I get you, I tried looking for such information myself in the past and always got very annoyed seeing “START NOW!!!” or some such being replied all the time. I get the sense we’re similar in wanting our time to be spent productively, so here’s some rough milestones (based on the WaniKani level I was at the time) at which I started using new resources:
~level 7: started reading through Tae Kim’s online grammar guide. (I only read through the ‘Basic Grammar’ and ‘Essential Grammar’ sections). Didn’t bother memorizing any of it, it’s good enough to know the different forms that exist and (roughly) how to recognize them. Focus on comprehending the content, grammar drills and conjugation practice is unnecessary.
~level 18: I finished the parts of Tae Kim I wanted to and at this point was sick and tired of theoretical grammar with no true practice, this is when I started struggling through Graded readers (it will start of being hard still, but I felt at this point it was actually doing something). There’s free graded readers from white rabbit press I believe. Those are the ones I used, started at level 1 and kept on until I got comfortable reading level 3.
~level 28: subscribed to Satori reader and start to take reading more seriously, making it an extra daily “requirement” alongside the SRS. I highly recommend this resource, but not as a true beginner. Wait until you’ve cleared some free graded readers, the content is aimed at Upper beginner → Upper intermediate learners. The first two articles of most (maybe all, I haven’t checked) stories are free, so you can just go have a look for yourself and see if you feel comfortable reading any of it yet.
That’s what I have for you so far, I’m still grinding through Satori reader myself at this point. I suspect I’ll be done with it in 2-3 months from now, at which point I’ll move on to non-curated native material. I’ve already bought the Claymore manga for that purpose and I’ll probably start watching anime with JP subs at that point as well (I already tried to do this about a month ago with Aggretsuko, but felt like it was still too difficult to get much value out of it, so I stopped after like 5 episodes).
For reference: I started using Wanikani 20 december 2021, so I’m nearly a year into JP studies (I think I average something like 2h/day, this is a very very rough estimation because I don’t use any time tracking tools aside from Wanikani doing so automatically) and I’m about a day short of turning level 37. I care about efficiency in my studies, so I hope this helps you get some idea. Ultimately though, what matters more is how much you can stomach. So the answer to the question “when should I start immersion?” would be: at whichever point you feel like the content you’re immersing in allows you to understand enough of it that the reward (fun + progress) outweighs the cost (time and/or money spent). Only you can be the judge of when that is, and the only way you can judge this is by actually trying it in practice.
I think it’s all in the approach. It’s never too soon to try and you will probably learn something. But if you don’t have basic kana down, some vocab, and grammar, it is too soon to try.
I did rush through Tae Kim, in order to be able to read normal manga, as soon as possible; while Minna no Nihongo is more difficult to rush to study properly. I feel that it eventually backfired a little by not remembering grammar points properly.
I’ve never needed that much Kanji in the first place to study grammar guides or textbooks. Vocabularies are just either in the guides, in some random selections (iKnow), or collected from native materials.
It is true though, that I remember Hiragana and Katakana, and Romaji equivalents / schemes, before studying any other things.
Only later on that I decided to specifically learn Kanji extensively (and intensively).
I think you should just grab any opportunity you can find as there’s never the right time to start. So I would really recommend just feeling it out. If it’s too much, take a break and focus on something else for a while, then try again when you feel more comfortable. That’s really the key point you can start over again and you don’t have to start at the same spot.
Look what tickles your interest and engage with it on a regular basis.
Even after hitting lvl 11 and WK email recommended nhk easy news It took for me quite some time to understand almost everything without looking up word meanings. Today it is like a breeze.
Bunpro it was the same, only started around lvl 33 here because I knew if I tried before to get grammar point and spent more time looking words up it would break the tool to focus on grammar points.
Today I watch anime with JP subtitles and since I am not into reading books/light novels like the majority here, for me my immersion is working fine so far.
This thread got too huge already, but i geuss ill still share my experience to battle the “NEVER TOO SOON” theory
all in all WK levels dont play big role in ability to start to immerse, kanji isnt required at the beginning since you can pick content with furigana, so its really only the vocab youve gained here thats useful when starting (not to say kanji are overall useless! its massive help later on not only for stuff without furigana, but also its easier to have both reading (furigana) and kanji as double system if one fails you + often being able to guess a vocab composed by already known kanji is huge help), so if starting to immerse with anything as soon as possible is the goal, i would just focus on vocab and grammar - both of which are taught in basic textbooks, or if thats not your thing i guess something like Tae Kims guide + N5 tango anki deck
here are my experiences with immersion roughly compared to my level (everything is of course subjective!):
before finishing Genki 1 (not yet N5) - i probably wouldnt do anything immersive, its fun to recognise a word or kanji somewhere randomly and that validates your struggles and it can motivate you, but delving into some piece of media trying to understand it is too hard - especially since you arent even fully aware of what to look up (you dont know all kind of conjugations or basic particles and without spacing in sentences its a nightmare to navigate in it), i think time spent on gaining a foundation is time better spent than trying to immerse
before finishing Genki 2 (not yet N4) - i personally havent done anything significant, but technically i started here and it should be viable to do stuff like graded readers, really easy stuff aimed at learners or easy content like Yotsuba manga. Its hard to say if its neccessarily efficient, but it doesnt harm to do at least a little bit of that so that its less of a shock to start delving into mainstream content, no amount of textbooks and theory will prepare you for the real thing, so its best to slowly dip your toes in it, rather then reaching x point and jumping into it. For me this was viable to do, but it was really frustrating and i quickly reached the limit with how many lookups i had to do
after finishing Genki 2 (N4) - this is the perfect point to stop focusing too much on studying grammar and vocab outside of context and put more time into immersion, you should be ok most of the time understanding whats going on and majority of lookups are just unknown vocab you can search up in dictionary fairly quickly. You do run into some grammar hiccups, but by this point you might actually have an idea how to search that one up or you can decide to skip it if you roughly understand whats going on. It can be a little bit frustrating depending on what you pick up to read and fatigue still builds up pretty fast so you cant do it nonstop, but its 100% worth doing.
after finishing Quartet 1 (N3) - reading is actually fun and you often forget this is actually a part of learning. Even running into grammar i dont know yet is actually fun, becuase it doesnt happen all that often, its like encountering some cool pokemon you havent caught yet. Vocab lookups are still somewhat common here, but lookups no longer sucks out the energy out of me, i can read the whole day if i want to. I dont know why someone wouldnt immerse at this point - that would be silly.
I would echo those here who say that “lazy” immersion (like watching Japanese content with English subtitles) is a totally valid way to listen to and familiarize oneself with language patterns, vocab, etc. without descending into frustration. I tend to rewatch things I love several times with subtitles and then watch them without. The fact that the whole Studio Ghibli catalogue is on Netflix helps a lot with this.
My main form of “real” immersion is listening to Japanese music. I listen to playlists of my favourites over and over, and each time I recognize a new word or grammatical construction, it boosts my confidence and motivation enormously.
I’m not sure these practices are as efficient as you’d like. But my experiences learning other languages have taught me that the most important practices are the ones you enjoy and will return to over and over. I also read graded readers and (painstakingly) beginner manga, I take courses and do my WK practice and, when I have time, fill my days with textbook and other exercises. But I would wager that watching media with subtitles and listening to music are the things that have boosted my overall comprehension the most.
On the topic of lazy immersion, I can chime in with experience.
I don’t consider watching anime and tv/film with English subtitles to be immersion at all.
Over a period of 25 years, I accrued over 15,000 hours of “lazy immersion”. The result of that is the acquisition of about a 400-word passive vocabulary that defies active recall and which can’t be recognized in written format. And the acquisition of a few particles and verb inflections.
When your brain encounters something it doesn’t understand, it attempts to analyze it using any information that may be available. This process of analysis and decoding of unknown information is the crucial part of language acquisition. When your brain is given the solution to a problem (subtitles), it subconsciously tunes out other information (Japanese audio).
Have you ever looked for something for a long time, probably your phone or keys, and FINALLY found it, and thought, “It’s always in the last place you look.!” Well, of course it’s always in the last place you look! Who would keep looking for something after they found it?! Your brain is the same way. Once it has an answer, it stops looking.
In lazy immersion, this equates to Japanese language audio turning into Charlie Brown adult voices (wah wah wah wah), because the subtitles provide enough information for the brain to understand, and the brain’s biggest desire is to purge that temporary space of all items it is currently analyzing, because that’s what an efficient machine does.
I do think that English subtitles can be put to good use, by watching a series and alternating episodes with subs and without subs. The types of grammar and vocabulary don’t vary a lot from one episode to the next in the same series, so watching half of it subtitled and half of it not, you will begin to see gains in comprehension almost immediately.
I know this is a long-winded post, but I just want to be an example for people to temper their expectations. Unless you’re on the 5+ decade plan, English subtitled anime is not going to teach you Japanese, and it’s also not going to make non-subtitled immersion significantly easier.
Studying will make immersion easier, but the biggest mistake I am seeing is over and over in this thread is that immersion is inefficient because you don’t understand. No, you have it backwards fam. Immersion is necessary, because it is necessary for you to not understand, in order to acquire language.
Immersion doesn’t mean stopping to look up words and grammar until you completely understand every sentence. It means to skip over everything you don’t understand and just enjoy the parts that you do understand. Eventually, the parts you understand will begin to expand. The more time you spend with the raw language, the more experienced your brain will become in actively decoding Japanese.
To reiterate: The purpose of immersion isn’t to understand. It’s to be exposed to the raw language with no aids to assist in comprehension. You’re letting your brain do the heavy lifting in the background, without stopping to perform any type of active study or lookup.
I don’t really remember how much grammar/vocab I already knew when I started “immersion” or even when that was exactly, but what I do remember is that trying to read material in Japanese that wasn’t a textbook gave me a headache after about 30 minutes or so.
Looking back, I think I would try to spend some small amount of time reading more frequently, even if I didn’t understand any of it. Just 30 minutes a day, or week, can help your brain get used to interpreting Japanese writing.
If you’re doing this kind of reading practice, I wouldn’t worry about what it says; just consider how the character is pronounced. If it’s a kanji that you don’t know, skip over it and keep going. If you can, read out loud to get some practice with speaking while you’re at it. As you do it more, and have more vocab and grammar that you’ve learned, you’ll notice that you’re starting to understand and that will feel really good.
Once you understand most of it, then you can start to look up words. Ideally you don’t want to be looking up words every few minutes - maybe once or twice every 30 minutes (as a guess).
I’d take that a step further, and just jot down any words/kanji you don’t recognize and can’t glean from context as you encounter them, and that will serve as a meaningful list of items that are relevant to you that you can import into SRS later. Jot them down and move on without them, swinging back around to study them after you’re doing immersing.
Your instinct is correct - you need a base level of grammar and vocabulary, otherwise immersion is too frustrating, in my opinion. I think the Genki books are really good for giving you a framework of grammar, and there are different ways to get some vocabulary memorized. I think I used an app called “I Know!” to learn a few thousand words before I tried to read books, and then I still started with the graded readers from Ask Publishing, starting with level zero.
That series is great, by the way - all the way up to level four.
This is just my “self-study from zero” experience, and I wouldn’t change anything I did, but still take it with a grain of salt.
I started WK and grammar at the same time (Lingodeer has a Japanese I and II course that lands you in the low N4 level after finishing). I don’t like textbooks or children’s books, so I never went the Genki/graded readers route.
After I finished Lingodeer, I think I was at around level 10 in WK? I did listen to Teppei-sensei’s beginner podcast, I understood maybe a word or two per episode, but that’s fine. I listened to maybe 20-30 episodes over and over, just feeling for pitch and stuff. I just like having something Japanese to listen to. My aim wasn’t to know what he was saying.
Then I plunged into the deep end and started reading a classic Japanese novel. Classic meaning 100 years old because it was free and it was interesting.
That’s basically my advice to anyone starting with immersion: Start with interesting and go from there. Because I found out that it didn’t matter what level. They’re ALL going to be difficult, they all whooped my ass, might as well enjoy the process. In my experience, I have a harder time reading/parsing/looking up things in an easy book where I have absolutely zero care about, than the one about a murder-mystery where half the vocabulary I can’t even use in daily life but was making me turn the pages.
I technically started immersion before I started trying to learn the language . Or at least, I was watching hours and hours of unsubtitled native Japanese content every day, and my twitter feed was half in Japanese, and I’ve basically not changed those media habits since I started actually learning. The only difference is that I’m gradually able to understand more and more of what I’m reading and hearing, which is incredibly satisfying!
But this doesn’t work with all media, or all language learners. It works for me because what I’m watching and reading about is professional wrestling, which is largely a media format that does not require words, and I’ve had fan translations and some official translations helping supplement my enjoyment of it the whole time.
I think that’s the main trick to starting immersion as early as possible: finding something that you’re able to enjoy at any comprehension level. I’d say most manga, anime, podcasts, etc. are not good candidates for this unless you have a series you’re extremely invested in to the point where you’re happy to have even 10% comprehension.
I did start reading manga probably “too early.” I wasn’t even halfway through my first textbook (Minna no Nihongo 1), and was maybe level 15 in WK. Kanji was a total non-issue because the manga was 大海原と大海原, and it had furigana. My overall comprehension of the manga wasn’t that great! I only was able to keep up with it thanks to the book club here, where people patiently answered grammar questions and helped explain the story.
I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t really learning a whole lot from my immersion because it was too far above my level. However, I enjoyed the manga and kept reading anyway, but I did it because I liked the story, not because it was the most valuable use of my learning time .
By the time I finished 大海原と大海原 volume 2, I was almost done with Minna no Nihongo 1 (so I was a little past N5), and was nearly halfway through WK. Perfect time to start 大海原と大海原 volume 3, which is much harder than the first two volumes because it’s aimed at a much older audience and has no furigana .
I still haven’t finished volume 3, but not because I got discouraged, but because I ended up running out of time to read manga because I was sort of forced to become a fan translator very suddenly for a wrestling company that I loved, which had just lost their official translator last December .
Was it way too soon to be attempting to translate Japanese when I was still somewhere between N5 and N4? Yes!! 100%!! I would not recommend choosing to go this route unless you have something that you truly love and you’re very, very dedicated to it. I stepped up because no one else was doing it, so if I wanted to keep following the company, I had to do the work myself. It has been a very hard year, and I’ve had days where I felt so overwhelmed by the translation workload, I cried a lot, but still managed to ultimately pull myself together and get it done.
I’m almost done with Minna no Nihongo 2 currently, though I have lots of random grammar knowledge beyond that that I’ve picked up from doing the translations. I think I’m past N4 but still well below N3.
And hey, still going strong with the translations! Over the past year that I’ve been doing them, they’ve gone from being pretty bad to being actually sort of okay! Maybe by the end of next year, I’ll be able to call them good!
I don’t think there’s anything I’d change about my own path. Even when immersion is hard, I’ve enjoyed the media so much, it made that worth it for me. But I’ve never really prioritized what’s most “efficient”, so what has worked for me probably wouldn’t work for everyone, even someone who shares my interests.
Basically, I wouldn’t try to push yourself with immersion unless you really, really love the material. If you love it, you’ll surprise yourself with what you’re able to motivate yourself to sink your time into reading.
But if you don’t have anything like that, it’s totally fine to focus on establishing a vocab/grammar base before you try diving in. The better your vocab and grammar are, the easier immersion will be, and the more comfortable it’ll be for you to spend time listening to and reading Japanese.
Just keep testing the waters every now and then and seeing how you feel about things, and if you realize “hey, I can actually sort of read this now!” that’ll probably be the right time for you to start putting more of your time into immersion without it feeling like a huge drag.
In my experience doing at least 30-60 minutes of “deciphering” native content daily (preferably something interesting to you) from the get-go can be beneficial. For me, explanations of grammar concepts in textbooks and other resources just didn’t properly stick/make sense to me until I began encountering them in meaningful contexts, so if you’re anything like me in that regard then studying grammar without also immersing would be inefficient.
I started learning Japanese eight years ago. With a combination of beginner classes, talking to Japanese people, reading TV show subtitles, collecting new words into Anki, and listening to Teppei-san, I was able to make progress but not to the point where I could follow conversations. Even Teppei’s monologues were too difficult.
On top of that, when the pandemic hit, most of my opportunities to practice spoken Japanese disappeared and I was mostly using Anki to learn vocabulary. According to Anki, I had learnt roughly 3,000 words but I still wasn’t able to read more than a sentence in Japanese without having to look up unknown kanji. And for me, looking up kanji is always a drag. I don’t mind looking up unknown words I can pronounce. That’s quick. But finding a word with an unknown kanji always takes at least a minute or so to draw the kanji or look it up by its radical.
About a year into the pandemic I switched to Wanikani to study kanji more systematically.
I’m now a year and half into Wanikani and able to recognize roughly 1,100 kanji. I feel like sensible immersion is close. A friend of mine who’s more advanced told me that somewhere around 1,300–1,500 kanji is the point where it starts becoming possible to read texts and subtitles without having to look up an unknown kanji every sentence or so. I think this is where immersion starts making sense. At least that’s my goal: I want to be able to read most of the subtitles in a TV show without looking up kanji all the time. Then it’ll become easy to expand vocab quickly. I hope.
In my opinion - having studied language acquisition in a master’s program but also having experienced it incrementally in three different languages but not yet entirely successfully - there is a strong *over-emphasis on immersion in the Japanese language community… but it does seem to work for some.
For me, (the beginner version of ) Nihongo con Teppei is actually good (ideal) for upper-beginners who have already built up some vocabulary and basic expressions.
Finish at least an intro/first volume of a beginner course first. Make that book your immersion. If the first book of Minna no Nihongo is too intimidating, then native material is not going to be efficient for you. I did two other beginner books myself before breezing through that one.
Also, make sure you find the right graded readers. There’s a very easy one that teaches colors and food and numbers and basic nouns. Start with those topics.
Learn how to introduce yourself, greet people, say where you’re from, where you live, what basic hobbies you like, the food you like, say this, that, and that over there. Then learn some past tense forms. And the Te-form. Learn some adjectives. Learn a few adverbs. Review.
I’ve been immersing (in my family) for about three years, but a lot of my progress has been through my wife and textbooks explaining things to me, not the immersion by itself but small explanations and interpretations given to me when I was ready for them, one by one. And I still feel out of place at times, but I understand a lot more.
I’ve found that trying to drink from a firehose is not helpful. I’ll get wet but my thirst won’t be quenched. What’s helpful is when I’m able to drink bottles at a time. Nursing on a 2L bottle throughout the day is better for me than pouring 5L bucket on my head in the morning… if you catch my metaphor…
I think we (and possibly others on this thread) do not share the same understanding of ‘lazy immersion’ and what it can do for a language learner. I’m going to preface this by saying that I may come across as very harsh. However, let me be clear: I do not mean this as a personal attack. I am simply displeased and frustrated by the idea of denying everyone a potentially very enjoyable and helpful study option that can be effective – based not only on my experience, but also that of others – provided
certain conditions are respected (i.e. there are factors that allow ‘lazy immersion’ to produce improvements, and ignoring them will cause it to fail)
‘lazy immersion’ is not the sole method one uses
Maybe this is just a case of ‘different people, different experiences’, but I’ve been on these forums for about 2 years now, and I’m a counterexample: I’ve been studying Japanese for 4 years, 5 months at this point, not 50 years. (I know that’s just hyperbole, but your point is that it would take a long time, right?) I passed the N1. I translate Japanese streams into English live, albeit I don’t always understand everything. My track record answering language and grammar questions on these forums, often by quoting and translating Japanese resources, speaks for itself. My main study method involves… watching English-subtitled anime. Almost all my grammatical knowledge and vocabulary comes directly or indirectly from… watching English-subtitled anime. So much for it not working.
Obviously, yes, I don’t just watch subtitled anime: I also pause episodes and look things up. I read dictionary definitions in Japanese. I read articles about keigo on Japanese websites. I go through news articles when I have the time. However, a lot of those things are fundamentally triggered by anime, and the additional foundation that I have thanks to anime (the first layer being what I learnt from my first textbook, of course) helps me to understand a lot of other things.
By the way, I want to point out one thing in particular:
That’s just a mental habit. Just because a mental habit exists for some people – even if it’s most of humanity – that doesn’t mean we are obliged to stick to it. Notice what I said when I recommended using subtitled anime:
Once again, don’t ‘just watch’. That’s what I’m saying. Make at least an effort to look out for familiar things. It’s essential to remain conscious of what’s going on in the show and to listen to the Japanese. And guess what?
This doesn’t happen to me, precisely because I am consciously resisting the temptation to simply stop listening. In fact, I listen to the Japanese and try to understand it without the subtitles as much as possible, and only start looking down at the subs when I start getting stuck. I currently only miss a tiny percentage of the Japanese words used (10% max) unless the theme of what I’m watching is completely unfamiliar to me. When I was a beginner, I would watch Konosuba while trying to match the subs with words I knew in the Japanese dialogue I heard.
Now, perhaps the real issue is that not everyone can do what I do, but unless I’m truly that exceptional (and I mean, what I do is essentially the same thing as turning the subs off and only turning them back on if you’re really lost, which I also do from time to time), I’m living proof that what you’ve just described is not something one has to be resigned to, because it doesn’t always happen.
On a related note, I believe that there is a logical flaw in what you’re suggesting:
If it’s true that everything just gets filtered out because your brain automatically takes the easy way out with subtitles, then you wouldn’t experience any gain in comprehension. According to your explanation, we essentially process none of the Japanese when subtitles are available, so why would any understanding of what’s already been seen or heard remain in our brains?
Final bit:
It must seem obvious by now that we’re gonna disagree on this, but here’s my question to you: how does it ‘eventually’ expand? By magic? No. (I hate the fact that I have to rely on an argument that sounds like Krashen’s ‘i+1’ idea just to explain this, but in my case, I do not believe that there is a fixed order of acquisition.) What happens if your comprehension improves without any external aid… is that you start to notice that the meaning of certain things is obvious based on what you already know. It’s a process of deduction. The other difference between me and Krashen? I believe that this process can be accelerated, and I’m living proof. (Japanese is my sixth language.) When you look things up, you get an idea of what’s going on. Furthermore, by the way, you don’t become experienced at ‘actively decoding Japanese’ by passively consuming it without attempting to understand. You need to desire to decode it at the very least. If you don’t believe me, think about people you know who are really into Japanese music. (I’ve definitely had many friends like that since my adolescence, in any case.) They spend hours immersed in the language. Some of them listen so much they effectively spend 1-2 months a year hearing Japanese. Many of them can sing all their favourite Japanese songs. However, all the same, many of them know nothing about what those songs mean. Just like how you said people don’t get anything out of English-subtitled anime alone, these people don’t get anything out of their immersion time in terms of comprehension and production ability. Why? The commonality here is a lack of effort (to learn, that is), not a failure to immerse the ‘right way’. This is not an accusation or moral judgement about laziness: I’m saying that whether or not they consciously chose to do so, people in these situations will not attempt to understand the Japanese they’re being exposed to. Language is not so different from other types of knowledge: you do not learn to do maths by watching a professor at work or even copying a solution off a board; you figure it out by understanding why the solution works.
The last thing you should perhaps consider with regard to this whole idea that immersing while waiting for acquisition is enough is this: I think everyone who’s reached a high level of Japanese on these forums has spent a lot of time actively looking things up while being immersed in Japanese. If your response to that is a definitional challenge – ‘that’s not immersion, because you shouldn’t look anything up during immersion; it’s the only correct way’ – then riddle me this: which one of those at a high level here has spent more time intentionally immersing without understanding than attempting to understand non-textbook material (since we shouldn’t perhaps use the word ‘immersion’ here under your understanding of proper immersion)? Which one of them (or should I say ‘us’? Perhaps that sounds too self-assured) would say more of their current understanding of Japanese comes from immersing while waiting for acquisition than anything else? I’m fairly confident that all of us who have reached a high level and shared our opinions have never banned look-ups during engagement with non-textbook material. Even hardcore ‘immersion is everything’ people like MattvsJapan (whom I don’t even like!) espouse sentence mining using sentences taken from immersion. Exactly what about any of all this aggregated language learning experience suggests that immersion alone suffices?
With all due respect, just as much as you can say that I (and others) have the wrong idea about immersion, I can say this:
You did this ‘lazy immersion’ wrong. With the subtitles on, you received too little information about the Japanese you were exposed to, not too much, and it’s precisely because of the ‘mental habit’ you pointed out: people tend to filter unnecessary information out. Like I said, it’s necessary (though I used the word ‘just’ to indicate that following my advice was not necessarily very demanding) to remain aware of the Japanese being used. The solution then is to make that information necessary, and you can do that by turning off subs… but you could also just decide that you need to listen to the Japanese too, which is what I do. Again, maybe I’m abnormal and most people can’t read and listen at the same time, but I do think that it’s possible to break this mental habit. It’s not something inevitable; it’s just something we’re used to doing. All habits can be changed if one so desires. Increased awareness is definitely possible for everyone, even if constantly reading and listening at the same time is not.
All in all, I think it’s necessary to recognise that ‘lazy immersion’ remains a possible approach to immersion. It is effective, and I’m not the only example of someone who’s benefited from it. However, it shouldn’t be done with the brain in ‘subtitles-only’ mode, and ideally, once one is comfortable enough with basic Japanese to check out additional resources, one should also make use of things like dictionaries to expand one’s understanding of what one is being exposed to via immersion. People say, ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it’, and while I realise that you’ve already tried ‘lazy immersion’ before, maybe you should give this sort of ‘high awareness lazy immersion’ a try while continuing to learn grammar and vocabulary through other means, and see if it helps. I’ve tried both ‘lazy immersion’ and immersion without aids, and I can say from experience that each has its place, and that they aren’t equally effective at all stages of language learning. I used both strategies for French and became indistinguishable, after 5.5 years, from a native speaker for most intents and purposes (obviously if you ask about my childhood, I can’t hide my un-Frenchness without lying); I’m using them for Japanese now, and I find that the same variations in effectiveness hold true.
If you want a summary of my views on full immersion without external help, I think @coicoy said it very well:
I do hope that i have not tried to imply i’m looking to avoid pain or difficulty. Truly, all progress is born of discomfort. I was being hyperbolic in the service of humorous effect by referencing tears
The reality is it can be hard at the beginning to tell run of the mill frustration from “oh wait actually this might not be a good use of time” hence the quest for input and feedback.
I’m someone who learned to figure skate as an adult. I’m all too familiar with being embarrassingly bad at something and having to work very hard to be even slightly less bad, I promise!!
I generally agree with what you’ve written here, @Jonapedia, so this reply isn’t a counter but rather a comment on terminology.
One of the biggest flaws in the Japanese language learning community is that “immersion” means different things to different people, which I think agrees with what you wrote here.
For example:
This quickly became something I wouldn’t call “lazy”.
This is where I think the terms “active” and “passive” help out.
If someone is watching anime with English subtitles and they’re just enjoying watching while their brain skips hearing the Japanese because it latches onto the English subtitles, it’s very passive immersion.
If that same person then starts trying to focus on what they’re hearing, and they occasionally pause to look things up and learn them, it becomes active immersion.
. Or at least, I was watching hours and hours of unsubtitled native Japanese content every day, and my twitter feed was half in Japanese, and I’ve basically not changed those media habits since I started actually learning. The only difference is that I’m gradually able to understand more and more of what I’m reading and hearing, which is incredibly satisfying!
.