I started learning about a week and a half ago(mainly just kanji and vocab via wanikani so far, about to start level 3 atm) and have been reading a lot about different things people do at different levels. I have seen many people mention learning through immersion and I am a bit confused about it. Some people I have seen mention it talk about it like they are somehow eventually comprehending the language by listening to it enough or seeing words they don’t know how to read without any other understanding from learning what the words mean. Which to me seems like an impossible thing to understand meanings to words simply by listening to them be said. So, am I misunderstanding what they mean? Or is it actually more of a look up what you don’t understand while immersing and learn that way kind of thing?
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Read the [refold](https://refold.la) guide but in summary:
There are 2 types of active immersion. Active and intensive. Intensive is looking up every word you don’t know and trying to understand why it’s there, while passive is much more just trying to get a general idea of what’s happening.
Some people do just watch stuff without this until fluency, which does work too. That is how you and I learned our native language. However, for speed (and not boring yourself to death) most are recommended to do lookups.
Again, read the refold guide for more info and better explanations than I could ever give you for all relating to immersing. They also have a pretty active discord that has been able to answer all my questions about the subject.
Sometimes you pick up on the meaning of words through context. It might be in writing, maybe there are pictures, but it becomes clear. You do this in your native language a lot:
“The florbus was once one of the greatest predators of its time, measuring 54 fleebs and weighing over 8 crobbles. That’s as long as a city bus and as much as 3 elephants! The florbus attacked its prey with razor sharp, aerated fleems. Every time a fleem fell out, another grew in to take its place – just like a modern shark.”
Florbus – some sort of large predatory animal
Fleeb – a unit of measuring length
Crobble – a unit of weight
Fleem – most likely, teeth
Op, I’ve been watching anime for close to 20 years with english subtitles, so I can attest that immersion only goes so far. All I picked up before studying japanese seriously were single words like baka, otou-san, okaa-san, ganbatte, etc.
I had zero knowledge of grammar from immersion. Now that I’ve studied for 9 months, I can pick up grammatical structures here and there from listening but I still watch with english subtitles.
>Or is it actually more of a look up what you don’t understand while immersing and learn that way kind of thing?
Yes, especially in the beginning. The benefit of immersion is proportional to how much you understand. To bridge that gap fast (as in 1 year minimum, don’t expect to learn in a month or two), you need to do a huge amount of SRS. Basically, looking up everything you don’t understand, creating Anki cards out of it and learning a huge amount of words, grammar points, etc.
There is a bit of a difference between the beginner stages of immersion according to methods like refold and methods that focus on comprehensible input, but by the intermediate stage I think they tend to converge: you learn new words just by understanding the context around those words, and add those to your SRS to keep them fresh (like the paragraph about the Florbus below).
From what I understand it, here’s the difference in the beginner stages:
Immersion/refold: super interesting content, even if it’s above your level, while looking up most words and doing lots of SRS
Comprehensible input: not always the most fun content, but you can understand 80-98% of it from context
Some people prefer one over the other. I personally don’t like diving in the deep end and find it head-bangingly frustrating. Others find comprehensible input to be too boing to tolerate. I think it depends on the person.
Here’s an example of comprehensible input you can understand from context with just about zero Japanese knowledge:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPdNX2arS9Mb1iiA0xHkxj3KVwssHQxYP
Also, here’s some general advice for a beginner if you’re interested in comprehensible input:
/r/LearnJapanese/comments/12c8p0s/comment/jf0y7y4/
Learning via immersion from zero is a meme. You need to have some base understanding for the language if you want to ever understand anything more than greetings, some nouns, and exclamations.
Nobody is going to learn Japanese by watching anime non/j subbed exclusively.
Usually you have to look them up but you can learn them by context (both other words and visual) It is how you learned your first language so you don’t need translations in theory, but they do move it along much faster. How I do it is, read things looking up with yomichan and having it make anki cards for me. 5 cards a day. Then I also do a ton of listening both of things I’ve read and other podcasts. If you want to see how learning from immersion works in theory, look up comprehensible input japanese and watch a few videos. I guarantee you will learn a few words without looking them up.
You find something at your level and you listen to it or watch it or read it. And sometimes you encounter a few words you don’t know. And you just repeat the process and surprisingly it really does work very very well. How else would you learn a language? It’s all input and immersion, lol 😆
watch this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTWwLvqOdA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTWwLvqOdA)
and you will understand 🙂