How Do You Know If You Are Making Progress In Your Language With Immersion?

Learning a language through immersion is a very long and slow process and it can often feel like nothing is happening and that you are not “learning” anything.

You can sit there every day for months and see no progress, which is of course quite worrying, you are going to start questioning if you are wasting your time or if it is actually working.

The reality is that it can be hard to see the progress with immersion as it can slowly creep up, but I will go through some ways that you can look at yourself and start to notice the progress you are making.  

You Have To Trust The Process Of Immersion

The first think you need to remember is that the process works and you just need to trust it. So long as you are putting in the effort and being consistent with it, you will see progress.

You are going to spend a long time feeling kind of lost and just generally unsure of yourself. This is totally normal and so long as you are trying to understand things and getting enough exposure, this feeling will fade.

Most people want results immediately and it doesn’t feel natural to dedicate months to something where you don’t really see any progress.

Just trust the progress. It has worked for everyone else, so there is no reason why it will not work for you.

(You can read more about – How Does Language Immersion Actually Work?)

Go Back Over Old Material To See How Much You’ve Improved

A very quick and simple way to see if you are making progress is to go and watch some videos you watched in the beginning of your immersion.

You probably watched some videos in the first couple of days and understood very little of what you where watching … but what about now? Hopefully you can re-watch these and they seem a little easier.

You hopefully you do not need to look up every word or think they are speaking too fast. You still may not understand it perfectly, but you should feel it does make a little more sense.

Of course make sure you actually give it enough time to do this. If you only started a month ago, these videos may seem just as hard, but give yourself a good 6 months before you start looking back and hopefully by that point you should be able to spot that you have made some progress.

Sometimes the progress may be subtle, but that still proof that it is working, so allow that to motivate you and push you to keep doing more of the same as it will keep improving.

Look At How Many Flashcards Have You Learned?

Hopefully you are pairing your immersion with flashcards as this can be a very objective way to check your progress, all you have to do is to just look at how many flashcards you have learned to see your progress.

If you have done 1000 flashcards …this is progress. Of course you still don’t know everything and you may feel totally lost when you are watching something, but there are 1000 words that you will recognise in this new language.

All you have to do is keep building on this and eventually you will pretty much understand every word.

You have to remember that daily speech only uses a small amount of the language, so you can understand quite a lot, while also still also not knowing everything. Just keep adding to your flashcards and you will reach this point.    

(You can read more about – Are Flashcards Effective When Learning A Language?)

You Will Notice That You Can Hear Everything

When I say “hear”, I don’t mean understand …I mean that you can actually just hear all the words.

When you start a new language everything will be fast and blur into one long mess and it can be hard to pick out individual sounds and words. As you progress, you will actually start to pick out all these sounds and hear the full words a lot easier.

Just take a second to see if you can hear things a little easier. If you have been doing a lot of immersion your ears will be more comfortable with hearing the language and this is a sign of progress.

The great thing about immersion is that you are listening to the speech at full speed. Once you get comfortable with this level of speed, it doesn’t go any faster! This means you don’t have to worry about that and can instead focus more on the understanding of the words.

Do You Feel Like You Can Follow Along With your Immersion Material?

Spotting your progress can be kind of subjective at times, but you have to ask yourself if you think you are able to follow along with what you are watching.

This can be a very weird experience, and you might not even realise it has happened.

I remember I was watching a video and when it got to the end it suddenly hit me that I had pretty much followed along with everything I had just been watching. I said to myself “I just understood that whole video”.

I didn’t know all the words, it was still hazy and I certainly couldn’t explain what was exactly said …but I also kind of knew what the video was talking about the whole way through. I was able to follow along and I was able to get the just of what I was watching.

I had just watched a 10 minute video in French and I was able to walk away with a weird sense that I had understood it.

This is what progress from immersion can feel like. You have to see it like you are stood in fog, the more you immerse, the more the fog starts to go away and the more you can see/understand, but it’s still not 100% clear.  

It’s hard to evaluate as it’s slow, but it does happen and you can start to notice it.

Everything Will Be Hazy For A Long Time

The problem is that this hazy feeling may be around for a very long time. Even if you understand something quite well, it may still feel a little unclear at the same time.

You may also find that you can understand one thing quite well, and then be totally lost watching the next video.

The whole process is a very bizarre feeling, but this is a sign of progress and it shows your brain is starting to make sense of things

So long as you can see some kind of progress somewhere in your studies, then you are moving in the right direction and if you keep going the haze will start to fade.

You Can Get Into A Flow State When You Are Immersing

This sign of progress can seem similar to the above, but it’s a little different. You may start to notice that you can follow along and get yourself into a sort of flow state.

The best way to describe this is for you to go and put your TV on now and just watch something in your native language. Notice how you just sit there and follow along. You don’t really think about it and you also don’t really think about anything else.

You just enter a flow state where you just pay attention and follow along and understand what you are watching.

If you can get into this state in your new language then you are making progress. Usually you have that “what is going on” feeling or you are trying to translate things and just generally make sense of everything. Your brain is really actively trying to comprehend things, which it doesn’t do in your native language.

You are also not being distracted by other thoughts outside of what you are watching, such as what you might eat for dinner, you are just 100% focused on the TV.

When you start noticing you can get it into this same state while immersing, then this is a very good sign. You are basically shutting off your conscious brain and allowing your subconscious to just absorb everything and follow along, which is exactly what you want and is a sign of progress.

You Will Notice That You Can Recall Words

Another sign of progress is just a by-product of lots of immersion. You will find that you can start to actively recall words.

Immersion is not about recalling words, but it will still happen, you are going to see some words so many times that you just start to get comfortable with them and they stick in your mind and you can easily recall them.

This is why so many people are able to pick up speaking very quickly when they move on to doing output after immersing.

Anyone who uses other methods to learn usually has to put a lot of effort into this, where as immersion just gives you the ability to recall words naturally through the mass amounts of exposure.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can spot some signs of progress in your immersion studies. They may be subtle at times, but they will be there.

Just try and think back to when you where first starting out and how you knew nothing, while you may still feel that way, it won’t be the case. You will feel a little hazy about things, and maybe you can’t explicitly explain things …but you will have a sort of understanding of things and that will only grow with time and is what progress looks like immersion.

Just keep working on it and you will get stronger and one day you will realise you understand quite a lot!

(You can read more about – Mistakes You Might Be Making When Learning A Language Through Immersion)