When to Immerse? Jumping In Too Fast?

14 comments

1. Listening is harder than reading and reading almost anything is hard at N5 level. Ramp up on your grammar and vocab and it’ll slowly get easier. Focus on reading but keep passively listening, trying to pick out words you know as that’ll train your hearing – but don’t expect any real understanding from pure listening at this point.

   You are correct in that getting real benefit from immersion requires some groundwork first to make learning more efficient.

2. I think the issue is moreso that you are immersing something far beyond your level. Like when you learned English you start with simple stories, work up to YA novels, then some more difficult novels. You don’t jump straight into Game of Thrones and To Kill a Mockingbird.

   Immersing is more about finding difficulty level specific content and comprehending it, than bashing your head against the wall until you can magically read something flawlessly.

   There’s a commonly cited method of 80% comprehension, in which, to learn at an effective rate using contextual clues, you need to understand at least 80% of a text. Even so, you’ll constantly be looking things up to fully understand a given sentence.

   So, it’s not about too early, it’s more about selecting your goals properly. Not saying that P5 is ultra hard, but if you don’t even have the vocab or grammar knowledge of a child, you’re not going to grasp anything.

3. I’d say after knowing 2000~ words. You sound like someone who is better at improving through output though.

4. I *THINK* it’s supposed to be, complete N4 or N3, and then use native media.

   But if you jump in early and are gaining from it, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

5. immerse in anything you like any time you like

   then assess how useful it was and how frustrating it was

   then readjust for your personal needs

   lather, rinse, repeat

6. I was an early AJATTer… it didn’t work for me. I did around the clock immersion for YEARS!…. nothing….

   And i+1 just wasn’t feasible.

   So I spent the better part of a decade just learning what I could. Doing learning apps, reading grammar guides, that sort of thing… until about 2020.

   In 2020 I still had ZERO reading comprehension. I had tried to read through material dozens of times but I couldn’t get more than a sentence here or there and there were SO MANY words I didn’t know.

   And listening to TV? Nothing. Nothing ever. I couldn’t even pick out words I knew.

   Unless the English subs were on, then I’d get mad at myself for glancing at the subtitles, catching all the words said, and going “Crap! I didn’t actually need the subs there!!”

   Frustrated, tired, and desperate I picked up Pokemon Shield and started picking through it. I already braced myself that it would be LONG, SLOW, and the most PAINFUL PROCESS EVER.

   I started by writing down every sentence with even a single word I didn’t know. Then eventually I parred down to writing only the words I didn’t know.

   Then I stopped writing down any of the words at all. I’d look them up as many times as it took to learn them. And if a word didn’t repeat and I didn’t learn it, it was no big deal.

   For listening comprehension I did much the same thing with Japanese TV shows and Japanese subs. Looked up the words I didn’t know, and replayed lines until I could match what I read to what I heard. Now I really only need subtitles to look up new words… and there’s a LOT of those.

   When it comes to having to look up vocab in immersion material it’s more WHAT you’re watching and less how much you know. As a traditional language learner, slice of life will have a LOT of words you’ve already learned, or will learn.

   Deviating to any other genre will more often than not leave you feeling like you don’t know any of the language at all.

   I’ve found the biggest culprits are: Crime, high fantasy, and military genres. With Shounen or fantasy bringing up the rear. It’s hit or miss.

7. Immerse by reading children’s books first. And then progress with harder material as you learn new grammar and patterns.

8. Try the [NPO Tadoku books](https://tadoku.org/japanese/en/free-books-en/) (free and with audio!)

   and find other books your level on [Learn Natively](http://learnnatively.com) 🙂

9. AJATTer here, or rather, CI input user. Input should be as comprehensible as possible if you want to grow your ability. I wasted a decent chunk of time on more intermediate content as a beginner because people would say how much you comprehend isn’t that important. But it is important. Immersion is essentially for building processing fluency and ease (and language acquisition). That involves grammar, vocabulary, and parsing sounds/words. If you can’t comprehend, you only get slightly better at parsing sounds.

   Language naturally starts with single-clause phrases, and works up to more complicated multi-clause phrases. To do the more complex task, you need to be proficient in understanding single-clause phrases. For some time as a beginner, I was only picking up the meaning of a single clause in a multi-clause phrase if I was doing listening immersion. But this isn’t ideal, because you aren’t really getting at the meaning of what people say. Therefore simple content is better.

   I admit sometimes I watch videos on YT that I can’t really comprehend that well because I’m interested in the content, but I understand that I’m not being efficient when I’m doing that.

   When immersing, there will be times you can’t make out the sounds spoken. Particularly since you’re still starting out, if you have subtitles access, check to see what the sounds spoken are supposed to be.

   Sometimes, you will feel like you are just on the cusp of understanding what was spoken, if that’s the case, rewind the video and give it 2-3 more listens. This will often get you over the wall to comprehension. Sometimes, you will know all the words in a sentence but not be able to comprehend it quickly enough before the next sentence begins; if that’s the case, rewind it a couple times and think about it.

   The first anime I felt was at my level was Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san. I have even re-watched some of the episodes. A lot of people have shared the anime they started out with on this subreddit; you can also sort anime by difficulty on [jpdb.io](https://jpdb.io).

   You are probably also wondering about incidental vocabulary learning. It is actually not that complicated of a concept. I watched an anime once, and an avalanche happened right in front of the characters. I heard the sentence spoken, “something something 雪崩[なだれ]!!.” I figured the fact that an avalanche was happening is something a character would comment on, and I looked up the meaning to confirm that I was right. This is basically theory of mind and how L1 language acquisition works, except a child will assume they’re right (hence calling cats dogs with confidence). In other words, humans come packaged with the ability to read the minds of other people, and understand the kinds of things they will comment on. Unfortunately, many words are difficult and inefficient to learn this way. Nouns and adjectives are the easiest (I learned the word for “barrel” the same way as mentioned here). Verbs are harder because they are often subtle. But adverbs are probably the hardest to try to infer. They don’t directly reflect the environment; it’s better to look up their meanings than try to guess them.

   Why bring this up though? When you are doing listening immersion it is a drag to look up every single word. So you are probably going to wonder what’s going to happen with the words you don’t know that you don’t look up. Well, if you weren’t able to guess or infer any of their meaning, not much really happens.

   If you’re able to hear an unknown word enough times in a piece of content though, it’s usually a good indicator that it’s highly relevant to what’s happening on-screen and that you should learn it. Such words are absolutely great for increasing comprehension of the content they are found in. I usually put such words down in a notepad file, this is my signal to myself to remember the word’s existence and its basic meaning. Since they show up frequently in their respective content, there will be many opportunities for your understanding of them and their usage to deepen passively.

10. Do you feel compelled to look up words when you are, say, watching a movie? It sounds like you are making inactive study into active study. You have to let your brain listen to Japanese. You don’t have to understand every word of it.

11. I’m still <N5 level, I only started like 2 months ago. I feel like my level of vocab is still too low to just jump into animes or mangas etc.

    My current strategy is to just build up a vocab of words. Trying to learn as many words as I can, sentence structures, particles, etc. Once I know enough to at least vaguely put things together from understanding at least 90% of the words in a sentence, then I think I’ll try immersing myself.

12. >when and how did you guys start immersion, and was it beneficial to you to do active listening at an N5 level

    I was watching anime reactions on YouTube and getting used to the sounds of the language and picking up new words and their uses without even realizing it. The more you know the better it is, but you need to be interested in what you’re listening. I learn more by reading manga though. Aku no Hana is one of the easiest ones that I recommend. It should be fine to start reading manga after you reach N4. Until then concentrate on learning grammar. I recommend ToKini Andy’s videos for that and using Duolingo for practice. You should start truly immersing after you reach N2 imo.

13. I’m just starting out, going through Duo as fast as I can, making mistakes, but generally getting the hang of it and practicing small things I’ve learned with my partner who has taken classes and lived in Japan. I would like to consume some media to later improve my listening comprehension. Is watching kids shows worthwhile? Any recommendations?

14. First month learner here, just finished Old Enough on Netflix today. I can barely recognize kana when started, but now I get quite a few words and simple sentences now, with Japanese sub. I watch 4 or 5 half hour per week, on elliptical. Sure it’s more enjoyable than action movies.