I’m probably overthinking this, but want to make sure I’m not going off down the wrong path early on.

I’m not that far into the journey (though rapidly approaching Level 2) and I’d be grateful for peoples’ views on:

• 1.) Understanding the gist

This feels slightly at odds with 90-95% comprehension.

My understanding of following the gist is that the content should be at a level where I can follow the basic story (on the basis of what’s being said, and prompts), ideally up to understanding all except the odd word or sentence; understanding that when moving up a level, this will be closer to the general story.

If the comprehension drops to “I know he’s playing a video game…”, I drop the video to watch something I have greater comprehensibility of. Is that what’s recommended?

Also, assume comprehension is the sum of drawings / prompts / actions and what’s being said, not just based on word choice?!

• 2.) Materials to speed-up / assist in acquiring the language

Refold is a similar CI principle, with the notable exception it recommends making native content for natives comprehensible - primarily through SRS (Anki) sentence mining.

I’ve been using the Refold ES1K (1,000 most common words) as a way to help boost my initial retention and understanding, though know the guidance is that it’s better to figure out words in context. Assuming this is fine as long as I don’t switch off to understanding context when used?

For those that relied on CI only and are at a decent level (4 ), how is your comprehension of / ability to use the more technical elements of the language? Not obviously to explicitly talk about grammar, but how intuitively did things like conjugations come to you? Or do you struggle with them and wished you used something to help understand?

Refold recommends skimming a grammar reference as a supplement to CI - and I’ve been using Language Transfer this way, in otherwise dead time (eg driving / walking, where I can’t watch videos). I assume this is useful in giving me the building blocks to help understand the language more during my CI, but is it unnecessary? Or actively harmful?