Complete Immersion-Where Even To Start?

[QuackingShoe]

Did you just say you don't believe input could lead to output, but then give a real life personal example of how input has lead directly to output?

[wccrawford]

Maybe I'm biased, but I can't imagine learning a language without drills.

But I seem to have no problem with verbs that I've picked up from JapanesePod dialogues or Japanese programing.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. You start off saying that extra input isn't enough and drills are necessary, then go on to say that you learn a lot better from that extra input than from the drills.

Personally, I have learned a fair amount from watching anime over the years, but that's nothing compared to what I have learned from 'drills' that are done correctly. That means learning the Kanji (from a game like Heisig's RTK) and then vocabulary (iKnow, My JP Coach DS, LiveMocha). I'm at about 1350 kanji and 200-300 vocab.

I'm comparing my Japanese progress against my Spanish progress from Highschool, which is a little unfair since HS students aren't motivated to learn and the class has to go slow enough for everyone. But my JP progress is going way, way faster than my Spanish ever did, and I spend about the same amount of time per day or less.

I expect my learning methods to change once I have enough vocab to start understanding manga without constant use of a dictionary. In fact, I've already learned words (and kanji!) from manga as it is. Once I've enough to start learning words from context, it's going to explode.

One last disclaimer: I watched anime for about a decade before I started to learn Japanese, so I had a -lot- of input and even consciously knew about 25 words before I started learning seriously. I knew enough that I was sometimes able to predict what they were going to say based on the subtitles in anime that I had never seen before, but only in short answers like 'of course!'

[johnpa]

You seem to be contradicting yourself. You start off saying that extra input isn't enough and drills are necessary, then go on to say that you learn a lot better from that extra input than from the drills.

I guess I wouldn't consider Journaling a drill.
For me "drills" are something like, "Here's ten verbs... Here's ten situations... Make ten sentences describing the situations using the passive verb conjugation."
I was actually trying to make a point about "forced output", but I guess I wasn't clear enough.

[percent20]

ok Dumb person moment, but what is an SRS and what does it do? googling the initials didn't help so well.

[Psy]

"spaced repetition system" if I'm not much mistaken. This generally refers to software which gradually increases the interval between reviews of given material, in accordance with studies of human memory. This allows you to study things more efficiently. Anki is probably the best freeware example of this.

[dakoina]

I might have said some things before, but I've started studying Japanese about 2/3 weeks ago. Currently I'm not that far as I would've hoped, but that's mainly because I'm trying to find a good way to study and that I'm meanwhile looking for more resources, learning the Kana first with flashcards and getting more info on SRS, Anki etc...

I think it's a good thing to have multiple resources, but it's difficult sometimes to give the right amount of priority to one or another resource. For example, I'm using the newbie lessons in parallel with a genki book and the heisig RtK1 book. First I gave a lot of attention to the Jpod lessons, after that it was more Heisig, now it's actually the Genki book. But, than again it's a good thing to see lot's of info reappear in just a slightly different way. Recognizing and remembering Japanese became easier for me like this. (it's actually just the basic learning rule: exposure).

For the more difficult words that I encounter, there's (for me) nothing better to drill them using a combination of Anki and writing them down.

I also got some "Word Cards (Tango kaado)" (a little ringed notebook like thing) which I'll use to write down some difficult to remember vocab, kanji's etcetera to use whenever I'm on the toilet or so