Does immersion have to hurt? Language learning secrets from @mattvsjapan

⬇️ GET MY FREE STORYLEARNING® KIT:

📖 LEARN JAPANESE THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY!

⏱ TIMESTAMPS:

In the interview, we discuss:

0:00 Intro

4:45 Why immersion-based learning isn't as popular as it SHOULD be given how effective it's when done right.

8:15 "TTF" (Time to Fun)

11:25 TikTok immersion?

12:27 How to strike a compromise between efficacy and enjoyment.

15:14 Why learning is about ACTION, not KNOWLEDGE, and the power of accountability through coaches and community.

17:26 What would Matt do differently he started learning Japanese from scratch today?

26:19 What do people wrong about Matt?

For more about Matt:

Other language learning projects I've documented on YouTube:

👉 Learn Thai in 14 Days:

👉 Daily Study Routines and Schedules:

And here are some other cool videos I like about learning languages fast:

[seoul_mate]

After trying to learn Korean for 3 years with textbooks as my main resource, I was going nowhere. I am now following the Refold method and immersing into native content and my level of Korean has skyrocketed. I think Matt is a great guy and I admire his dedication to Japanese a lot.

[languagecomeup]

Thanks for having Matt on again Olly. Always a good interview.

[portisha]

I don't think learning a language without studying grammar is rare. I think most people who learned English as their second language did exactly that.

[melissabennett]

This is one of the best YouTube interviews I’ve seen. Not only is it very interesting and engaging with a wide range of topics covered but it is also well-produced and well-regulated interview. Your skills as an interviewer really come though. Thanks for the excellent content.

[Day-in-our-Lives]

Great video Olly Richards! The question: "What would Matt do differently if he could relearn Japanese from scratch, " was great content. That really helps the beginner community in terms of the bigger picture.

[fisslimen]

Thank you for splitting the interview up! I can jump to the parts I want to hear.

[majinmj]

Immersion isn't populair because they can't make money of you that way. Same thing with diets vs calorie counting. If they can't make money with it they will completely ignore the method.

[michaelkobylko]

In the last year of taking my language learning really seriously, one thing I've discovered is how many opinions there are out there about the best way to learn - and how passionately people often hold those opinions. Sometimes I feel like a sail boat trying to get from one destination to the other, but constantly being buffeted off course in all different directions by the wind every time I encounter advice that contradicts other advice. The only conclusion I've been able to come to is that I have to try and find what works for me and disregard what doesn't.

It's already too late in terms of reading ability getting ahead of listening. I read much better than I listen. I've been trying to improve my listening - with some success - but it remains way behind my listening. I don't mind this too much as being able to read and understand is quite motivating and keeps me going.

In terms of speaking, I've encountered the opinion that you should be speaking right from the start, as well as the idea that you should wait and build up some base knowledge at first. I began speaking with little more than Duolingo knowledge, but for me, it was the right decision, because speaking (and listening, of course) is why I'm doing all this. Much as I love reading, I'm principally learning to speak a new language, and I'd rather stumble through a basic conversation about myself and what I do for a living and what I'm having for dinner than sit around getting hundreds and hundreds of hours if input but fretting about whether it's the right time to start using it. And there's nothing more motivating than expressing yourself in a foreign language and having a native speaker understand it and respond to it. That's just my point of view. And for what it's worth, Story Learning has been really useful for me both as a motivator and as a form of input.

[hopperhelp]

Yay. More Japanese stuff.

Edit:
Also glad you're talking about refold. I've been using it along with your Japanese courses.

It's a wonderful combination.

[lucasps]

That is absolutely what I needed ! I was doubting about my immersion approach and that discussion helped me a lot. Thank you both !

[ThomasDowdyWinslett]

The advice on how much to read vs listen being dependent upon how much you want the language being "more formatted" like a native speaker (which is more listening oriented) was INCREDIBLE! I am in month 3 of learning Spanish with the goal of moving to Spain. So I will keep more focus on listening even though I struggle with this. I can understand written Spanish much better and see I need to spend more time listening. Thank you, thank you.

[Paul-ykds]

Matt has this calm awareness about him. I wonder how much he meditates. I would guess pretty regularly.

[GoodMorningButch]

For me, there’s good things to be taken from a lot of sources. I love the way immersion works and I’ve been reading books in my target languages and purposely not looking up too many words (if any at all) for the sake of just staying immersed. However, I do love using textbooks and there’s some languages where I don’t feel like I can get a firm enough grasp of the grammar without being explained explicitly (Finnish, looking at you).

[Tehui]

My daily input routine is 50/50 reading and listening. I was thinking that maybe I need to devote more time to my reading, however Matt's feedback has changed my mind. Maybe a 50/50 split is better in the long-run.

[jirojapandaily]

What a great video.
I’m Japanese and learning English .
I uploaded Japanese life.
Your video is good help for me.

[AngloSaks]

What Matt suggests at 10:07 "will come, perhaps in the next 10 years, maybe sooner", i.e. "use artificial intelligence to generate custom-made comprehensible input to individuals" is what I've already been doing in recent weeks, asking Chat GPT to create various short texts in a foreign language using only the most commonly-used 500 words of that language. It does it very well, with very occasional imperfections. Just this last two weeks it's given me a bunch of stuff that I can manage to read and repeats a bunch of language in various contexts again and again, and I'm picking a bunch of it up and noticing the repeated grammar aspects and getting some idea of their meaning too. Also I make sure the texts are about things that interest me, plus simply the creative process of thinking up your own requests to the AI makes it more interesting, and you can try again and tweak your instructions if you don't like what you get. And if I start losing interest, then I think of something that will stay reasonablyrelated to what I've done so far but is about something new, or has some new interesting angle at least. Even getting it to write the same thing various ways is possible and can be good, and makes reading about the same thing a few times more interesting. Each text basically gives me ideas for the next. I got a ton of stuff just 2 days ago by simply asking it to give more detail about certain parts of the previous texts. Generating audio for the same text is not a big thing either, though that is harder for rarer languages, and will get easier and easier in the near future. Maybe Chat GPT #2 too will create audio too. And, well, I guess I'll metion that I've been doing it for Ukrainian, and all the features that LingQ has are free for Ukrainian right now, so I can just import this stuff as lessons on there and get it to generate audio for it, then also do the other activities with it on there, though mostly I just listen and read, and look at the meaning of words occasionally.

[Sam-shushu]

Great interview, Olly. And great website, Matt. I'm currently shifting from output based learning to input based, and the refold roadmap (and your books, Olly) is really good.

[clairegittens]

The full immersion Olly talks about... I think it is possible, but in certain circumstances. After having learnt 5 languages with different methods, I tried DVD immersion with Korean. Horribly inefficient. After 2 years of watching the same drama series every day, I had learned greetings, some family members, and 2 verbs. Lol. Then I read somewhere that you cannot learn solely by watching tv. If you are going to learn solely by immersion, you need interaction. I fought with that for a while, but I kind of get it now. If someone points to the salt and says, “Pass me the salt, ” you know what they mean even if you can’t understand or even hear them. So Olly’s friend having that kind of interaction with people whose objective was to have him understand, would be a giant help to him learning without other study. Content for native speakers, isn’t trying to make itself understandable to you, so you’re going to have to meet it halfway with grammar or subtitles or translation.

[ben-kgvh]

Great video! Just want to quickly point out that you get the best sound out of your Blue Yeti mic if it's pointing up and you speak into the front face above the mute toggle button

[santiagovalencia]

Possibly the two best language learning promoters at reaching superior language levels here in Youtube. Their love for languages is also palpable. I have loved this video.

Amazing interaction and a pleasure to be able to watch them chatting about languages. I have really lost the sensation of time passing, so good this one, with so much interesting and condensed content.

It paid my attention how Matt touches so much into interest but does it indirectly as he still channels it through 'motivation', and how Ollie described perfectly the Split Attention Effect (SAE) when he explained how we usally learn by chunking things and then trying to put them together but that instead of identifying that is exactly the problem because by doing that we overwhelm our senses at cognitive level he went into another question. Avoiding SAE is one of the main reasons why immersion is so powerful curiously so everything was there (ready to go).

After watching it I have the feeling we all intuitively know what is wrong with the way we used to learn languages but we still seem to miss the doors to speak out loud the "why" and finally connect the dots for everyone to see them. The terminology is still going on just at research and academia levels, that could be one of the reasons why immersion never got mainstream.