What's the 'deluge' method?

I’ve done this once (2 years in Australia, though not to learn English, just felt like it), and it’s the best thing if you’re young and can afford it, but what you said is true (and kind of sad, I’d like to do it again). I suppose for most people immersion is ‘read and watch everything Japanese all the time’.

It is entirely possible to become fluent in a language like that, though - takes longer, but it’s a lot cheaper too.

I have learned a language this way (German, by watching German television) and this is an extremely slow and inefficient method. Also, your active language skills will be lacking if you don’t practice them.

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Aren’t we specifically talking about learning Kanji via ‘deluge’ method?

It’s unlikely that you will use active skills on Kanji even if you are in Japan. Tae Kim must be talking about massive reading. Unless you are a writer, or a manga artist…

Still, I do learn some Kanji from the IME. (an active skill, isn’t it?) Though, does not require to be in Japan.

Speaking as someone currently in Japan, it’s frustratingly easy to conduct most of my life in English anyway.

Well we’re obviously talking about the later. It appeals to people and it sounds good. No one who is trying to sell you on some bullshit is going to say, “Hard work and consistency is how to learn a language”, they’re gonna tell you something that sounds good and appeals to “I can just watch some animes” or something of that nature.

However, I do enjoy the occasionally Schadenfreude I get to see watching someone act like they know a lot more than they do and then stumble out some gibberish when trying to talk, bonus points for the rare occasions I’ve heard things like “この俺” in real life, in a completely serious manner. I didn’t think it happens, but it does.

I’d is, but I’d dare say it becomes very hard to have a more complete life, unless you can 100% surround yourself in the Gaijin bubble, which sounds very unfortunate.

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I don’t believe anyone here is straight up saying that watching anime is good enough or anything like that. I think the bigger point is that, for lack of the ultimate solution that is outright moving to Japan, immersion through media is a good thing. Just because people enjoy it does not make it bad, I think. If you have fun with the limited immersion you can attain, all the better.
Further, I don’t see people advertising watching anime for immersion purposes are automatically saying they are not up for

I feel the leap that “anime->lack of hard work” leap is a non-sequitur as learning through anime does not mean a lack of hard work, nor does it mean that anime is all that is used as a learning tool. You can enjoy anime, use it to immerse yourself the best you can, and work hard and consistently at the same time.

This is not idealist by any means, it is just making use of multiple resources, some of which you enjoy a lot.

TL;DR: There is no guilt to be had in pleasure :slight_smile:.

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I understand what you mean. I’m not saying you can learn a language with this method alone, but rather that after you get a grasp of the basics, exposing yourself to as much varied reading and listening as you can will give you a deeper understanding of how a language is spoken or written in a variety of real world situations - something that no amount of grammar studying will teach you.

True. Of course you can find lots of articles and videos online promising you can learn Japanese easily just by watching anime, but I don’t think that this is what the people on this forum mean when they recommend watching anime - they are on WaniKani, after all. By the way, I learned a great deal of English by watching Friends episodes as a teenager. I’ve also learned lots from playing Pokemon for GameBoy (there was no Portuguese translation, we had American versions only) and Harry Potter books (translation used to take months back then). After a certain stage, time spent on regular studying yields diminishing returns, at least in my experience. I haven’t reached that stage with Japanese, though.

I don’t think anyone here is saying that you shouldn’t watch or enjoy anime or that it somehow means you are not a serious learner if you do. Obviously you should consume a large variety of native language media as voraciously as possible, but you simply aren’t going to learn a lot by osmosis, which the “deluge method” seems to be based on.

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Hi everyone im new here and im stilll working my way around this site sorry if i have interferd with this chat

I think the critique being made about those who tout using anime as their form of “study” is that those people aren’t studying the content they are watching. They breezing through series with subtitles with the sense that actually understood everything that they listened to when in fact, they didn’t notice how reliant they were on using the subtitles to inform the meaning of everything they’re hearing.

One good way to use media to help study requires watching and re-watching content until one could possibly recite what is being said (and actually understand the meaning of what was said). It’s more than likely that finding these kind of people are more or less a rarity in the “I use anime (whatever media source) to study Japanese.”

Whether or not that was the point that Syphus insinuated, I do agree with him in that people who don’t properly analyze content they consume are deluding themselves in the end.

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I watch anime with subtitles, primarily for entertainment, not for studying. There are plenty of times that I read some subtitles and can make a connection to a word or phrase that I heard in the dialog. But I also recognize the fact that most of the time I wouldn’t have understood even that small portion of the dialog without the subtitles giving me a hint. In that sense, I agree with you.

With that said, there are some small things that I do to make this slightly better for learning. First, I occasionally relisten to dialogue. I certainly don’t rewatch scenes ad nauseam as you recommended, but watching a portion of dialog you “kind of” recognized to try to understand more of the specifics can be useful. Second, any time I hear a word or phrase that I feel I should have understood (but didn’t quite catch) or when I was able to match dialog to the subtitles (but didn’t know the word in Japanese up to then), I look it up in a dictionary to get a more accurate definition than the subtitles usually give.

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For songs, even if I do analyze lyrics, what I actually learnt is still limited. It is still limited to that song.

That’s true about the vocabulary. Of course only studying WK to learn to read will get you nowhere. For me, I learn the words best when I have seen them “in the wild”, either at the store, online, on TV, etc. However, without WK, I would never notice those words to begin with! Which I think is the same principle as starting out with immersion vs. starting out with some basic language skills and then immersing yourself.

I think it’s helpful to be able to experience the language firsthand, then afterwards figure out what new rules/forms/words you learned. Because then you’ll start noticing them everywhere. But you need a starting point, or else you’ll slow yourself down.

From my own experience, immersion (living abroad or surrounding yourself only with the target language and avoiding your native language) is most helpful at advanced levels – when you can already function as a basic adult in the language and are trying to upgrade yourself to actually thinking/living in it. At a basic level I’d imagine it’s about as useful as listening to Charlie Brown’s parents all day.

(I’m also very skeptical of anyone who claims that full immersion can be done in your home country or who promotes any sort of immersive-language-learning products because I don’t know about y’all, but around here our schools, jobs, and families generally do not come with a handy “switch to Japanese mode” toggle on them.)

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Just to be clear. The suggestion I wrote was one of many ways people could use media to help them study. It is by no means a claim that it is the best or even the most effective, for that matter. Beyond that, it seems like what you do works for you, and it’s a lot more than what the people I’m talking about do when they claim to use media (specifically anime) to help them “study.”

Some of the key aspects I take into consideration when using alternative studying methods are repetition and deliberately moving beyond the entertainment realm of media to actually retain something useful. If I’m able to accomplish these things, I can start to call that activity “studying” in some form or another.

That site you linked has some interesting stuff. In particular, I found out about the app Japanese for iPhone/Android which has flash card capabilities with an SRS system! All I have to do is click on the + button on a word I’ve looked up, and it’s added to a list I can review later! So much easier than adding stuff to Anki.

Also, just the other day my Japanese language teacher was telling me how I should learn new vocab. She said just by reading a novel, you will likely come across the same vocabulary again, which will reinforce it. This sounds similar to the deluge method that the OP has mentioned.

EDIT: what’s this cake symbol next to my name? I didn’t realize today was the anniversary of when I joined.

thank you so much for all your replies everyone! I was watching the replies come in but didn’t wan to interrupt the interesting conversation that was going on (I’m replying so late because I had to put Japanese on hold)

I’m now 100% clear on what the deluge method is and with all of you that it’s best to do a combination of immersion and SRS/study. I think my favourite way to immerse is watching my favourite anime I’ve seen a million times without subtitles and listening to music, so if anyone could recommend any Japanese artists, I’d be grateful!

Thanks again!

I’m confused :no_mouth:. Isn’t that the case for literally everything? If you used vocab from Genki, you’d be limited to Genki. If you took vocab from a movie, you’d be limited to that movie. By those standards, it may very well be that all resources are terrible since they are all, by their finite nature, limited…

I’m using WaniKani to prepare for going to language immersion school in Tokyo next fall–not as an exchange student for something else, but only to learn the language for ~8 hours a day. I’m still realistically looking at a minimum of two academic years of treating Japanese as a full time job AND consuming and using it daily to get where I need to be to function in academia (which is where I’m headed with it). I’m pretty skeptical when people tell you to just “immerse” yourself in media. I don’t really watch anime, but I’ve worked at anime cons and with the community for almost ten years now and I’ve never met a person who learned any significant, usable amount of Japanese just by constantly consuming it. I feel like people want learning a language to sound more fun than it actually is. Immersion is the best practice, but you can’t practice something you haven’t been instructed in yet.

Anime by itself obviously doesn’t teach you Japanese. However, you can use it as a tool to apply the knowledge you got from your Japanese studies. I tend to identify a lot of grammar and vocab from/on anime. That trains my listening, but I still have to study and work on reading/speaking/writing.

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