A photo I took in Taipei at the historic area 榕錦時光.
Immersion is increasingly recognised as an important part of a healthy language-learning diet, especially at the start. Immersion is a fancy word for getting more exposure to your target language (TL). In my experience, this trains your brain to parse the language better and helps you practice what you’ve learned recently. When your comprehension is good enough, you start picking up new words and grammar structures from immersion without conscious effort.
There are lots of things you can immerse with: social media content, movies, games, comics, and so on. Of course, the most famous and effective immersion method is living in a country where your TL is one of the primary languages.
Aside from providing an enormous amount of motivation and free resources for your language learning, living in a TL-speaking country has another advantage: it’s live. You can’t hit pause to read the ads you see from the train window, you can’t rewind to listen to what your conversation partner said again1, et cetera. This live aspect of immersion can also be achieved via other, easily accessible sources: TV, radio, and livestreams.
But why? What makes live content better?
You can’t pause and look things up
Once you pause, there is a risk you will get distracted and not press play again. The cardinal sin of immersion is to not be immersing.
Also, the more words you look up, the less of them you will learn. Live content forces you to listen for the most important words in a conversation, fix them in your memory, and note them down or quickly look them up as appropriate. It also teaches you to practice comprehension with incomplete understanding, a crucial skill in language learning.
You can’t save it for later
There is no need to conserve that precious immersion content for the perfect moment, because there will always be more. You might not be in the best form for learning today. You might not understand everything… you might not understand anything! But as the meme goes, the time will pass anyway, and the content will still be streamed, so why not put it on? This will reduce friction around immersing and thus help prevent you from committing that cardinal sin.
You don’t need to search for more
Live content is either endless (radio, TV) or lasts for several hours (livestreams). With shorter formats such as videos or music, you either have to continually seek out new content or keep an eye on the autoplay to ensure you still like what you’re getting2. This takes up energy and reduces the chance that you’ll immerse when tired.
On a related note, your energy won’t be wasted on making improvements to your immersion either. For example, if there is a really boring section in a livestream, there is no way to skip ahead or even to know when it will end. You’re powerless. All you can do is relax and let it keep playing.
It simulates real situations
Again, almost any real-world usage of your target language will be live. You cannot hit pause on someone speaking to you or a conversation you are part of. You either keep up, or get lost and miss out. (There is a third option, asking the correct questions in order to keep up. This is an important skill but not one which can be practiced via immersion.) Live content trains you to deal with the speed of keeping up, and with recovery when you get lost - the ability to move on from whatever you missed and focus on jumping back in to the current topic.
Downsides
Not being able to pause is a tradeoff. Sometimes you simply won’t be able to look up the word you heard or you won’t be able to find that song before it stops playing. It can be harder to keep going when you don’t get a win in return for your efforts.
There will rarely be subtitles on anything, which can both make lookups harder and mean that you won’t practice or pick up new written words (this may be less or more of a problem depending on your TL’s writing system).
In general, I can’t think of any truly live written content which can be used for immersion, aside from the writing you see when walking around in a TL-speaking country. Social media and news both have the ‘unlimited’ feeling, but it requires self-discipline to avoid going through them slowly and thoroughly.