| > Focus on producing speech over everything else That’s a great way to gimp your language learning curve. Receptive skills develop before productive skills. This is just a truism about language. I could buy into dedicating time to speaking, as many folks don’t put enough time into that skill, but I’m not sure I would ever recommend prioritizing it over receptive skills. > it's the hardest part 90% of the time. While this is true, it doesn’t mean that production should be one’s “primary focus”. > There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," I assume you are basing this on second hand information, or “really strong evidence” is doing a lot of work here, but volumes have been written about the efficacy of comprehensible input in foreign language learning. To be charitable, I think many people do “comprehensible input” incorrectly (content too difficult, overly scaffolded with translations/subtitles, etc.), but the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary) almost always have had massive amounts of (comprehensible) input at some point in their language learning journey. |
What I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods.
>the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary)
Realistically, this is a small subset of language learners. Most people vastly overestimate the level of proficiency they are going for. People also underestimate just what a high level B2 is.