The Native Language Approach

Native approach: Surrounds you with the language in it's purest and rawest form (e.x content made by natives for natives).
Pros: Fluency (intuition) through tons of exposure. Grammar and nuances all ingrained into your brain. (e.x how you learned your native language)
Language is acquired through understanding messages. Exposure to language has to be comprehensible enough.
Cons: takes too long, often high ambiguity and low comprehension like during babyhood. (analogy: being thrown into the deep end)
Immersion approach: Follow the native approach but make it comprehensible enough meaning it's enjoyable and somewhat challenging. (analogy: ease your way into a pool with floaties gradually removing them as you build proficiency)

Learning like a native but smarter¶

In the previous section, we dissected the the traditional, classroom based method. We concluded that while it has it's benefits speaking from a structure and social perspective, it's inclined to prioritize language education (passing exams, learning about culture and political system) over a more efficient language acquisition. It can lack expose to real native content, motivation and thus often leading to foreign language attrition.

This begs the question: "What would be a method focused purely on acquisition look like?" To get the bottom of this let's look at the method we all know and have been doing ever since we were born.

How natives acquire their language¶

I want you to ask yourself how you learned your native language, how does everyone learn their native language? This goes all the way back to the moment when we were born. Ever since birth we were surrounded by our native language. Be it by television, people talking, attending school or seeing how it looks like to trying uttering our first words, our whole environment didn’t give us any other chance but to be surrounded or I should rather say immersed in our native language. And this would go on for years where we would be exposed to our language constantly. In such an environment be it at school, at home or just outside we had no choice but to acquire the language naturally in its purest and rawest form. We basically adapted to the environment we were put in and actually excelled in specific ares.

To foreigners our native language might be illogical or difficult to understand certain nuances in vocab or grammar while for us natives it doesn’t even require a real mental effort to conjugate or speak or understand even the little peculiarities.

For example a native german person who has lived their whole life in Germany and only spoke german wouldn't have a problem differentiating and knowing when to use any of the 16 different article forms while a foreigner who could be coming from the US and only knew English would have a hard time wrapping their mind around the idea why a language would even need 16 articles and why not just use one definite articles like the in the english language. Not to speak of how a Japanese person would have the same kind of problem understanding why even use a definite article to begin with since the Japanese language doesn't have an article.

These "difficulties" are not difficulties for natives, since they have been ingrained and reinforced over a long time into their brains; they didn’t know it otherwise. Their brains were basically programmed to understand their native language through years of expose hence they are so good at it.

So, if this native approach is so effective, why don't we just do that to study our target language? Actually we are going to replicate it, but better.

Improving the native approach¶

The ingredient in native acquisition isn't just exposure and hope to make sense of it after some time; it's exposure to language that is comprehensible enough. A child understand the questions: "Want cookie?" because of the context as in seeing the cookie and the gestures of the person giving it, not because they are familiar in depth with all the grammar rules. We acquire language when we understand messages, not by purely memorizing rules.

This is the point where we make a crucial improvement over the native approach.

Distinction between the native approach and immersion¶

Natives learn their language by being thrown into the deep end. They experience high ambiguity and low comprehension for years while being surrounded constantly by native content. As adults learning another language we don't the luxury of tens of years.

Immersion adds one condition: The material i.e the input you immerse in is understandable enough for you to be enjoyable and challenging, but not overwhelming. With immersion we set ourselves up for success by using pop up dictionaries, subtitles, space repetition systems and most importantly content that is comprehensible.

Think of it this way:

The Native Approach: Being thrown into a water, where you're being put into an environment where you forced to swim in the language i.e immerse in it
Immersion: Easing your way into the pool gradually with floaties keeping you afloat, gradually removing them as you gain confidence and skill. You're still in the water, but supported at the right level so you can actually learn to swim.

The same way how we grew up while being surrounded by our native language and becoming so proficient in it, immersion also does the same but faster, more efficiently and enjoyable. It's an improved form. In a way, you reading this guide is you doing immersion in English, because it's written for natives of the English language, its comprehensible for you and at least a bit interesting since you are reading this.