🎏Immersion, its quirks, and tips for language learning this way!
its the 5th of May, so happy children's day! 🎏
I got a question in one of my posts asking for some advice on immersion learning! i thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about immersion in general, my current study(?) routine and perhaps give some useful advice!
As the name suggests, Immersion language learning is done primarily by consuming media in your target language. Immersion can seem super intimidating to us learners, mostly cause we can't understand most of the stuff available to us. But! its not impossible to start out using immersion right out of the gate.
i think people tend to get scared or go "I'll immerse when i get better at my TL!"
But the truth of the matter is, your not going to get used to, or better at your target language unless you consume actual content. (in my opinion.)
Honestly, a lot of immersion learning is being able to tolerate that i probably wont understand everything right away. I will someday, but for now i have to be comfortable with not understanding a lot. which is okay!
So, what is my current study routine?
right now, my routine consists of:
doing vocabulary cards on Anki from a premade anki deck.
playing about an hour of Animal crossing everyday
watching 1 - 3 episodes of an anime
watching Youtube videos
weekly (ish) grammar done by reading Imabi, and watching Cure Dolly videos on Youtube.
The bread and butter of my routine is learning vocab, and occasional grammar studies. I'm using the core2k/6k deck. which as the name implies, is an optimized vocab deck that contains the most common 6k JP vocabulary. i currently take 5 new vocab cards a day, and try to get my reviews in everyday. my anki deck has contributed a lot to me being able to immerse so early in my language journey. learning and then reviewing new words everyday lets me recognize words in my immersion.
As time has gone on, i can recognize more and more words, and even some words I haven't encountered yet in my deck. Immersion, while still uncomfortable, (especially with complex media) is the other side of the coin. i try to spend double the time i spend on anki, immersing. Mostly because i enjoy what I'm immersing in, but also because i get more out of it the more time i spend immersing.
"that's all well and good Lucky, but what advice would you give to someone who wants to learn this way?"
Well! first of all, and this is very important:
Be comfortable with ambiguity.
you may not be able to understand some, or maybe most of the thing you are immersing in. that's okay!
Your brain is already looking for patterns to see in your TL, and is growing more accustomed to it. I got a lot of headaches in the beginning, i still do actually. but i know that's my brain working hard! (take a break if you get a headache!!)
Second, and probably just as important:
Follow your interests. make immersion fun!
whats the point of immersing if its torturous?!
I'm a lot more likely to continue immersing in something if i actually enjoy it. there are a lot of easier anime to immerse in, but if I'm not having fun, I'm not going to learn anything. you should do the same! even if its too difficult to understand. I'm currently watching someone on YouTube play a dating sim, and even though its waaaay above my skill level, I'm really enjoying myself watching it! I've even recognized some words i know. whole sentences, even.
Third:
Be Consistent!
This is probably advice you've already heard, but it bears repeating! even if you do something small like listening to a song in your TL, that's immersion babyy :) consistency is key, above all.
Lastly: Track your Immersion.
a problem with immersion is it can feel like you are going nowhere. tracking how much time you spend doing an activity, (watching videos, reading, etc) is a great way to make immersion more tangible.
lots of people reccomend toggl, but i personally use polylogger. its built with language learners in mind, and is stupidly easy to use. i also keep personal logs in an online diary, as well as here on my blog to measure my progress. it helps!
alright, i think thats everything i have to say for now! if you've made it to the end of this long post, hello! and thank you <3 hope you've had a good day so far!
I will leave you with some links to more reading on the subject under the cut, they go into more detail than i have here.
take care for now! またね!
this article by Refold about tolerating ambiguity:
The Moe ways guide to immersion:
Making the leap to Immersion, Video by Cure Dolly:
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My Comic!
Since I officially have the first 20 chapters and a whole outline (more or less) written I figured I should probably let you all know about the comic I'm writing!
It's called Little Fawn
It's a retelling of Snow White about the huntsman promising protect Snow from the Queen's wrath after almost killing her himself
If you're a fan of stories about a tired/grumpy man accidentally adopting a goofy kid, this might be your vibe
The Main Characters:
Emil (AKA The Huntsman)
When he’s summoned by the Queen and asked to kill her step daughter, Princess Snow, everything in Emil is screaming no, but he finds himself accepting the task against his own mind and heart.
Emil is quiet and apprehensive of most people. He’s honest to a fault and always keeps to his word. He struggles endlessly with his guilt over almost killing Snow
Snow White:
Snow is Crown Princess and beloved by all who know her. All except her step mother, Queen Ennlin, who hates how "her" subjects love Snow more than her and orders a huntsman to take care of it once and for all.
Snow, like the Grimms Brother version, is only seven years old.
She's is a very curious kid and has a special interest in animals. Especially spiders, frogs, rats, and birds (much to many's chagrin). She also has a knack for sneaking around and hiding (also to many's chagrin).
If you have any questions let me know!!
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Man this is so random but this theory is stuck in my head and I wanna see how other people feel about it because I don't see people talk about it a lot (I have no clue if the link will go through properly since I've never put a link in a ask box)
https://www.tumblr.com/art-w0rm/667910993425350656/theory-time
Oh god not this theory again. I really truly try not to be mean to people for no good reason on this blog, but this theory is literally one of the stupidest fucking things I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't talk about this theory because to me it's like the walten files theory equivalent of that tubby custard mechanically separated chicken post.
Most of the time I genuinely don't even consider it worthy of my time, because it's nonsense, but this is a very nicely worded ask, and I really don't mean to dedicate any of the vitriol I hold towards this theory to You, poor anonymous person, so I will deconstruct it. I will go through the theory point-by-point and deconstruct why I disagree with it.
First up, this:
Showbear is not a character in The Walten Files anymore. Showbear was fully retconned and is never going to appear in the series again. He was effectively just a cameo of ThunderingStatic's (one of Martin's friends) OC, but when The Walten Files blew up and people started assuming Showbear was Martin's character, Static decided to withdraw his character from the series and focus putting him in other projects.
Martin talked about this on Twitter forever ago, but I wouldn't be able to find that tweet now. But here's a bit from the interview he did with KnowYourMeme back in 2021 where he talks about it:
Now this:
This is just stupid to me? Like a complete logical incongruity? I barely even know how describe what is dumb about this because I can't even fathom how anyone draws this conclusion from this information. How is it strange for a man to say 'if my wife isn't home by the time she said she was going to be, let me know, in case something happened.'????? Why would Rosemary be out cheating on her husband with her fucking daughter with her??? If Rosemary was cheating on her husband why would her whole life collapse when he went missing? If Rosemary was cheating on her husband why would she show up at the restaurant every day after he disappeared asking if anyone had seen him and hoping to find him alive??? Why would she make paintings of herself and him together after he disappeared????? What the fuck are you talking about?
Ok now this:
Whatever. This is maybe the most coherent part of the theory, to me. I definitely agree that Sha evokes a 'wolf in sheep's clothing' sort of aesthetic, but I do remember Martin saying something in a Twitter Q&A at one point about how that wasn't actually intentional, and that Bon was the character he actually meant to seem unusually predatory. I looked for a while and couldn't find a screenshot of that, but I did find this one where he says the thing about Bon:
So whatever. take that with a grain of salt.
I don't even know what to say. here. Whatever. sure she was rolling in the hay
yeah Rosemary is asking if she's still beautiful because she cheated on her husband and not because she was chopped up and stuffed inside a big animatronic sheep. I think this is correct and is the True Deep Lore.of the walten files. I'm sure this doesn't have anything to do with the recurring motif of the double-meaning behind the word Beautiful either.
I don't know why it's weird that the lost lingering spirit of a mother would be calling out to her only living child. I Don't know why that needs additional explanation involving this batshit infidelity conspiracy theory.
Sha's chest is also ripped out
So is Banny's, honestly? Just a little less?
ok now this:
I guess I can't disprove this except that I think this is dumb. I think this is a really incredibly stupid logical leap to make. Y'know I really meant to go into this levelheadedly and very calmly go through every point and talk about why I think it's Decisively Disagreeable or whatever but I can't. I really can't. I just cannot keep my patience with this sort of thing.
You'd think if there was an infidelity aspect here it would've been lampshaded in some respect, at all, in the old /sophiewalten findjackwalten page text. Where it's literally Sophie talking to Jenny about what she remembers about her family.
Especially if the idea is that Sophie is meant to have been there. You'd think something like that would have come up here. Not 'she was nice and a good mom until my dad disappeared and her mental health started getting worse'
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it'd absolutely make my day too some makokuu from you (i loved that illustration of them im insane about them)
what about some domestic makokuu 👀 them spending time together at home :3 no pressure ofc
Help I know I asked for saiki k requests TWO months ago and I had a really fun idea for an illustration, but my brain is a smooth cube. so that idea stays up in the air.
For now take a really quick silly crack doodle about one of the many possibilities I think Kusuke/Makoto telling Saiki/Teruhashi would go. Spoiler alert: it’s hilariously horrible.
(Saiki thinks they’re messing with them and Teruhashi is seething. Are they pranking them? Who knows.)
And ya know what? Beneath the cut take my redesigns of these guys and my notes for them because I made several months ago ‘cause I haven’t touched them since :(
Warning: I talk a lot.
A quick note! These designs aren’t meant to say ‘fix’ the original-they’re just for fun! Even if I think elements of mine look better, clearly the original works and are well loved. Also I’m not especially fond of these anyways JAJSJANW
Saiki doesn’t change much other than his palette is a more balanced. Also I really like designing hair, and wanted the idea that Saiki really tries to sleek it down to something very generic and unassuming, but the hairpins get stuck in the way and his hair sorta moves outwards from there. Continuing the idea that his powers make him subtly less normal. It also accidentally made him look A LOT more like his parents, oops.
Also I drew a comparison from his canon hair to his redesign, because I didn’t think it was particularly clear until side by side.
Also I actually gave this one a proper illustration lol.
Teruhashi’s design was actually partly inspired by @lu-kario’s human mlp designs because they’re really good :^ She’s also pretty standard except her hair and color (which I’m not too satisfied with.)
I like the idea of the Teruhashi Siblings being a bit supernatural, so along with weird shine effects, they also get constant wind effects! Like in all the anime where they have flowing hair at just the right times even though it wasn’t windy at all before? Yeah! Except that’s more Makoto’s thing while the shine stays Kokomi’s.
Also what ethnicity are these characters now? To me they’re still Japanese, but I think people don’t ever use a range of skin tones for the same ethnicity. But really these are just fun designs I didn’t really think too hard.
Kusuke! He was the first one I did and an absolute PAIN. He was also the reason I did this, because as much as I love Saiki K and respect the author, I just got to know what is going on with his debut clothes.
Well not like I did that much better… Kusuke is stuck with four alt palettes because I can’t decide which shade of weird yellow and purple to make his head and gown (I’ve resolved to draw his hair a different shade of yellow in every drawing.) His eyes also match Saiki with purple eyes, because I think they look better lmao.
Also, that’s his Cambridge gown he’s wearing. And fun fact-they have a great amount of rules on what color does gowns get an accent of based off what subject people are taking! I decided to not think too hard on that and just gave him a better looking gown.
And I really like the hair I gave him, the original to me just lacks a bit of anime shape style. Also his headgear is shaped like a graduation hat now lol.
He also has a silly little doodle for what he’d look like with his lab coat. It’s not here, but I like to think he always puts a ponytail up!
Last and also least xp, Makoto! He’s uhh about the same with the points I said with Teruhashi. Just very angular now. I swear I tried to design a better fashion for Makoto but I just ended up with the same.
I tried to style his hair how Japanese celebrities would, but I don’t know if I succeeded. His hair as I said is constantly blowing to the left lol. Also he has a hair clip now! In my head Kusuke gives him a telepathy canceller disguised as a hairclip.
Also anyone can draw or get inspired by these designs if you wanted lol Though I don’t really like these, I still use these hairstyle for drawing them cause I think they look cool lol.
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