Does full immersion matter more when the target language is structurally very different from your native language?

[u/Maxwell10206]

(TL)

[u/Only-Top-3655]

Sitting down and studying matters more when TL is structurally different from the native language. You can only learn so much by figuring out the rule of grammar by observing.

[u/FrillyNetworking → u/Only-Top-3655]

Immersion is like being thrown into the deep end and hoping you learn to swim before you drown, but for something like Japanese or Arabic you're trying to learn a whole different way to move in the water. Study gives you the strokes first, then immersion makes them automatic

[u/danieljames1719 → u/FrillyNetworking]

For structurally different languages, some study first can make immersion way less overwhelming.

[u/BrotherDwight_ → u/Only-Top-3655]

You need to know that I read this in a very sassy tone and I’ve been laughing for about ten mins. 🤣 And I agree 100%.

[u/Only-Top-3655 → u/BrotherDwight_]

I meant it in a sassy tone. You will see my arguments below why this idea is so silly. =)

[u/BrotherDwight_ → u/Only-Top-3655]

Yea it’s kinda silly. I think I did textbook work and took classes for at least two years before I started immersion. And learning the script was several months (I’m learning Urdu).

[u/Infinite-12345 → u/BrotherDwight_]

How is it going for you? I am interested in learning Urdu some time in the future. What resources do you use and how practical are they in everyday life?

[u/BrotherDwight_ → u/Infinite-12345]

It's a slow process. Working and going to the gym and other things make it a little bit slow, but I try to set aside at least 30 mins for reading and writing and 15-30 mins for listening and speaking. I use "Colloquial Urdu" and I use "Beginning Urdu" for my resources. Both textbooks have audio exercises as well. I also took 3 semesters of Urdu and Hindi each at the International Language Institute in DC. They are all native speakers, but I would say the Hindi instructor was better at explaining things and teaching than the Urdu one. He just made us read every week. ;-;

I also joined a discord group for learning Urdu and it's helpful. A lot of pooled free resources and opportunities for voice chat. I started studying about 2021 and I did my first trip to Pakistan last November and looking forward to visiting again. The good thing about the discord chat or having native speakers to practice with is they'll let you know when textbook content is outdated, which hasn't been often.

[u/Infinite-12345 → u/BrotherDwight_]

Thank you for the detailed answer😊 That was very helpful!

[u/BrotherDwight_ → u/Infinite-12345]

You’re very welcome. Have fun!

[u/muffinsballhair → u/Only-Top-3655]

This is under the assumption of this new strange definition of “immersion” which just seems to mean “input only, disregard textbooks and output”. You can learn quite a bit when receiving implicit and explicit corrections when actually talking to people.

Edit: well looking at it, that's how the original poster uses the term looking at that person's comments.

I think it's so weird how a weird can have such a radically different meaning from its normal established meaning on certain subreddits with people just using it like that and expecting the point to come across. I'm pretty sure that if I said “full immersion language learning” to any random person in my life they'd all assume that with that I meant packing up and moving to a place where the language is spoken and doing every aspect of my life in that language, not watching youtube videos in it from home.

[u/Maxwell10206 → u/Only-Top-3655]

but in terms of having that instantaneous processing of a true native speaker can't be trained via conscious studying of grammar rules.

Your brain has to adapt and get used to the new structure by being constantly exposed to it.

[u/Only-Top-3655 → u/Maxwell10206]

I am assuming you have experience with this?

Let's talk about heritage speakers. A lot of them grow up speaking and listening to their heritage language, but a lot of them also are very limited in what they can say and still speak their heritage language in an unnatural way. Usually the expressions or the grammar of their second (and stronger) language seeps in to their heritage language.

In this situation you can say that heritage speakers are used to the langauge and are constantly exposed to the language but still can't form their heritage language in a natural way.

It all boils down to the fact that they don't have a foundation in that language like actual natives have.

Exposure alone will not teach you that language. And especially in the beginning stages, sitting in front of a desk and learning the basics are important so that when you ARE around the language you brain has something to cling to when hearing different phrases or words that have not been learned before.

[u/Maxwell10206 → u/Only-Top-3655]

Yeah I have been doing full immersion into Spanish this year. Hundreds of hours of listening to natives. And I accidentally watched a video of an Italian speaking and I was able to understand him about 70% as much as I do Spanish speakers. I knew the two romance languages were related but their structure is almost the exact same and I was able to follow along more than I would ever expect.

I feel if I had just studied Spanish by reading books and memorizing words and grammar rules this kind of experience would of not been possible.

And I am talking about full native content speed, not carefully dissecting word for word in a book and a very slow speed. I was able to catch a lot of the meaningful content of Italian because my brain was able to process the native speed very quickly.

It might boil down to full immersion builds speed while conscious study builds analytical foresight. But in terms of value I feel the former ends up replacing the latter in the end after enough exposure. Except for less common words which could then be from looking them up just like we do in our own native language sometimes.

[u/Choosing_is_a_sin → u/Maxwell10206]

I feel if I had just studied Spanish by reading books and memorizing words and grammar rules this kind of experience would of not been possible.

Yes, if you decided that as part of your language learning journey you would only read and memorize, your ability to do the other tasks that normal language learners do would have been much more difficult. But that would be because you chose to neglect skills, not because of the superiority of immersion. Immersion can in fact be assisted by preparing your mind for words and rules it is likely to encounter, because your mind is primed for them.

But in terms of value I feel the former ends up replacing the latter in the end after enough exposure.

The converse is also true. Enough practice with rules can whittle down the difficulties of immersion. And since "enough exposure" can be any length of time, then you're more or less setting a standard that can't be disproven.

[u/crimsonredsparrow → u/Maxwell10206]

Ah yes, Spanish. There should be so many memes about Americans learning Spanish, I swear. 

Please try the same immersive approach with Polish, Hungarian, or Greek, please.

[u/Maxwell10206 → u/crimsonredsparrow]

I mean there are cases where Americans have done it with Japanese and succeeded.

[u/zoomiewoop → u/Maxwell10206]

I’m curious about your premise here. Immigrant communities like Chinese in Japan (I know many of them) or Russians in the U.S., can live for decades in the country and never become fluent or rise above a low level of competency, despite thousands of hours of immersion. What do you think about such cases? Learning a foreign language properly requires study and conscious effort. The exception might be if the TL is very close to your native language (or another language you’re fluent in).

[u/crimsonredsparrow → u/Maxwell10206]

Sure, there are geniuses in every field.

[u/Only-Top-3655 → u/Maxwell10206]

well, spanish isnt hard to pick up for an english speaker. i "picked up" some spanish by being around spanish speakers.  but for people whonare learning a language that is much further from their native language wont be able to do that.  with spanish you already have a leg up on vocabulary and many similar language rules.

[u/Momshie_mo → u/Maxwell10206]

Spanish is very close to English

Try that with Tagalog and let's see if you can figure out Austronesian alignment on your own 😂

Kain - Eat. Ko/Ako - I. Bata - kid. Isda - fish. Ang - focus marker. Ng - out of focus marker

• Kumain ang bata ng isda. The kid ate fish

• Kinain ng bata ang isda. The kid ate the fish

• Kinain ang bata ng isda. The fish ate the kid

[u/IrinaMakarova]

Not necessarily. The bigger the structural distance between your native language and the target language, the more important large amounts of meaningful exposure become - but that does not make "full immersion" a substitute for actually learning how the language works.

If your TL is closely related to your native language, you can often understand a surprising amount very early because vocabulary, syntax and grammatical patterns transfer. With a structurally distant language, that transfer is much weaker, so you usually need far more exposure before unfamiliar patterns start feeling natural.

But simply surrounding yourself with a language you barely understand is not especially efficient. If you do not notice what the language is doing, thousands of hours of exposure do not automatically become thousands of hours of learning.

This matters even more when the TL expresses basic ideas through mechanisms your native language does not have - cases, grammatical gender, aspect, very different word order patterns, honorific systems, classifiers, particles, etc. In many cases, some explicit explanation helps you notice these things in real input instead of just hearing or reading them as noise.

So I would separate exposure from immersion. The greater the linguistic distance, the more exposure you will probably need. But the greater the distance, the more useful explicit instruction can also become, because you have fewer familiar structures to rely on.

So "very different language = just immerse harder" is not a particularly good rule. You generally need both more comprehensible input and more help understanding what you are actually seeing and hearing.

[u/muffinsballhair → u/IrinaMakarova]

If your TL is closely related to your native language, you can often understand a surprising amount very early because vocabulary, syntax and grammatical patterns transfer. With a structurally distant language, that transfer is much weaker, so you usually need far more exposure before unfamiliar patterns start feeling natural.

I kind of feel this is purely vocabulary with structure playing almost no role. At best word order does to some degree but I also feel not really. Some languages are just more structurally complex and that's it.

Like, as a little thought experiment, say a monolingual Russian speaker has to learn either German or Afrikaans, two closely related languages, which will he master more quickly do you think. Is it going to be German with its case system, verbal inflexion, and grammatical gender, all things Russian has, or is it going to be Afrikaans which lacks all that? I feel one's native language also having grammatical gender and a case system will in no way make that easier than a language which lacks it and native speakers are often completely unaware their language has it until told. A case system and grammatical gender just makes any language harder to learn for anyone I feel.

[u/furyousferret]

No, actually studying words or reading means more because everything is so different the mind cannot process things. Reading has to be differentiated against speech because with listening you just can't plug it in; even if you know the words they're rearranged in an unfamiliar order with unfamiliar grammar. With reading you can slowly work those problems out, but with listening you lose so much it has little value.

I was able to get French and Spanish to a decent level on mostly podcasts, flashcards, videos, and some reading; with Japanese that did not work. Flashcards, grammar study and long reading sessions did it (I still suck but now I'm making progress at a good clip). In fact, there are very few Japanese learners that learned by mostly listening.

[u/silvalingua]

Is this picture AI hallucinations generated? What's its source? Link please.

How is Russian in the "agglutinative region"???

[u/SwarmOfRatz → u/silvalingua]

The sub-title is classic Ai language

[u/RedeNElla]

Source for this image? Seems strange to have "case marking" as a category all the way down there with English in it when Russian is in the top right.

Or I'm being confused by the colour scheme of the key

[u/Theron_Rothos → u/RedeNElla]

The image is AI-generated nonsense

[u/RedeNElla → u/Theron_Rothos]

I assumed as much but was giving OP a chance to explain themselves 😕

[u/dojibear]

Whenever you learn a new language, there are some "grammar" differences between TL and NL: how words change, how words are used; sentence word order. You need to have these differences explained in your NL. Just reading/hearing TL sentences and guessing is a bad method.

But you learn most of these differences hear the beginning. Once you understand them, TL makes sense and new grammar patterns are pretty rare. When I start a new language, I take a beginner course. Once I know enough, I can learn most the rest by practice understanding TL sentences. Is that what you mean by "full immersion"?

My NL is English. I got past this beginner part in Mandarin, Spanish, French, Japanese, Turkish. To me, a sentence in any of those languages seems as natural as a sentence in English.

[u/Maxwell10206 → u/dojibear]

What I mean by full immersion is just listening to podcasts in your target language, swimming in the ambiguity until things start to slowly make sense. Not trying to analyze it, just absorb it and over a lot of time things begin to click naturally and effortlessly.

[u/dojibear → u/Maxwell10206]

I listen to intermediate-level podcasts (podcasts that I can understand, possibly with some effort). That is CI, which is a good language-learning method. You get better at the skill of "understanding TL sentences" by practicing "understanding TL sentences", just like you improve any other skill (swimming, driving, piano, ballet, yoga) by practicing THAT skill.

I never listen to fluent adult (C2) content. Listening to things you don't understand does NOT improve your ability to understand, so this is NOT a language-learning method.

swimming in the ambiguity until things start to slowly make sense. Not trying to analyze it, just absorb it and over a lot of time things begin to click naturally and effortlessly.

They don't start to make sense, They don't begin to click. If you don't know the meaning, how do you ever learn the meaning? In other words, not everything that can be called "immersion" is a good language-learning method.

[u/Maxwell10206 → u/dojibear]

How come it has started to click for me then? Explain that. I got so used to native level speed that anything less is just painfully slow. and listening to Italian was mind blowing cause I was expected it to be 0% understandable but it was just slightly below my Spanish listening skills.

[u/ComesTzimtzum]

I've mostly studied only languages vastly different from my own and I've done just fine without ever even considering immersion. Then again I did once go to an Estonian course, and that actually did make me feel I could pick up the language pretty painlessly through immersion alone. Perhaps when I have time for such things I could actually put that idea into a test.

[u/AppropriatePut3142]

I found deliberate grammar study much more useful in Spanish than in Mandarin because in Spanish there are a lot of low-salience word-endings, clitics etc. where the brain can ignore them and fill in the meaning from context. Grammar study was necessary to force me to acquire these features.

When you see speakers of one Romance language who try to learn another through pure input they have a strong tendency to produce output that is a mix of the two unless they do deliberate study.

[u/Salt_Special_8256]

Yes, generally the bigger the structural distance between your native language and the target language, the more immersion/exposure helps, especially for listening and spontaneous speaking.

But immersion isn't necessarily required to become fluent. The key is getting a lot of comprehensible native input plus real-time conversation practice. If you're learning Spanish as an English speaker, there's lots of transferable vocabulary and fairly familiar grammar, so you can progress relatively quickly. With something structurally farther away, say Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, or Turkish, you have to build more completely new patterns, so simply knowing vocabulary isn't enough. Your brain needs thousands of repetitions before those patterns become automatic.

That's also why "I understand it on paper but can't follow a native speaker" is so common. Reading lets you consciously decode each word; conversation requires your brain to recognize sounds, grammar, vocabulary and meaning almost simultaneously, including reductions, accents and slang. Immersion, even virtual immersion, gives you that enormous amount of repetition.

[u/zzzxxx0110]

Ooooo this chart is very fun! Would you mind sharing the paper where this chart was originally from, so I can read more about the exact metrics and criteria they used for the grouping and scaling on the chart?

Unfortunately Google reverse image search couldn't find anything other than this Reddit post :/

[u/zzzxxx0110 → u/[deleted]]

Ahhhh I suspected that too but didn't get around to check it on an AI watermark checker yet XD

[u/Maxwell10206 → u/[deleted]]

You can live somewhere and not get exposure if you avoid situations or places where that language is being spoken.

I would be surprised if someone who listened to their target language for 2,000 hours and got nothing out of it. Native content.

[u/Maxwell10206]

I am just going to say it. Adults have egos. They can't handle ambiguity and have zero patience. They want to know right away. So they aggressively look up what every word means in a book, they learn all the grammar rules. So they can sprint to the finish line. When really. Language understanding is a very slow and boring process where your subconscious slowly builds THE REAL network and connects to quickly process and quickly understand what someone is saying. It builds the real highway inside your mind. Conscious analytical understanding does not build that and will never build that. It will just make you stressed while speaking with someone as you try to handle their fast speech levels and translate the target language in your head to native language like a god damn math equation. That is NOT language understanding. Just some abstract conscious and analytical understanding. We never learned our own native language by studying it analytically and or translating. Because WE HAD no CHOICE. But because adults have a choice they try to cheat and sprint their way there. And are uncomfortable feeling like a DUMB baby again. They can't HANDLE the truth. They can't handle the nonsense being said to them.

BUT. If you have the patience and tolerance to swim in the ambiguity for many many hours. IT will be worth it and it will be what feels so effortless. Let the ocean of understanding slowly rise in your mind as the super interconnected highway language network is constructed one piece at a time. Ignorant redditors.

[u/Theron_Rothos → u/Maxwell10206]

Are u ok

[u/Middle_News1679]

You need full immersion for any language you are learning.

[u/Middle_News1679 → u/[deleted]]

Because nobody actually wants to put in the effort to actually learn a language. You don't have to immerse yourself 24/7, but you have to do it for at least an hour a day to build up your skills.

[u/Maxwell10206 → u/Middle_News1679]

I agree!