I learned about Immersion from youtube, you know matt vs japan and the others promoting this method and it got me pretty intersted
mimcking their journey when they said immerse in the language as much in the language and SRS whithout paying much attention to grammar.
I started with traditional RTK and immersion in anime throught all the the time , i was having issues with being consistent at things so I did only 10 cards per day for almost 3 months,
in the 11th week I stumbled on a discord server they gave me advice to just quit it and do rrtk and tango n5 so i just did that I completed both in 8 weeks
in that period I was doing a grammar guide here and there but was never consistent I don’t know if it’s just me but it felt boring and I didn’t understand and people told me that it was gonna make sense later but I never continued it.
In week 21 which is the 5th month I started minning, I mined polar bear cafe but in my minning process i just mined whatever words I don’t understand whatever they are i+1 or not and I’am currently learning the deck and I just began minning clannad.
my point is after all of this I feel like I’am doing no progress, is it because of the grammar? or not enough vocab(I should mine more),can someone help me
to give me thorough opinion and speak of their experience on things they did wrong and how they fixed them.
10 comments
Put more into grammar. Everything else you’re doing looks fine. Grammar is something that can be a little unintuitive, and although you can go without studying it, studying it a little will greatly improve your ability to understand.
Also remember that you probably have seen good progress from when you started. It’s difficult to see it because you aren’t where you want to be yet, but if you drag this out to the span of years, Japanese will make sense.
What am I doing wrong? It seems like you aren’t even following the guide you chose.
> because of the grammar
ya, I feel like you understand the problem already
don’t immerse before learning some basics of grammar, Genki I and Genki II or Tae Kim or whatever other possible textbook or guide you end up liking
Get a beginner text book stop trying to attack things way above your head. You’ll find it challenging enough with a textbook and supplementary materials without trying to reinvent the wheel
>my point is after all of this I feel like I’am doing no progress, is it because of the grammar? or not enough vocab(I should mine more),can someone help me
Likely both. Immersion doesn’t mean not paying attention to grammar at all, rather not worrying about nuances. You should either skim through a beginner grammar guide and look up on as-needed basis, or learn grammar through SRS the same way you learn words, also on as-needed basis.
Regarding vocabulary, you likely underestimate how many words are need to understand even a simple anime.
> without paying much attention to grammar
No, you still have to pay attention to grammar.
Have you skimmed the entirety of [Tae Kim’s grmmar guide](https://guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar) or watched the first 40~60 [Cure Dolly videos](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06WlhnypWj). If not, do that and after that, every time you recognise but don’t understand a grammar point, try looking it up again.
Some of you should really start charging money for advice
Just people won’t do anything unless they’re paying for it
You need to say the number of hours… 5 months doesn’t mean that much on its own.
Personally, I think immersion from day 1 isn’t that great for languages remote from your own. You’re better off starting with some traditional methods. I heard on the Refold podcast that they’re suggesting non-immersion for beginners “for some people’ now, but they just haven’t updated their guide.
Try some listening/reading to learner materials or watch some comprehensible input. All the things you have been doing have benefitted you, even if it doesn’t show yet. Try to consolidate what you know. Such as listening to sentences with the vocab you know spoken slowly and clearly. You’ll get there. Don’t panic!
Read more.
Some people can pay less attention to grammar than others and just pick up on pattern.
Some people need a healthy grammar explanation for everything.
Some people are the latter at first, and the former later.
Personally, I don’t understand grammar jargon so things like Tae Kim aren’t my go to most times. Instead I go to places like Maggie Sensei which has layman friendly explanation and a TON of examples.
But reading grammar guides on their own never helped me much. I’d read a grammar guide and forget the grammar points instantly. Eventually I moved on to referencing my grammar guide as-needed when working through an app or something.
Which brings me to the next thing, traditional learning into immersion isn’t as seamless as everyone makes it seem. It wasn’t easy after 7 years of study (13K hours for those who want hours), so after 5 months of study I can’t imagine it will be easy for you either.
**That isn’t to say you’ll need 7 years of study or 13K hours to be able to do it** I should have gotten into it much sooner, but that’s another story.
It took me like 6 months (180 hrs) to orient myself to understanding natural Japanese phrasing, and still every so often I stumble upon a sentence that I understand all the words in, but can’t make heads or tails of. Regardless of if I know the grammar rule.
You may also be trying to pick apart immersion a little early.
I started studying German recently. I figured because I’m really good at picking out cognates and have even learned non-cognate words from audio only context this way (German music… I listen to German music…) that I could jump straight into immersion with my studies.
I was wrong.
I tried to pick apart a couple pieces of media, but the amount of unknown was too much to pick up anything new. So I had to drop it and retreat back to traditional learning. So that’s what I’m doing rn.
Before I actively started mining media, I WAS at the point where I could play something like pokemon and understand simple directions. “Talk to X person” “Meet us in the neighboring town” “go to the mirror” “go to the cave in Y town” “my dog is missing please help me find it.”
….. I didn’t get any of the story… but I knew where to go and what to do.
What I’m saying is, before you really dig into immersion, you need to have a foundation of some sort. You should have enough vocab and grammar knowledge to understand at least parts, so you’re not having to reverse engineer the WHOLE thing. y’know?