Hello everybody, how do you use immersion or comprehensible input?
After several years of language learning i came to the idea that methods like listening reading or learning with interlinear word for word translations while reading a text and listening to an audio have all the same goal. They all make a full content comprehensible. More translations/decoded words helps to make an content accessible.
Do you use translations or do you learn only with target language? If so how fast do you progress in the beginning?
For example, pure comprehensible input without translations works best when you already know 90–95% of the words. Listening-reading (from my experience and what I’ve heard from others) seems to work well with at least 60% known words. And interlinear word-for-word decoding (like an interlinear reader or the Birkenbihl method) seems to work even right from 0%.
How do you see this methods and the help of translated words?
Hey I 100% agree with your take here, I got frustrated at the idea that “comprehensible input” methods suggest that you should just listen to tv shows/children cartoons that are specifically at your level.
My thought is that vocabulary is something you need to learn anyways, so why not make sure that you learn the actual words from whatever content you want to watch and translate the everything you don’t know, and at the end you have new vocabulary + comprehensible input (with content that you can rewatch/reread to make sure you don’t forget the new vocabulary you just learnt)
Now I would really like your thought about something I’m building around this concept:
Basically I want to try to make sure that people can watch eg youtube videos, where each word in the video has flashcards, and you study the flashcards until you feel confident about them.
Then similar to language reactor, have dual subtitles, but hide the words that are ‘known’, until you have a full video you can understand.
I wanted to build something for me first because I felt like 50% of language learning is this core loop, but not sure if other polyglots agree with me here
The percentage thing is real but it wasn’t just about how many words I knew, it was also about which words I was missing. If I didn’t know a handful of words but they were just background vocabulary, I could still follow the thread of something. But if I was missing five words that were essential to how the sentence worked, I was lost, even if I technically knew 80% of what was there.
I started with Language Transfer, which doesn’t do word-for-word translation exactly, but it does make things comprehensible by building from what you already have. I think that’s why it worked for me.
And then I tried to go full target-language pretty quickly after that, which I probably wasn’t ready for. I dropped a lot. I ended up going back to easier stuff not because i was being disciplined about it but because trying to follow things I couldn’t understand just felt like white noise after a while.
I think the translation question depends on what the translation is doing. If it’s building a scaffold so the content makes sense, that seems different from just reading an English subtitle and not processing the Spanish at all.