[hyencomper]

This is how I have learnt various languages - by speaking while learning. However, Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis expounds that language acquisition occurs only during exposure to new language and not while speaking. Do people who give up learning a language still understand what is being spoken by the other person in that lang, even if they themselves may not be able to construct a sentence?

[lqet]

> However, Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis expounds that language acquisition occurs only during exposure to new language and not while speaking.

I think exposure and actively speaking are the wrong categories - your learn a language by using it to participate in a common experience with another human being. For this, you both have to use the same protocol, and at the beginning, you have to figure out this protocol using a simpler fallback feedback protocol. This is something I am currently realizing as a father of a one-year old. This involves of course exposure and speaking, but I strongly doubt that you could learn a language just by listening to it and re-producing the words. I expect this would only result in text/speech resembling GPT-2.

I also think that you can have a common experience without actively producing text or speech, for example by watching a movie / TV show were you want to follow the story and participate in the lives of the actors. In fact, I know many people who effortlessly learned a second language by watching foreign movies and TV shows for years.

[arcsin]

Yes and no. I’m someone who took krashen to heart and learned almost exclusively though reading. What I’ve found is that it’s possible to understand everything as long as it’s written or spoken very slowly and clearly but this is a different thing to understanding the spoken language at a normal speaking pace. It’s too fast and at that speed often sound alone is not clear enough to distinguish words. For example if you took a recording and cropped the audio just before and after each word I think there will be many words you will not recognize out of context.

I think the way that we are able to process speech at that speed is that we essentially guess what words are coming next, which is really only possible if you’re able to construct the sentence yourself. If you stop a sentence at a random point a native speaker will be able to predict the kind of words that will come next, if not the exact words. Another bit of evidence for this theory is that if someone says something very unexpected and out of context we often won’t understand what they’ve said.

Now it’s possible that you could achieve this ability only through input and not through production but I believe that it will be much less efficient.

[monster_group]

It depends on what one's goal is. If one's goal is to just be able to read and understand others speaking or comprehend written text, then yes, I think creating your own sentences is not that important and mere exposure can take you a long way. In fact, I would say 99.9% of people who "know Sanskrit" fall in this category. I have met people who hold Masters and Ph.Ds in Sanskrit and they can't hold a basic conversation in Sanskrit. On the other hand if one wants to be able to read, write and speak the language then you absolutely need to engage in producing content (verbal and written).