I understand there is a big debate in the language community about Stephen Krashen and comprehensible input (CI). A lot of the language Youtube channels push the idea that you acquire a language purely by absorbing messages slightly above your level.
I speak four languages (at various levels), and across my life, I've found this to be only half true. Input is necessary, but it's not sufficient in my experience.
To learn english, I watched dozens of hours of US or UK content in France as a teenager (therefore not on French TV, which is fully dubbed and no Netflix option at the time). My passive comprehension became near fluent, but my speaking didn't move an inch until I moved abroad and was forced to defend my opinions out loud in uni classes or discuss IRL with people who had not the slightest understanding of French. For the other languages I learnt, I never solely relied on CI.
I see the exact same thing with my wife right now. She had zero formal French (TL) education before meeting me. Over the years, she’s had a lot of passive exposure just by being around my French family or friends. Today, she catches c.70% of what someone says at normal speed (assuming a normal conversation, not a very deep dive into a niche topic), which I would argue is classic CI at work. But her active level is entirely plateaued around A2/B1. Because she doesn't actively produce the language or get forced to make mistakes (at least often enough), the input alone isn't translating to fluency.
For those of you who lean heavily on CI methods (like Dreaming Spanish or Refold): at what point do you actively transition to output? Do you think the "input only" crowd is underestimating how much the brain needs to actually struggle with speaking to lock the language in?
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