I have no idea how an immersive environment can be harmful. I don't think the music thing is a very good example on the part of your friend. When I listen to music, regardless of the language, I typically don't try to follow the lyrics. And for the whole using the website in Japanese thing, well there's always the idea that even though you aren't learning new words you're improving recognition speed and reinforcing the context of those words. Maybe more passively but it's something I'm sure.

There's no good reason to immerse yourself in incomprehensible input, but there's no strong reason -not- to do so. I think the motivation/frustration points that you just mentioned are what should be the deciding factor for any individual. If it motivates you, do it, if it frustrates you ... don't.

Later on, exposing yourself to semi-comprehensible input is an entirely different matter.

corry wrote:

I wonder whether it helps listening or pronunciation even when you dont understand it.

I don't think so. One of the barriers to listening comprehension is distinguishing long vowels and short vowels, distinguishing the different consonant sounds that aren't quite as they are in English (or whatever your native language may be), picking out the sound of the っ, and so on. With enough context to identify borderline-comprehensible words correctly, or with a written guide to follow, you can tune your ear.

With a stream of incomprehensible sound... what can you achieve? You're getting used to hearing the sounds, sure, but not getting used to identifying them or distinguishing them.

corry wrote:

I wonder whether it helps listening or pronunciation even when you dont understand it.

I think it depends on just how much you don't understand it. If, for instance, you can become familiar with the sounds, and general rhythm of the target language, while you aren't actively comprehending anything, you are at least building up a passive sense of identifying how the language generally sounds.

For an example, after spending years watching subtitled movies on the Australian TV station SBS, I have built up a mental sound bank in which I can differentiate between certain languages purely by hearing their cadence, patterns, stresses, sounds, etc. While they may not be comprehensible in any meaningful sense, compared to the average person who may hear Japanese, Korean, Thai, Mandarin; German, French, Russian, Swedish, etc. they usually fail to tell the difference between them, whereas it seems rather clear to my ears.

That is to say that I do not see any harm in immersing yourself within your target language, regardless of whether you can understand it or not, just as long as you allow it to truly flow into and out of you without getting too hung up on trying to understand it. That what the active study is for. Immersion would probably be better put as ambiance, as in something greater you are apart of which your body adapts to the sounds and flow of. Like traffic outside your window. Eventually it should start to feel normal to hear.

Anything comprehended while being within the environment is really just a sign that certain parts of your active involvement with the target language is starting to click together. Just don't try to focus too much on trying to catch all the sounds and breaking them apart inside your head. Immerse yourself as though it were water. Try to wrap yourself tightly up within it and you'll drown. Relax and spread yourself out willing to let it flow unto your limbs and you'll float.

If it's sapping your motivation that much, whatever benefit your learning method has, it doesn't seem like it's going to work out extremely well in the long run. But if you don't want to drastically change your method, here are some quick ideas:

This is trivial, but you can change your native Japanese material to something that requires actual communication or interactions. For example, if someone is responding to you in real life, you just can't zone out and ignore them. If someone is replying to your post on a forum, blog etc, you'll never fail to notice it's in Japanese. It takes horrible personality to teach yourself to tune Japanese out when someone is talking to you. This idea may require a nonzero output ability, but regardless of your level, you should be able to find someone, something you can "take advantage of" for your Japanese somewhere.

Speakers of major languages like English and Japanese may not always be happy to communicate with you if your speaking/writing is very poor. So if you would like a real person for this purpose, it might be more successful if you do a formal study beforehand to an extent and show them you did your homework. It all depends on your current level and circumstances though.

Also, you can have interactions without actual people. For example, certain types of games like RPG naturally require interactions/simulated communication. The typical gameplay of visual novels, dating sims, and the like is exactly simulated human interactions. This is just a quick example I came up with off the top of my head, but there must be various kinds of material where you can have active interactions without speaking or writing.

Another thing you can do is only use Japanese material that draws you in. You use something that gets you, something you're really into, well, anything that keeps your attention longer. I'm sure you already heard this, and you may be thinking it's painfully obvious. I know it's not always easy to find such ideal material too. But it doesn't bode well if you can't pay any attention to the stuff you're using to the extent that you feel like it's teaching you to tune Japanese out. I mean, it sounds like you're literally torturing yourself...

I can't give concrete advice about how to find more interesting material, and no one knows what you might like because everyone is different. You yourself may not know what you might like either. So why don't you just throw lots of random stuff and see what sticks? If nothing sticks, you still payed attention to the material when searching for good stuff. You can't fail to achieve your goal with this strategy.

Having lived in Japan for years, I have to say, it's been far less helpful than I'd hoped.

As others have noted, a lot of what you don't understand gets disregarded as noise.  Of course, as you progress, you start to fill in the blanks, and every exposure reinforces what you've learned.  But it's far from magical.  Nothing, unfortunately, seems to replace studying and consciously building vocabulary with reading and anki reps.

In terms of harmful, yes, I think there is an aspect to life in Japan that actually makes it harder to learn Japanese.  (Granted, "life in Japan" and "immersion" are slightly different topics, but they're pretty closely related.)  Living and working here is a pretty hectic lifestyle!  I enjoy going on vacations to other countries, where I can just relax and read a book or watch a movie in Japanese.  That's often more beneficial than talking to a colleague or a friend, in terms of actually learning something.

magamo wrote:

Speakers of major languages like English and Japanese may not always be happy to communicate with you if your speaking/writing is very poor.

As a point of contrast, consider this well-meaning bit of advice from Mango Languages:

Talking to native speakers is an invaluable step toward improving your linguistic skills. But if those strangers look at you and start laughing, don't run away in tears! In Japan, laughing at someone is not always the sign of spite. The Japanese may grin, giggle, or even laugh when you talk to them most likely because they are delighted at your efforts to learn their language. So when you end up with giggling Japanese, join them in their happy mood!

Ah, giggling Japanese.

Aside from music, I only use comprehensible immersion. That means that everything on my I-pod I have already watched several times with subtitles, television I watch is stuff that I can figure out from context (i.e. I recently watched some of the World Baseball Classic and Paris-Nice cycling on Japanese sports stations streaming on-line, and was able to follow what was going on fine), the shows I watch without subs I'm already so familiar with that, even if I don't understand every little joke or observation, I know what's going on, etc.

This type of immersion helped me immensely (including the subtitled stuff, but of course not as much as re-listening without subtitles, or watching things I can follow live without subs, like sports and variety shows).

By the way, I've learned foreign languages before. In those cases too, immersion was by far the main tool. Not only that, I think it was essential. Without immersion, I doubt I would've ever learned any language as an adult.

I haven't watched variety shows that much, but my impression is that there aren't reasons for particularly complicated or simplified language. There's often big and colorful subtitles of what they say (supposedly to put emphasis on jokes I guess?). Sometimes there's text on like, half the screen lol.

I've been meaning to check out ガキの使い, they have the famous 笑ってはいけない skits.

corry wrote:

Its true English will mess you up and make it hard but it you pay attention you can still hear the differences. Say you got an A with すき and B with つき then any one can ABX them apart with a little practice without knowing the meanings. Then its just a matter of re grouping the sounds into Japanese groups.

No, you really can't. Without meaning you don't know what sound difference indicate that something is a different phoneme and what sound differences are just accent or mannerism. There are rolled r's and hard r's and "Rs" that sound like "L" to western ears. Without meaning, you'll probably group R sounds alone into four or five groups, or more depending on how close you're being. が can and usually is pronounced at least two different ways just by the same person never mind varying accents. If you're going to 'A' and 'B' すき and つき then you're going to also C, D, E, and F different ways of prouncing 'これ'.  (Not that you would even know to take such logical units as sound groupings, making the whole proposition a non-starter.)

Without meaning, you have no idea how many boxes to put which sounds in. There's no way to know that THESE two sounds that seem totally different are actually the same phoneme while THOSE two sounds that seem only the tiniest bit different are actually different phonemes - unless you already know something about the language.

bertoni wrote:

SomeCallMeChris wrote:

No, you really can't. Without meaning you don't know what sound difference indicate that something is a different phoneme and what sound differences are just accent or mannerism.

Thank you for making me feel less defective.  My experience is very much the same here.

Heh. No problem. I do form my opinion from reading a bunch of phonetics and linguistics pages some time back (from tangents in some giant pitch accent thread), it's not totally out of the blue, but I don't really have links handy (other than pointing to 'phonemes' in wikipedia which ... has some hints at the complexity of the listening problem but isn't really a good place to start, it's just an easy page to remember.)

OTOH, I have no evidence but my personal experience... but once you -do- have meaning I find that the hearing clicks into place pretty quickly. A little reading-listening practice goes a long way. Rewind is a wonderful thing too - I've found that if I have both the audio and the text in front of me, and it doesn't sound like what's written I can generally learn to hear it 'correctly' after repeating a clip a few times.  It's a little strange to have what you (mis)heard as one consonant just a few minutes ago seem to become another consonant even though it's the exact same sounds being replayed...

I don't think this works with simply playing single words like the EDICT entry word clips, or, at least not for me. I need a string of context words to get my brain to process it as meaningful language and make an adjustment. And of course, even when not replaying a particular clip, any comprehensible listening is going to do this automatically, I believe; in the same way that our ear adjusts to a regional accent, I think it also adjusts to the sound of foreign language once comprehension begins and starts a self-reinforcing cycle of better ability to hear. Which is good, 'cause I'd much rather improve my listening by watching shows and only occasionally rewinding than by playing short clips over and over.

Regarding myself as one member of this forum that probably still has the worst listening comprehension ever (it was really badass, believe it or not), the following might be of interest to you.
For your interest, I could not understand virtually any conversational simple Japanese. Just usual every day talk was ways too much, although I could read newspaper articles and novels having a greater understanding (know about 2500 kanji and 12k words).

I can't stress enough finding audio ressource that is really interesting to you. It must be appealing. You must want to replay a phrase up to 20 times to get it, so that you can look it up on the dictionary. Not only interesting, but also - that applies for me - it must be entertaining, funny, humorous.

I totally immerse myself in 太田光の「今週のコラム」 and コント of 東京03 (you can find all of them easily on YouTube). I automatically spent more time listening actively, desperate to understand the puns. Perhaps having finished a challenging novel might have contributed to my defect listening skills to slightly improve. Who knows, but I can certify: get something that gets you!