unwilling-turquoise•7mo ago
When to immerse to streamline your learning experience?
So curious, I’ve been doing the academy now for 28 days straight. Adding lots of vocab and grammar under my belt, but one thing I’ve noticed when watching content, even if there is a sentence where I’m learning almost all the words and even some words where I know (according to Migaku), it’s technically not, will use the word acquired. Where sure I know the word and if I pause I can bring forth the meaning of the word, but it’s not an instant thing like with native language. Which also if I’m not watching the subtitles, I’m definately missing some words.
So I’m curious, should I just go through the entire course, so that way I got lots of vocab and grammar under my belt and I’ll find mining for sentences and words easier since a lot of the gaps will be filled, or should I just be listening to content as I’m going through the course despite 99% is still gibberish at this point.
I just don’t want to be wasting time, obviously no matter what, as long as you keep moving forward in some way, you’ll get to where you’re going, but I imagine you can get there faster depending on your course of path. Obviously not rushing, just trying to make deliberate steps.
Any info on how you study and how you find you best method that works best for you would be amazing.
3 Replies
generous-apricot•7mo ago
Here is the thing: Preparation will only get you this far. It's a tool to help you, it won't get you to the level where you watch stuff like in your native language. The immersion itself will get you there.
Learning vocabulary requires more than just seeing a word in one context or one example sentence. I'd say roughly 20 to 30. But that varies and can be different from word to word and user to user.
Linguistically speaking you need to understand language to acquire it. Migaku helps with that due to the easy dictionary lookups. So basically you need to watch shows to be able to understand them normally at one point. Basically like a workout.
In general the fastest way to acquire your goal is to start with easy content where you have lots of i+1 sentences (sentences with only one unknown word), because these are the sentences with which we learn the fastest. They are not required in general, but it can be rather hard to get knowledge out of i+n sentences. The more unknowns, the harder to learn.
This doesn't mean though that you should just passively watch through shows. When you don't understand anything, you won't acquire anything. And that's where stuff like secondary subtitle display or AI translations of Migaku come into play.
If you don't understand something in your target language, you look up what it means and then you try to piece together how the sentence you read in your target language conveys this meaning.
The funny thing is that basically you don't even need to learn grammar to do this. But knowing a bit of it can once again make it easier. We come to the part here where i+1 actually does not mean "1 unknown word" but "1 unknown entity". Sometimes you can know a word, but haven't seen it used in a specific way, which will then obscure it's meaning again.
Afterwards everything is just about endurance. There will be words you will have to look up over and over again. But that's completely normal. They will suddenly stick at the weirdest moments. Sometimes without you noticing. But you need to throw yourself in there and don't let having to pause all the time stop you. That's the learning part of it. It's not about instantly being able to watch shows normally.
unwilling-turquoiseOP•7mo ago
Thanks, that’s just what I needed to hear. The secondary subtitles now make sense too. I was turning them off.
generous-apricot•7mo ago
Turning them off is a good idea, so that you actually try to read in your target language first. But there's a shortcut to quickly turn them on and then off again. I would really handle them as a "Look them up quickly when you need them for understanding." thing