How to Rate Your Comprehension
When you log input time on Lengualytics, you’re asked to rate your comprehension using a slider with values from 0 to 10. These numbers represent your comprehension as percentages: 0 means 0%, 5 means 50%, 10 means 100%, and so on. Each step on the slider increases by 10%.
Understanding how to accurately rate your comprehension is crucial for tracking your progress and finding content at the right level. This guide will help you determine which rating best matches your experience.
What Does “Comprehension” Mean?
When doing input based learning, comprehension isn’t about knowing every individual word or understanding grammatical structures. It’s about following the message being communicated. Can you understand what’s happening, what’s being discussed, or what the speaker is trying to convey? That’s comprehension. So, don’t think “how many words did I understand?” or “how many grammatical structures did I understand?” Think “how clearly did I follow the message?”
This still might be a bit abstract. An even more concrete way to judge your comprehension could be to try explaining what you just watched or listened to someone else. If you can’t explain it, you more or less didn’t understand it. If you can explain it, you more or less understood it. Watch this video below to get an even more thorough explanation.
How Comprehension Actually Works
Most articles online that talk about rating comprehension treat it like a word-by-word thing. They’ll say “understanding 80% of a sentence” means you understood 8 out of 10 words, and the other 2 might as well be gibberish. In that model, they might start with a sentence like this:
“After a long day of work, she sat by the window, watching the city lights flicker on one by one while thinking about everything that had quietly changed.”
And to demonstrate 80% comprehension, they might replace 20% of the words with gibberish:
“After a long day of opcof, she sat by the runlob, watching the city bralpz flicker on one by one while modavove about ouvovglap that had quietly muglubu.”
Most words perfectly clear, others completely gone, replaced by nonsense. That’s the traditional view. And when shown like that, it makes 80% look like a very low level of comprehension.
I don’t believe that’s how it works. Words aren’t understood 0% or 100%. They’re acquired in percentages. When you’re learning a language, you don’t suddenly “unlock” a word. It starts vague and becomes clearer over thousands of encounters. So when your comprehension drops, the ambiguity doesn’t punch holes in the sentence. It spreads across the whole idea. Every word gets a little hazier. The meaning doesn’t have gaps. It has fog. To me, 80% comprehension looks more like:
“After a day of work, she was by the window, watching lights turn on while thinking about things that had changed.”
No gibberish. No holes. Every word is still there, just softer, less precise, less certain. The whole idea dims together.
To demonstrate what I mean, here is the same sentence at every comprehension level from 100% down to near-zero. Notice how the meaning doesn’t lose individual words. It loses clarity, evenly, across the whole idea.
Comprehension Levels Explained
100% - Perfect Clarity
“After a long day of work, she sat by the window, watching the city lights flicker on one by one while thinking about everything that had quietly changed.”
Every detail is crystal clear. There is zero ambiguity. You understood this as effortlessly as you would in your native language. If someone asked you to explain what you just heard, you could do so perfectly.
90% - Near-Perfect Clarity
“After a long day of work, she sat by the window, watching the city lights flicker on while thinking about everything that had softly changed.”
You followed essentially everything. One or two minor details are slightly soft, but the full picture is intact. You know who, what, where, and why. If someone asked you to explain what you heard, you’d get it almost exactly right.
80% - Strong Understanding
“After a day of work, she was by the window, watching lights turn on while thinking about things that had changed.”
You understood the main idea and most of the details. A few specifics are vague, but they don’t prevent you from following the message. The meaning is all there, just slightly soft around the edges. You’d explain this confidently.
70% - Comfortable Understanding
“After some kind of tiring day, she was by the window, watching lights while thinking about things that changed.”
You got the main idea and have a reasonable sense of the situation. Some of the finer points are unclear, but you could explain the gist without much trouble. This is the sweet spot for comprehensible input.
60% - Mostly Following
“After a tiring time, a woman was somewhere, looking at lights, and she was thinking about change.”
You caught the broad strokes but the scene is losing its shape. You understand the general topic and a few details, but the connections between ideas are getting loose. You’d explain it in very general terms.
50% - Partial Understanding
“A woman was tired and she was somewhere, looking at something and thinking about something.”
You picked up on a few key elements but they aren’t connecting into a coherent picture anymore. You have a sense of what the topic is, but you’d struggle to explain this to someone else without guessing.
40% - Getting the Gist
“A woman was tired and looking at something.”
You caught just enough to have a vague sense of the subject. Beyond that, you’re mostly guessing. If asked to explain, you’d only be able to offer a single, very rough sentence.
30% - Occasional Glimpses
“A woman and lights.”
You recognized a couple of isolated elements but couldn’t connect them into any kind of meaning. You’re left with a feeling more than an understanding.
<20% - Fragments
Below 20% is not worth mentioning. It’s basically just noise. You have very little to no understanding of what was said.
Tips for Accurate Rating
It’s okay to estimate. You don’t need to calculate your comprehension scientifically. After watching or listening to content, you’ll have a gut feeling about how much you understood. Trust that feeling and use these descriptions as a guide to translate it into a number.
Don’t judge yourself too harshly. It’s tempting to rate your comprehension lower than it actually was. A lot of people will get hung up on not understanding words or grammar. But truly, these things will come with time and exposure. In the beginning, you will feel confused, things will be ambiguous, and you will understand nothing 100% clearly. That’s expected. Do not let fear that “you’re not really learning” be the reason you rate yourself too low.
Don’t judge yourself too generously. On the other hand, it’s also tempting to rate yourself higher than your actual comprehension because you recognized a lot of words or felt like you “almost” got it. If you find yourself constantly filling in the blanks with assumptions, guessing at what was said, or only understanding the topic but not the specific ideas being discussed, your comprehension is probably no higher than 60-70%. Being honest here will help you track your progress more accurately.