I was definitely immersed - with my own apartment, and later a Spanish wife, baby, etc. - but I was also there on tech business, so there were plenty of people around with great English skills. I understand your point, and will agree that immersion is better than not, but my point is simply that there's no magical transformation just by living in another country.

My tutor definitely spoke Spanish to me, but the first several months was all in English. I hate the teaching method where a teacher just yammers away in the target language, as if (again) by magic and special miming gestures, the students will 'pick it up.' Bleh. Nieves gave me a review of concepts in English first, then we practiced speaking. I can't imagine learning any other way - but that's probably why she taught me that way. That's the benefit of a private tutor.

I can second what you are saying. Currently living in Switzerland and trying to learn the same way is nearly impossible. I learned better on my own for the years prior to coming here from the states. Every class I have taken, the teachers are just instantly speaking from German without zero explanation in your mother tongue. It truly is a waste, im here on tech business as well and basically all of my colleagues speak english as its the internal speaking language for businesses around Zurich. What has helped me slightly, is memorizing german songs, and translating them via google translate, to me the speaking it and hearing it doesnt help nearly as much as memorizing vocabulary, which is what I focus on now.

>My tutor definitely spoke Spanish to me, but the first several months was all in English. I hate the teaching method where a teacher just yammers away in the target language, as if (again) by magic and special miming gestures, the students will 'pick it up.' Bleh.

This is usually the difference between a trained teacher and someone who's teaching to earn a bit of money. When English speakers go and teach English abroad, it's normally to give already-fluent people conversation practice. They don't have the training to be able to teach beginners effectively.

It is remarkably difficult to drop your language to a beginner's level. You need to remember exactly which tenses the students know (which may just be the simple present) and their extremely limited vocabulary.

The best lessons I had were where the difficult concepts were explained in English, but the majority of the lesson was in Spanish. I think a lot of teachers view dropping to English as cheating or breaking immersion, so they don't do it.

I've known people who intentionally moved to a place where people only spoke the local language (and perhaps a few word of English) and they sent their children to a local school. It was incredible to see how effective immersion can be when there's no escape hatch. Of course usually it's difficult to pull off, considering how many locals speak English and how many non-locals tend to be around.