Japanese Progress Update - 3 Months | Refold/Immersion Learning

[@MidirAlucard]

to anyone who is at the starting line of learning Japanese like me, it seems the first 1-2 months of learning for most people isn't really immersing by listening or reading. most of the immersion in this early timeframe will be spent doing anki cards and passive listening. it probably does not hurt to jump right into sentence mining, but it seems much more painful without having a few hundred anki cards banked away. I've seen some videos where they say they jumped straight into watching raws or JP subbed content, but i find this hard to believe as they wont have any foundation to really comprehend anything. i think most of these claims are more rooted in passive listening where they probably just didnt understand anything at all. at best you will get a good feel for how japanese sounds at least. I guess i was feeling discouraged trying to immerse in content with raws or JP subs, but I noticed that even learning just like a new 50 words makes the immersion process more bearable. the ambiguity of immersion does and will fade very slowly as long as you keep building the vocab with anki. I'm in my first month of real immersion (not doing duolingo or genki anymore). perhaps ill come back and update this comment in a bit. anyway if you are like me, don't feel discouraged. having the listening or reading make zero sense is normal at the early stages. just focus on building the vocab and eventually it will get easier.

[@ToadisBest]

after 2 months, hows the progress?

[@MidirAlucard]

@@ToadisBest 2 month update: i know around 1000 japanese words. I have consistently studied vocab every single day, but because I'm in my final year of engineering, i have not been practicing active listening. the times i do sit down and listen to Japanese, there are some sentences where i pick out 60% of the words, and am able to fill in the rest. other times i can only pick out 10% and am completely lost. i will say this, now that i have a much broader learned listening vocab, even without doing grammatical study, i can stumble my way through content like vtubers and anime with maybe 30-40% comprehension. if i didn't have the vocab base i do currently, i would not be able to fill in any of the gaps. so for anyone just starting out, don't worry about how well you are comprehending. it takes TIME, and after a few months i can say it feels very cool and rewarding to pick out words in a sentence and fill in the rest. look forward to it! i still recommend a base of a few hundred words before active listening.

[@blix7727]

I got recommended this on my alt that I mainly use for just 日本語 videos and I gotta say this video is really well done and communicates your personal experience quite well. It's also refreshing to hear about burning out and getting back into the language as a 2 year learner who has crashed and burned with Japanese before. Keep up the great work ありがとうございます!!

[@b-san948]

you made a channel just for japanese content? that sounds like a really good idea, how was your experience??

[@blix7727]

@@b-san948 its kind of hard to keep it strictly Japanese because I kept forgetting to switch channels but I found it easy to be able to collect Japanese language videos.

[@somedude6351]

To anyone reading this. What I would recommend to watch is a show you've already watched before (with english subs/in dub) because having that context and knowing what they talk about makes your brain fill in the gap way more when you then rewatch it without any subs. If you know they're talking about a fish and how much they think it looks cute or something and you know 60% of the words in that scene your will brain will fill in the rest since you know what it's supposed to be about

[@spaghettiking653]

Ahh you read mataona too! That one's a certified canonical classic in the Japanese learning circles, I read it just this week as well. Light novels (and just novels in general) are supreme, I'm convinced they're the best thing for learning so it's great to hear you're planning on reading more! Good luck brother, I'll be reading alongside you as well. I won't lie tho, I do sympathise with your feeling of taxation when reading; reading in Japanese is my sleep serum, doing so in the dark just sets me dozing within half an hour with no fail lol. Best of luck to you in your learning! You're doing some hard lifting so I'm sure you're gonna go quick and far :))

[@yasuomi7127]

I think the best thing for working on listening would be drama tracks (for example, Milgram's or Hypmic's) because all of the context comes from listening, making it the sole focus.

[@benjivalorant]

wth i felt like i was watching a youtuber with 100s of thousands of subs, keep it up man really great video

[@kenn1on]

That's too cool to be unnoticed

[@mchuberto1026]

Good stuff bro! I’ll be looking forward to the next update and how you progress

[@swagodaman6320]

Thanks for making this, nice progress. Do you plan to ever do any 'isolated' kanji study, as in studying radicals or their equivalent? Also thanks for recommending the Tango deck, I find it more accessible than the core 2k myself.

[@dfirebug922]

I had the exact same journey realizing that anki cards worked for me. I first started with Genki for a few days, tried duolingo once I gave up on that and then moved to anki cards.

[@АртёмКоранцов]

man keep going you're on the right way

[@Hoppitot]

Thanks for bringing up tsuki ga kirei just to remind me how much I hated that dogshit. Just seeing those characters again brings me back to internally screaming at my monitor.

[@VG-yh3ci]

Hello, I couldn’t hear correctly at the beginning you were talking about a deck you were studying from? 42k is what it sounded like to me but I don’t think this is correct. Can you please tell me what the deck of cards you were studying 😊greatly appreciated it

[@meaniezucchini5216]

Core 2k I don't know which version he used, but it's a very popular list of the most common vocab. There are several popular decks based on it.

[@senpai12349]

I started seriously studying using the immersion method in march too, Btw what was your first visual novel, you didn't mention it?

[@Ziel..]

Can you tell me what you're using to read lightnovels? Like being able to yomochan the words

[@hulloh]

It's the ttsu reader, just need the epub and you can use it with it

[@AmazonGuru6000]

can you tell me where I can find that particular light novel?

[@hulloh]

Anna's Archive will have it available as well as many other novels too.

[@meeeeesh1843]

I tried googling what tool you used to do quick text highlight translations, yamichen? yamichan? But wasn't able to find what was used, can anyone fill me in? I use MateTranslate but that seemed quicker

[@hulloh]

Yomitan

[@meeeeesh1843]

Thank you! Loved the video, really helped me on my own journey. @@hulloh

[@cozyunbox]

How do you track your time outside of the Google sheets tracker?

[@chaoz6097]

where did you find jp version of LN?

[@hulloh]

Amazon JP, BookWalker if you want to buy. TheMoeWay website (and discord server) has a resource list with a lot of ways how to start reading novels.

[@ivangg378]

Hey guys... sometimes its hard for me to find japanese KZbin channels (native), mostly because most of them are over the top or very slow/boring. If you guys have recommendations for interesting yt channels, I would appreciate it. 🫡

[@rosssteyn4189]

All fun n games till kanji enters the chat 🫠