If you’ve ever studied a foreign language and suddenly surprised yourself by knowing or saying a word that you didn’t know you knew (!), then, you’ve just proved that ?immersion’ as a technique to learn a second or foreign language, works. I found myself doing just that when I was studying French. There I was, having a rather stilted, but very enthusiastic conversation with mon amie, when suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I found myself answering her “je ne sais pas,” with “non, moi non plus.” I didn’t actively learn it – I’m sure my teacher never taught it to me, or wrote it on the board, or got us to repeat it – but my clever old brain had somehow picked up the fact, maybe from listening to other people or reading it somewhere, that “moi non plus” means, “I scholarships for high school students don’t know either!” Magnifique!And that’s pretty much the basic idea of the ?immersion technique.’ By surrounding yourself in a language, and even without actively setting out to learn it, your brain picks things up, stores them without you even realising it, and then, suddenly, just when you need it, out it pops. In fact, as I’ve often told my students who are glued to their electronic dictionaries, if you think back to your first words when you were developing your language in your mother tongue, no one gave you a bilingual ?Japanese/Baby talk’ dictionary. Children learn by what they hear, read and see. They absorb words like sponges and then use their stored knowledge to communicate. So why should it be any different for an adult learning a second language.