If you learn through comprehensible input, you probably already have a routine. Maybe it’s an hour of Dreaming Spanish a day, or the Refold roadmap and a long list of Japanese YouTube channels, or graded readers before bed. You’ve probably also run into the question every input learner meets eventually, which is when you’re supposed to start talking. There’s a kind of input that sits between watching and speaking, and you can try it without settling that question first.
What comprehensible input is
The idea comes from the linguist Stephen Krashen, who set out what he called the input hypothesis across the late 1970s and 1980s. His claim was that we acquire a language by understanding messages in it. In his view, studying rules helps you monitor and edit what you say, but acquisition itself happens when you understand something slightly beyond what you could have produced on your own. He wrote that as i+1, where “i” is your current level and “+1” is the bit just past it.
You understand something beyond your level through context. You know the situation, you can see what’s going on, and the words you already know carry you across the ones you don’t. A parent holding up a cup and asking “¿quieres agua?” doesn’t need to explain what agua means.
As for the research, the input hypothesis was very influential and is still argued over. Hardly anyone disputes that a large amount of understood input matters. The stronger claims, that input is sufficient on its own and that speaking contributes little to acquisition directly, are contested. Merrill Swain’s output hypothesis and Michael Long’s interaction hypothesis are the usual counterpoints, arguing that producing language and working out meaning with another person help too. Dreaming Spanish and Refold both build on the input side of that debate, and a lot of people have reached solid comprehension with them.
The gap in video input
Video is very good input. A well-made comprehensible input video uses drawings, gestures and a clear, patient speaker so that you can follow, and there are thousands of hours of it at every level for the bigger languages. Its one limit comes with the format. The video doesn’t know you’re there, so it carries on at the same pace whether you understood or not, and nothing you do changes what happens next.
For acquisition in the strict sense, that may matter less than it sounds. Where it shows is attention. Half-watching is easy, and it’s hard to tell whether you really understood a sentence or only followed the gist, because nothing depends on the difference. In a conversation, understanding shows up in what you do next. You hand over the right thing, turn left at the right corner, or laugh at the right moment.
Input you have to act on
That’s the idea behind the games on mossyrune. They’re 3D games that run in the browser. You walk around a small place, characters talk to you in the language you’re learning, and what happens next depends on whether you understood them.
The characters are built to be understood the way a good CI video is. On beginner they use simple language and speak more slowly, a little above where you are. They gesture, change expression and hold up props, so the baker is holding the bread when he says “bread” and the guard shakes his head when he means no. The scene does part of the work as well. If you’re in a dungeon cell and a nervous merchant is whispering about a price, you know roughly what’s being discussed before you’ve parsed a single word.
Unlike a video, though, the input here leads somewhere. In the dungeon game you’re stuck with an old prisoner, that merchant, a dramatic ghost and a bored guard, and the way out depends on what they tell you. In the bomb game you have to find a bomb before the timer runs out, and the commander’s briefing, an informant’s tip and a professor’s disarm code are all things you need to understand to get there. A door stays locked, or a timer keeps running, until the meaning has landed. You can replay any line, control the pace, and save lines to your notes to come back to later.
There’s more on how this works for specific languages on the pages for Spanish, Japanese and French.
When should I start speaking?
Input communities have argued about this for years. Some people speak from the first week. Others, following stricter versions of the approach, wait hundreds of hours or more until speech starts to come out on its own. Both groups include people who got good.
For these games you don’t have to decide. On beginner and intermediate you can answer in your own language, and the character understands you and replies in the one you’re learning. This is sometimes called crosstalk, and there’s a longer explanation of it here. It means you can play on day one without producing a word of the target language. Your side of the conversation just steers, and all the input comes from the character.
When you do feel like trying a word or a sentence, you can. The AI judges what you meant rather than your exact wording, so a clumsy attempt that gets the idea across still counts, and on beginner the character recasts it, saying what you meant correctly and carrying on. You won’t get a list of corrections or a grammar score. Nothing forces the switch, either, and you can drop back into your own language whenever you like.
Where it fits in an input routine
Think of the games as one more source alongside what you already do. A session is interactive and fairly intense. Most people can’t keep it up for hours the way they can watch videos, and there’s no reason they should. Video will still be where most of your hours come from, because there’s so much of it and it fits into any gap in the day.
The games are useful as a check and a change of pace. After a stretch of watching, it helps to be somewhere that understanding has consequences and to see what actually lands. Some people play a couple of times a week. Others come to it when they’ve hit a plateau and the videos have started to blur together. It’s also a gentle way into speaking, if and when you decide you want that.
You can play in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and several other languages, with more games on the way. It runs in any modern browser, including on a phone. A free account comes with enough credits for one full game, and after that it’s a monthly plan or a credit pack that doesn’t expire.