The goal in Stage 2B is to get to level 4 comprehension with a genre of native content. Once you achieve this level, immersing becomes much easier because you understand enough to easily stay engaged.
Members of our community report that at level 4 comprehension, their immersion becomes self-sustaining because they look forward to spending time with their TL.
Choosing Intermediate Content
Children’s content is great for beginners, but it’s not how the language is actually spoken by adults. Now that you’ve built a solid foundation for comprehension, it will be easier to watch real native content.
To maximize your comprehension, try to find content that’s relatively easy to understand.
Simple Story
Choose content with a simple story. A romantic sitcom is going to be easier to follow than a science fiction show about time travel.
Visual Context
Choose content that shows you the story instead of just telling you. A soap opera with exaggerated emotions will be easier to follow than someone giving a monologue.
Simple Language
Choose content with simpler language that’s more relevant to your everyday life. Someone telling a personal anecdote is going to be easier to follow than a political debate.
Domains
Different genres of content use different types of language. The type of language used in a fantasy TV series is different from the type of language used in a high-school drama. We refer to these different types of language as “domains”.
As you explore your interests throughout Stage 2B, you will immerse in many different domains. Some of what you learn from one domain won’t be useful for other domains. You can speed up your comprehension growth by focusing your effort on just a few domains of content.
We recommend “slice-of-life” (SoL) sitcoms as your first domain. SoL follows normal people in their daily lives. The stories are simple, they provide lots of visual context, and the language they use is relevant to everyday life.
However, this needs to be balanced against your interests and enjoyment.
Maximize Enjoyment
When choosing content, prioritize enjoyment above everything else. Find content that aligns with your interests. The more you enjoy your immersion, the more you’ll learn.
If you don’t like slice-of-life, then choose a different domain you do like. If you get bored of a domain, then switch to a different one. It’s more important to stay interested in the language than to optimize for efficiency.
Embrace Ambiguity
The best tip we can give for enjoying your immersion is to stop worrying about understanding everything. Many learners get disappointed about every little thing they don’t understand instead of celebrating the things they do understand.
Avoid getting frustrated. Understanding will come in time.
How Much Immersion
The more immersion you do, the faster you will acquire your TL. If your TL is similar to your NL, we recommend 2-3 hours per day of active immersion (intensive or free-flow). For harder languages, 5+ hours per day is ideal to make rapid progress.
This may seem like a lot of time, but remember, immersion doesn’t need to feel like work. If you convert your leisure time into your TL, you can relax with your favorite TL TV show and learn a language at the same time.
Level Up
You’re ready to move on to 2C when you have level 4 comprehension of native content that you’ve never seen before. You can use subtitles and pause on each line, but you should not do any lookups.
There’s a huge spectrum of difficulty when it comes to native content. For this test, you should choose content that’s meant for adults and it should be within a domain that you’re comfortable with.
Watch an episode that you’ve never seen before. Stop to read each subtitle line. Without doing any lookups, ask yourself:
- Can I understand most of the sentences?
- Can I understand the whole story and not get lost?
If the answer is yes, then congratulations! Move on to Stage 2C.