When should you pull the trigger on full immersion? Looking for benchmarks.
I’ve been at French for about 159 days consistently. Currently sitting at:
~4,000 known words
142 hours of listening
210k words read
11,850 LingQs created
I’m using LingQ as my primary reading/vocab tool alongside French Netflix and YouTube (with French subtitles), and I’d say I’m somewhere in the A2 range, somewhat comfortable with familiar content, but still a lot of gaps with native-speed material.
My question is, is there a rough benchmark – known words, listening hours, comprehension % – where full immersion actually becomes more productive than structured input? Or is it more about a feeling of readiness?
I’ve read arguments that you should jump in early and let confusion drive acquisition, and others that say immersion before 5–6k words is just noise. Curious what people here have actually found works in practice (it does not really matter what the language is).
What was the point where immersion clicked for you?
I am thinking about literally converting everything into my target language when I have acquired 12,500 known words. (I am talking everything that I write, read, listen to and speak being in that target language outside of work and school work.)
“If you had only one hour a day for the first year, I would literally spend all 60 minutes just creating LingQs and turning words into known words until you hit 10,000. After you hit 10,000, then you want to start splitting the time…”
Steve Kaufmann generally starts gently pushing speaking around the 5,000 word mark.
Another interesting framework is ALG (Automatic Language Growth), which breaks acquisition into 10 levels of roughly 200 hours each. Many ALG-inspired learners find that full immersion starts becoming significantly more productive somewhere between 4,000–6,000 known words and several hundred hours of listening.
So there seems to be a general consensus that 5k–10k known words is a common benchmark where shifting toward heavier immersion makes more sense.
Looking at your stats, your listening hours (142h) currently seem to be your weakest area compared to your known words and reading. Increasing your daily listening time would likely help a lot as you approach those higher word counts.
It seems that my guess to basically start “full immersion" does seem to be around that 10,000 known words range.
I still have a while to go, but I know that once I get there I for sure want to be consuming everything in that language to really push myself to the next level.
From my experience, I’ve found that with Romance or Germanic languages I can follow intermediate or advanced learner podcasts and YouTube videos somewhere around 10,000 or so known words. By around 15,000 words, young adult novels are manageable. By 20,000, I’ve switched to mostly native podcasts and YouTube videos. I usually will start reading adult fiction novels around 30,000 words. At that point, I’ll also start to enjoy native movies and TV shows, though I’ve noticed this was much easier for me at 30,000 with Portuguese than it was for French, where I didn’t start enjoying the activity until closer to 40,000. This probably has more to do with the number of listening hours required than known words though.
Gonna target your question with the intention of improving listening comprehension.
Full Immersion is useful in a sense that you already have a foundation of the language in a listening context. This is the debate between passive and active listening in which this is describing prioritizing passive listening. Thoughts for this are to not think much about full immersion since you should prioritize all of your time on actively listening to the language instead of passively listening to it (Full Immersion)
Known words: 10,000 known is a good start. The easier the language, the less the number is. 10,000 was a number for hard languages that are FSI category 5 roughly. In terms of french, you can go a lot lower since it’s a category 1.
Listening: Would say at least 365 hours. A year’s worth of work.
Comprehension: As much as you can get since it’s ultimately the goal in the end.
Full Immersion provides the same benefits as passive listening in which it allows your brain to follow the speed and rhythm of the language better. Even if you don’t understand it. You hear the words more clearer. Finally, you reinforce words from listening that are already actively listened to.
Did 10,000 hours of immersion, and I honestly regret it. You don’t need to immerse heavily. You just have to actively listen with a transcript consistently everyday. Immersion is more for lazy people who do not want to directly put in the harder work needed to grant you the ability to listen with minimal effort.
If you mean native level content, I can only speak for my Spanish and more recently German journeys.
I jumped into or eased myself out of CI content and into native content at a solid intermediate level. At least for my Spanish.
For my German I began watching dubbed content from the start. Still mostly CI content, but was okay with some ambiguity at first.
So when I master CI content in a language I’ll switch to only native level content.
For both languages I “immersed” in comprehensible input content from the get go. I strategically use dubbed animes or animated shows like Avatar, and dreaming Spanish type content as a means to internalize the language while using LingQ to bridge to start immersing in native content.
Which is what I think comprehensible input material is best for.
