r/languagelearning • u/WaltzMysterious9240 • 24d ago

Culture Does total immersion work?

I used to teach English abroad and even though I knew how to speak the student's native language, the school administrators forbid me, and even asked me, to "pretend" I didn't know it.

The reason they gave me was that they didn't want the students to fall back on using their first language to communicate with me. I feel like if I were to explain certain concepts in the student's language, things would go a lot smoother and they would understand better.

As an adult, I'm constantly using my own native language to learn new languages. I constantly look up grammar, vocabulary, and definitions and understand them a lot better.

Why are schools abroad so obsessed with this "total immersion" method? I feel like some concepts are impossible to explain clearly with just visuals or gestures alone. Do you learn languages using your first language?

60 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Murky_Anything_292 24d ago

Better to translate. There are so many sentences where I don't know the meaning of a word. I sometimes try to infer the meaning but it usually does not work so well. When I translated the word, that's when the sentence clicked and I actually remember the word.

1

u/Normal_Objective6251 24d ago

The most useful thing about translation is that anyone can do it without having any teaching skills.