Learn About The Method
Say goodbye to grammar books and acquire language subconsciously through high-quality audible input.
The PrOblem
Traditional language learning doesn’t work very well.
How is it possible that millions of children and teenagers learn English for anywhere between 4-8 years during primary and secondary education and then leave school still not being able to hold a conversation with a stranger?
It goes like this:
A young student will spend years at school completing “fill in the blank” grammar exercises, studying lists of vocabulary and completing units in a textbook. They take an English exam and may even get a good score!
Then, they leave school. A foreigner approaches them on the street and asks “Excuse me, do you have any idea where I can find the nearest post office?”
The young student stands there stunned. They try to speak and give an answer, but their brain is still trying to process what this stranger has asked them.
They respond “Uh…sorry. No English sorry”.
No English? What about the 6 years of English classes at school?! What was all that time spent studying English from a textbook for if this young student can’t answer a basic question about the nearest post office?
Why Traditional Methods Fail
Something is clearly wrong here.
Now, not everybody leaves school still not being able to use English properly, but many do.
The reason traditional language learning is so bad is because they have to create meaningless tests in order to give students a score.
School teachers are incredibly busy and aren’t able to take the time to give each student in the class a full speaking test and give them a score on their true level of listening comprehension.
It’s far easier and far less time-consuming to give students a test where the questions have a “right” answer and a “wrong” answer.
“Fill in the blank” grammar exercises, “multiple choice” questions and other meaningless tests like these have absolutely nothing to do with true language acquisition.
These tests allow teachers to quickly and easily give a student a mark out of 10 for their test, but this is not how a language is learned.
Here at EnglishSponge, we don’t have the same limitations that exist inside the school education system.
With our method, you will learn English in an effective way, and in a way that will be enjoyable for you!
Learning English shouldn’t be a painful and boring process. And It really doesn’t need to be.
Let us explain to you the comprehensible input method used here at EnglishSponge.
Now, not everybody leaves school still not being able to use English properly, but many do.
The reason traditional language learning is so bad is because they have to create meaningless tests in order to give students a score.
School teachers are incredibly busy and aren’t able to take the time to give each student in the class a full speaking test and give them a score on their true level of listening comprehension.
It’s far easier and far less time-consuming to give students a test where the questions have a “right” answer and a “wrong” answer.
“Fill in the blank” grammar exercises, “multiple choice” questions and other meaningless tests like these have absolutely nothing to do with true language acquisition.
They are used to assess a student’s English level. These tests allow teachers to quickly and easily give a student a mark out of 10 for their test.
But this is not how a language is learned.
Here at EnglishSponge, we don’t have the same limitations that exist inside the school education system.
With our method, you will learn English in an effective way, and in a way that will be enjoyable for you!
Learning English shouldn’t be a painful and boring process. And It really doesn’t need to be.
Let us explain to you the comprehensible input method used here at EnglishSponge.
What Makes Comprehensible Input Different?
Our method is based on the theory of “Comprehensible Input”, popularised by Stepehn Krashen. Below are the basics.
Benefits of Comprehensible Input
“Input” is: Listening and Reading in English.
Any English content that you listen or read is “Input”. Doing grammar exercises, writing or speaking is “Output”, not input.
Comprehensible Input means that you can understand the content or general message of the content you’re listening to or reading. This doesn’t mean that you understand every single piece of vocabulary or grammar point in the content, only that you understand generally what the content is about.
It’s important that the content you listen and read is at the correct level for you.
If you’re a beginner English student, listening to intermediate or advanced content is not a good use of your time.
It’s simple. If you’re a beginner English student, then listen to beginner-level content. If you’re an intermediate English student, then listen to intermediate content. You should be able to understand the general message of the content without constantly having to pause or translate vocabulary.
If you find that you don’t really understand what the content is about, that’s a sign that the content is not “comprehensible” to you and that you need to reduce the level.
When you listen to comprehensible input, the conditions are met for your brain to naturally acquire language and because the new vocabulary you learn is within a context (a story, a conversation, a monologue, etc), you will learn the vocabulary in a deeper way that you are unlikely to forget—unlike learning vocabulary in an abstract way using tables or vocabulary lists.
With our method, the only thing you have to do is watch our videos.
You don’t need to:
- Take notes
- Complete comprehension questions at the end of the video
- Complete grammar exercises
- Understand 100% of the video
- Worry if you don’t understand absolutely everything.
Just watching is enough to learn English.
When you were a baby, you spent the first 12 months of your life just listening to your native language, and you learned a lot! You didn’t take notes. You didn’t complete comprehension questions. Or do grammar exercises. You just listened!
The comprehensible Input method we use here at EnglishSponge mimics the way in which a child learns their native language. But our method doesn’t just work for babies and children, but for adults of any age.
This method is proven to work. And thousands of students have already seen success using this method with other languages on websites like DreamingSpanish.com.
But for some reason, no website like this exists for English which is exactly why we’ve created EnglishSponge.com.
How to Watch Our Videos
Our library of videos is constantly expanding. Keep checking back for more content targeted specifically for your level.
Pay Attention
When you watch our videos, you do have to be paying attention.
If you’re only listening to the video passively (E.g. Having them playing in the background while you scroll on your phone), you will not learn very much.
But as long as you’re paying attention to the video, and the video is at the correct level for you, you will learn English just by watching.
Do's & Dont's
A lot of our videos (especially the beginner ones) use a lot of visual cues (pictures, hand gestures, etc) that make it easy for your brain to make a deep connection between the new vocabulary and its meaning.
You should focus on simply watching and enjoying the video.
You can turn on the subtitles if you need to. But ideally the content should be understandable without them.
You can translate words if you need to. But ideally you should not be translating too much while watching our videos.
Ideally, you shouldn’t be thinking too much. You should just be watching and enjoying the video.
Start Watching
If you want to watch a video twice, three times or more, that’s absolutely fine!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you learn vocabulary just by watching videos?
The way that you learn vocabulary with this method is different from traditional language study methods.
With our method you do not have to actively memorise vocabulary. Instead, you will naturally encounter new vocabulary over and over again through the process of watching our videos.
Let us give you a simple demonstration of how acquiring vocabulary works using our videos.
Let’s take the verb: to scratch
Through watching our videos you will come across this verb over and over again, and each time you hear the verb you will learn it a little more.
While watching a video, you hear this sentence: “If you look at this picture, you can see that the cat is scratching the sofa”. This is your first exposure to this new word. You may have to use a translator to understand what this verb means the first time.
Later, while watching another video, you hear another sentence: “My dog always scratches me when I try to stroke him”. As this is only your second exposure to this verb, you may have to use a translator a second time to remind yourself what it means.
Then in another video you hear “The tiger has claws that it can use to scratch you”. Now you’ve heard this verb 3 times in 3 different contexts. This time, you may know what it means immediately without having to use a translator.
Then for a forth time, you hear “I scratch my face when I’m nervous”. This time, you immediately know what it means.
Then a fifth time, you hear “I have been scratching my leg all day because it’s so itchy” Upon hearing this verb for a fifth time, it further solidifies your understanding of the word.
And there you have it, you have learned a new verb: to scratch.
At no point did you study or memorize this piece of vocabulary. You learned it simply by watching videos! Not only that, but if the verb was used in conjunction with a visual cue like an image, you wouldn’t have even had to use a translator! It’s possible to learn the new vocabulary through listening alone.
And it’s not just possible to learn vocabulary like this, it’s also more effective. Learning vocabulary through comprehensible input means new vocabulary is linked to a specific context in your mind, which means this new piece of vocabulary has been learned in a deep way. After learning vocabulary through comprehensible input, it is not usually forgotten.
Then, when you eventually start speaking English, you will find that the vocabulary you need appears in your mind like magic. You will have the words you need to express yourself, but you’ll often have no idea how or when you learned them!
And finally, because you learned the new piece of vocabulary through listening and not reading it on the page, you will also know how to correctly pronounce it.
Which brings us onto the next major benefit of learning through comprehensible input.
What About Pronounciation?
Although comprehensible input can be used to learn more or less any language, it is specifically useful for learning English. Why? Because of pronunciation.
You see, English is not a phonetic language. This means that when you see a word written down, it’s not obvious at all how it’s supposed to be pronounced.
Just take these classic examples:
Though | Through | Throughout | Tough | Thorough
In fact, in English you can even have words with an identical spelling that have a different pronunciation:
I want to live in Spain
This is a live recording
When an English learner reads a lot, especially early on (as they do in schools around the world) it leads to bad pronunciation habits.
When reading English as a learner, you have to continually guess the pronunciation of new vocabulary because words in English are not spelt the same way as they are pronounced.
Then, when the student speaks, these guesses then become how they pronounce things. These early guesses quickly become habit and create long-term pronunciation problems.
Example
A beginner English student reads the word worked written on the page. They read the spelling and they guess/assume that the word is pronounced “wur-ked”. They then start trying to talk in English and start saying things like “I wur-ked in Brazil for 2 years”.
(The correct pronunciation is “wur-k-t”, with a tricky consonant cluster at the end)
This pronunciation of the word worked then becomes the habit for this student. And even after being corrected by a teacher countless times, they often continue to make this mistake.
If this student had instead originally learned the word while listening to it through a comprehensible input video, this bad habit would have never been created in the first place. They would have heard the word pronounced “wur-k-t” multiple times and would have imitated it.
It was learning the word through reading that caused the problem.
This is why here at EnglishSponge we recommend spending the majority of your time learning by listening instead of reading.
In fact, we recommend not doing any extensive reading until you are at least at the B1-B2/intermediate level.
By focusing on listening at the beginner and intermediate stages, you will end up with much better pronunciation as you will copy the correct pronunciation you’ve heard through watching videos, instead of guessing the pronunciation after seeing the vocabulary written down on a page.
This is also important for stressed syllables.
With English, there is no way to know which syllables are supposed to be stressed in a word by reading it from a page.
And so after learning vocabulary by reading, students have to guess where the stressed syllable should be.
Take the word: Computer.
Where is the stressed syllable in this word? (These are written in a British accent.)
- COM-pyoo-tuh
- com-PYOO-tuh
- com-pyoo-TUH
The correct answer is number 2. But there’s absolutely no way for students to know this by reading. And that’s why many students pronounce it as it is written in number 1.
If they had learned the word “computer” through listening, they would naturally pronounce it with the correct stressed syllable without even really thinking about it.
English pronunciation is very different from English spelling. Students may notice when the difference is obvious, but will often miss instances where the differences between the spelling and pronunciation are more subtle.
Take the word development.
Non-native English speakers usually mispronounce this word: “dee-veh-lop-ment”
But in fact the correct pronunciation is (and there is no way you would know this by looking at the spelling): “duh-veh-lup-munt”. This word actually has 3 schwa sounds in it.
Non-native English speakers attempt to use the vowel sounds they know in their own language to pronounce English words without noticing. They do this because they haven’t listened enough, and because they did too much reading and not enough listening in the early stages of learning the language.
Of course, pronunciation practice techniques like shadowing and learning the mouth positions for the sounds of English are still very important. But a huge amount of pronunciation can be learned simply through extensive listening to native English speakers. Especially if this is done at the early stages before bad pronunciation habits can form.
At EnglishSponge, we don’t suggest that you have to completely avoid reading entirely (although you could). But we do recommend that you limit the amount of reading you do, and instead spend at least 60-70% of your study time just listening during the beginner and intermediate stages of learning English!
Reading is an excellent way of learning new vocabulary at the advanced level. But we do not recommend spending a lot of time reading before you getting to at least B1-B2 intermediate level because of the negative effects it can have on your English pronunciation.
What About Speaking?
Here at EnglishSponge, we have what some might see as a radical view on speaking.
Our recommendation is that you go through a “silent period” whereby you only listen to English through the beginner and intermediate stages.
That means that we recommend you do not speak English until you have reached at least the B1 / intermediate level of listening.
Now, you may think that sounds a little crazy. You might think: “How are you supposed to learn a language if you don’t speak it”.
Well, don’t worry. You will speak English eventually, but just not at the beginner stages.
Because there are a number benefits from going through a “silent period”. And there are also a lot drawbacks from speaking too early.
With traditional language learning in a school, you are forced to speak before you are ready. This is a very anxiety inducing experience for many beginner students as they are forced to speak an unfamiliar language in front of their classmates.
It is much more enjoyable and relaxing to learn what the English language sounds like by listening first and then speaking later. This way, you only begin speaking particular words and sentences after you have heard native speakers say them hundreds of times.
When you attempt to speak at the beginner stages of learning a language, you have to constantly make guesses as to which words to use and how to pronounce them.
By making these guesses at the beginner stages, students create bad speaking habits and end up speaking in a way that sounds unnatural. Students usually translate directly from their native language and attempt to use similar words in English as they would in their mother tongue.
The end result is English that sounds unnatural, with strange word choices and incorrect pronunciation.
By going through a “silent period” as we recommend here at EnglishSponge, you only speak after having listened to English for hundreds of hours. That way, when you finally do begin speaking, you will not be guessing, but instead imitating what you’ve already heard.
When you were a baby, you went through a roughly 12 month “silent period” of only listening before you started to speak. You started speaking when you were ready, instead of being forced to speak early.
Our method imitates how babies naturally learn their native language.
What About Grammar?
Despite popular belief, most of the grammar we learn is learned through input (listening and reading) and not grammar exercises.
Let me give you an example. Take a look at this sentence.
“This is my brother. He is knowing English very well, you can speak to him”
Does this sentence sound correct to you?
If you already have an intermediate level of English, you can probably feel that this sentence isn’t correct.
Why is it incorrect? Can you logically explain the reason why it’s wrong?
The actual reason it’s wrong is because the verb “to know” is a stative verb, and stative verbs cannot be used in continuous tenses like the present continuous here.
But my guess is you probably didn’t know that. You probably know that saying “He is knowing English” is not correct because it just sounds weird to you. You don’t know specifically what’s wrong with it, but you can feel that it isn’t correct.
So why does this sentence sound weird to you? It sounds weird to you because you’ve heard (and maybe read) lots of correct English, and this sentence seems different from what you’re used to hearing (or reading).
This demonstrates that it is very much possible to learn grammar without specifically studying grammar! Grammar can be learned simply through input.
Also, learning grammar through comprehensible input will help you become much more fluent later on when speaking while using that grammar because you will will not have to think hard to calculate which verb tense you should use or which order the sentence should be in while you try to speak. Instead, the correct grammar will just spill out of your mouth naturally.
When you learn grammar through comprehensible input you become similar to a native speaker in that you have a feeling for what’s correct and incorrect but you cannot explain why.
For example, if you want to learn the third conditional tense in English, instead of studying the grammar rules of the third conditional, and instead of doing grammar exercises for the third conditional, just watch lots of content that has the third conditional in it!
If you listen to a native speaker use the third conditional for 10 minutes like in this video, you will learn it much faster and much deeper than you would doing grammar exercises for 10 minutes.
Of course, some students do find it beneficial to do some grammar exercises alongside their comprehensible input listening practice. At EnglishSponge, we say that you can do grammar exercises and grammar study if you wish to.
But we suggest that you do not spend huge amounts of time studying grammar. In fact, we recommend spending no more than 5% of your time studying grammar. Instead, we recommend you spend the majority of your time watching comprehensible input videos and learn grammar the natural way instead of learning it artificially through “fill in the blank” grammar questions and so on.
You will be surprised at how much grammar you can learn without studying grammar!
What About Feedback?
You don’t really need anyone to correct you.
First of all, as we mentioned already, we recommend that you start by going through a “silent period” whereby you only listen until you reach the intermediate/upper intermediate level. So of course, no corrections are necessary if you’re not speaking.
But aside from that, the belief that we need to make mistakes and be corrected over and over again to learn a language isn’t really true. The thing with being corrected by a teacher is that it targets the conscious part of your brain, not the subconscious or intuitive part that does most of the work of producing fluent language.
Quite often, students are corrected on a mistake by a teacher, only to make the exact same mistakes 30 seconds later. This happens because even after being corrected by the teacher, the student still has the habit of saying the incorrect thing.
Also, being corrected can be an annoying and unpleasant experience for some. It can simply be quite irritating to be interrupted constantly told that you’ve made a mistake over and over again.
While more advanced speakers may enjoy getting corrections, being corrected over and over again at the beginner stages of learning a language can be demoralising and frustrating and lead many to start feeling negatively about learning English.
Instead of relying on corrections, we recommend simply getting more input! Keep absorbing correct English from native speakers and gradually the number of mistakes you make will decrease.
Corrections may be useful for some, but are they actually necessary for learning a language? No!
