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Comment by kjerzyk | Hacker News Reader

It is a lot of time. But at some point, when you start understanding more, something as simple as watching 20 minutes of The Simpsons in language you're learning instead of English is an immersion. You listen to a podcast or a radio and when you feel like watching random YouTube videos you do it in that language. All of this adds up.

I'm currently averaging 1.5h of video/audio a day and sure, some days it feels like a lot - work is busy, I have to go to the office, gym, and all.

But I'm trying to cross the line of 'I can understand without having to focus really hard' as quickly as I can because then immersion is so much easier. TV, books, podcasts - what I do on a daily basis will all count towards my immersion.

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Watching The Simpsons is not simple. If you watch movies and shows, you are pretty far along. Podcasts and radio are even further, they are super far. You get no subtitles with these, you get no context clues from visuals. Just the sheer size of vocabulary you need and ability to parse spoken sentence. I was able to converse with Americans (have actual discussion) long before I was able to understand English in shows.

I am not native English speaker. I did learned 2 foreign languages. One of them was through very intensive program, the other one without that. It consistently seem to be that these advices are skipping the beginning and also do not conform to either my personal experience or what I observed in others.

Like, obviously you learn faster if you go in super intensive. No question about that. And your interest will fluctuate.

What I said is "But at some point, when you start understanding more, something as simple as watching 20 minutes of The Simpsons in language you're learning instead of English is an immersion. "

I don't suggest watching shows from day 1. It did take me some time to build up to being able to sit through a 20/30/40 minute TV show and actually be able to follow the story. I wouldn't recommend it to people who are just starting out though. It's best they start with very short and very simple content that's fully in their target language but is created by people who know their audience is learning.

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