At this point, you have prepared a collection of flashcards which you can practice for 15-45 minutes a day during ā€˜dead timeā€™.

Now you are going to dedicate all of your active and passive study time to immersing yourself in the language: listening, reading, speaking and writing the target language.

As you go through your first immersion cycle in A1, we will explain each of the activities into more detail. However, the process remains exactly the same in higher levels, just with more challenging content.

Immersion may be overwhelming at first, as you understand virtually nothing and donā€™t know how to say anything. This is ok, as your brain unconsciously picks up a lot. It also allows you to focus on the message rather than the words* (context, body language and hand gestures can all help to understand the message). This trains your brain to directly translate the target language to images, rather than first translating to your native language.

References

Note: some methods strictly following Stephen Krashenā€™s input hypothesis recommend getting a good level in comprehension (listening + reading) first before doing any production (speaking + writing). On the other hand, production enables interaction with natives, which is a lot of fun and hugely motivating. Polyglots like Scott Young and Chris Lonsdale recommend speaking from day one. If you want to do only comprehension first you can do that with this template, by just skipping the speaking + writing steps and doing them at a later stage.

šŸ‘Øā€šŸ«Listen + Read: Immerse

šŸ‘Øā€šŸ«Speak + Write: Interact!