Your comparison between language immersion and writing a large program all at once is invalid, since you get real-time feedback during the language immersion. You don't spend the whole class trying to pronounce words on your own and then get a list of everything you did wrong at the end.

You are only partially correct, in my view. While I may get real-time feedback, I may have absolutely no idea what to make of that feedback. I remember on my first visit to the Netherlands. My friend Wim Bloemen took me to a family gathering... I was the only one in a room of maybe 20 Dutch family members who had no clue what the others were chattering about (except, by some ESP, I always knew when they were talking about me). It was a fascinating experience as, for once, I was a lingual minority. In such situations, the real-time feedback becomes just like a Perl golf regular expression... a bunch of line noise.

In any case, my point was -- am I making myself prone to commiting errors because I am always depending upon the perl -w switch to complain. Its like constantly depending on the calculator and hence, losing the ability to compute basic math quickly in one's head.