Japanese Stage 0: Choosing a Path

Hello everyone,

This blog is a way for me to document my progress following the Mass Immersion Approach by Matt vs Japan in order to become fluent in multiple languages.

(Disclaimer: Any links found in this blog are not affiliated or sponsored in any way. I am including links so that you can check out my sources for yourself. Any opinions found in this blog may not be reflected by the sources I link to.)

Choosing a Path: 

Beginning MIA, we find ourselves at the table of contents. 

There are five stages of MIA, some tools, and some extras to look at here. 

At the time of writing this, Stages 2-5 have no content. So that means within the designated paths any references to reading articles past Stage 1 have no purpose yet. Hopefully before I move on to Stage 2 Matt will update with some new content. Otherwise, I am supporting him on Patreon, so I have access to his videos and can glean any necessary information from there. 

Hopping into Stage 0, there is an overview for a Balanced Path and a Perfectionist Path for learning languages and an article on Customization and Adaptation.  

Reading through Customization and Adaptation, it seems like the goal of the Perfectionist Path is to get to a native language like level by focusing on listening first, rather than relying on reading ability. The Balanced Path focuses on total progress equally. 

Balanced Path vs. Perfectionist Path: 

Here is a spreadsheet I've made to try and compare the two paths at the different stages. 

Some of these terms may be hard to understand for new users, and I'm not sure how a lot of this is done. From what I know about these methods, I want to blend the paths a bit and see what I can come up with. This way I won't be going hard core perfectionist, but still leaning a bit towards perfectionist.
This may change for different languages, since so far quite a few of these only apply to Japanese and sometimes Chinese.


My Path:

For my path, I've blended the perfectionist and balanced approaches to a mix that makes sense to me. I tried to keep the integrity of both by having both audio and text cards in the first two stages and mediating the time frame.

So this is the path I will be attempting to follow for my MIA journey. If I ever move on to other languages, this will probably look a little bit different.



What's Next?
Upcoming will be the things that I'm doing to get ready to start with Stage 1. I'm hoping by putting this part out there others may not feel as lost when just starting out. I'll be combing through Matt's videos, the Patreon discord and videos (without revealing anything that should be paid for content), and setting things up to begin my journey.