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Glossary

Immersion — the NoaLingua glossary

Immersion is spending large amounts of time with material made for native speakers, rather than with material made for learners.

The claim is that quantity of real exposure eventually outperforms carefully graded study, because real language contains the frequency distribution, the collocations and the register that textbooks smooth away.

The failure mode is passive immersion: hours of video that feel productive and teach very little, because understanding a translation is not the same cognitive act as retrieving a word. Immersion works when something forces retrieval.

In NoaLingua The design assumption throughout: watching is the input, and the saved card plus the review schedule is what turns exposure into retrieval. It is why saving a word keeps the sentence rather than just the word.