How does one do “intensive immersion“ as a beginner?

10 comments

1. Immersion works best if you can use the words and grammar you already know to make sense of what you don’t. I believe comprehensible Japanese on Youtube puts out videos like that for beginners. For reading level 0 graded readers could fit.

2. Doing intensive immersion would mean that you completely limit your english usage to a near 0%

   It would also mean you spend a loong time before you really understand anything.
   Consider how you learnt your first language, it was literally a 100% immersion experience. And it would take about 3-4 years that you could apply language at a beginner level, but still be limited in many ways.

   Japanese is also a lot harder than english, but at least we have an understanding of language learning to prepare ourselves for it.

   I recommend slowly just incorporating things into your study routine. Watch children’s show, with Japanese subtitles. It’ll be super painful if you don’t like children’s shows, but it’ll help. Read children’s books as well. If you have any video games from childhood, see if you can change the settings to Japanese.

   Additionally, read, write, listen and speak everyday, as much as you can in Japanese. Or at least, spend 15 mins for each. And if you can find a native to talk with, even better.

   But also study grammar, and learn words. But don’t rely solely on flashcards. They’ll help you learn, but to a limit. You still need to learn how to apply the words, by using them. In Japanese, many words have very similar meanings, but different applications. You have to learn to utilise those differences.

   But remember, you’ve just started your Japanese journey. Be patient with yourself and have fun! Getting burned out when language learning is easy to do, especially when you try “get fluent fast” methods. Take your time, have fun with the language.

3. Maybe check out [TheMoeWay](https://learnjapanese.moe/routine/) ? I personally haven’t been using this, as I’ve already established my own routine. But if you want something immersion based, it’s worth a read!

4. youtube: Comprehensible Japanese

5. From my understanding, intensive is just looking up words and forming your own understanding of sentences and how everything works. If you understand what is being said, you move on. If you can’t figure anything out after a minute, you also move on. The whole point of intensive reading, or intensive immersion, is to put things into perspective and pick up vocabulary and grammar. And no, it isn’t like using subtitles, because you won’t be expected to understand 100% with look-ups. Ideally though, you’d want to combine intensive immersion with something like freeflow immersion, so I’d suggest reading either graded readers or something easy like manga for intensive immersion and watching comprehensible input videos for freeflow immersion (where you do no lookups).

6. I haven’t read a single guide that the creator them self used to get to a high level of fluency.

   Immersion learning (as in, listening to raw audio) was an idea created to fix the problem of long term learners being unable to progress further in the language. This works here because the learner has the knowledge/ability to learn from it and make sense of it. A beginner does not, incomprehensible raw input does absolutely nothing for comprehensibility. (It can but none of the guides suggest using it this way)

   On the other hand, we have learning by reading books/manga/VN’s. Whilst this does come under immersion learning, it is distinctly different from listening to raw incomprehensible audio as the learner is constantly looking up words and trying to make sense of sentences etc, this is more inline with studying as opposed to wasting hours listening to incompressible audio.

7. Watch something like cocomelon in Japanese on youtube

8. Beginner myself; started learning hiragana and katakana Sept last year, today on lvl 9 WaniKani and in Genki I’m on Chapter 6 making sure it’s all actually learned.

   I LOVED learning hira and kata because it was so easy in that I knew what to do, sit down and write it out every day for a month.

   After that, I was very lost.

   Laser focus became a shotgun blast of Cure Dolly, TokiAndy, GameGengo, Anki, Wani, Satori, BunPro, Genki, RTK, Tango N5, Reddit searches, Google searches etc etc.

   All these things are solid but what was lost is my focus.

   In the last 2-3 months, took a breath and reminded myself I’m a beginner. If it took me one month to learn a solid foundation of hira and kata why would I think a week could do the same, for instance, learning the difference between godan and ichidan?

   This week I have been doing my regular Wani and Genki studies. Can do Wani on the bus, toilet, lunch breaks, it’s a beauty. With Genki I can really only sit down and really read the book with OTO Navi Twice a week but all the extra stuff I do I try to link it to the lesson.

   For instance, doing 10-20 verbs from [Game Gengos Complete N5 Verb List](https://youtu.be/dwlafs0odbQ) and physically writing the basic dictionary form (basic) verbs and the negative form for practicing godan and ichidan.

   All of what I’m saying, in this sub, is a kid bragging about pedalling his first bike in a room full of extreme sports enthusiasts.

   But even in the last two months the things I’m listening too and watching with subtitles I’m catching words, seeing patterns in forms and it’s exciting even though very basic. Sorry for the long message.

   TLDR; Because there is SOOO much to learn it’s overwhelming but if you really focus on the basics for just 3-6 months you’ll have much more fun and I would guess success with immersion.

9. No point in actively using JP immersion material. Complete N5 vocab first (+ the grammer).

10. The short answer is you don’t. The best material for you to read is the example sentences for vocab and grammar in your textbooks and JPLT prep books. Any watching of anime or reading of anything else is going to mostly be a waste of your time. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it, but it’s not a good use of your time. You should wait until you know at least 500-600 kanji and know most of the N4 vocab imho. You will still struggle with most things(lots of lookups) but there is much more within striking distance of being mostly understandable available to you.