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You, mi amigo, are not a native Hispanic and will not learn like one. Why then do so many people buy into this method called immersion, that basically says, learn like the natives?

Let's find out what immersion is and why it is not the best language teaching methodology as is promoted by many schools throughout the United States and Latin America. Please understand that I will critique only a method, not a school. Please put on your thinking cap and I believe you will understand this issue clearly by the time you finish reading this chapter.

When people are immersed in a language they are put under water (everything is in Spanish and you leave your English at home) and most people drown!

You have probably heard things like:

• The best way to learn is like a child.
• You should learn like the natives.
• Try to think in Spanish.

Ask yourself a few important questions.

• Are you a child?
• Are you a native?.
• Do you think in Spanish?

If your answers to these questions were yes, yes, yes, you should go to a school that teaches using the immersion methodology. If they were no, no, no, keep reading. I think you just might find the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Before we move on, allow me to clarify something. Sometimes when people refer to immersion, they mean intensive. Here I am talking about immersion as a Spanish teaching methodology, not an intensive language learning program.

I frequently ask people to consider how long it takes a native or a child to learn his or her native language. They say, two to three years. I then say, if that is what you want, then choose an immersion approach because that is how long it will take you to learn well. Also, if you think about it, that is total immersion — you know, living there in the environment. Think about how long it will take if you just go to an immersion method class for four to six hours a week in the United States!

Let's dig deep here and analyze this scenario!

How old are you? Take your age and subtract two years.

That is the number of years you have been thinking in English if you are a native English speaker. For the sake of argument, let's say that Jane is 35 years old. For the first two years of her life her thought process was very image based. If she saw a pen she picked it up, stuck it in her mouth and tried to discover what its purpose was.

At about two, Jane began learning to call these images by name. Pretty soon she became more and more word based. In other words, Jane would see a pen, and simply say the word pen and that was it. She didn't stick it in her mouth anymore, in fact, if someone dropped a pen on a table she didn't even think, Why did that person drop that thing to write with on the table? No, she thought, Why did that person drop that pen on the table?

Adults are word based, not image based.

When we talk about traffic we do not see little BMW's, Fords or Hondas flashing through our heads. The reason for this is that it is easier to manage large bodies of information concretely rather than abstractly.

Which is faster to download on your computer, a graphics file or a text file? Text is always faster to process than graphics! The same is true for the human brain.

Back to Jane. For 33 years now, minus two years for when she was a baby, she has been thinking in English words.

Every thought she has ever had has taken her directly to what type of words? That is right, English words. Thirty-three years of established thought process in English.

Here is an important question: Is it possible for Jane to superimpose over thirty-three years of thought process in English so that in three months, six months or even a year she will be thinking in Spanish?

Of course not! It takes the average person three to five years living in a Spanish-speaking environment for this to happen. And this only if she already has a pretty good mastery of the language at the beginning.

Here I am speaking about really thinking in Spanish. I do not mean reaction phrases like Buenos Días, ¿Cómo está?, etc. I mean really thinking in Spanish. The totality of the language. This simply does not happen magically, and unfortunately, a lot of people buy into this myth of thinking in Spanish.

Many teachers will point at objects in a room or on paper, thereby creating the mental imagery and then giving you the word in Spanish. Many courses do the same, giving you the visual with no English equivalent. As you now know, adults are not image based in their thinking and this is not effective teaching.

You need the English equivalent and then a great memory system so both vocabulary and structure are completely cemented in your being. This way, you can quickly and lucidly use your Spanish. Learning is very much about proper input and programming of information.

The immersion approach presupposes you will think in Spanish. Everything you learn is taught to you in Spanish. It is assumed you will somehow be able to go directly from your very engrained English thoughts to Spanish thoughts.

This simply does not happen! I have talked with countless students who have tried the immersion route and they have told me over and over that it is a very frustrating and slow learning experience. They do learn a lot of words and phrases but struggle greatly with lucidly structuring sentences and paragraphs on their own once they get out of very easy verb structures.

Sometimes people will say, the only way to learn is to go down and live with native speakers for a while. That is like saying I will become a great mechanic by hanging out at AutoZone or PepBoys for a couple of weeks. I would no doubt pick up some things, but I would not be a competent mechanic. ¡Por favor, un poco de lógica! (Please, a little bit of logic!)

I believe that an in-country immersion program is a great thing to do after you learn the language well, not before. What would you talk about in Spanish in your Spanish only class when you do not speak or understand Spanish?

Please understand that the fastest way to learn anything is to work from your strength, not your weakness. It is very difficult to learn in a vacuum. Your strength is your English, not your Spanish. Learning everything entirely in Spanish is learning in a vacumn. In other words, you are trying to learn something you do not know from the same thing you do not know.

In his classic book, The Seven Laws of Teaching, John Milton Gregory asserts that the unknown must be learned from the known. This is accepted in all valid forms of training. It is time we accept it in language training. It is faster, it is easier and it works. You do not, nor should you, learn in a vacuum. You learn best based on tangible, understood principles.

Putting it Together!

• You are not a child and you do not learn like a child.
• You are an adult with a very highly developed language infrastructure which should be used to your advantage.
• Immersion is a slow and frustrating learning method for adults.

By saying all of this, I am not saying that I advocate a grammar based approach like used in most High School's, Colleges and Universities. That is the other extreme and does not work either. Many of you will relate to this as well. You cannot learn to master an entire language getting constantly bogged down in verb tenses and conjugations. This is why I am a proponent of the pattern system of which I spoke in the previous Chapter. In fact, we do not use the words tense and conjugation in our training at Bilingual America.

I believe in dynamic, flowing processes that create automatic triggers from an English thought to the same thought in Spanish. In other words, this is not a static process. It is important that the proper types of systems are implemented so whatever you think in English automatically triggers the Spanish equivalent. Great training does this.

I can hear you thinking, Well, then I would be translating. No, No, No! I said that we properly program your Spanish so whatever you think in English immediately takes you to the same thing in Spanish. This is true whether we are talking about words or verb structures.

People who learn in immersion methods are frustrated because when they do get into a conversation their mind is not programmed to move seamlessly from what they think in English to Spanish. They feel like they are in a mental gymnastics meet trying to find the right equivalents but the language is simply not programmed correctly. They are the ones who are trying to translate but cannot because of improper programming.

The solution is simple! You need to program your Spanish correctly so you can move easily from your English thought processes to what you want to say in Spanish. If we have the privilege of working with you, we will show you how to learn so that everything clicks and you are able to put things together for yourself in any structure or time zone. It is a beautiful thing!

One last word about immersion. There is a place for it. You should be in an immersion program when you already understand and have a mastery of the Spanish language and are just looking to smooth out the language.

Unfortunately, a lot of people pay for language instruction and are really only paying for somebody to try and talk with them in Spanish. The worst part about this is that many times they are trying to talk with you in Spanish and you do not even know Spanish yet! My goodness, if you just want to talk with someone, go down to a local Hispanic market on a Saturday afternoon. It is free! Personally, I would not pay for someone to talk with. I would only pay for a cohesive, results-driven process with real objectives.

In essence, many immersion teachers become what I call, human dictionaries. A lot of time is spent simply answering the questions, ¿Cómo se dice? and ¿Qué significa? That means, How do you say? and What does that mean?

When this happens, it automatically tells you that you are being taught outside of your knowledge base. Dictionaries are very inexpensive. Good instructors in real time are not inexpensive. Becauase of this, I would suggest that your tutor or instructor be implementing conversation only based on your existing knowledge base so you get comfortable with the application of that knowledge. More on that in a later chapter.

Before closing this chapter I want to remind you that going to Costa Rica or some other country to learn Spanish is not in your best learning interest, unless you already speak Spanish relatively well. Being around people who speak Spanish is not the answer to you learning Spanish. It is not about where you are at, it is about how you are learning.

The last time we were in Costa Rica we met a young lady about 25 years old. She had been there for six months to learn Spanish. She had been in an immersion school with native teachers for three months and then traveled the beaches and countryside for the other three months. We met her the night before her departure.

Guess what? We have students at Bilingual America who have never set foot out of the United States who speak much better Spanish after finishing our Basic Level than she did after living in Costa Rica for six months!

Please click on Chapter VI, The Four Secrets to Long-term Retention, in the left-hand navigation to continue.