Oh boy, I'm finally getting around to that
video about immersion and AJATT. I can't wait to write the script. What could possibly go wrong? *samurai grunt* Ow, my hands. *Taco Bell fart* *girly rawr* *panting* Man bun is actually two words. And lose the man bun, you girly-man weeb. Immersion is often seen as the GUARANTEED
way to learn a language to fluency, but out of the millions who study and learn
foreign languages, VERY FEW people are willing to pay the price of immersion. Most people aren't willing to sacrifice their
old lifestyles and hobbies to learn a foreign language, and this is.... understandable. At the same time, there is a lot we can learn
from programs that advocate immersion like AJATT and even polyglots like
Alexander Arguelles and Steve Kaufmann. The overall main message you'll find is that if you want to get really good at a
foreign language really fast, you're going to need spend multiple hours
per day reading and listening to that language. For most people, language learning is just a hobby they do for 30-60 minutes a few days a week. If your goal is to have basic everyday
conversations in the language, this might be all the time you need. If your goal is to understand almost everything
in the foreign language, however, it might take you 20 years to get there at this rate. It's easy to get wrapped up in this idea that
we have to study 2, 3, or even 4 hours a day to reach the advanced levels,
but this isn't true at all. In fact, the opposite is true. There comes a point somewhere in the intermediate
stages where you can stop studying all together and go out and live the language! This means to ask yourself
this question every morning. “What's one thing that would be really fun
and exciting to try to learn from? Then, go read and listen to it. You might be wondering, "But how do you learn from books, TV shows, and video games where everything
is in the foreign language and you understand so very little?" This... is a great question actually and one
that has many different answers. For.. reading materials, however,
the how-to is a lot simpler. It's simply to look up as many words as you need to and keep going until you find yourself
continually getting bored. At that point, take a break and then find
something else to read/listen to. Here is where beginning language learners
make the biggest mistake. This includes my past myself who made the
same mistake for YEARS while studying Korean. There is this tendency we have to try to study
and review almost everything new to us. When we start reading, we immediately encounter
thousands of words we have never seen before, so what do we do? We slow down the reading to a snail's pace so that we can "practice" and "review"
all of this new material. We make hundreds of Anki cards
for almost everything new or even re-read material over and over
in order to "master" it. The truth, however, is that there is no need to study nor review all the new language
you encounter through reading. The only thing you need to do is...more reading. If all these new words are SO IMPORTANT, you'll
encounter them again and again and review them through.... more reading. Each time we re-learn a word through a new
context, it makes it just a little harder to forget it the next time. This is also how we build upon our understanding
of the multiple meanings and connotations a single word can have. I believe what's most important about Anki
and other forms of review is their ability to make your progress visible during the
beginner and early intermediate stages. They give you a sense of personal progress
in comparison to native materials, where it can feel like you're making no progress at all. You feel like you're moving in the right direction every time you successfully
recall something while reviewing. But in the end, when you get into the habit
of reading for a few hours every day, you can review the hundreds or thousands of words
you have already learned while picking up 25, 50, or even a 100 new words a day. You might even find that a hour of reading
can be infinitely more fun than an hour of Anki reviews. When it comes to listening and immersion,
you'll find a large variety of strategies and ideas between AJATT and polyglots, but
if I had to pick the most important idea here, it would be this one. Read when you can. Listen when you can't. And whenever you think can't read or listen anymore, you....actually can. The trick is to switch materials whenever you get bored. In language learning, there's no need to finish
anything.....ever. You're finished when you're bored and not
when you complete something. In a single day, you can jump from manga,
to an article on a news site like NHK or even Famitsu, to an episode or two of an anime
or a TV drama, to even MORE if you want to learn FASTER. For news articles, there's NO NEED to finish
the ENTIRE thing. Learn what you can until you get bored and
then just.......forget the rest. On the next day, you're going to find PLENTY
of new articles to move on to. The same applies to anime and TV dramas. Learning just a few lines from each episode
is enough to move on to the next. Turn off subtitles and keep them off until
the end of the episode, and THEN use them to learn AS MUCH AS YOU CAN before boredom
eventually settles in. Once you understand the power of reading and
listening over studying and reviewing, you'll find it naturally easier to spend
more and more time in the language. When you finally stop studying and reviewing
altogether, you start to really feel like you're not just learning the language
but actually living it. At that point, immersion
becomes a natural consequence rather than something you force yourself to do. There's one last thing before I disappear
from YouTube for yet ANOTHER month or two... These kinds of videos do take a lot of time
and effort to make, but at the same time, I'd like to provide more content that is hopefully
helpful, higher quality, and can also actually pay the bills. With that in mind, I decided that I'm going
to start a podcast over at Patreon. I believe in making my best content free and
available on YouTube, but I also don't want to just take people's money without giving
SOMETHING back in return. So this podcast will be a mish mash of behind
the scenes content as well as additional language learning and self-development content. I'll also be taking and
answering common questions I get. I hope to see you there, and as always,
thanks for watching!
