How is total immersion the best way, or any way at all to learn a language? How would you pick up more than a handful of words?
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Total immersion is how you learn your first language while you’re still peeing in diapers — it works even better when you’re out of the diapers.
Contextual learning is really powerful, your brain takes cues from the environment and helps you memorize things way better than if you were trying to memorize a word without the context that it’s used it.
It also forces you to learn the things you actually need to learn. Probably not great for learning advanced grammar or literature, but when it comes to your everyday life, you’ll soon pick up most words that you need to get through the day.
I moved to an English speaking country at 11 knowing the alphabet up till M at most, and there’s no course I could take to help me learn from my native language, so literally every day at school was total immersion. It took about 3 months and I was able to do most school work without a dictionary and make friends.
Immersion is not an effective way for adults with no prior background to learn. With babies it works because the adults have patience and explain every single thing multiple times. You won’t find any other adults willing to show you an egg five times a day and say it’s name slowly.
Immersion does help (enormously so) when you have some basic understanding. It helps you add to your vocabulary by inferring the meaning of new words and the context in which they are utilized. It also helps you streamline your speaking and listening skills. The caveat being that you only gain this advantage if you have that basic familiarity to build upon.
> How would you pick up more than a handful of words?
Because you will start to recognise individuals words through repetition of hearing them. Add in the context in which they are used and over time you will start to understand what words mean what and start to form an understanding of the language.
You’ll start off by building an understanding of some of the most commonly used words, and those that are used in things you do everyday – your greetings; yes/no; good/bad that sort of thing
I would imagine from there you will quickly build a growing list of nouns – things and objects that you reference or other people reference that can be picked up by either being pointed to as you fumble in a shop or by context…and at the same time simple ‘commands’ (I want X, what is Y, how much is Z)
By being completely immersed in the language you are faced with all those learning moments all day everyday.
By comparison, learning through tuition or online lessons – you will switch from potentially intensive sessions of learning to virtually no interaction with the language, and then back to intense learning.
The ideal combination is **both** – tuition (teaching you the rules, the tips, the theory) *and* immersion – that would have most people learning the language fastest.
The first thing you should learn is how to say things like, “What is this called?” and “What does <word in target language> mean?”
Once you can learn new words while using only the target language, you can pick up vocabulary pretty quickly.
Why immersion works is a question for cognitive scientists. That it works is a pretty simple observation. How many of us got high marks in some foreign language for four years of high school and still can’t find the bathroom? Those of us that have immersed are aware of the massively increased competence we achieved from the experience.
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