I’ve been learning Japanese since the beginning of the year and tried various resources and methods. I started with Italki teachers and Genki. I found methods that seem to work for me which are doing the textbooks with a professional teacher and doing flashcards to learn common words. I can assess my progress easily that way because I either remember the meaning and use or I don’t.
However so many people I speak to online recommend immersion. I don’t understand much when I listen to Japanese and wonder if immersion might help me much. I’m very low in intelligence but am passed the N5 level right now which took me around 7 months, with 3 being moderately intensive and the rest casual. That’s progress I can measure but with immersion how would I tell if I’m getting anywhere? I’m doubtful I can pick up much because of my low intelligence but at the very least the immersion will reinforce words I know and improve my listening skills. I will also mine common words I don’t know which will be similar to vocabulary flashcards but less organised.
I guess I just want to know if immersions been effective for you, if you think it would be effective for me, and how to assess the progress I’m making with it?
3 comments
Immersion really works when you have a strong foundation in the language’s basics. No basics usually means no meaningful learning for your efforts.
Textbooks generally have the goal of teaching those foundations, but not even advanced textbooks will prepare you for everything — especially not vocabulary. That’s where immersion comes in. For the record, N5 won’t prepare you for true immersion, but it’s a start for comprehensible input. Once you’ve learned enough from comprehensible input, you can more comfortably dive into native materials.
immersion has to be mostly comprehensible to be useful. its a good idea to study more traditionally to get to that necessary foundation, especially if you’re trying to consume native content. there are some immersion materials for all reading and listening levels if you wanna try some graded readers or somethin but i cant attest to their quality as i jumped straight into “easy” manga made for natives. (it was still really hard for a long time)
It works, but it’s less time efficient. Depending on content you might need to use media for at least 2-4 hours everyday even at beginner stages and more when you are already fluent. More dense material like books work better, you have more words to work with, at the same time slow materials with a lot of pauses require more time.
And yes, you have close to zero indication how much you learn. Basically you need to do it for a long time, like at least 1-2 months, but usually 6-12, and then you can compare and see results.
Combining with other methods like SRS works better.