As a beginner, it's hard to understand anything—so instead, play the Noticing Game! Focus on spotting full words, interesting sounds, or repeated phrases.⏎⏎Then, confirm what you noticed. Look up words, explore sounds, and build on your observations. This deepens your knowledge—and soon, you'll start understanding more.
Parent Skills:
As a beginner, it's hard to understand anything—so instead, play the Noticing Game! Focus on spotting full words, interesting sounds, or repeated phrases.⏎⏎Then, confirm what you noticed. Look up words, explore sounds, and build on your observations. This deepens your knowledge—and soon, you'll start understanding more.
Train yourself to do interactive immersion
Solidify things you learn from priming
Expand your knowledge
More fun than not understanding
The Noticing Game with Confirmation is a technique you can use as a beginner (or intermediate) when you aren't able to understand content in the target language. Instead of trying to understand the content, as you would do in a language you're good at, you're just trying to notice things, then guess what it is, and check your work. This simple form of interactive immersion helps you stay focused on the content and learn from it, rather than getting bored or frustrated.
The Noticing Game with Confirmation is the first kind of interactive immersion you can do. It's incredibly helpful for helping you train your brain to do this kind of immersion and start to solidify and expand your understanding of the target language.
Interactive immersion can be tough! Which is part of the reason we recommend this as most people's first kind of interactive immersion. But if you try it and feel like it's pretty difficult, that probably means you're doing it right! It's a brain workout. This means that you shouldn't try to do it when you're exhausted.
To "play" the Noticing Game with Confirmation, you start just like the regular Noticing Game... by looking out for and noticing things! It can be anything, but looking out for words you think are familiar is the easiest way to do it. Other things to notice might be sounds you've learned during Ear Training or a grammar pattern you say during Grammar Study.
Once you see something, try to remember what it means or what it does in the language. If you need to pause for this, go ahead. Once you have a guess, check by using your confirmation method! If it's a word, look it up. Were you close?
Being correct doesn't matter yet. All you're trying to do is notice things, then figure out what that thing you noticed is.
The only thing you need (besides some content to immerse in) is some way to do confirmations. The easiest tool would be a dictionary of some kind. But you can use whatever. Dictionary, website, AI Chatbot... You may also find it helpful to have a list of recent words you've learned so that you can have something specific to look for, but that's optional.
When you feel like you've got the Noticing Game with Confirmation down, try moving on to Interactive Reading with Audio! It's a slightly more in depth version of this, which will really help you make progress.