Hi, I haven't read the comments above, I just wanted to say that this question about literacy might be different en different languages. For example, I think it is well known that American children became literate later than kids of other countries who speak other languages. In Spanish, my native language, it is reading which makes your vocabulary bigger. Spanish is a very phonetic language, so you hear the words in your mind as you read, even if you hadn't encountered them before. The way a see it, English spelling makes literacy and educated speech a bit elitist.

When I started listening to real content, in my case BBC radio 4, I would usually understand 1% of what I heard, although I had the potential to reach 15-20%. After a few weeks of half an hour's listening every day, I made it, I started breaking the language into words, and I got at this 15-20%. Ever since, when I listen to radio 4, I understand just about 100% of what I'm capable to understand, and at the same time, I keep picking new words and expressions just by hearing them. The absolute percentage depends on the kind of programme, it can vary a lot, let's say 40-100%. So, even now, there's a fair amount of content that is beyond my understanding. To think that being exposed to this content could harm me, well, that's never occurred to me. In what way could this happen, Chad? About the post, well, I won't say you can't learn through purely passive exposure, since there are people out there who seems to have make it, and I myself haven't listened to the radio or watched movies in any way that could be called massive, but just like Steve, I personally prefer to complement passive exposure with attentive reading, repetitive listening and deliberate practice. When I'm tired I turn the radio on, while not, I keep learning in a more active way.

Hi, I basically agree with you, but in the same wise you should quickly move from learning material, you should also leave transcribed material as soon as possible, because the most interesting content for you usually doesn't have transcriptions. My ideal path would be something like that: 1th stage: parallel texts, for example Assimil 2th stage: real native material with transcriptions. 3th stage: you listen and read independently, without having to rely on transcriptions. I think that in the second stage, if you have problems finding interesting material, you can always use TV series and movies, because they are usually distributed with subtitles. You can split an episode into manageable chunks and import them into your library along with the subtitles. That way you'll also have a better grasp of the colloquial language, in addition to the more formal language usually found in podcasts.

Hi Steve, I use Mnemosyne for learning English, I've been doing so for more than two years and I think it is really worth it, but lately, well, I haven't learnt new words for quite some time. I've got 2000 cards ready to be learnt but I just feel to lazy, actually I've been doing the opposite, pruning a lot of cards. I do that when I feel like a card doesn't deserve to be in my collection, because I keep forgetting it or it doesn't make much sense for one reason or another. Like you, I spend most of my time listening and reading. So, I suppose mine is a good example of how things get in the long run. The good news is that the amount of work becomes amazingly low. You don't even need to run the program every day, it doesn't make any difference if you do it 2 or 3 days per week. It's not that I've got loads of flash cards, just about 6000, but the daily reps aren't huge either, 15 or so, which takes me no more than 20 minutes. It really depends on the type or flash card, I use a mix of 3 different things: single words, long real sentences, and audio/video. To answer some of your other questions, I would say that over my experience with SRS I've become very picky about what things I add to my database what do not. Just as background let me say that I don't live in a country where my target language is spoken nor I need it for work or anything, so I don't speak it in a regular basis and I've never done. I use English just for the Internet, movies, and so. That said, what I aim to learn through SRS is: 1) A huge amount of words that doesn't appear in my readings frequently enough, because let's face it, when you read for fun you always end up reading about the same subjects. I mean the kind of words you only learn when you live in a country where English is spoken and all natives know, no matter their background or education: house items, furniture, animals, cards, etc. 2) Colloquial expressions that I get from TV series. And this is what I don't care about: formal language, written language and in general whatever word or sentence that belongs to a rather high register. I prefer to absorb that through reading.