This week, I have the opportunity to be immersed with a family whose native tongue is Swedish. Quite honestly, I'm more interested in learning Japanese, ASL, or even Japanese and I haven't been studying the language too much, but I'm learning a little bit with every conversation that I hear. I find myself able to pick out the words I've already learned, I can form better accent (that I can hear if I'm saying, for example, the vowel wrong - which I had trouble with) and figure out what is being said through context. (Just now, I jumped into a conversation to explain whether or not hackey-sack -sp?- is a popular sport in certain parts in America).
I would count the above as pros. For cons: Without instruction or knowing any of the vocabulary, I doubt that immersion would have helped me at all. I also have a major headache that won't go away from trying to process all this new information and I'm not exactly able to enjoy the sites.
I'd really like to hear what everyone else thinks about learning through immersion and, also, what their own study tactics might be for learning a language.