Overview of Guided Immersion

You didn’t learn your own native language by memorizing grammar and vocabulary; you learned it by being “immersed” in “native input”: genuine language generated by native speakers of that language. And you primarily mastered your native language by extensive reading, which exposed you to far more advanced words and complicated grammatical constructions than you would typically hear in the spoken language.

But being immersed in language as a child, your language learning was “inefficient”. To begin with, the vast majority of what you heard was incomprehensible and didn’t help you at all. Then as you learned, the most common words / phrases / interactions were so well known to you that they didn’t help you to learn anything new. You only learn things on the boundary – things easy enough to be within your capability, but hard enough to require some effort to learn. And one of the rules of thumb for continuing study in a foreign language is to try to read or listen to things where you already know 95% of the words.

If you’ve ever used a course to learn a different language, like Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone, this is basically what they do: the courses have been carefully crafted to gently introduce you to new material, and integrate review, such that at any given time you understand most of what you’re hearing / reading; and review is integrated into the course so that you don’t need to worry about it.

But these systems all come to an end, long before you’re fluent in the language; at which point you’re all on your own, trying to find material that’s at the right level among a sea of material that’s either too easy or too hard. Your main options for review are flashcards, which take a lot of time to create, and are difficult to make effective.

So what if rather than having a human carefully craft something, you could have a computer algorithm, that knew what words you knew and didn’t know, and could do both the “gently introducing new material” and the “review” aspect automatically, in a way that didn’t end, but took you all the way through to fluency?

That’s what I’m trying to do with Guided Immersion: to have you learn Biblical Greek by reading actual Bible verses, and have the system gently introduce new vocab / grammar and review, so that you’re always reading in the right zone for learning, all the way through to fluency.

Ready to give it a try? Sign up for our free beta!