Discover how to speak a second language quickly and naturally by signing up for a total immersion language learning program. Students benefit from these programs that put tedious vocabulary drills on the back burner. Are you ready to get started? Despite our education system’s best intentions, classroom learning is an exercise in laboratory futility. We memorize by rote a few words, we take a few tests, and when language learning is no longer a requirement, we forget everything immediately. Although experiencing learning a language in an immersion environment is fairly common for some college students who study abroad, it’s definitely far from being the norm. Here’s why an immersion environment, even if only for a month, is absolutely instrumental.

When you learn a language in a classroom, you do so piecemeal. You memorize vocabulary words, do some conversation exercises, maybe write a few paragraphs. In an immersion environment, you have to speak the language, or else suffer isolation. After a while, you begin to lose your inhibitions and you become less afraid of making mistakes, grammatical or otherwise. And when you lose this fear, you open yourself up to authentic conversation practice, one in which you learn as you go.

There’s more than just vocabulary and grammar when we talk about learning a living language, as it is actually spoken. There’s learning the way people joke, and the types of jokes that are considered funny. There’s also idiomatic ways of speaking that aren’t necessarily considered slang. For example, in colloquial English, we may say “I’m about to head over to my friend’s house.” No English teacher would correct this construction, but it’s not something you’d learn to say in an English textbook either.