I’m talking about textbooks and lessons etc. I’ve seen flashcards and immersion mostly recommended online. I’ve been using Italki teachers since I started learning this year but also switched between nearly all the methods I found.
After having found a good professional Italki teacher I think that’s the best for me overall. Flashcards are also good for kanji and vocabulary but they don’t give you the nuances of them. I have to use flashcards for genki’s lists, or practice using them, or I forget.
Personally I think the teacher has been the most effective for me. She can explain well, give feedback and answer questions. I learn and practice new and old content with her which I feel is a complete course. The thing is it’s pricey so can’t afford to do it for hours a day like immersion. So I’m limited to around 2-5 hours a week.
But I want to know if anyone has gotten to an advcaned level with books, a teacher etc, but without much immersion. Methods like the refold one act like traditional methods are a waste of time and immersion is all you really need, with maybe some flashcards for vocab. I assume eventually you have to interact with the full langauge as that’s the goal but I’m not a big fan of immersing with video because I have nothing tangible I can say I learnt at the end of it, except maybe a couple words that i’ll forget then relearn when they get used again.
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> I assume eventually you have to interact with the full langauge as that’s the goal but I’m not a big fan of immersing with video because I have nothing tangible I can say I learnt at the end of it, except maybe a couple words that i’ll forget then relearn when they get used again.
That’s kind of the point. Even if you need to re-learn every ‘new’ word you encounter 100 times its still more efficient to learn to comprehend the language from immersion because you’ll be learning them all at once.
How often do you re-watch contents? I think you could prove the efficiency of immersion for yourself by just coming back to the same contents every few months and realizing that your brain has learned to comprehend it better with basically zero effort.
Immersion is much more about internalising and reinforcing what you already know (refining conscious knowledge and building a strong intuition on top of it) than learning brand-new stuff, which, as you point out, is generally not going to be efficiently achieved through sheer exposure — though you *can* make an active effort to look up and mine (or otherwise keep note of and later review) new vocab and grammar you come across. Anyway, without *any* organic exposure to the language at all, I highly doubt you can ever become fluent (and by “fluent” I don’t necessarily mean proficient or knowledgeable; I mean strictly *fluent*, with Japanese that’s become second-nature to use and *flows*, effortlessly) or idiomatic.
**Edit:** Ah, that’s not to devalue textbooks and the like in any way though; I myself are a proponent of structured, formal study, as I think it’s the best way to build that foundation of knowledge and make the most out of your immersion material. Formal study to learn, immersion to reinforce/internalise (and also pick up a couple of new things here and there).
Teachers work to help you understand and apply anything, but language is so complex that they can’t teach you everything you need to know. That takes thousands of hours, which is expensive for you and impractical for a weekly session.
That’s why self learning is encouraged. But there’s nothing wrong with using a teacher.
>I’m not a big fan of immersing with video because I have
nothing tangible I can say I learnt at the end of it, except maybe a couple
words that i’ll forget then relearn when they get used again.
Sounds like an issue of perspective really.
The reality of scale is that your “tangibility” is going to shrink inverse proportionally to your total progress. If you focus on the smaller scale [1 scene, 1 episode, 1 page] than you can see your growth in a different frame of reference. This morning you didn’t understand this part, now you do.
Just my two cents, I study almost exclusively from the books I’m reading. When I finish a study session, I will usually have a section of a chapter that went from 50% literacy rate to 95%. In the process I’ll get 75ish words closer to my goal of 15,000 in my Anki deck. For my tangibility I now understand a section that this morning I did not and I’m 0.005% closer to my
current goal. The binary of understanding versus not understanding a page will always be tangible for me while I’ve stopped caring about the 0.005% growth a long time ago.
Makes sense
Your parents taught you the thousands of words you know one by one right? Oh wait
I will never understand people who expect to learn a language by never engaging with content in the language