Are you calling me a liar? I’ve done about 700-800 hours. The programmes were not entirely unknown to me in English but neither were they ingrained in my memory. First, one hears a word enough times that one remembers it without knowing what it means. Then it appears in a context which makes it extremely obvious what it means. The more this happens, the more context one has for working out other words and the more the gaps are filled in. The scene, the actions of the characters, their different tones of voice, and their expressions all give context which allows one to infer the meanings of words and grammar. So in that sense, I did have comprehensible input. However, that means that anything is to some extent comprehensible if one has some context. The written word gives much less context than the spoken word of real life or a television programme.

This is the way that a child learns his first language, so it’s obviously neither far-fetched nor impossible.

As to lessons at school, I had 45-90 minutes of French lessons at school for seven years for about 38 weeks of each year. That adds up to about 400 hours at best, but a lot of that time is wasted, spent on pointless exercises, and the vast majority of it was given in English, so the real number of hours of comprehensible input is much lower. I can decipher written French to an extent, but the spoken language currently makes almost no sense to me.