[T-989] Our immmersion conversation from today

Dear Rine,

To make it easier to keep me accountable, I’ll share my portion of the conversation we had earlier today (wasn’t sure if you were cool with me sharing your lines publicly so I omitted them)

Henry’s comments from the other day actually made me reconsider my approach. Or, to say it better, you nudged me to slightly adjust my views on fun vs comprehensible content, this will show in my approach for the next few weeks.

Then you asked if I planned to go as easy as possible. To which I said:

[5:42 PM] supersrdjan: I’m not sure but I want to experiment. I get that, in theory, that would be ideal. That video Henry shared says that you should find material that’s 95% comprehensible. But outside some ideal lab conditions, that’s hard to come by in these early stages. First, you have to have a large volume of the stuff. And second, it has to be fun, or in Krashen vocab “pleasurable.” At low levels of comprehension it’s hard to find the intersection between the two.

But… I figured, I’d seek materials as simple as possible that are still above the boredom threshold. [5:44 PM] supersrdjan: The main thing I’ll correct after Henry’s input is that I intend to be more active in seeking comprehensible materials vs being guided just by what I find entertaining [5:47 PM] supersrdjan: For example, I listened to the same 20 minute audio from an episode of this TV show I watched before with subtitles… and after about a week I exhausted everything I can learn from it.

At first, I’d catch something new each time I listened. Words I already knew (in the SRS sense of knowing) but that I still simply didn’t register on the previous passes.

But now I can no longer hear new words…

And the comprehension level overall is quite low… maybe 20% if I could throw out a rough ballpark estimate

[5:48 PM] supersrdjan: For the sake of completion I just wanted to watch the same episode again, with Japanese subtitles, and make some cards. But afterward I intend to move on to simpler sources of input.

[5:50 PM] supersrdjan: But I like the idea of listening to audio from video sources… after you saw the video. The visuals increase comprehension, and the big picture of the overall plot remains.. .. so on subsequent listens you have extra context to make out parts of dialogue

What I planned/did today

What I plan for tomorrow

Obstacles