To clarify, by active immersion I mean: looking up vocabulary, grammar rules and kanji you don’t know and deconstructing sentences that you don’t understand word by word until you do. I’m also a complete beginner and really just throwing my ideas out there, so please correct me if my ideas are misguided.
You of course would have to be able to recognize all of the kana and their associated syllable, but this only really takes a few days if you use the right method. Then, you could use a basic Anki deck for kanji, BUT you don’t really need to intensely focus on the kanji (their meanings, pronunciation, stroke order etc). You just need to be able to recognize the symbols so you can create stronger memories of words that you come across. Add kanji that you come across to the deck over time.
You then do the same thing for vocabulary words or grammar rules that you come across.
You could speed up your progress by studying grammar rules through Genki or other resources in the meantime, but theoretically it would not be necessary as long as you were methodical with your sentence deconstruction.
I commonly see the idea thrown around that you shouldn’t even begin to start immersing until you’ve completed both Genki I and Genki II, AND know hundreds of vocabulary words, and I honestly don’t see why this should be the case. By immersing right off the bat you can start learning vocabulary, pronunciation, and kanji *in context* which would allow for a much faster understanding of the language. Thoughts?
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Yes of course you can look stuff up as you go. This is how 95% of it works anyway.
But imagine if you could “prime” looking stuff up in some way, which already presented information to you in a clear way meant for beginners. This “way”, could it be organized in to chapters presented in a logical order?
This is what a beginner textbook is basically, and it can save a lot of confusion as it is a sort of stepladder to get you past the very beginner stage.
Textbooks do have reading sections which provide “immersion” (we really overload this term a lot here) sort of, in a way made for beginners kind of like how graded readers work, by creating a written section which has reduced vocab and grammar so you can understand it.
Anyway back to that “immersion” word, I think it used to mean “go to Japan and live as they do” and now it means “read something written in Japan” which is a bit weaker.
You can definitely learn a language that way. I just don’t see how you are going to be looking up grammar in the beginning if you don’t even know what you are looking at for the most part. There’s no deconstructing a sentence if you don’t even know the most basic grammar.
So unless you work at least through a basic grammar guide first I think this will be a painful process.
For basic grammar points that show up in basically every sentence, it is a lot more efficient to read through a grammar guide than to try finding and looking up patterns yourself. After all, somebody already did that for you and wrote down what they found. You can do that in a matter of days though. What makes textbooks inefficient for people wanting to learn mostly via input is doing all those grammar exercises.
This is a tough thing for a lot of people to do. If you are really genuinely starting from zero with sentence structure and verb conjugations, then you’re going to get stuck a lot thinking “why isn’t this word in the dictionary?” rather than realizing that it’s a conjugation of a verb, or it’s a grammar point that you need to look up, or whatever.
Some people can make it work. And I think that for some people, the combination of challenge and interacting with authentic materials (rather than textbooks and language learning apps) can be highly motivating. But for a lot of people… the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. You realize that you’ve taken twenty minutes just to read a single sentence, and it’s demotivating. And it’s going to be hard for people to explain things to you at a level that you can understand because you’re trying to understand E before you’ve learned A, B, C, or D.
So it requires a high degree of tolerating ambiguity. Which, again, is a thing that works for some people! But if you try, and you get burned out, or discouraged, or confused, don’t get down on yourself, because that’s not an uncommon experience.
You can, but I would say to use textbooks as a way to prime the basics in your head so that you can look out for them during immersion. That’s what I did. I read Tae Kim and played visual novels. If a grammar point came up that I didn’t know, then I would use something like bunpro or another grammar reference. Don’t do the exercises though. If you’re already installing immersing, then they’re kinda useless.
Yes, but it will take much longer compared to studying. Additionally, you will only learn spoken Japanese. It is very unlikely that you will understand anything more academic or business-oriented.
While it is possible, it is not efficient. If you truly want to learn, studying is the way to go. Learning through immersion is not as easy as it may seem. It requires 100% of your focus on the content you are consuming. This method is not significantly better than studying a few rules and doing some exercises each day.
Yes, this can be a very effective approach if you don’t burn out on it. Its not how i study Japanese, but a few years ago I had a job which necessitated me learning a different language where I had to commit to a much more “immersive approach”
The problem (imo) is that it is nearly impossible to not burn out unless your circumstances give you no other option but to learn.
In my case above I learned pretty fast, so I wouldn’t question that it works, but if you’re just learning the language as a hobby there’s no reason to make it so hard on yourself. It’s better to take 5 years and actually learn the language than to try and rush yourself and give up after 5 weeks. You might be able to learn the “classroom stuff” on the go through immersion, but for most people I think it’s just less stressful to do the grammar books and vocab first, then branch out to trying to speak/listen/etc.
If you want to go the immersion route, check this reddit post out: [https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/sedr0m/how_i_got_180180_on_n1_in_85_months/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/sedr0m/how_i_got_180180_on_n1_in_85_months/)
And check this interview if you want something more: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv234kZdBgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv234kZdBgs)
It’s about a guy who basically managed just that. Immersed intensely for 8.5 months and aced the N1 exam without taking any practice tests.
There is a lot of valuable information for a beginner but don’t get discouraged. He’s a genius that’s why he managed this in this short of a timeframe. Even if you have the discipline that he had the likely hood that you’ll accomplish the same is very low. He definitely has above average iq. Btw he was also juggling a physics major along with this.
It’s one hell of a reddit post and I’m sad that it doesn’t get posted here as much. Not to say it didn’t get a lot of recognition, I just wish people directed beginners to this goldmine more often.
You could, but it would be way more time consuming than simply working through a textbook that does all the looking up and deconstructing for you
but by all means try it out, let us know how it goes