Important part:
The crux of what I’m saying, is that at any point in time, if one is really dedicated to learning Chinese (and actually like it), if learning Chinese ever feels like work, you should IMMEDIATELY change whatever aspect you’re studying and change to something else. If you’ve been working on reading, then switching to reviewing grammar for 2 days will often make you feel like superman and like you’ve learned a ton. Upon making the transition to vocabulary, reading a ton (with Skritter as an aid or chinese chrome extension which I got today), and then finally going back to writing, can be ridiculously efficient.

Now that I’m more advanced, I’ve gotten significantly better at ascertaining which aspect at that time I need to work on, in order to set myself up to improve a different skill. I’ve made plenty of mistakes that cost me a couple of days.

In any event, it seems that the different abilities of reading, listening, writing, talking (grammar, pronunciation, sentence structure) really need to be maturely self-determined at each step of the learning process. One has to be humble in learning all that one can from different sources and taking advice, and yet one also has have a personal arrogance about knowing what’s best for yourself to study, after having heard others’ advice.

My experience:
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Though I haven’t systematically gone through your articles on my learning Chinese odyssey, I have enjoyed them quite a lot. I think one interesting phenomenon you might want to note is the importance of doing things at the right time (maybe you have already). (My experience: Last year, I did a 6 week BLCU summer course starting from nothing; this year, I started in 6 week B+ course, then after 3 weeks self-studying, skipped C and went into D, where we’re reading excerpted newspaper articles.

Exactly as you said in this article, it only seems hard when you first get in, and then if you work hard, you can very quickly adapt. In both cases of skipping levels, I probably only understood 60% of the first day of class, but within a week, comprehension jumped to ~85%.

The BLCU schedule is pretty much this:
A level: pronunciation and basic communication
B level: massive amounts of grammar, every class at least 5 new
C level: Pile grammar together into paragraphs and ought to maintain conversations
D level: Transition to newspapers, ought to be able to write an essay
E level: Reading essays with ease and explaining similarly

But at the A, B, C levels, I don’t think it’s possible to demarcate things so easily. For one thing, it quickly gets monotonous to every day learn 5 pieces of new grammar, simply because it’s so difficult to incorporate so much new info and newly creatable sentences. I’ve found that studying material that is NOT class material is frequently best way, for example, now that I’m in D and reading newspapers, I review grammar and it’s ridiculously easy to review and memorize, since I encountered (but only really understood it 75%) it passively so much in speech and reading.

Well, to be honest, I find it hard to understand how someone can claim that input is everything in the first place. It’s so obviously wrong. 🙂 I mean, I know lots of Chinese people who’s understanding of English (written and oral) is excellent, but who can’t manage basic communication. If input were the only thing needed, these people would be able to speak English as well. It seems obvious to me that language learning has both an acquisition component (input works fine) and a skill component (actual practice is required).

To the best of my knowledge, even Krashen himself admitted that his broader theory was incorrect after studies showed that it didn’t work in practise [i.e. that input is ALL that’s required]

i+1 is a decent idea, and is worth using all I’m saying is that it shouldn’t nnecessrily encourage further adoption of his ideas

I think it’s a simplification to say that he has been “widely discredited”. As far as I know, the major complaint with his theories is that they are vague (i.e., it turns out to be impossible to define what either “i” or “1” means in this situation). I still think the principle behind i+ is sound and that most people who debate that do so from a scientific standpoint (i.e. they don’t necessarily think he’s wrong, just that his theory isn’t scientific because it’s hard to confirm/refute a statement which can’t be clearly defined).

David