> It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.
Things you don't understand are not comprehensible to you, so this was not experience with comprehensible input. If you don't know anything at all, you can at least collect words.
Look into "graded readers." They're basically children's books, except native children are fluent and would find them primitive.
What you're looking for is a situation where you understand 98% of what is going on, and you're baffled by the last 2%. If that situation is two- and three-word sentences spoken slowly, then that's the input you should be looking for (and which Duolingo isn't bad for.) The goal is to walk away from that thing you knew 98% of, but now with the last 2%.
Anecdotally, download comic books in your target language. The pictures help enormously in getting you to that 98%.
> It just washes over me and I don’t understand anything.
Things you don't understand are not comprehensible to you, so this was not experience with comprehensible input. If you don't know anything at all, you can at least collect words.
Look into "graded readers." They're basically children's books, except native children are fluent and would find them primitive.
What you're looking for is a situation where you understand 98% of what is going on, and you're baffled by the last 2%. If that situation is two- and three-word sentences spoken slowly, then that's the input you should be looking for (and which Duolingo isn't bad for.) The goal is to walk away from that thing you knew 98% of, but now with the last 2%.
Anecdotally, download comic books in your target language. The pictures help enormously in getting you to that 98%.