I’ve been doing refold for about 2 months now and I’ve gotten a lot of gains with it even though I only knew about 500 words when I started. Free-Flow Immersion is when you watch something in Japanese and instead of looking up every word (“Intensive Immersion”) you just avoid looking up words more often than every 3-5 minutes. The majority of your immersion time in refold is like this. You still try to understand, but not looking up words. Obviously, you will not understand, that is normal and “tolerating ambiguity” is a big part of Refold, but with context from visuals you can pick out pieces and words and start to understand. You of course still have to do some intensive immersion (looking up every word), but refold recommends waiting until you’ve gotten your first 1000 words down before you start, and do more free flow than intensive. When I started I worried I was wasting my time, but now there are dozens of I+1 sentences in every video that I can mine, and I could even understand a lot of a let’s play of Paper Mario RPG with some help of having played the game before. I’m only N5, but it definitely works for me.
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You had me in the first part. I was going to say “This sounds like osmosis learning…. which results in no learning…” but as long as there’s intensive going on then yes… passive immersion is fine.
This sounds like a lot of really fancy terminology for a really simple classic thing, ie watching things in the target language and writing down some words you pick out. But hey, it works
intensive vs extensive reading
I’m laughing at this post, not because it’s wrong (fellow refold user here too, good stuff so far), but because the moment I needed to respond to somebody about the whole “you can’t immerse from the beginning argument”, this post suddenly appears. Good progress dude. I’ll be honest when I say that I’ve been doing just intensive this whole time and little free-flow. I understand the benefits behind free-flow, but the problem is that I mainly do reading and not listening. Regardless, good luck dude. You’re making amazing progress.
I’ve started doing more of this lately, especially with anime, since I got tired of intensive listening and reading. My problem is more that I like to understand some details and not just the general idea in order to enjoy something. Mixing that with some sessions of intensive in between makes it at least more fun, if not as efficient.
I somewhat agree, but only if you’re consuming easy content so that it gives you more avenues to understand. Theres “tolerating ambiguity”, then there’s understanding basically nothing because they speak too fast and they use mostly words/grammatical functions that you don’t know. It’s just way more efficient to learn the core grammar features and most important words from a textbook or something than immersing. Like immersing at n5 probably “works” in that you’re learning something, but imo it’s just not efficient.
was there particular media that was more helpful early on?