English, the language which gave me lots of pain when I was a student in the education system of China.

When in high school, English is one of the three main subjects a student must take. Even then in university, English was still a subject that have to take.

Unsurprisingly, the thing we put the most attention on is grammar. We emphasized grammar so much during that period, I thought being good at grammar was the only way to master English.

Then, until a few years ago, when I tried to search for how to learn English on YouTube again, accidentally found a video from a Professor whose name is Stephen Krashen. In case you are eager to watch the video, here's the link .

At the beginning of the video, the professor gave a powerful statement:

There's only one way to acquire a language and we all do the same. We learn a language by getting comprehensible input.

Comprehensible Input

Comprehensible input means the input you can understand. The input can be a picture, a piece of voice, video or text. Eventually, the part of your brain that is responsible for language, will gradually learn the language.

The statement is intuitive. Just try to recall how you mastered your native language in the early years of your life. You were just an infant, lying on the bed and listening to the meaningless voice that came out from the mouths of people surrounding you.

But somehow, you was able to say "Mama" or "Papa" for the first time in your life. And then, more simple words and sentences you started to speak. Then, more complicate sentences and your parent started to worry about you using inappropriate words.

During the whole process, I believe nobody tried to teach you grammar of that language. Instead, people around you just tried to speak to you and you just tried to listen.

But, when you speak, there's always words and sentences that are already in your mind. They show up there unconsciously so that you feel effortless.

So to get comprehensible input, a lot of it, if you want to learn English or other languages.

Affective Filter Hypothesis

In the video, the professor also mentioned another important thing called the Affective Filter Hypothesis. You may heard the funny phenomenon that when a family moved abroad, the children are always able to learn the language in the country very quickly, while the parent often struggle to learn.

The Hypothesis explains the phenomenon very well. When we try to get comprehensible input. There are factors that will influence the efficiency that our brain learn the input.

The first one is Motivation, students with more motivation will do better in language acquisition.

The second one is Self-esteem, more self-esteem is good for acquisition.

The third one is Anxiety, the lower the anxiety, the better the language acquisition.

The hypothesis also explains why we should watch or read the material that we feel interested in. More interesting the material is, the lower anxiety we will have. If we can totally forget that we are learning a language by watching or reading things, that would be the best.

Some other resources

The theory paves us a solid ground. But when it comes to practice, there are still a lot to answer.

For example, I want to speak English fluently, how much comprehensible input do I need to get?

How much input should I get before starting to output?

What is the best type of input for learning language?

Those questions are difficult to answer. At the moment, I only can give you some links and videos to check out:

• antimoon : A website includes a series of article that explain how to learn English effectively which is based on the theory of Professor Stephen Krashen.
• @mattvsjapan : A YouTube Channel about learning Japanese, the youtuber also explain lots of practices and methods on getting comprehensible input.