Core Principles

Choose native media that is "comprehensible enough": Content that is slightly above your level = sentences where you don't know at least one thing, allowing you to use the context and sentence itself (=your existing knowledge and comprehension) to infer the unknown piece of information (=something new you learn like a word) in the same sentence. These sentences are called "i+1".
"i+1" sentences (a sentence where you don't know exactly one thing) are rare. Sentences that are "i+1-3" (=a sentence with 1 to 3 unknown pieces of information, meaning they have more ambiguity) are more common in real life.
Effort over 100% comprehension: Accept that at the beginning you can't understand everything every time, but put effort into understanding every sentence and pay attention as much as you can.
By consistently consuming (=immersing in) comprehensible ("i+1-3") native content you will acquire the language (grammar, word usages, nuances etc.) intuitively like a native.
Choose native content that you enjoy and interests you. Let your interests guide you. Having fun is the biggest motivator!
Aim for roughly 85% enjoyment and 15% challenge in native content. Enjoyment is your comprehension meter.

Recap¶

Before you can start using your foundation to start immersing, we first need to go over what to look for in immersion content, define our key takeaways from What Immersion tries to achieve and answer our questions:

Why take explanations from beginner grammar guides at face value?

How much challenge is too much and why is it part of the process?

How much should I understand at the beginning?

What should I look for in immersion media?

In the section What Immersion tries to achieve we have established that immersion material has to be comprehensible enough and enjoyable. Here we are going to contextualize what comprehensible enough actually means and how to setup oneself for success.

What "comprehensible enough" means - i+1¶

With immersion we are trying to create an environment where we are engaging with material that is optimally slightly above our level. The key here is slightly! For the beginning, this means to learn as effectively as possible we should not immerse in something too easy, because there wouldn't be any new information for us to learn from it, and not immerse in something too difficult, because we wouldn't be able too understand anything at all. This is the same with any learning process.

You have to build upon your existing knowledge i.e the foundation you built and use it to understand new kinds of information related to it. This actually goes way back to 1876:

Apperception

“The new content of a section defined by its goal can only be made one’s own by the pupil with the help of the old and the familiar that he already possesses. Within the older material lie the conditions without which grasping the new understood as dependent on the former is not possible.”

— T. Ziller, Herbartian pedagogy 1876

This concept of using your existing knowledge to learn new information is referred to in immersion language learning as i+1.

i = stands for your existing knowledge of the target language
+1 = stands for one information you don't know in a given sentence. Basically meaning something that is slightly above your current level. That unknown piece of information (+1) can be a new grammar pattern, a new pronunciation of a known word, an idiom, or a cultural reference.

The idea behind having one unknown information in a given sentence is that you use the rest of the sentence i.e the context to understand the missing piece of information. Here is an example:

Example sentence¶

To illustrate the process of how to mine, let's pretend we are learning a language called "Volga Tatar". For clarity reasons, the sentence will not be written in complete Volga Tatar and instead in English and with one unknown word that is written in Volga Tatar.

"While her brother was quiet and reserved, Maria was incredibly сөйләмчәк, telling long, detailed stories at dinner, chatting easily with strangers, and always having an opinion to share."

By reading through this sentence you'll know that Maria's brother is quite and more reserved while Maria herself is the opposite as in something (сөйләмчәк) because she likes telling long, detailed stories, is talkative and always open to share. Through context you'll understand now that the word сөйләмчәк means something like loquacious or talkative.

Here the unknown piece of information (i+1) was the word сөйләмчәк and your existing knowledge, about the English language, (i) was everything else in the sentence helping you understand the unknown piece of information. Essentially you learned the word through context using your existing knowledge. We found the ideal type of sentence where you have a good understanding of the entire message of the sentence except for one missing piece of information you are trying to learn.

Doing immersion is basically trying to have as many moments like this (i+1 sentences) as possible. This is the most optimal case speaking from an efficiency standpoint.

How i+1 is a motivating ideal but not reality¶

In reality, coming by true i+1 sentences where you know almost everything except for one word or phrase is rare. Which is why we need to add more leeway to the limitation i+1 gives us.

We are going to expand on the concept of i+1 by allowing ourself to not only have one missing piece of information in a given sentence but perhaps multiple. Meaning we would be exposed to more ambiguity. Using the example from before, sentences could look like this

Sentence A with i+2Sentence B i+3Sentence C with i+n

"торса да her brother was quiet and reserved, Maria was incredibly сөйләмчәк, telling long, detailed stories at dinner, chatting easily with strangers, and always having an opinion to share."

"торса да her brother was quiet and reserved, Maria was incredibly сөйләмчәк, сөйләгән long, detailed stories at dinner, chatting easily with strangers, and always having an opinion to share."

Sometimes even like this: "Her brother энесе тыныч һәм reserved торса да, Maria бик сөйләмчәк иде. Ул кичке аш вакытында озын-озын детальле хикәяләр сөйләгән, easily strangers белән сөйләшкән and always having an opinion to share."

Now how did you feel when reading through these kind of sentences?

For sentence A, you were maybe a bit lost but overall you could probably understand what the sentence was generally about. Given the context you could infer that "торса да" means something like "although" or "while".

For sentence B, you were maybe more confused but still hanging on. It's more challenging but you could still infer that "сөйләгән" would mean something like "to talk/to tell". If you had a dictionary you could very well look up what you don’t know and understand the overall meaning or maybe the whole sentence.

Avoid these

While for the i+n sentence, you probably felt overwhelmed and lost. Even a dictionary wouldn't help at that point to understand the overall meaning of the sentence. There is just too much ambiguity to use the sentence, or context, to infer some kind of meaning. This is no longer comprehensible but just unintelligible whitenoise.

Getting just the gist is fine if in moderation¶

What I want you to take away from this little exercise is that immersion is not about comprehending every sentence perfectly. It's also fine to just get the gist sometimes. It's fine to not understand every sentence perfectly every single time, what matters is putting in the effort into trying to understand a sentence completely. The effort is you looking up words using a dictionary and putting in cognitive effort to infer and deduce meaning based on the given information. You must learn to be comfortable not knowing everything in a sentence every time and just absorb whatever you understood. In a way doing immersion is tolerating this specific kind of ambiguity.

For now think of it as food. You don't need a perfectly scientifically mutinously crafted gourmet meal every time (i+1). What you generally need is a nutritious homemade meal that makes you full (a sentence you put effort into to understand completely). Sometimes you have a snack (catching just the gist). Sometimes you try a new spice you're unsure about (an expression you look up). Bottom line is it all nourishes you. It all helps you acquire the target language.

Snacking in moderation

Don't get comfortable with just getting the snack (catching just the gist). Aim to understand a sentence as much as you can and pay attention.

The „magic“ in immersion¶

So what we end up doing is we allow ourselves to be exposed to a little more ambiguity, as in one or two more unknown pieces of information, at the cost of a some comprehension, as in sometimes only getting the gist. We do this for the following reasons:

By deliberately allowing ourselves to be exposed to more ambiguity we will encounter words not only in different contexts like before but more importantly at different difficulties.

For example with vocabulary, let’s say one time you encounter a word in a context where you only get the gist („i+3“). Then you continue immersing meaning you expose yourself more to your target language i.e learn more and get better at it. Then you maybe encounter it the next time and understand more how the word is used („i+2“). Then you immerse more and finally in an „i+1“ context you grasp its precise meaning. By consistently exposing yourself to your target language (doing immersion) you acquire it (e.x here a word sticks naturally).

This is what learners who do immersion describe sometimes as magic. Even though you didn't consciously sit down to learn something specific for example a grammar pattern, you have developed a feeling or rather intuition how it’s used and what it means, without knowing any rules why it does the things it does. And this is basically the same feeling we have with our native language, we might not be able to explain why something is right but we feel it’s right we know it sounds or looks right.

Example: The proposal didn’t end up being acted upon

Now try identifying all the word classes.

If you immediately recognized that this sentence contains a non-finite progressive passive formed with the "act upon" + preposition construction, combined with the strictly intransitive main predicate "end up ~" and the negated past-tense auxiliary "didn’t," then awesome, good job! But most native speakers couldn’t break it down like that. Does that mean they "don’t really know" English? Of course not. They don’t need to know this and be able to recall grammatical labels or analyze structures on the spot. They can use the language naturally and effortlessly because the patterns are already wired into their intuition through immersion. They just know it intuitively.

That's why we actually having a bit more ambiguity is actually not something hurtful, but works in our favour. It only becomes hurtful when you don't put in effort to understand every sentence as much as you can but more on this in section Whitenoising.

The umbrella term for this is us training our pattern recognition skills which builds fluency.

How to acquire a language intuitively

Acquisition of a language happens through tons of comprehensible immersion (exposure to the language) and seeing things like words and grammar hundreds amount of times in different contexts to grasp its full nuanced meaning.

Think of it like transfer knowledge from school where you do different exercises. If you were to do all the same type of questions (i+1) then you would have trouble using your knowledge and transfer it to the exam (real world) where there could be different questions types.

A disclaimer for grammar

What to look for in immersion material - Importance of enjoyment¶

We'll use the last sections about „i+1“ as motivation for defining a guiding principle, a framework so to speak, for choosing what to immerse with. We’ll also bring in the final key idea from What Immersion tries to achieve; enjoyment. To illustrate this, I want to show you a quote that pretty much sums up immersion in slightly meme-y yet real way:

"Step 1: do fun stuff

Step 2: don't do boring stuff"

— Nunko, January 2022

This quote here highlights one of the most if not the most important aspect of immersion. It reminds us that immersion, no language learning is at the end of the day a hobby you do for fun. While the goals for learning a foreign language might be different for everyone, the reason why people continue doing immersion does not. It's all fun after all. This is because with immersion we let our interests guide us. Unlike with school classes where we are most often forced to engage with material that is most often boring and not important to us personally in any way, with immersion we have the freedom to choose to immerse in everything we are interested in and thus enjoy it.

Enjoyment as a metric for comprehension¶

Enjoyment is so to speak our core principle, and enjoyment is a great metric for comprehension. If you enjoy something then you probably understand enough to enjoy it, meaning it's at least something around your current language skills. If we were to take the concept of i+1 here, then i would be here your enjoyment i.e comprehension. What's great about enjoying something is that you forget about a bit of struggle or difficulty, because you'll inherently pour in more effort to understand or do that thing because it's fun, thus learn more. Enjoyment is basically the "cheat code", a tool we use to handle i.e get through those sentences with more ambiguity. We are driven to understand what interests us so we put in that effort comprehend it.

If you don't enjoy immersing with something, then it might be because it's either genuinely uninteresting to you or more likely too difficult preventing you to understand. Taking the i+1 example once again, that would be a i+n sentence with a lot of ambiguity, which we want to avoid to progress.

The ratio¶

To express the idea of one having immersion material that is comprehensive (=enjoyable) to you and challenging enough to learn efficiently (=i+1-3) we use the following ratio:

80-85% should be enjoyment(=comprehensive) and 15-20% should be challenging (=falling into that i+1-3 range). This ratio ensures and encapsulates everything we have talked about so far.

This ratio changes person by person

Some people may be able to tolerate more ambiguity but can still enjoy what ever they are immersing with. While some people may lose enjoyment when they don't understand as much i.e can't tolerate as much ambiguity. Both worlds are fine and justifiable, for example sometimes you may want to immerse in something thats really hard for you because you know you would enjoy it. But then the question arises if you can justify your time spent reading more difficult stuff and maybe progressing slower that reading something easier that may not be as enjoyable but would make you progress faster. How to handle this dilemma will be discussed in Overall insights on Immersion Media.

For now take away the following:

Basically we are juggling enjoyment(=comprehensive) and challenging (=ambiguity). To iterate again, enjoying something is another way to say you understand something enough to well enjoy it.

Challenging can mean different things.

Challenging can be when you know all the words but not the grammar in a sentence or vice versa.
Challenging can be even when you understand every word and grammar but still need your time to understand what is actually being said for example missing some culture clue.
Challenging can be when you think you understand everything in a sentence but nuances are flying above your head keeping you from grasping the real meaning.

What challenging means in immersion, is having content where most sentences, if not all, have at max 2-3 unknown pieces of information you don't know. At best every sentence has 1 unknown information, meaning the context of the sentence can help you remember the word as well. That missing piece(s) of information will stick the better the impression, you understanding of the sentence, is. It will probably stick not as easy or even not at all if you juggle multiple unknown pieces of information in a sentence, a lot of ambiguity, which will make the context less impactful and more vague.

Everything comes down to your comprehension, so how do you comprehend something? Introducing How To Start Immersion.