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I think there's a big myth which I prescribed to back when I was a monolingual English speaker that somehow being "immersed" in a culture is how you become fluent. But my experience has always been that if you can't understand what anyone's saying, and are unable to say anything yourself, you just become mute and introverted.

I have no experience with Japanese, but the (in?)famous youtuber MattVsJapan detailed a time when he went to Japan without a base of knowledge and just went back home after every day to watch anime at home, then only really learned how to speak Japanese back in America afterwards. I had a similar experience in Germany — the first few years the only people I really spoke with were other expats and Germans in English.

The only real thing I think being immersed gives you is motivation to learn. But after you're able to order in a restaurant and read basic signs, that motivation disappears pretty fast as you're sort of about to just fumble through everything.

On the other hand, people speaking English has seemingly increased massively worldwide, despite the fact that in some countries it would be rare to even encounter an English speaking native. Notably, imo, the countries that are better at it tend to subtitle movies and TV rather than dub. Compare the Nordic countries with Germans, the Greeks vs the French, Koreans vs the Japanese.

It seems pretty clear to me (and I am by no means alone with this assertion) that the main way people learn is through exposure to the language, which is completely different than actually living in a place where you're "immersed".

So if you really wanted to learn a language, the best thing you could do is as soon as you're able to (before, even) watch TV/films and read books in that target language. I think this book is an excellent explanation https://www.tesl-ej.org/books/lomb-2nd-Ed.pdf for German, I started really learning it only after listening to Deutsche Welle learning German radio shows and TV. The modern equivalent is this online TV show for beginners https://learngerman.dw.com/en/hallo/l-37250531 which is great. I learned more in a few episodes like this than I did with two years of formal teaching at school.

Sorry for sort of hijacking your comment, it just caused me to fall down a rabbit hole somewhat :)

Nice question :) A good textbook should go over the sounds in the language comparing them to something in the target audience's language. This isn't foolproof (a language YouTuber (Language Jones, I think?) was talking about trying to learn an African language, but the author expected reader to speak South African English where vowels differ from, for instance, US English), but it generally works pretty well. These days, wikipedia is also typically a great resource for reading about sounds in the language. Further, nowadays, you can toss stuff in Google Translate and have it speak. Finally, consume media from that country. When I was learning German, DeutscheWelle had a German-learning mp3 series. Also streaming radio in those days (no Youtube or anything yet).

Edit: and for output, the time-tested technique of shadowing is great. Record yourself if you can because your ears might do better picking up any mistakes when not speaking at the same time.