Comprehensible Input vs. Speaking From Day One: What Stephen Krashen Told Me

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A few years ago I got to chat with the linguist who invented the concept of comprehensible input, Stephen Krashen. If you've spent any time learning a language online, you've heard his idea even if you've never heard his name: don't force output, get masses of input you can understand, and the language grows on its own.

For years people had been sending me his name like it was the end of an argument. “Benny, you tell people to speak from day one, but Krashen proved you wrong.” He was the renowned linguist, and I was the loud Irish guy telling you to go embarrass yourself in a café. So I'll be honest, part of me sat down to that call ready to defend myself.

And about ten minutes in, he reached off-screen, held up a copy of my book, and told me the thing I want to talk about today: that speaking from day one was never against his theory at all.

Here's the video version of this blog post, including parts with Krashen in his own voice:

“I tried speaking early and it was miserable”

I know what some of you are thinking, because I've been hearing these arguments for years. “I tried speaking early and it was miserable. I'm an introvert. I froze. I sounded like an idiot and I never want to feel that again.” I get it. I'm not going to pretend that first conversation feels lovely. It doesn't.

But here's what I've come to believe after twenty-three years of learning languages as an adult. The thing that makes early speaking miserable isn't the speaking. It's the stakes. It's the exam, the teacher waiting for you to conjugate, the sense that you're being marked. Take that away, make it a friendly chat where nobody's grading you, and the fear has nothing to feed on.

What comprehensible input gets right

Let me start by giving the other side its due, because most articles on this topic don't.

Comprehensible input is real, and it's powerful. The idea that you grow a language mostly by understanding loads of it, rather than by memorising grammar tables, is just true. It's true for me. It's true for every fluent person I know.

And I'll go further. That call with Krashen actually changed how I learn. He's mad about graded readers, these easy little stories pitched just above your level, and he talked about them with such joy that I realised I'd been skipping reading until I was already intermediate. I was wrong about that. I now read far earlier than I used to, and it's because of him. So this isn't me versus input. I'm a fan.

Why I still speak from day one

So why do I still tell you to open your mouth on day one?

Because speaking is the thing that tells you what to listen for. The moment you try to have a real conversation, you find out, instantly, what you can't say yet. The word you reach for and it isn't there. The sentence that comes out backwards. That little stab of “oh, I needed that” is the most valuable feedback in language learning, and you cannot get it from your sofa.

One of my viewers put it better than I can. He said attempting a conversation reveals the things you can't say, thought you could say, and want to say, and then you go and learn exactly those. That's not output replacing input. That's output aiming your input.

And the crucial thing is that a beginner conversation is itself full of input. When you talk to someone patient, they slow down, they simplify, they react to your face. You're not just producing. You're getting a custom-made, comprehensible version of the language, built live, around exactly what you're trying to say.

What Krashen actually told me

Which brings me back to that call. I put this to him directly. I said that people treat what I do as the opposite of comprehensible input, and I asked him what the overlap really was. Here's the full conversation, the original podcast episode I recorded with him:

And this is what he said:

“As long as it includes speaking early and often, that's the main thing, no question. As you point out in your book, you make sure beginning stages the other person is comprehensible, you're slowing down, and so on. You're still managing to control the input to some extent, and I suspect you got a lot more input than you let us see in the book, because you're always talking to people. You're getting lots and lots of input all the time, and that totals up. So yes, it's an input-output idea.”

And then, a little later, the line that settled it for me:

“We're using both. That's really how it is. We're not doing things that the theory doesn't allow. It's all within the theory. Just different weights to each.”

Different weights. That's the whole fight, right there. It was never input versus output. It's input and output, and all anyone's really arguing about is the dial. The linguist who built the theory put speaking from day one inside it.

He even went out of his way to be generous about the book itself: “Here's a free commercial message for Benny's book, which I read every single damn page twice.” He credited it for changing his own habits, saying he'd started finding people to talk to on the computer because of it. The father of comprehensible input chasing conversation practice is not the picture most people have of him.

The affective filter cuts the other way

There's one more piece of Krashen's own theory that matters here, and it's the affective filter. That's his idea that when you're stressed or embarrassed, your brain basically shuts the door and acquisition stops.

And that's the bridge. A friendly, low-stakes chat where you're allowed to be rubbish lowers that filter. It opens the door. The exam raises it. So “speaking causes anxiety” has it backwards. Bad speaking situations cause anxiety. A kind first conversation is the cure, not the cause.

The dinner I forgot was in Spanish

I want to tell you what's on the other side of all that awkwardness, because it's the best feeling I know.

A couple of weeks ago I was at a dinner here in Mexico. Locals, all in Spanish, a few hours in, the jokes flying. And somewhere in the middle of it I noticed something strange. I'd stopped noticing the Spanish. The little background process I usually run, the one checking the language, holding it up, just wasn't on. I was only there. Laughing, arguing, being a person. I genuinely forgot I was speaking Spanish!

That's where speaking consistently takes you. Not to a perfect accent or a flawless verb table, but to a dinner you forget was even in another language. And you don't get there by waiting until you're ready. You get there by speaking early and speaking often.

Your one task this week

So here's the one thing I'd love you to actually do this week. Not a hundred hours of anything. One short conversation. Friendly, low stakes, with a real human, in your language, where you're allowed to be terrible at it. That's it. It can even be over Zoom, and they don't even need to be a native speaker, because you still get loads out of practising with other learners.

If you want a hand turning that into a plan, I've got a completely free Speak in a Week course that walks you through exactly how to get to your first conversation, even from zero. You can sign up for it here.

And if you want me coaching you through it directly, with live calls to help you intensively learn a language over the next three months, that's what my Bootcamp is for.

This is the stuff I actually believe about learning a language, even when it's unfashionable. So go and have that awkward conversation. It's the fastest thing you'll ever do for your language, and the linguist who invented comprehensible input is, it turns out, on my side about it.