How To Find Comprehensible Input: 5 Strategies That Work

A fifteen-year-old listener named Jonathan sent me a question that I found both impressive and relatable.

He’d been learning Hebrew for over two years. Despite all that effort, he still felt he wasn’t close to the B1 level he’d been aiming for.

His question was a good one: when you’re learning a minority language, how to find comprehensible input at the right level?

It’s a challenge I know well from my own experience learning Cantonese. The B1 stage is the hardest point in any language journey — you’ve exhausted most beginner materials, but you’re not yet advanced enough to dive into native speaker content.

For major languages, filling that gap is straightforward. For minority languages, you have to be more creative. Here are five strategies I’d use.

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1. Find Other Learners Of Your Language

The first thing I’d do is find other people who are already learning your language and ask them what they use.

This sounds obvious, but it’s genuinely one of the most reliable ways to surface materials you’d never find on your own.

Go to language learning forums like LLORG. Look for Facebook groups — either language-specific ones or larger communities like the Polyglots group.

For Cantonese, there’s a website called CantoDict where learners from all over the world congregate and share tips. Every minority language tends to have its own equivalent gathering point.

Find yours, introduce yourself and ask what people are using at your level. You might turn up some real gems.

2. Turn Specialist Bookshops Inside Out

There is material out there for minority languages — it may not be fresh off the press, and it might take some hunting, but it exists.

Dust off those forgotten corners of specialist bookshops. Don’t assume that because something isn’t on Amazon it doesn’t exist.

When I was living in Hong Kong, I regularly found locally published Cantonese resources that I’d never seen anywhere else in the world.

The same principle applies wherever you are. Go out and look — you’ll often be surprised by what’s sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting for you.

3. Find Language Bloggers Who And Email Them

Search for bloggers and writers who focus on your target language and get in touch with them directly.

There are people out there who have written extensively about learning Hebrew, and they will almost certainly know of resources you haven’t found yet. Email them through their websites.

In my experience, people who blog about minority or less-taught languages are passionate about the topic and genuinely happy to help. Don’t be shy about reaching out. The language learning community is a generous one.

4. Hire Someone To Transcribe Material You Like

This strategy changed the game for my friend Francesco. I gave him this piece of advice at a polyglot workshop — and he later came back to tell me it had transformed his approach to learning Estonian.

The idea is simple: if you can find YouTube videos or other audio content in your target language that are roughly at your level but have no transcript, pay someone to transcribe them. That way, you create your own comprehensible input.

I’ve done exactly this for Cantonese — I paid someone to transcribe a TV series for me, and suddenly I had rich, natural material I could actually study.

You can hire a tutor through LanguaTalk and ask them to use your session time transcribing content rather than teaching.

Platforms like Upwork or Proz.com are other options, and they’re often very affordable.

5. Make Your Own Materials

If there are speakers of your target language where you live — and for Hebrew, there very likely are — this might be the most powerful strategy of all: make your own materials.

Get together with native speakers, record your conversations and have them transcribed. Yes, it takes initiative, but it’s also genuinely enjoyable, and the material you produce will be perfectly tailored to your level and interests.

I’ve been doing this in Hong Kong with Cantonese speakers, recording conversations that I’m then getting transcribed to use as study material.

There’s something uniquely motivating about working with content you’ve created yourself — it feels real, because it is.

One More Thing: Don’t Forget To Speak

All five strategies above will help you find comprehensible input — but none of them is a substitute for actually speaking.

One of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever given — and one that a student of mine, Courtney, later told me had been the most valuable thing she’d taken from my teaching — is simply this: if you want to speak a language, you have to actually speak it. You have to put the books away and have real conversations with real people.

Use the materials you find or create to build your understanding, then get out and use the language with native speakers.

Language exchanges, conversation partners, informal chats with speakers in your community — all of it counts. Input and output work together; you need both.

How To Find Comprehensible Input FAQ

How To Find Comprehensible Input: The Materials Are Out There

Learning a minority language is harder than learning Spanish or French — there’s no getting around that. Figuring out how to find comprehensible input takes more effort and creativity than it does for widely-taught languages. But the materials exist.

Other learners have found them, bookshops stock them, bloggers know about them and, if all else fails, you can commission or create them yourself.

Don’t sit back and wait for the perfect course to appear. Go out and look, reach out to the people who know more than you do, and be willing to invest a little time and money in building the resources you need.

Do that — and keep speaking alongside your study — and you’ll be making real progress before you know it.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.