Don’t I need to learn the basics of the language before consuming input?

The basics of how we acquire a language are very different to what are usually considered the basics in traditional language education. In traditional language education, it’s very common to start putting together sentences from the beginning. That usually includes learning the equivalent of the verb “to be”, prepositions, conjunctions, articles, and other abstract grammatical connectors. However, all these things are not basic at all! These things are acquired at a much later stage during natural language acquisition. Children start using them only after they have been speaking in 1 or 2-word sentences for quite a while. And the same happens when learning a second language with comprehensible input. For your brain to figure out what these grammatical connectors are doing, it needs to understand most words in the sentences in which they appear. Only then is when their function within those sentences becomes apparent. More information in our video "The truth about function words" (in Spanish):