Immersion does wonders for some, and leaves others scratching their heads.

From my observations, people who already know more than one language (especially those who are native in 2+) are the ones who respond really positively to full immersion.

So for those of us who hatched from our eggs in a location where only one language is used, is immersion actually effective at all in early-mid stages?

At the height of my Japanese immersion, I was spending 5+ hours a day listening/watching raw Japanese, and spending an additional 15 hours a day (this includes audio while sleeping) having some sort of exposure to the language. I did this for a little over a year.

Even though the sheer volume of intake was massive, I feel I learned as much as I did doing the complete 90 lessons of Pimsleur beforehand.

Time Pimsleur took: 90 lessons x 30 mins x 3 repeats / 60 = 135 hours.
Time Immersion took: 5 hours x 365 days = 1,825 hours.*
*This calculation doesn't even include the ~15 hours of passive listening!

I feel I lack what Steve Kaufmann calls "the ability to notice", and I believe this is because I'm a monolingual pleb.

Agree? Disagree? Have any advice for me doing immersion?

Any feedback is welcome. I already realize I blow at language learning, so nothing you'll say will be too harsh.

Input needs to be comprehensible in order to learn from it. Any old input won't do. I wouldn't watch unsubbed anime when my vocabulary is two hundred words and my grammar ends at "Therefore, the running car could not stop.". Successful immersion requires some kind of mentor or a way to break things down as they come. Otherwise, it's mostly just sounds.

It's actually kind of annoying since I know I don't have anyone to immerse me, and my vocabulary is just too small to read fluidly, where reading starts to help very much.

Interesting question. Wareya has it right about the input being intelligible I think. Lacking the ability to notice that Steve mentions is less about you being a monolingual and more with your level and the material you are using. For me, being bilingual helps in that I have less doubts and can feel more patient and accepting about not getting something the first, second or tenth time around. I just keep hearing and seeing words and know they will become as familiar to me as English ones in time. So, it's more of an attitude advantage, and that can be made up for by reading what people like Steve have to say and keeping it in mind. You can partly get that benefit without actually being bilingual. Believing you can do it really does matter when you are dealing with a process that takes many years if not decades.

A comparison. I've been learning Mandarin slowly for the last few years, after already learning Japanese first. I went full immersion with Japanese after several years of study, and it worked nicely. What I've noticed with Mandarin though is that early immersion of native level material like radio and movies was more for helping my ear get used to the flow, as there was little chance at first to "notice" much without any background knowledge. Now that I've gotten my passive vocab into an intermediate stage, but with strong Kanji knowledge thanks to already knowing Japanese, watching movies and TV with subtitles in Mandarin is great practice as I can "notice" a lot. Radio is helpful, but much less so still.

I'd break it down like this...

Starting out... - a few thousand sentences with audio. For input otherwise, listening to a bit of radio. Listening to some music. Just getting a rough idea of melody and flow.

Picking up the pace (where I am now)... - continue with sentences, watching TV with subtitles more and more, reading texts (I use Lingq.com for this), listening to radio when doing other things.

Going forward... - importance of sentences declines as importance of lots of reading and listening picks up.


So, my feeling is that if you put all your focus on listening to radio or TV in the "starting out" stage you won't get very good results. It's still potentially fun and even useful, but more for giving you motivation or being a source of sentences if you like SRSing (like song lyrics etc).

I would ramp up the input from intermediate onward though. So for most of the process it is very important I believe. My problem with Japanese was that I got all the way to an advanced level without really ever taking immersion seriously enough, which led to frustration. Hence when I finally did read AJATT and went all out I had very good results very quickly because I was already primed for it. Meanwhile a lot of people starting from scratch with a similar attitude find it very rough going.

BTW I really like SRS with audio files. You can keep on pressing play until you hear a given word enough that it will then stand out when it is repeated in radio, TV, conversations etc. I also found the SRS to be great as a beginner for keeping me on track with this Mandarin project even while I was so busy with thesis writing, job hunting, working etc. I haven't made much progress in four years compared to when I could study Japanese as a student, but I have progressed. I know if I keep plugging words in I will keep going forward, and that's very heartening. There is also much less effort involved in going from say, 3000 to 4000 words in your deck than in getting through the first 1000.

Immersion, as many people refer to it, is about not having any access to your native language.

When someone can turn to someone ask a question in their native language, when they are 'immersed', then most would say they are not actually immersed.

My perfect example of this is listening to people who studied Japanese use (or attempt to use) two common phrases:

1. 持って来て
2. And any of the various ways book learners use to try and say "must do" that no Japanese person uses.

Immersion means you have 'magic words': noises you make to get what you want, rather than trying to say the words you want to say. Immersion is connecting the fact that you need to pee" with "Noises that get you to the bathroom" rather than trying to learn how to ask "Where is the bathroom?"

You learn these magic words, the appropriate noises to make at the appropriate times, and later come to understand the 'logic' behind it, such as there is.

I agree. You're spot on.

There's a lack of ability to notice, and even an ability to hear.

This happens a lot with my Japanese students, particularly the lower-level adults. They simply can't distinguish the sounds I'm making. And I recognize that as the same problem I've had for years with Japanese. (I grew up monolingual.)

If someone says a word slowly and clearly, I'm like Oh, I know that. But if they say it too fast, indistinctly, or with an unfamiliar accent, I can't pick it out. I've gotten better over the years, partly because my ear has improved, but also in part because I know the collocations and can guess from context what word is likely to fit.

Thanks to everyone who has responded so far.

I really found that Stephen Krashen video useful. The description on the video states it's from the 80s. Funny how off-handedly he mentions concepts in learning that today are being marketed as revolutionary "hacks".

But either way, comprehensible input is a theory I never really appreciated. I figured watching raw videos alone would be enough because the audio would match the actions.

Well, immersion certainly drove home what 行ってきます, 良かった, and 私は meant. But anything beyond a couple words (and certainly any complex concept) was over my head.

I even had my OS in Japanese during my immersion year. I had already gone through RTK1 as well. But even so, I didn't learn anything from this. (Well, it did help me memorize where Edit > Copy/Paste is without looking.)

Now the question is where to find comprehensible input. Hmm... Anyone know of a Japanese Bob Ross? Bobbu Rossu?

CreepyAF Wrote:Time Pimsleur took: 90 lessons x 30 mins x 3 repeats / 60 = 135 hours.
Time Immersion took: 5 hours x 365 days = 1,825 hours.*
*This calculation doesn't even include the ~15 hours of passive listening!

I'm with most folks that immersion has to be comprehensible in order to be of much use.

However, I think there is some use, however small, for immersion from the start. Like you said, in your year of immersion, you learned as much as 90 lessons of pimsleur - so you learned something, just not very much. Presuming your 5 hours of immersion were passive listening(I really hope they were passive), you gained as much knowledge as 135 hours of active study, and (again I'm presuming) you didn't lose anything from doing immersion. In economic terms, you gained a small profit and suffered zero cost, so your return on investment is infinite!

For me, I'd rather take it easy and listen to music and podcasts and loose out on that free 135 hours of learning per year. But for someone who is trying to learn as fast as possible, it might be something to consider.

Thanks for your thoughts, Yogert909.

yogert909 Wrote:Like you said, in your year of immersion, you learned as much as 90 lessons of pimsleur - so you learned something, just not very much. Presuming your 5 hours of immersion were passive listening(I really hope they were passive), you gained as much knowledge as 135 hours of active study, and (again I'm presuming) you didn't lose anything from doing immersion. In economic terms, you gained a small profit and suffered zero cost, so your return on investment is infinite!

Very true, though I these 5 hours a day were somewhere between active an passive.

To make sure we're on the same page, here's how I define the two:

Active - my full attention is turned to the media I'm consuming for a continuous amount of time.
Passive - the media is playing in the background, but the focus of my attention is pointing somewhere else.

During these 5 hours, I would have my attention turned to the media, do some shadowing, and generally trying to understand what I was watching/listening to/reading.

I would categorize this as active if it wasn't for the fact that my inner monologue is an English chatterbox.

If my focus waned to 85%, my inner monologue would start to take over.

"My foot is uncomfortable...I should get a soda...I could probably make money on YouTube...man, what is up with all the tentacles in this anime?"

My attention wasn't always undivided, so I don't know if I could classify this time as completely active.

Either way, I still agree with your point. I didn't walk away empty handed. However, it does seem like an awful lot of work for such little results. Water can carve rock, but if a hammer and chisel are available, I'd rather go with that.

I grew up bilingual, but I don't know how that has or has not affected my learning process in Japanese.

Speaking from my own experience, I think input in any form is useful, but for purely effective reasons, comprehensible input is the way to go. Listening to things you don't understand is frustrating, I know, but it helps a lot with discerning patterns of speech, getting used to the flow of sound, speed, how people talk, etc., even though it may not provide much for comprehension, except for the more common and obvious phrases, like what you have experienced. What I have noticed is that rapid-fire babble became easy to follow (I got used to the speed of speech, and as such I was able to separate string of words, etc., very fast. And then I was able to look up stuff I didn't understand, which in turn made the incomprehensible a bit more comprehensible, and that gradually got better). So it helped in this respect.

But yes, it's hard, slow, and frustrating, and I couldn't have imagined being able to put up with it for long early on. I think what helped me is that I was listening to things I really enjoyed like music and anime for the most part, and then branched out from there as my understanding got better. It never bothered me much, because I enjoyed listening to Japanese in general.

Most of the time, though, I tried to really focus on comprehensible input, for the sake of making gains in comprehension, if I was actively studying. I went about it through the Japanese graded readers, picture books online, hukumusume (a website for children's stories, many have audio), anime I've seen before, and there's Pocoyo on youtube, dubbed in various languages, one of which is Japanese. There's also Paboo Project on Youtube, which helps Japanese kids learn English letters, and it's wonderful for us learners because it's in easy Japanese, so useful. I know, I know, kids stuff get old really fast. I like children's books and shows, so I have no problem there, but I balanced it out through watching regular dramas and shows early on, and wasn't overly strict about cutting off subtitles. Sometimes I would keep them, a lot of the times I wouldn't. I tried not to rely on them, but didn't want to be too harsh on myself early on, at least until Japanese became a habit that I couldn't stop. Gradually I weaned myself off of those. I also watched a LOT of NHK ETV, which had various educational documentaries and shows for children, teens, and adults, and travel and cooking shows which are great since they name things and describe them as they go and as such provide comprehensible input. This all balanced out so that I didn't get too bored with baby TV while at the same time try to learn a lot. And reading. Lots of it. First children books, picture books, and easy manga, then more difficult material. Audiobooks are great because if you know the story before hand, you'll be able to pick out a lot than if you didn't know anything. Slowing down as I read, and taking my time to notice patterns, then rereading that sentence again at a faster speed, helps a lot with what Steve Kaufman said about "observing/noticing patterns."

Youtube, too, is really amazing and you can find a lot on there as well. I found many of these ideas here on the forum, and some on my own.

I like and prefer graded comprehensible input, but many times that's hard to find, and you just have to improvise and adjust what you have to make it so. So I focused a lot on all of the above initially, and still continue to do so, even though I have branched out now. I kept listening to mix of comprehensible and more difficult material when I wasn't studying, though, because I wanted to get used to the speed and flow of speech, and because I found it useful. But that's just me, and I'm just one of the many opinions here.

SRS is also very useful. I never stuck with it for many reasons, but I imagine it would have probably been very useful. Or not. I don't know. I usually prefer just reading and listening and looking up things as I go, but this is just a matter of personal style. I really believe SRS is useful. I have used it some for med school, and it's helping keep a lot in my head. I don't know why I can't seem to keep at it for Japanese....

Anyway. That's just my experience. I hope you were able to find something useful reading all of that

CreepyAF Wrote:During these 5 hours, I would have my attention turned to the media, do some shadowing, and generally trying to understand what I was watching/listening to/reading.

Oh geez. That's what I was afraid of. I thought getting the same benefit as 90 hours of pimsleur sounded generous even allowing that I don't think pimsleur itself is very efficient. So you didn't get anything "for free" - that knowledge was hard won.

Did you have any english translations to help out with decoding what you were listening to?

Thanks again to everyone who has replied. Some of these responses have been very in-depth, and I appreciate you all taking the time to write them.

Woodsei Wrote:Speaking from my own experience, I think input in any form is useful, but for purely effective reasons, comprehensible input is the way to go. Listening to things you don't understand is frustrating, I know, but it helps a lot with discerning patterns of speech, getting used to the flow of sound, speed, how people talk, etc., even though it may not provide much for comprehension, except for the more common and obvious phrases, like what you have experienced. What I have noticed is that rapid-fire babble became easy to follow (I got used to the speed of speech, and as such I was able to separate string of words, etc., very fast. And then I was able to look up stuff I didn't understand, which in turn made the incomprehensible a bit more comprehensible, and that gradually got better). So it helped in this respect.

This is something I was never able to achieve. While I did get sort of used to the speed and sound of the language, I never got to the stage where I could really pick out individual words/sounds in realtime. I used to listen to the JUNK podcast and quite often I'd only be able to pull out a word I knew every 15 seconds, and occasionally I'd get two or three in a row. It was a magical moment if I ever understood a whole sentence.

yogert909 Wrote:Oh geez. That's what I was afraid of. I thought getting the same benefit as 90 hours of pimsleur sounded generous even allowing that I don't think pimsleur itself is very efficient. So you didn't get anything "for free" - that knowledge was hard won.

Did you have any english translations to help out with decoding what you were listening to?

Don't be too afraid, my skull is incredibly thick. I consider myself average when it comes to language learning, though on the lower end of average.

I don't think Pimsleur is very efficient either, and I think it's pretty low on content as well. I'm not going to advocate for it, but it is a good measuring stick for how much I really learned in immersion.

I didn't have any English translations to help me decipher what I was listening to. I went full monolingual in Japanese. Though at the same time, I did have an Anki side project going on, which I amassed about 1,200 cards consisting of words or simple sentences. I also had a deck for RTK (I had already finished the book and made this deck by hand for memory maintenance.)

Looking back, if I devoted 60% of my energy to building Anki decks and doing some sort of structured lessons, and 40% of my energy to immersion, I likely would be miles ahead.

You've gotten some good replies obviously but I find the topic interesting. I think being able to understand is key to benefitting from immersion. With Japanese, coming from English you need a lot of groundwork to understand much at all of what you hear but with languages closer to English you can start seeing patterns and understanding a lot much more quickly so you can jump into total immersion early on. I think that's more important than being monolingual but I am speaking from my own personal experience only. I was monolingual until studying German in my mid twenties.

Oh, I apologize, I wasn't very clear. I didn't mean to understand individual words on the go. Yes, I was able to do that to with the very obvious ones, which are not much. But what I meant to be able to separate the stream of speech into individual words, which I can later look up. I think what helped me do that is was because in conjunction with that, I was also actively reading graded readers, looking up points I didn't understand, and go over what I read or listened/watched multiple times. I didn't do them separately. I definitely think that if I had only watched raw, ungraded TV without putting in any effort to learn, or seek comprehensible input, it would have been very slow and ineffective. I also started out watching things on ETV, which generally employ somewhat slower speeds, and "show and tell" type shows that helped with both getting used to the speed of speech as well as comprehension.

CreepyAF Wrote:Looking back, if I devoted 60% of my energy to building Anki decks and doing some sort of structured lessons, and 40% of my energy to immersion, I likely would be miles ahead.

Yea, if feels bad saying it, but if you spent those 1,825 hours doing a textbook and/or ankiing vocab and sentences, you'd probably be above N3 by now! But there's no use worrying about the past. At least going forward things will come much easier! And btw, I do think that you likely gained some intangible feel for the language from all of that listening which will benefit you further down the line.

Regarding the 40% immersion / 60% structured learning thing, I still think that's too much immersion, especially at the beginning. Probably 0% immersion at the beginning and gradually ramping to 30-40% after the first 1,000 hours. I really believe that time is best spent on vocabulary acquisition until you know at minimum 1,500+ vocabulary. Then, gradually adding in grammar study, reading and listening comprehension. All of these other skills are much more efficiently learned once you have a basic vocabulary.

CreepyAF Wrote:Don't be too afraid, my skull is incredibly thick. I consider myself average when it comes to language learning, though on the lower end of average.

Me too. My memory is especially terrible, and I'm awkward in my native language, so I can only imagine I'll be a bore in Japanese as well.

Woodsei Wrote:I also started out watching things on ETV, which generally employ somewhat slower speeds, and "show and tell" type shows that helped with both getting used to the speed of speech as well as comprehension.

ETV? I'm just now starting with native material and could really use something basic like this to get me started. ETV sounds great, but where can I find it?

yogert909 Wrote:

Woodsei Wrote:I also started out watching things on ETV, which generally employ somewhat slower speeds, and "show and tell" type shows that helped with both getting used to the speed of speech as well as comprehension.

ETV? I'm just now starting with native material and could really use something basic like this to get me started. ETV sounds great, but where can I find it?

NHK Educational Television/E Terebi (NHK ETV). I used to watch that on NTKTV (it was the only channel that was free on there) before it stopped airing a few months ago. They programs would air live, and would be saved in 1-hour formats all the way for 10 days so I was able to re-watch things over that time period before it was removed from the queue. It's not working anymore

What I do now is look up the show names, mostly on the NHK website, and try to find any episodes on Youtube for them, but it isn't the same. I should probably ask in the TV thread if anyone knows of any other options for that particular channel.

yogert909 Wrote:I really believe that time is best spent on vocabulary acquisition until you know at minimum 1,500+ vocabulary. Then, gradually adding in grammar study, reading and listening comprehension. All of these other skills are much more efficiently learned once you have a basic vocabulary.

That's really some very good advice. Understanding the words makes everything else so much easier to learn.

kraemder Wrote:With Japanese, coming from English you need a lot of groundwork to understand much at all of what you hear but with languages closer to English you can start seeing patterns and understanding a lot much more quickly so you can jump into total immersion early on.

Makes sense. With languages related to English, it seems that ideas are expressed in a similar manner, whereas it's a whole different ball game with Japanese.

yogert909 Wrote:Yea, if feels bad saying it, but if you spent those 1,825 hours doing a textbook and/or ankiing vocab and sentences, you'd probably be above N3 by now!

[...]

I do think that you likely gained some intangible feel for the language from all of that listening which will benefit you further down the line.

Don't feel bad, I've come to terms with it. I've internalized my resentment and planted a black seed of bitterness in my heart long ago.

Yeah, I think I did gain something intangible. Sometimes I can get the gist of what's going on, especially if there are some obvious visual clues.

Edited because the second quote was attributed to the wrong user. Fixed.

Woodsei Wrote:NHK Educational Television/E Terebi (NHK ETV). I used to watch that on NTKTV (it was the only channel that was free on there) before it stopped airing a few months ago. They programs would air live, and would be saved in 1-hour formats all the way for 10 days so I was able to re-watch things over that time period before it was removed from the queue. It's not working anymore

What I do now is look up the show names, mostly on the NHK website, and try to find any episodes on Youtube for them, but it isn't the same. I should probably ask in the TV thread if anyone knows of any other options for that particular channel.

Figures...I'm always late to the party

Thanks just the same though!

CreepyAF Wrote:

kraemder Wrote:With Japanese, coming from English you need a lot of groundwork to understand much at all of what you hear but with languages closer to English you can start seeing patterns and understanding a lot much more quickly so you can jump into total immersion early on.

Makes sense. With languages related to English, it seems that ideas are expressed in a similar manner, whereas it's a whole different ball game with Japanese.

With the romance languages, I've heard the cogantes with english are around 60%. I don't know how accurate that it's but that's enough similar vocabulary where I can read an instruction booklet in spanish a few times slowly and get the gist of what I'm reading. I still don't think I can do as well with Japanese and I've been studying for 2 years! Then there's grammar. If you haven't done this fun trick yet, google translate something from Japanese to English and it's be almost complete gibberish. Then translate Spanish, French, or even Russian into English and you'll see a huge difference! This combined with a totally unknown writing system means that you have quite a bit of Japanese to learn until you are at the same level as the first day you study a romance language.

yogert909 Wrote:With the romance languages, I've heard the cogantes with english are around 60%. I don't know how accurate that it's but that's enough similar vocabulary where I can read an instruction booklet in spanish a few times slowly and get the gist of what I'm reading. I still don't think I can do as well with Japanese and I've been studying for 2 years! Then there's grammar. If you haven't done this fun trick yet, google translate something from Japanese to English and it's be almost complete gibberish. Then translate Spanish, French, or even Russian into English and you'll see a huge difference! This combined with a totally unknown writing system means that you have quite a bit of Japanese to learn until you are at the same level as the first day you study a romance language.

I did try to go on Google Translate before. Oh boy. Compared to something like French or Spanish which is almost perfect, Japanese is messed up. At least with the longer sentences. If you try and divide the clauses before feeding them into GTranslate, you might end up with more meaningful translations, but it's such a pain doing so.

I don't think one needs a huge amount of time to get themselves at the same level they would be at on the first day they start to learn a romance language, but yeah, the writing system certainly needs significantly more time and effort. I also think Japanese grammar is a somewhat more uniform and intuitive than some grammar found in the romance languages. I think the biggest hurdle, really, is that the Japanese word order needs some time getting used to.

yogert909 Wrote:

Woodsei Wrote:NHK Educational Television/E Terebi (NHK ETV). I used to watch that on NTKTV (it was the only channel that was free on there) before it stopped airing a few months ago. They programs would air live, and would be saved in 1-hour formats all the way for 10 days so I was able to re-watch things over that time period before it was removed from the queue. It's not working anymore

What I do now is look up the show names, mostly on the NHK website, and try to find any episodes on Youtube for them, but it isn't the same. I should probably ask in the TV thread if anyone knows of any other options for that particular channel.

Figures...I'm always late to the party

Thanks just the same though!

You're welcome. I'm sorry I couldn't be of much help there. I wish I had used it more when it was still available, so I don't think you're late or anything There's still plenty out there, it's just that I really like any kind of native input that would allow me to work out the meaning and the language without resorting to a dictionary.

Woodsei Wrote:I really like any kind of native input that would allow me to work out the meaning and the language without resorting to a dictionary.

Exactly! I don't think I'm quite to that point yet, but once I get there, my plan is for that kind of reading to form the bulk of my study.

yogert909 Wrote:

Woodsei Wrote:I really like any kind of native input that would allow me to work out the meaning and the language without resorting to a dictionary.

Exactly! I don't think I'm quite to that point yet, but once I get there, my plan is for that kind of reading to form the bulk of my study.

I'm sure you'll do great! And you're going to have a lot of fun, even if things are somewhat challenging. I know I still do

CreepyAF what were you actually doing every day?

Working in English? Going to school in English?