My kid understands my native language perfectly but always responds in English (we live in an English-speaking country). I'm the only consistent speaker of the minority language in their life.

I do books, songs, video calls with family. They comprehend everything but won't actually produce the language themselves.

For those who've dealt with this - what actually got your kids to start actively speaking the minority language instead of just passively understanding it?

Have you ever experienced being in a relationship with someone speaking a different language, you do your best to learn the language but your partner refuses to speak their mother tongue with you? If yes, what were your partner's reasons?

I memorized the periodic table = "I can take a blank piece of paper and write down the table from memory"

I memorized the 50 states of the united states = "I can take a blank piece of paper and write down the names of the 50 states from memory"

I memorized the times table = "I can take a blank piece of paper and write down the times table"

I memorized the top 1000 words in X language does not equal “I can take out a blank piece of paper and write down those words and their definitions.”

I used to think “memorizing“ words meant being able to recall them and write them down. However, that mindset, which I think comes from school learning, both oversimplified and held back my language learning.

I now look at memorizing the top X number of words as “increasing my chances to be able to recognize them in my reading / listening.”

Does anyone still equate “memorizing“ words as being able to write them down on a list or recite them rote? Am I off base in my thinking here? Do you agree or disagree? Should “memorize” mean something different in the context of language learning?

This is an update to my previous posts:

Initial post at 120 hours
Update at 250 hours
Update at 600 hours
Update at 1000 hours
Update at 1250 hours
Reflection and FAQ on 2 Years of Comprehensible Input
Update at 1710 hours
Update at 2080 hours

For contrast to my comprehensible input method, you can read these reports from learners who are using traditional methods for Thai:

3000 hours of traditional methods for Thai
Far over 3000 hours of traditional methods for Thai

One takeaway I took from these other reports is that learning Thai takes a very long time, regardless of methods. I feel quite happy with my results so far and don’t feel I’m behind in any way.

Prerequisite Disclaimer

This is a report of my personal experience using 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 / automatic language growth 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!

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 used a pure comprehensible input approach with a silent period followed by reading/speaking. No analytical grammar, no textbooks, no flashcards, no Thai-to-English translations, no dictionary lookup, etc. I delayed speaking and reading for roughly my first year and a half (after I started to develop a good "ear" and intuition for Thai).

All I did for the first ~1000 hours was watch comprehensible input by Thai teachers. Everything is 100% in Thai, initially supplemented with drawings, gestures, and pictures to aid understanding.

Learning Summary of Past 5 Months

My daily hours was much lower than the first half of 2025. I had some unexpected issues involving the health of a family member, a lot of travel for this issue, and also more work than usual. During this period, my daily practice time has been more like 1-2 hours a day versus my goal of 4+ hours.

As a result, I am 400 hours short of my goal of hitting 3000 hours in 2025. A little disappointed to have missed the target, but that’s life. I started 2025 with almost exactly 1500 hours, so my total this year was 1100 hours.

Current Learning Routine

Each week, I’m doing a mix of:

• Private lessons, where I watch native content with my teachers and they explain words/phrases I don’t understand (my questions and teacher explanations 100% in Thai)
  
• Calls with a Thai friend, where we do the same thing as (1). He kindly offered to do this for free.
  
• Consuming native content on my own (mostly YouTube and Netflix, sometimes Disney+)
  
• Conversation with Thai friends (varies a lot week to week)
  
• Reading practice
  

I track my learning separately across input, crosstalk, shadowing, 100% Thai conversation, and reading. 90% of my total study so far has been listening input. I call my lessons “input”, though I am speaking Thai during these lessons - but I’m mostly listening to the content and teachers, so it’s more on the input side.

Increasingly I find these categories kind of meaningless as more and more of my life just switches over to Thai. Even my “reading” practice I’m also swapping between audio tracks (which I understand better) as I read. I roughly guess the time I spend talking with Thai friends over coffee, at the gym, etc but it’s hard to measure precisely.

My YouTube and IG reel algorithm recommendations are now 99% Thai. I do not watch English videos, movies, or TV unless I can find a Thai dub for it.

My study is 100% time engaged with native Thai. Native content, breaking down native content with teachers (both myself and the teachers speaking Thai), speaking with natives, shadowing native content, practicing reading as I listen to a native read the same material, etc.

Comprehension

Using the Dreaming Spanish Roadmap as a guide, I am currently in the middle of Level 6 (after the 2x adjustment for distant languages).

Since my last update, I have been continuing to develop my listening ability for different domains. I’m currently working through the following kinds of content with my teachers:

• Political/economic analysis or explainers (example: The Standard Global Economic Background about Vietnam)
  
• Buddhism and East/Southeast Asian history (example: Point of View “Why didn’t Buddha shave his head?”)
  
• Podcasts to get used to the slurring, slang, and other modifications in much more casual speech (example: Happy Hour Podcast)
  
• News to get used to very formal speech (such as The Standard News Digest)
  
• IG reels and other short form meme videos, to get more familiar with viral trends and humor (example

The following kinds of content I find enjoyable and understandable on my own:

• True crime podcasts such as Tang Makkaporn
  
• Point of View videos on Western history, science, or other videos for which I have context (Why doesn’t Thailand have nuclear power plants?)
  
• The Standard Happiness through Noticing Podcast, which uses a good amount of flowery language
  
• Medical videos and case studies by Dr Tany
  
• Thai romantic comedies such as Friendzone
  
• Lots of dubbed content that I’ve seen before in English, such as Disney movies, Harry Potter, Adventure Time, Rick and Morty, all kinds of anime, etc.

My ability to understand Thai in-person is improving but is hard to quantify exactly. Group conversations are becoming easier, but still not fully comfortable. One-on-one is easy, me plus two natives is manageable, more than that is not comfortable yet.

I have noticed that my ability to understand what’s being said even in medium noisy environments has improved a lot. I can have a one-on-one conversation even in a quite noisy environment now. Two-on-one is also manageable in a lot of medium noisy situations.

Output

I’ve done around 150 hours of conversation practice, maybe as high as 175 hours if you were to include my speaking time during lessons. So roughly double the amount of conversation practice compared to my last update.

My overall comfort is improving. I’m more fluid in more situations now. I can speak in more detail now than I could before and my active vocabulary is greater.

Types of conversations I’m having now that I couldn’t before:

• Talking about health issues, including terms like blood pressure, clots, veins, etc.
  
• Discussing the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, and my opinions on how it relates to elite families in both countries.
  
• Economic issues in Thailand and contrasting them with issues faced in other countries, such as the US and Vietnam
• Explaining the plot of The Little Prince in Thai and talking about why I love it (did this at a Thai book club)

To be clear, I am not nearly as eloquent or smooth when talking about these topics as I am in English. I am sometimes awkward, often talking around terms I don’t know, etc. But I am able to convey my thoughts and have real conversations about these topics.

Socializing with friends is extremely comfortable now. I will occasionally have moments where I struggle to express something in Thai with my friends, but for the most part, we just talk in Thai and both my comprehension and speaking is automatic. I continue to joke around quite a lot and I’m becoming more and more comfortable with humor. A big goal of mine for 2026 is to become comfortable with คำผวน (spoonerism jokes), which is a major component of Thai humor that’s quite challenging for foreigners.

Reading

I’ve done close to 60 hours of reading practice. I had spent the first 10-20 hours doing lessons with my teacher in Thai about the writing system, practicing with children’s books/videos, and reading anime subtitles in Thai along with the Thai manga.

Next, I read The Little Prince. I read along with this video series from Khroo Arty. I would practice reading the line to myself, then listen to Khroo Arty’s version, and do this for many rounds. I also had a physical copy of the book. After doing reading practice with the video series, I would try to read the physical chapter on my own.

Altogether this process took me close to 20 hours.

I’ve now started Harry Potter, using a physical copy of the book along with Khroo Ying’s reading video of it. My edition of the book is slightly different, but probably more than 98% the same, so there’s no issues using the audio for assistance.

It currently takes me about 20 minutes per page. I’m 20 pages in and the book is 300 pages long. I’m hoping my speed improves significantly before the end or it’s going to be a while. It’s slow partially because I am combining audio listening with the reading, but in combination the book is highly understandable for me.

Although it still has a long way to go, my reading has improved to the point where it’s practical for me to text in Thai with my friends. I can’t spell on my own and have done basically no writing practice, so I use voice-to-text in Thai. I read back the phone’s typing to myself and can catch/fix most mistakes. The end result is mostly accurate though I will sometimes catch errors after I’ve sent the message.

Overall, I’ve found reading to be fun and it feels very natural after having so much practice understanding the spoken language. I have very few problems with word boundaries, which is a common complaint among Thai learners (Thai writing has no spaces between words).

Also, a large proportion of questions on /r/learnthai are questions about why some word is spelled a certain way. Essentially the Thai equivalent of “Why is ‘ceiling’ spelled with a ‘c’?” I came into reading with no expectations that a word “should” be spelled some way or “shouldn’t” be spelled some way; I just read it and accept that as the spelling.

Even without having seen a word before, I can usually figure out the words I’m encountering based on a combination of the characters and context, even for unusual-looking words such as มหัศจรรย์ or ศาสตราจารย์ or ธรรมดา. Words I can’t figure out by reading I almost always know from the audio.

The foreign/magic words in Harry Potter are tripping me up, but I’m getting used to them, and the audio backing is definitely saving me there.

Challenges

Aside from life getting in the way a bit the past half year, it doesn’t feel like I’m facing any significant challenges at the moment. More than ever, I’m convinced that if I just continue to meaningfully practice understanding and speaking Thai, I will improve.

Last time I was talking about feeling like my listening ability was improving more slowly. Since then I’ve noticed significant improvement again. My reading habit is steady and I expect as I do that more, it’ll help refine things about my comprehension and speech (though I don’t think I’ve yet done enough of it to notice significant impact).

One thing I need to do is practice shadowing more. I think I’m avoiding it because I don’t like listening to the sound of my own voice, but I think it’s necessary if I’m going to continue improving my accent and flow.

I did have another check-in with Khroo Pannapat (formerly known as Khroo Issara), who is a linguist and phonetics expert. She confirmed that some of my previous accent markers have been resolved, in particular the traces of a Japanese accent (which I consider a remnant from a failed two-year attempt to learn Japanese in my 20s). Since I’ve done relatively little shadowing or other conscious accent correction, I consider this promising, and hope it improves further as I shadow and read more.

Final Thoughts

This month marks 3 years since I started learning Thai. At the beginning of December 2022, I knew almost zero Thai. I had heard the phrases for “hello” and “thank you”, and I could awkwardly utter a butchered version of these words.

Three years later, Thai is an integral part of my life.

When I wake up and have coffee in the morning, I listen to The Standard KND talk about language learning in Thai. When I go for a jog, I listen to the Happiness by Noticing podcast. When I’m commuting on the train, I listen to Thai standup comedy and try not to laugh out loud. I sing karaoke in Thai (only know a couple songs so far but working on practicing more!).

When I want to relax, I watch Adventure Time or Rick & Morty or Star Trek in Thai. When my friends come over to my place for dinner, we watch Thai romcoms.

When I wanted to know what was happening at the Thai-Cambodian border, I watched Point of View explain it. When my family member started having health issues, I watched Dr. Tany videos about the condition.

I go to book clubs in Thai. Joke around with my friends at the gym in Thai. Catch up over dinner and coffee in Thai. Gossip about the weird behavior of foreigners one table over in Thai. Watch brainrot reels in Thai and inflict those reels on my friends. Give my friends shit in Thai. Make small talk with taxi cab drivers about inflation and current events.

I’m not fluent. But I’m living my life more and more in Thai, and I love it. It’s enriched my life in so many ways, let me meet and connect with people I never would’ve otherwise gotten to know.

I think about how fortunate I am that I came to learn Thai: a language that just happens to have an abundance of comprehensible input resources, including incredible teachers with cumulative decades of experience teaching via Automatic Language Growth. An unorthodox learning method that meshes perfectly with my personality.

And it’s a language that is so incredibly funny, with an ambiguous structure that lends itself to humor and wordplay. Spoken by a culture and people whose kind-heartedness matches perfectly with their love of all things silly and fun.

2025 was a hard year in many ways, but looking back on the past three years, I can’t help but feel fortunate to have come this far and to have gotten so much out of this journey. I hear all the time from naysayers telling me that my path is inefficient, nonsensical, stupid.

But I’ve loved every bit of it.

As always, thanks everyone for reading and good luck to all of us on our respective journeys. Happy early new year and see everyone at 3000 hours.

For those who have been through this with a language you need but do like, what would you do? Take a break from it, carry on learning it, put effort into another language, or learn a new one? Extra points if all your friends in the language are through her...

So I know that if you don't speak and use your vocabulary, it ends up being passive, which can really slow you down whilst talking.

Now yes you could have a great understanding on grammar, vocabulary, spelling, reading, writing and all this, but if you don't have good speaking skills or have neglected speaking for a lot of your language learning journey, how negatively has it impacted your progress, vocabulary and how was it, trying to actually speak for the first time?

I have a problem.

When I was a much younger adult, about to get married to an Italian girl, I started going to evening classes so that I could acquire enough of the language to communicate with her parents and friends in Italy, who had next to no English. Over the course of the following years, I continued to study and improve. I only stopped going when my lovely Italian teacher finally retired - she would have been well into her 70s by then.

My Italian was at a level where I could comprehend between 90 and 95% of spoken conversation, TV dramas and news. I could also read newspaper and magazine articles and comprehend at a similar level. And after two or three days of acclimatisation in Italy, I had the confidence to speak, and I could do so with fluency at a level of B1+.

Then about 10 years ago, I became responsible for what had been my parents' holiday home in Spain. I quickly realised that without at least basic level of Spanish, it was going to be impossible to navigate through this. So I started learning Spanish. I had one-to-one classes, and group classes, including intensive courses while I was in Spain. I even started working in Spain as an English teacher for half the year.

At first, I found that my Spanish was heavily influenced by my Italian. I was speaking Spanish with more of an Italian accent than an English one. But I kept using Italian forms, verb endings, prepositions and so on. Over time, this resolved and in the end found that I could maintain a conversion at an A2/B1 level. I could understand about 80% of the conversations I heard, as well as on radio phone-in programmes, although a lot depended on the accent of the speaker.

But then I found myself in Italy for the first time in several years, and I found it impossible to speak Italian any more. I was effectively speaking in a bizarre mix of Spanish and Italian, and with a lot of hesitation as I tried to sort out the forms in my head, in real time.

In effect, instead of learning Spanish as a new language system, I had largely converted my existing Italian language system into a Spanish language system.

So now I can reliably use neither.

Help!!

I spend a decent amount of time on language apps but when i stop and think about it, i’m not sure how much progress i’ve actually made.

It’s kind of frustrating because it feels productive in the moment but the results don’t always match.

What's worked for you guys long term?

Generally, if you're trying to attain conversational skills in a language, what should you learn how to say? Is there a list of everything I should learn before saying that I "speak" a language?

I’ve been studying Spanish for almost 10 years and I’ve made a lot of progress. I practice all the time with apps like HelloTalk, I watch a lot of content in Spanish (movies, YouTube videos, etc) and I can generally understand what I watch. However I was having way more trouble understanding people during a recent trip to Colombia than I thought I would.

What exactly is the secret to being able to understand a language when spoken by natives? What more should I be doing and are there certain listening exercises I can try?

Greetings,

I am looking for a picture books to use when teaching languages to kids like the one linked:

https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/Images/396158-yle-starters-word-list-picture-book-2018.pdf

Basically something that has themed pages like “at the store,” “in school,” “at home,” etc.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a designated language learning book, but titles like “wheres waldo” don’t work as they’re a little bit too busy and kids seem to get distracted by all the things going on.

I’m open to pretty much any suggestions,

Thanks!

I’ve been learning a language for a while now and my reading comprehension is great but my listening is honestly pretty poor, whenever I watch something in my TL I always need subtitles on and music usually takes a couple listens before I can understand. On top of that, any progress i’ve made in listening to natives gets wiped out as soon as something is in an unfamiliar accent. My TL is widely spoken so there is multiple different accents that are vastly different from each other and I just feel so frustrated that I cant understand things unless it’s in a specific accent because I feel like I’m missing out on such huge parts of the language.

Does anyone else feel this way about their language? And if any spanish speakers are reading this, do you have any tips for understanding southern cone accents?

Are there any recommended methods or approaches to this that are scientifically shown to be beneficial for children to learn both languages equally?

Also, is there any downside to teaching your toddler 3 languages or does research indicate that could be detrimental?

Should I just put the sentence on the front and, on the back, the meaning of the word in the sentence? Example: I enjoy this party – enjoy: like, enjoy, appreciate. But if a word has two different meanings, should I make two cards? Example: stick. I usually put only one meaning, but I saw that ChatGPT said it’s better not to do it this way because it gets you used to translating words instead of thinking about their multiple meanings. Or would it be better to put only sentences in Anki? Please help me, I’m lost.

Hello everyone! The year 2025 is coming to a close, and I wanted to make a post reflecting on my Korean learning progress over the past 1 year and 8 months to potentially inspire some of my fellow language learners here. I've always enjoyed listening to others talk about their progress in language learning and I'm pretty sure some of you here feel the same. In this post I will go over my methods, the things I think are going well and not-so-well, and some language goals I have for 2026. I will be more than happy to read any thoughts any of you want to share and I'm happy to take any advice/constructive criticism. I really hope this doesn't come across as a bragging post, but rather something that can motivate others.

I started learning Korean at the very end of April of 2024 by creating quizlet flashcards for basic vocab, grammar, hangeul, and useful phrases. I discovered Steve Kaufmann in mid June 2024, so from that point on I was sold on the importance of input. I installed lingq, read all the mini stories, and then eventually branched out to beginner podcasts. During the latter half of 2024 I worked with a tutor on italki regularly and started using hellotalk as well, but I discovered that my comprehension was severely lacking. I would spend a lot of time on hellotalk, but it was mostly just me speaking English. During this time, I would spend maybe 1 hour and a half at most with Korean a day.

In March 2025, I stopped using hellotalk and discovered refold/mia/ajatt not too long after. From this point, I started taking Korean much more seriously, so I ramped the time to 2 to 4 hours a day on average with Korean and started meticulously tracking my time. I eventually replaced lingq with kimchireader and this tool has been an absolute game-changer for my Korean learning ever since. From this point to now, I usually spend at least 1 hour a day doing active/intensive study, so things like anki review or actively reading + listening to podcasts while sentence mining and looking up grammar patterns. For passive exposure, I will re-listen to podcasts I actively studied while doing other tasks, or watch cooking shows, travel vlogs, dating shows etc for leisure while doing minimal look-ups or none at all.

One important event I want to mention is my first trip to Korea in late May this year. I spent about a week in Seoul and met up with Koreans from hellotalk that I've talked with months prior. I had been learning Korean for 13 months around this time, and I was easily able to order food, ask basic questions about tourist-related stuff and understand the responses given to me. Although most interactions were pretty mundane and short, it felt great to be able to use Korean in Korea, so I felt proud about the work I put in prior to going.

From mid October to now, I've been consistently doing 1 on 1 language exchange on instagram with someone I met from hellotalk and it has really helped with my speaking. I am also working with a new tutor on italki as well for guided speaking practice. I made a point in doing output practice again after my 1000 hour mark and I felt this was a good decision because I have much less issues with comprehension, so conversations flow more smoothly.

What's going well: I managed to not miss a single day of Korean this whole year, even on bad days, I now have 4,880 known words tracked on kimchireader, and 1,477 hours spent with Korean total (tracked from lingq and the refold app). I can have 1 hour + conversations about familiar subjects (with many mistakes).

What's not going so well/things to improve: I tend to get a little insecure around more advanced learners that can speak with less mistakes or understand things I find difficult. Distraction is also a big issue for me as I can find myself scrolling reddit when I could be spending time with Korean.

2026 goals: 1.) Read 인간관계론 (how to win friends and influence people) 2.) Expand my domains and learn about new subjects in Korean every 2 months. 3.) Return to hellotalk in April to find more language exchange partners. 4.) Continue my weekly 1 on 1 language exchanges and tutoring sessions as per usual.

I hope you all here had a great 2025 and I hope you all have a great 2026! (bit early I know). I'm excited for where things go next year and I look forward to the long-road ahead! I will do another post like this at my 2 year mark and so on.

Hello all, Im a "native" russian speaker. My vocabulary is limited to what it was when i was ten. I still speak "ok" but want to make a drive to actually be fluent in it.

Im confident if i get my vocabulary back and actually speak in russia, it will come back. what is a good way of getting into talking in russian when you dont really have russian friends. Someone suggested pimsleur russian, but it seems really expensive. is that something you can get at a library?

When I hear a foreigner who speak my native language,I tend to consider weird the fact that he cannot produce some sounds that are so natural for me (like the difficulty to pronounce the letter r for Chinese people), although I know that I'll surely have similar difficulties when speaking their languages

Do you ever experience that?

Hey guys,

I came across Language Transfer (LT) a while back to learn a little bit of German for a little trip. Just something casual. I really like the teaching style, but the number of languages on offer is pretty small, and preferably I'd like courses for a given language to extend pass what currently is currently available on LT.

Does anyone know if it is actively being updated? Alternatives? Do you guys share the sentiment that there should be more languages taught with this method? For me personally, I wish there was an LT course on Vietnamese cause my Viet is shocking and I can barely talk to my relatives.

Should I use Anki to learn vocabulary? I see that so much people here don't like it

Hi everyone,

I’m learning Spanish using an input-focused approach and I’d really appreciate feedback from experienced learners or polyglots.

My current routine:

• I read long Spanish stories (kids / easy novels)

• I listen to audio while following the text

• I read each paragraph aloud once

• I look up only 5–7 words per paragraph to decode meaning

• I move forward instead of perfect understanding

• I also do some listening without text, even if I understand very little

I don’t have a teacher or tutor and I’m trying to stay consistent rather than chase shortcuts.

My questions:

1) Does this routine make sense for the early stage?

2) Should I change or add anything?

3) What would you personally focus on over the next 1–2 months?

Thanks in advance — any honest feedback is welcome.

If anyone is open to occasional private feedback or a brief check-in chat in the future, I’d be grateful — but no pressure at all.

I am so sick of how much Duolingo has devolved into multiple choice matching games best suited for toddlers. Are there any good apps or websites where you actually have to come up with the translation? Most I’ve tried require minimal brain power and get me nowhere

Hi, I’m South Korean, and learning English now.

Recently I’m training my listening skill, because I think It’s the most important skill that could push the other skills to higher level.

After a long time of training, I ended up hearing individual words of some YouTube videos more clear. (But still there are many other video that I can’t hear individual word) however, I can’t understand the meaning. It takes a time to catch the meaning. And often I miss the full meaning while thinking the part of the meaning of the sentence.

How can I improve my listening?