Watch Matt’s own video from when he was young. Listen to his story and pay attention to what he did initially in his learning (starts 2 minutes). He started as a freshman in high school because of Yugioh and started taking high school and community college classes… He studied for another year in a traditional high school class as a sophomore… The following summer he went to Japan as a tourist on a summer trip. He start AJATT but also continued and got into Japanese 5 at his high school. During his third year of formal study in the middle of the year, he went to Japan and did a homestay and was completely rude to his host family and blamed them for his being a loner and ignoring them…
He did nearly 2 years of formal study PLUS tourist trips and college courses (up to roughly JAPANESE 3-4) before doing a deep dive into immersion while still taking formal courses… He completely downplays the work that his teachers did and the ‘decks’ others had made for him to be able to do AJATT.
In other words, his story is not exactly (only) about ‘immersion only’ but about maniacal hard work and determination and obsessiveness over resources he found useful.
I actually came across the same video linked in the OP a few weeks ago which is the reason why I started with immersion content a lot earlier than intended. That being said I didn’t expect to learn just by listening and nothing else. Even the video’s poster mentions that they learned heaps of vocab while they were immersing, so it makes sense that eventually after 1000’s of listening hours and learning vocab on the side, they’d start to understand what’s being said alongside grammar/context.
I think this sums it up really well. I’m sure there’s someone out there who could learn a language purely from listening to content, but I do think the idea is simplified a bit. Yes, babies will constantly hear the language around them and not understand until they eventually do, but kids are also growing up doing nothing but being taught vocabulary and how to put it together.
We probably don’t remember much of what we did in our earliest years of school, but so much of it was learning the fundamentals of our native language until eventually it just became second nature. When you’re shown a banana and told “this is a banana”, you then know what to call the funny shaped yellow thing. As adults (or otherwise not babies), we have the distinct advantage of being able to speed up the language learning process. WK is a great example of this, learning in a few years what Japanese kids learn in 10.
tl;dr: Whether it’s your native language or an additional one, I do believe at least collecting vocab on top of simply listening is necessary. That being said, I’m sure there’s a prodigy out there somewhere who could prove me wrong!
This. I think many of the videos out there about Japanese learning are either clickbait, or made by people who actually are really unconscious about their learning process. Bare in mind that many of these videos are made by people who want to earn money
Also, this. Immersion is not about practising reading, or practising listening. That is a given for any language learning process… You must read, listen, and speak at some point if you want to actually learn. And you should do it as much as you can. For any language. The important thing is how you do it!
Many times these videos talk about how babies learn. What they seem to miss is how many times they are repeated the same things, over and over again. “Look at that, a bird!” “This is a spoon”. And so on. So what I’m trying to say is that repetition is a very important part of the process, especially early on. If you are a beginner and put on some anime, you’ll probably don’t understand shit. Learning just won’t happen. You’ll start to get a feel about how the language sounds, but that’s it.
As a beginner, you need beginner content with a lot of repetition, for both reading and writing. That’s how one gets the basic structures of the language inside the brain. Those structures are fundamental to understanding. Once you have that, your brain won’t be using that much energy on those, and you’ll start to want to fill the rest of the gaps.
Actual learning happens when you understand most of the content, not when you have to look up most of the content.
TL;DR; do listening, do reading, but if you’re a beginner, you have to do it at your level, with stuff that you can mostly understand, and with lots of repetition.
This is a really good point. The small amount of listening practice I’ve done, the words I’ve learned are the ones that have been mentioned several times. First it makes me go “hey, they’ve said that a lot, let’s find out what it means”. Then once you do know and it comes up again, it’s much easier to understand and retain it.
Also kids have usually a full childhood of learning to do lol. They have so much time by comparison. For the most part, adults do not
Seeing what works for them is useful (for instance i think the kid tendency to mostly read for pleasure should be adopted by all language learners who don’t have deadlines), but needs to be properly moderated and contextualised.
If the looking up is in english - yes I would. In both cases you have text in a language you don’t understand that you read explanations in a language you do. The only difference is that you don’t curate the native material in the textbook but you do with the book.
In both cases you have no control over the grammar points you read and you need to read about them in order to understand what you read as well as new vocabulary. So it’s essentially the same actions. The only difference is that a text book is a one stop shop and with a book you have to look for explanations in other sources. But overall same difference.
Absolutely this. Also, when you’re a child, you have a child’s brain. When you were three years old you didn’t mind being read a 4 page ‘book’ about a friendly dinosaur or listening to someone say: “Look at the apple! Say apple!” ten times because you couldn’t comprehend it.
As adults we have the advantage of being able to speed up the learning process, but also the disadvantage of essentially being returned to an infant state of understanding in whatever language it is. It can be a difficult thing to accept when learning that you effectively have to ‘start over’ when you’re fully literate in your native tongue.
You need to be listening in some sort of context that connects what you are hearing to the world around you and in general.
Listening (no visual, no interaction) to someone talk about plates, bowls, cups, pots and pans will perhaps allow you to recognize repeated occurrences of words (sounds), but will do nothing to let you figure out what those words are. Interacting with someone that is saying “plate” when they pick up a plate and “bowl” when they pick up a bowl, or “red” when the the item is red and “blue” when it is blue will allow you to understand what each words is.
I basically learned English that way and then Portuguese, Russian and now Japanese using more “traditional” methods.
My take on full immersion is this:
Most people who say they learn solely through immersion are lying or at least embellishing the story somewhat. I just did that above: while I did learn the vast majority of my English through immersion, I actually had some English classes at school. It’s easy after the fact to say “well those sucked and I certainly didn’t learn a whole lot there”, which may be true but even just getting a couple hundred hours of lackluster classes giving you the basics of vocab and grammar is going to help getting into proper immersion later. How many of these “full immersion” salespeople can truly claim to have never opened a grammar book?
Immersion works best if you can actually, you know, immerse into the language. For English it’s super easy in most places because you’re drowning in English-language material whether you like it or not even in non-English-speaking countries. For Russian or Portuguese it’s vastly trickier. For Japanese it’s a mixed bag: a lot of Japanese media finds its way to the international markets but engaging with it in Japanese may be a little more difficult. You can find manga anywhere in Europe, but Japanese-language manga is a different story.
I firmly believe that immersion works best when you’re young, although this is based purely on anecdotal experience. I think it’s partly because I feel that when I was younger I’d assimilate knowledge much faster than I do now at nearly 40, but also because I think when I was a teen I valued my time a lot less than I do now and could more easily justify spending 20 hours in a week immersing in random stuff even if it wasn’t super satisfying or rewarding.
The whole “babies learn language that way so why don’t you” argument is frankly moronic. Babies have adults catering to their every needs, spending an incredible amount of time speaking in a simple language, explaining and repeating everything, day after day, week after week, month after month for years on end. Babies get exposure to the language basically exclusively (assuming a monolingual household) every waking hour for many years before they reach something you can claim to be fluency. That’s not comparable to watching Naruto in Japanese in the background while you’re cooking.
As others have already pointed out in this thread I think the best approach is somewhere in between: use SRS and grammar books to build the foundation as fast and efficiently as possible, then transition more and more towards consuming native material when you have the tools to do so effectively.
It doesn’t have to be Genki or immersion, it can be Wanikani and bunpro + book clubs for instance. Experiment and find the formula that works best for you and then don’t hesitate to tweak it as you progress.
I don’t know the reasons for the aggressiveness here, so won’t go further into that, but…
Do you really think both are fundamentally the same activity?
Reading through a curated textbook with specific grammar drills that are highly cut together to make the reader read short snippets in a way most natives would never actually speak or write and reading through native material in your specific interest, looking up things on the way are 2 very distinct types of “studying” in my opinion.
You also don’t learn the same grammar points in short intervals over and over to push it into your brain, but naturally see things again and again, coupled with usually a wide variety of vocabulary and structures they are used in.
In the end I don’t know because I never clicked with textbooks or grammar drills, the only specific “grammar study” I ever did was reading through Tae Kims grammar guide a few times without stopping or doing exercises, just to get the general gist and went from there. What is more effective in the end I can’t say with absolute certainity, I just have the feeling the latter is way more efficient and way more fun. But I am also sure that doesn’t work with everyone.
So in short it’s mostly a matter of pre-learning and of when to do output, right?
A “textbook faction approach” would be:
Spend a long-ish time pre-learning grammar (via a grammar guide e.g. in a textbook and then exercises) and vocab before
eventually starting to interact with native content (while looking up stuff as it comes up, but also continuing to pre-learn new grammar/vocab).
Do output (exercises both in writing and speaking) as soon as possible.
An “immersion faction approach” would be to
Spend just spent the bare minimum time pre-learning grammar (via a grammar guide) and vocab (via a pre-made deck), and then
as soon as possible starting to interact with native content (while looking up stuff as it comes up and only learning those).
Do output only when your understanding is already great, so as late as possible.
I feel like the actual interaction with the native content (pick content slightly harder than your comfort level, look up stuff you don’t know as you go) isn’t much different.
And I feel like the immersion faction is doing themselves a disservice by calling their approach “easy” or “easier” as I’ve often seen, like in the video the OP posted: “Learning Japanese Isn’t Actually That Hard”. I don’t know if they mean “To me this is easier than learning with textbooks which I personally think is hard” or whether it’s just false advertising, but it just comes off as “We have the right approach, and it’s better than yours”. It’s not a surprise to me that this rubs lots of people the wrong way. (And it doesn’t help that there seem to be a lot of misunderstandings. It’s not only consuming native content, you still look stuff up and do SRS, you just don’t pre-learn stuff as much.)
It’s hard and time-intensive with either approach. It seems more a matter of whether you learn well with a textbook and exercises or whether you hate that and feel like it doesn’t do anything for you.
Personally I started with Genki I, started reading a graded reader while finishing Genki II, and then slowly started native content with book clubs. Nowadays I’m mostly just learning via native content (i.e. mostly reading, watching vtubers and conversation, while doing a bit of Bunpro/Anki).
I’m glad for the pre-learning I had and I feel like an “immersion faction approach” as described above would’ve been very frustrating for me. But I can totally see how for someone who has no affinity to textbook learning the other way around would be frustrating.
I think some people do literally mean it, but forgot what it took them to get to that point. Like you see stories of “I did textbooks/anki for two years and couldn’t read and then I started reading and could in six months”, and it’s like they ignore the foundation that (a) allowed them to get anything out of reading and (b) made the experience not miserably frustrating.
I don’t know, but does that sound like a good time? Just banging your head against an incomprehensible wall until it clicks? I think it sounds more motivating to understand the content you engage with and that can only be done via lookups (if it’s above your level, which it has to be, if you learn only through immersion). Plus, the above mentioned technique also sounds really inefficient. If it works like that, I am pretty sure it would take way longer than focused study. But you could do lookups for your first listen (= focused study) and then do a second listen without lookups (= more free flow), the possibilities are endless…
You can always mix and match. You can try different textbooks. You can try just googling stuff or find a Japanese person (friend, tutor, …) to explain everything to you. You can watch anime and not understand anything in addition to more focused study. If you don’t have a time limit in learning the language, I wouldn’t overthink it and just try whatever works for you. After some time (1 month?) evaluate if you can see progress, if not, switch methods or add another study method to your current ones if you have a lot of fun with what you are already doing but can’t see progress.
There are lots of tips everywhere about how to learn any language and some are helpful to me and some are not. Some people have completely different goals from me (eg sounding like a native, reading advanced philosophy, …). There will never be a correct way. The best way is the one that lets you make progress but also keeps you motivated to do something for your language learning every day.
The worst of this kind of weird representation of pre-installed knowledge before “it all easily came together.” There’s learning advice videos out there about how easy it is to quickly learn Japanese, and then the video creator suddenly brings up they’re already fluent in Chinese and Korean.
So they already know the meanings of most of these characters. And know a language with a very similar grammar structure. Yeah, no wonder it was easier for them. But this advice isn’t going to help people looking to get started unless you want them to learn two other languages first.
There’s definitely content creators out there who mean well and actually want to teach. But a lot of them really don’t give any information most people can put to use at all, intentional or not.
I say this as someone who jumped in and fully immersed much sooner than most. Spending time in a lot of spaces with natives online, in a form where I could not look things up. Though I still studied for two hours every day for a year while doing that. I’m not going to pretend it all just came together on its own just from talking to natives. It mostly helped settling studied material, or give an understanding of what else needed to be studied later because I was lacking there.
I think you misinterpreted the irony I was referring to.
The irony is the people who use the term immersion in the wrong way losing all credibility as an authority in the matter - and we’re talking about language learning here, accurate comprehension is not optional…
As someone who uses both methods I can tell you that as a beginner the amount of time I spent looking up stuff while reading devolves anything that has too much unfamiliar words and new grammar points into snippets anyway, and it is definitely not immersion. The OP asked about immersion and gave an example of a very misleading representation of what immersion really is, and as @coicoy pointed out
So that’s where the problem is.
The thing is, and I’ve said it before, eventually regardless of the method you started with you come to a point when you are able to learn new things from context without doing any look ups or a very minimal amount of.
Personally I think it is always better to engage with native material from the get go if it’s available, but you gotta understand it won’t be easy and it takes time and effort.
It depends what your goal is and how much time you have to put into it. Using native material is very demanding, if you don’t have a few hours a day to dedicate to it, it won’t be very efficient, unless you are able to find material that suits your level every single time, but that’s not usually the case with independent learning, so there’s also some luck involved.
I don’t think reading Tae Kims grammar guide is “grammar study”, it is the real deal grammar study so it means you had some foundation before you’ve started reading.
Do you know why the curated textbook uses “specific grammar drills that are highly cut together to make the reader read short snippets in a way most natives would never actually speak or write”? It’s because that is N+1 content for beginners - the type of content that mostly uses things they already know and only adds one more thing so that they can learn that.
The natural “native material in your specific interest” is N+1000 for a beginner. Before that there’s some native content outside of their interest at N+100, and after that there’s lots of N+1 native content, but you gotta get there somehow. Some people do it N+1 step by N+1 step via textbooks, some people have the grit to push through it by sheer force of will and time investment.
So, yes, both are fundamentally the same activity. Both have a certain difficulty compared to what you are at (N+x) and the goal is to get you to the next level. Native content isn’t “better” than textbook content because it’s more natural and less curated, it’s just content on a different level.
(Of course this is only speaking on a fundamental level from a language learning perspective. Most people would probably agree that interacting with native content they mostly understand is much more enjoyable and fulfilling than textbook exercises. But I think most people would also agree that interacting with native content far above your level is extremely frustrating, so that’s why many like starting out with textbooks instead: to get to a closer level first.)
To the best of my knowledge, yes, it is possible to learn purely through immersion without textbooks or studying grammar. This does not mean that just listening to random Japanese podcasts or TV shows will make you learn Japanese. Learning through immersion often requires the learner to comprehend the context the language is being used in and through that pick up words, phrases, and proper grammatical structures. It is not easy and it can take a long time.
If you want to learn more about this kind of immersion based language learning I recommend checking out Dreaming Spanish, a website designed to help teach Spanish through comprehensible input. They layout the methodology and timelines as well as explain the research behind it.
What most people do is study grammar and vocabulary and supplement that with content in their target language, in this case Japanese, to solidify that content and move beyond static textbook dialogue into dynamic, real-life language use. I believe there is a website similar to Dreaming Spanish called Comprehensible Japanese that can help get you started with more Japanese content.
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