other religious traditions; my vocabulary in this area is just much smaller than for other kinds of subject matter.
I think this relative imbalance will definitely resolve itself as I listen more, and since around 450 hours I've made a conscious effort to increase the variety of my input. I'm currently taking live lessons with four different sets of teachers.
I've noticed I'm much better at distinguishing phonemes that were very hard to distinguish before. For example, a lot of the consonants that beginners mix up sound really clearly different to me now. There are words that used to sound the same to me that sound like totally different words now.
Occasionally, I'm surprised when I realize that there are two words that differ only by tone, but feel very different to me and that I didn't realize are minimal pairs. This usually happens when I hear the two words in close proximity to each other and realize that the sounds are similar, even though in my head the words are totally disconnected. I think the exposure to otherwise "similar" sounds in totally separate contexts makes them more disconnected and distinct in my head.
Wild speculation incoming: I suspect this is why more advanced CI learners are able to tell tones apart so well - they hear the words without thinking about the sounds, but their brain is encountering the different sounds in different contexts. I think this allows learners to acquire the differences more automatically and subconsciously, since you hear these sounds over and over again, connected to very different meanings, at very disconnected times. So "similar" sounds end up in totally different mental boxes.
To be clear, I have not fully grasped the tones. Some learners are able to do this by 600 hours and I'm not there yet. But I do think it will come with more input and (based on my discussions with more advanced learners) I think the tone distinction will feel very natural to me when it does happen.
More Random Observations
See my previous post for other tips, especially for more beginner learners.
My main priority has been to focus on material I find interesting/engaging. My secondary priority is to vary my sources of input and learning topics. So I know I'm currently somewhat unbalanced toward certain teachers/topics, but I'm okay with that as long as the material keeps me excited about learning. And I am getting more varied input, even if I'm not balancing perfectly now.
I don't know if there is necessarily a minimum number of hours a day to commit for CI to be effective. But I personally felt really discouraged during certain weeks when I was only getting an hour or less of input a day. At the upper beginner / intermediate level, I think it's harder to feel progress at that rate on a week-to-week basis. I don't know if my progress was actually slower on a per-listening-hour basis, but it was definitely slower on a week-to-week and month-to-month basis, which is disheartening. So I do think it helps me to commit more daily time to it, to stay motivated (which is like 90% of the battle when it comes to language learning).
That being said, even when I was really struggling to find time due to life obligations, it was still much easier for me to find thirty minutes or an hour for some CI versus my previous experience learning Japanese and trying to work up motivation for Anki. For me, there's no question which is easier to stick to.
Live lessons are much more engaging to me than YouTube videos. The interaction you get with the teachers can't be beat - sometimes they'll ask me questions (in Thai) and I'll respond (almost always in English). This really keeps my attention high, since I want to make sure I can answer if they ask me about something we're talking about. I also feel like I'm building a personal connection with the teachers, which also helps a lot with engagement.
I totally think you could become a highly advanced listener purely with YouTube, but I do think it demands a bit more attention and willpower than live lessons. If you can afford them and they align with your schedule, live lessons are a great supplement! But if not, then you can still reach your goals with only recorded lessons.
At this level, I do think I'm getting some value out of more passive listening as I walk around, commute, work out, etc. It's of course not as valuable as active listening, but having it in the background, I will hear and recognize words, understand phrases, etc and it reinforces stuff I know well. It's certainly better than listening to English music or podcasts.
For similar reasons, I think I'm also getting value out of watching anime in Thai, even though my overall comprehension is only around 25%. It's also nice to continue to gauge my comfort and comprehension ability with actual native dubbed media.
Some people have wondered how much specialized vocabulary you can acquire if you never do explicit vocabulary drilling. I'm only at an upper beginner or lower intermediate level, but my guess would be... a lot. I think this method builds strong memories of words over time. You also get high exposure to certain vocabulary sets based on what you're consuming. Since what you're interested in isn't a random distribution, you will get exposed to "low frequency" words in high density when you start listening to a lot of material about a certain topic.
For example, I remember pretty early on cementing the words for "demon" and "sword" because I was bored and watching Demon Slayer in Thai. I've barely watched Demon Slayer since then, and those words have only come up in a couple lessons, but I still recall them because they were said a lot while I was watching something I was really interested in.
Closing Thoughts
As I mentioned before, I've experienced more ups and downs with Thai since my last update. But knowing that I can stick with it even when my personal and professional life is really demanding makes me more confident that this method will work for me in the long run.
I feel quite happy about hitting 600 hours and hope to get to 700 by the end of the year. It'll be a little tough as my work schedule ramps up again in December, and I'll have family/social obligations with the holiday. But regardless, I'm really hopeful that 2024 is a year that sees my Thai ability grow a lot.
Hope this post was interesting to some of you, and good luck to all of us on our learning journeys!
