What were your experiences like creating an immersion environment? Also thanks for creating the timeboxer, its a lot better than what I used before. Cheers
thanks for creating the timeboxer, its a lot better than what I used before
Thanks, I’m glad that people are actually using the timeboxer! I’m considering rebuilding it so that it can be a mobile app, but I’m swamped with other projects at the moment so that’ll have to wait. Also, apologies for taking so long to answer. Not gonna lie, I forgot that the questions form existed and just never checked.
What were your experiences like creating an immersion environment?
Creating an immersion environment for me was particulary difficult. I don’t have the luxury of switching everything to Japanese and pulling the whole AJATT approach because my job is programming and I am not at a level where I can read technical documentation in Japanese. Compound that with my other hobby of reading academic papers, I really have dug myself into a hole that I can’t get out of until my Japanese gets exponentially better. It has gotten to the point where I have a twinge of guilt when reading a book in English because I could be reading a book in Japanese instead.
Here’s what I do do though. I have both Chrome and Firefox on my computer, and I use Chrome for English and Firefox for Japanese. Every account I have logged into Firefox is in Japanese. Every bookmark is in Japanese or about Japanese. I have the luxury of having multiple computer monitors, and Firefox is always open on one of them. It’s usually opened to a dictionary entry, some blog post I’m reading, or perhaps a YouTube video. Whatever it is, that specific monitor is the Japanese monitor and it’s always staring directly at my face. I also have an old laptop that I completely wiped clean except for Firefox and Spotify so if I really wanted a 0 distraction zone I can use that instead.
Other than that, podcasts are a great help. Recently I’ve been into Let’s Talk in Japanese and こんにちは未来. I also listen to a Japanese music, watch anime without English subtitles, all the stereotypical immersion stuff. In the future I want to start incorporating read-alouds using a book and its associated audiobook since I feel like I’m getting to a point where I should probably start doing shadowing practice.
