How to Start Immersion

Try out immersion while building your foundation. If it's too overwhelming and a struggle (too many unknown things in a sentence, "i+n", where a dictionary won't help) go back to building your foundation. If you can stomach it and it's comprehensible ("i+1-3") then continue immersion.
Create a mining deck for immersion separate from your starter deck. Use Yomitan to add things you didn't know to your mining deck.

When to start Immersion¶

You have a good enough foundation that allows you to not be completely overwhelmed when consuming native media in the language. Taking the examples from Principles of Immersion you mainly encounter sentences where you don't know at least 1 to around 3 things ("i+1-3") instead of sentences where even a dictionary wouldn't help you understand ("i+n").

How i+1 is a motivating ideal but not reality

You understand that you have to build upon your existing knowledge to learn something new and that challenge is part of learning. The key is here to not overwhelm yourself ("i+n") with difficulty but expose yourself to content that is mostly comprehensible ("i+1-3").

Dipping in your toes¶

This fine balance between "I'm struggling this is too hard" and "This is fine" changes for each person depending on one's existing knowledge, enjoyment and tolerance of ambiguity (=how little or how much you need to understand in order to have fun).

Especially since everybody perceives things differently, everybody needs a different amount of comprehension to enjoy something. Thats why the disclaimers say you don't need to finish your beginner Anki deck or beginner grammar resource. Some people might be doing fine starting immersion knowing 1000 words. Some people might need to know 1500 words. This can change even more depending what content you immerse with.

The bottom line is once you hit a reasonable amount of basic vocab (at least 1000 words) and basic grammar you learned, you try to immerse and see for yourself, just don't be stuck in the beginner loop.

How to start Immersion - Mining¶

Mining is the process of immersing, looking up everything you don't know and creating flashcards for it in Anki. These flashcards, or just cards, you create are added not to your beginner Anki deck but to a separate Mining deck you create in Anki.

Creating a mining deck and setting it up is a topic that deserves a thorough explanation though it's up to debate if this discussion would fit into this guide's theme and goal. For now I'll refer to 天・Ten (Heaven)'s Mining Guide.

Yomitan is used to lookup, create and add cards to your mining deck. Using Yomitan is integral when doing immersion. Mining is the process we are going to be doing when dealing with sentences and trying to understand them.

What is Yomitan¶

The browser addon Yomitan is a powerful and versatile pop-up dictionary for language learning used by 100,000+ language learners. It makes looking up words effortless and seamless whether you're reading a book, browsing the web or watching movies. Just hover and press a key to instantly see detailed definitions, word frequencies, native audio, examples sentence and more right where you are. With Yomitan's powerful Anki flashcard integration you can turn your lookups into formatted Anki flashcards and send them straight to your deck with single key presses.

Installation

For now I'll refer to 天・Ten (Heaven)'s Mining Guide. Here's Yomitan's official website.

What to do with those mined cards?¶

You learn them in Anki. How often, when and how to do Anki will be answered in Using Anki.

Terminology¶

"Mining deck" = your own unique Anki deck which contains all things you mined from immersion.
"To mine (something)" = creating a flashcard of something you didn't know, for example a word, with Yomitan and adding it to your mining deck.

How does mining look like?

When and what should I exactly mine?

These questions alongside others will be answered during the Process of mining.