You’ve probably heard that it’s extremely difficult for adults to learn a second language. You may even have proof: You tried it yourself, and it didn’t work. But maybe that’s because you took the wrong approach.
Stephen Krashen has a better idea. In the 1980s, Krashen, now professor emeritus at the University of Southern California, developed the Comprehensible Input Theory of language acquisition. The word acquisition, as opposed to learning, is key.
Learning is what you did in school: memorizing vocabulary lists and rules of grammar, taking tests, and awkwardly trying to pronounce Me llamo Juan or Comment vas-tu? Acquisition, on the other hand, is picking up a second language in more or less the same way you learned your first: by listening to and engaging with people speaking the language. Your brain does the rest without much conscious effort on your part.
In a sense, comprehensible input, or CI as its adherents call it, is like being thrown into the deep end of the pool and figuring out how to swim. But with language learning, that’s neither as traumatic nor as cruel as it sounds. That’s because your brain can learn language just by being surrounded by it. The brain is a pattern recognition machine, so sorting out the patterns of a language is part of its skill set. In fact, that’s how you learned your first language.
