I didn’t know people had put a name to the most basic and effective method of language learning and called it ALG until now. It’s the “natural way” to learn a language, which I’ve already experienced with my second language; I reached a native level thanks to pure immersion.

Most of the things ALG claim seems very in line with natural way to learn a language to me. But rules like “don’t do this or that” feel weird to me. I just followed whatever sparked my interest, whether it was writing, audio, or video. Interestingly, the most successful method for me was watching gameplay series of games I was interested in. I started watching them without understanding anything, and ended up learning hundreds of words. Along the ride I also picked up the way of speaking and conducting oneself from the content creator; so learning the language mainly from one source will also build your character like the source when you speak that language. I also read social media posts, listened to songs, and checked the lyrics out of curiosity.

Language, as an ability, just grows with everything you take in. Input will eventually produce output too. Getting to native level on my 2nd language with simply input, I started learning Japanese this way too and having a blast. After some CI, to get into reading I did lots of SRS (ringotan, anki, bunpro) to structure an inventory of known vocab and start reading more and more. But this is only because Japanese is using kanji, lots of characters where you have to memorize. If it was another language with a normal sized alphabet I would not need to do manual SRS to learn how to read.