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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1425 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 22, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I counter your example of Napoleon with the example of Pablo from Dreaming Spanish who learned English, French, and Thai through immersion learning. There's a whole community built around Dreaming Spanish that has learned that language in the same way that Pablo has. I too have learned Spanish and considerable amounts of Italian merely through reading, watching TV and YouTube, and vocabulary lookups. So I call bullshit on your theory: you can indeed learn in the same way that a small child does. Of course I doubt either myself or Pablo used the pure immersion learning you speak of in the immersion school. The amount of time a small child needs to learn a language is immense: 12 hours a day for the first 5 years of life, plus constant exposure for the next 10-15 to truly reach fluency. No adult has that kind of time, unless you only interact with speakers of your target language.

Adult language learning is different from child language learning because we can use higher level reasoning processes to accelerate the acquisition process. We can deliberately review and study vocab, we can make comparisons to our L1, we can look up grammar rules. We can choose specific immersion opportunities that maximize acquisition. Thus we can accelerate a process that requires 10s of thousands of hours into a process that requires mere thousands or perhaps even hundreds of hours.

Taking your 6 words a class example: assuming 200 days of language education a year, multiplied by 12 years of grade school, you should get to around 14,440 words, which is more than enough to read most basic texts.

"reading" is the first method in your list of ways you learned Spanish.

So? You can do immersion with reading the same way you do it with listening.

Ah. That’s not what immersion means. “Immersion” means there’s no way out, you are totally submerged; the metaphor connotes sink-or-swim. All language coming at you is the target language, and the only outgoing language that will work is the target language. For Japanese immersion, you have to move to Japan so that you can never English your way out of a situation. If that’s not practical, you need to go great lengths to create those conditions elsewhere. And these conditions need to be in long chunks- all day, preferably all your waking life for whatever period. Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home, because you can just close the book and read something else, and you have dictionaries and translators available. YouTube immersion makes even less sense, because you can just watch another video. It’s studying, it’s learning, but it’s not immersion. It’s bathing or showering or something.

What do you guys mean by immersion?

Therefore you can’t get “immersion” from reading if you’re reading at home

Eh... I feel like this is way too strict. Arguably this would make immersion impossible these days, because the gateway to your native language is right there in your pocket, whether you live in a foreign country or not.

What do you guys mean by immersion?

Learning by interacting with the natives, in any form. It can be talking to them, it can be reading books, or consuming their media. The more you do it, the more "immersed" you are.

gog is correct in the sense that's how they formally define "immersion" as a learning method. When a student enters the study environment (such as, the classroom), everyone will engage only in the target language, native speakers present or no. You are forced to join the conversation and other activities, feeling immense social pressure to get out any words, hopefully with some fluency lest you look like a dim-witted idiot. Actually travelling to foreign countries used to be even better, because not only you'd come across as dim and rude, you couldn't achieve anything. (And yes, today you have to artificially limit yourself to use your own brainpower instead of using translator tools nor give the natives another free lesson to practice their English.)

That's fair enough, I think I went too far by restricting it to natives. But check his other comment, apparently these schools put hardly any pressure on the students at all, no wonder they don't work!

Agreed, I think /u/gog is describing what happens when immersion meets lax schooling. And perhaps it is prone to encourage laxity. Vocabulary and grammar tests are "easy" to grade. Immersion-as-technically defined requires more work to grade to objectively, which is a great boon for teachers and schools that don't want to be harsh.

I suppose that for "immersion" to work at all as a classroom method, the classes need to be a bit nasty, which can be psychologically brutal for weak-willed. It doesn't work if the kids can just ignore the teacher or laugh at him/her. I remember the immersion classes I attended as quite stressful. Yet many implementers think of it as a nice cuddly alternative to vocabulary tests, whereas it should be anything but. If you have not done your vocabulary homework, you will be embarrassed for the 5 minutes the teacher has time to question you. If you come to immersion class unprepared, you'd be embarrassed for the whole lesson.

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