But most of the kids that I've spoken to
admit that they have trouble speaking. Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here, and
today I wanna talk to you about immersion and language learning. Remember, if you enjoyed these
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good thing to do, leave a comment. I do appreciate it. So, we hear a lot about immersion. The way to learn the language is to
immerse yourself in the language. The image is sort of jumping into
a lake or a swimming pool and covering yourself in the language. And that way somehow you'll learn
the language and, uh, immersion can have different meanings. And I wanna touch on some of these. Particularly as it pertains to a, a
learning strategy that we can use. So as a young child, and I experienced
this as a five year old coming to Canada from Sweden, I started playing with kids. I have no recollection of no longer
speaking Swedish, speaking English. We spoke English at home with my parents. Very quickly, Swedish was gone. I had been immersed in an environment
where I had lots of input from my friends, where I was totally uninhibited. I was simply immersed in the language. I learned it. I think a, a similar form of immersion
is what happens in those countries where television programs and movies are in
English or in the original language. Kids watch cartoons and stuff in
English, and when they go to school they're already familiar with English. So that's sort of the natural immersion
approach to language learning. Now, before going on to how we might
use immersion, say as adults to learn a language uh, I'd like to talk about
another example of immersion, and that is immersion, say, in the school systems. For example, in the English speaking
school system in Canada, the French immersion program is very popular. So we have, I don't know how many hundreds
of thousands of English-speaking kids that take all of their schooling in French. So they sit in a classroom with
other English speaking kids and the teacher speaks to them in French. The material they use is all
in French, and they learn their chemistry and their history and
their mathematics all in French. So it's called immersion. And those kids end up with a much
better level of comprehension in French than kids that are in conventional
French stream in the school system. However, and I've had three grandchildren
go to French immersion, they don't end up speaking all that well. They have quite good comprehension,
but most of the kids that I've spoken to admit that they have trouble
speaking, which is not surprising because they haven't spoken very much. They speak English with their
classmates or with their friends, and once they get home, they speak
English and everything around, in fact, is in English, so it's only the
classroom situation which is immersion. Now on the positive side, with a good
level of comprehension, if those kids go off to a French speaking place, be
it the province of Quebec or France or Belgium, or maybe somewhere in
Africa, they will very quickly see their ability to produce the language. You know, improve dramatically
because they have good, good comprehension and so they will
quickly be able to speak quite well. So it is a good program
from that point of view. It gives them a base, gives them
vocabulary, it gives them comprehension and the speaking, I mean to speak,
well, you have to speak a lot. They don't speak a lot,
so they don't speak well. So that's the sort of language immersion
programs in our schools, and I think it's not only French immersion. I've heard of Spanish immersion,
Chinese or Mandarin Immersion and other immersion programs on the same model. Now, how about as an
independent adult learner? You sometimes hear people say,
Well, I'll just go to the country and immerse myself in the language
and I will learn it naturally. That's not such a good strategy because
what I have seen is when people move to a country where another language is spoken. If they don't make a deliberate effort
to learn that language, they're not going to learn it, and they will probably fit
into a pattern of relying on English. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, the locals there
who speak Spanish or Chinese or Czech, they're not teachers. They simply wanna communicate, and if they
sense that you don't communicate in their languageas well as they communicate in
English, they're gonna switch to English. So whenever I've... and I have used immersion as a
strategy, but I always prepare for it. So if we are going to say, I want to
go to Mexico, I want to go to Italy, I want to go to, uh, you know, wherever
Poland, and, uh, so I, and I want to use visiting the country and even staying
in the country as a way to learn the language, then I have to have a plan. And that plan should consist of making
sure that you hit the ground running. In other words, that you are
sufficiently well prepared so that you can take advantage of
being surrounded by the language. And, uh, that's what I've done. I've spent a year doing a lot
of listening and reading in Czech and then I went to Prague. I set up with teachers so that I
could have that opportunity to speak to people, and then I supplemented
that with whatever random, you know, encounters I could have with Czech people. But you can't rely on random people
kind of humoring you in the language that you are trying to learn. The better you speak that language,
the more likely they are to respond to you in that language. Uh, I often hear people complain they
go to Germany, they go to a store, they ask for something in German
the answer comes back in English. However, if your German is good
enough, they won't reply in English, they'll reply in German. They just want to communicate. So if your strategy is somehow to use
immersion as a means of, of learning a language, I would say use immersion as
a means of improving in the language and set yourself as sort of a plan of how
you're going to get your comprehension. Much like those kids in French
immersion in the English school system in Canada, they've got a level of
comprehension, they've got a level of vocabulary so that if they're put
in a French speaking environment very quickly they'll be able to speak well. So you won't have the benefit of 10
years of French immersion in school, but you can certainly expose yourself
to a lot of listening and reading in the language, building up your comprehension
so that when you arrive in the country fairly quickly, you can sort of start
interacting with people at an adult level. So I think with immersion, it
sounds sort of like a magic. I'll just go to Japan and once I'm
there, uh, I'll just learn Japanese. It, it's probably more
difficult than that. And there are so many things that you
can do before you get to, say, Japan to ensure that you hit the ground running. So just a, a comment here on immersion. It can be a good strategy, but I think it
does take some planning, and if you do it right, it can be a great way to develop a
high level of proficiency in a language. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.