[HN Gopher] What makes comprehensible input comprehensible?
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       What makes comprehensible input comprehensible?
        
       Author : surprisetalk
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2025-06-22 18:51 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cij-analysis.streamlit.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cij-analysis.streamlit.app)
        
       | joshdavham wrote:
       | Oh wow! I'm surprised to see someone post my analysis haha
       | 
       | Happy to answer any questions here. I kept my analysis really
       | high level for a general audience but since this is HN, we can
       | get a bit nerdy :D
        
       | flippyhead wrote:
       | I love this. I made a totally free, just for fun, tool based
       | around learning Japanese via Youtube using the CI approach.
       | https://seikai.tv The trick is finding content that is at the
       | right level but that you also find interesting. Great article,
       | thank you!
        
         | joshdavham wrote:
         | Thanks for the kind words!
        
       | ragazzina wrote:
       | > Word length - At least in English and French (the languages I
       | know best), longer words are generally considered harder.
       | 
       | I think in a language with a lot of similar sounds or even
       | homophones, longer words are easier. For a beginner Chinese
       | speaker that knows both words, hearing "che" will probably be
       | ambiguous, but "chuzuche" will be parsed immediately.
        
         | joshdavham wrote:
         | That's a good point.
         | 
         | I don't think the 'longer equals harder' pattern holds for
         | every language. I actually reached out to the head teacher at
         | CIJ when I first made this analysis and she said the same.
        
       | EdiX wrote:
       | I don't think this captures the whole situation. Much of what
       | makes comprehensible input comprehensible, at lower levels, is
       | presence of visual hints.
        
         | joshdavham wrote:
         | That's exactly right.
         | 
         | Much of the beginner videos make use of visual hints like you
         | say (images, props, etc), and none of these were taken into
         | account in my analysis.
         | 
         | I do think it could be cool to do a 'visual' analysis of CI in
         | the future where you attempt to measure how much context is
         | present (or not) in each video and see what insights you could
         | draw from that.
        
       | joshdavham wrote:
       | Here's the source code for this analysis to those interested:
       | https://github.com/joshdavham/cij-analysis
       | 
       | I will note that the transcripts (and parsing scripts) are not
       | included in the repo. The transcripts are not my intellectual
       | property so I can't share it (and the parsing scripts are a bit
       | of a dumpster fire).
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-06-26 23:02 UTC)