Japanese Progress Update - 6 Months | Refold/Immersion Learning

[@FiZc]

I think Detective Conan is the best cartoon for japanese immersion. Over 1100 episodes, such a wide range of topics covered, contemporary real world environment, Conan is very smart talking to professionals, but also talks to children making his vocabulary probably varied. Stories include lots of mystery and thriller elements making it relatively easy to stick with it.

[@CB-ix2lh]

Is that the anime that gets depicted often in these videos? I was looking for it's title! There's a screen of it @5:17

[@FiZc]

@@CB-ix2lh No, that's something else.

[@bleepbloop2242]

@@CB-ix2lh a quick google search told me its called "The dangers in my heart", incase ur interested

[@なにいってんの-s5e]

I ve been studying jp for 3 year and I can assure that if you continue like this you will reach super sayan level. Good job!

[@Livingxche]

Wow! What level do you say you are on after 3 years, I've been thinking about starting back. I am currently on n4, I usually take 1hr a day on it; I watch Japanese shows and yt videos also. (I'm a junior this year btw and I do sports)

[@なにいってんの-s5e]

@@Livingxche I can understand pretty much every thing I usually consume level. News, anime, series, movies, books you name it. But I am still practicing since alrhought I am able to understand the content I usually consume the most, there are other topocs which I can't understand tha well. 頑張れ！

[@Livingxche]

@user-vf2sq6pt7p Oh, that's really good.👍 👏 👌

[@Livingxche]

@user-vf2sq6pt7p ohhh tysm for answering!

[@b-san948]

it's great to see you come back!

[@ganqqwerty]

I'm at 8 months mark, but I'm a heavy listener: about 900 hours of listening and less than 100 hours of reading. Hmm, maybe less than 50 hours of reading. I am trying to get more reading, but it really feels harder than listening. Your vocab increases so quickly and your anki time is so low, it's amazing! I guess it's all because of reading. Best of luck!

[@PirateNightsuN]

what are you listening to ? i feel like the opposite where i have thousands of things to read that i'm interested in but not so much to listen / watch

[@geckoram6286]

Man your dedication is on another level. I struggle with 5 anki words/day, 20 would be unthinkable... And half an hour of the most basic of manga (I'm currently reading chi's sweet home) is enough to fry my brain

[@EllaRayTur]

Thank you! I love these kinds of videos- so motivating!

[@HypotheticalTiger]

Good video! Hope things are still going well :D

[@LokitoGFX]

bro 100 new cards A DAY IN ANKI???

[@antre-mk9ps]

when i was really into it i did >200 new cards a day with anki with ~2000 reviews every day

[@ColemakDH]

well these were things he'd already seen

[@donkeyhota.dontflamingo9294]

100 reviews, not new cards. He said it only took him around 30 minutes a day

[@Hoppitot]

@@antre-mk9ps How long did you keep this up and how many cards in total do you have rn

[@antre-mk9ps]

@@Hoppitot i deleted a lot of decks because my anki ended up taking 6gb of space but if i were to guess how many cards i would have with every deck i used it would be ~26k, most being mature. I have 17780 cards right now with 16529 of them mature (750 suspended). I kept up the 200 cards/day grind for about 2.5 months before i began running out of cards. nowadays i only do about 10 cards a day with around 300 reviews/day as i'm running out of words to mine in the book i'm reading. i have 370k reviews in total

[@Test_749]

he is back!!

[@Chloe-ds9jf]

For listening immersion, I'd definitely recommend choosing content that is easier/more comprehensable, such as beginner/intermediate japanese podcasts. Immersion is much easier to enjoy when you understand more than 5% of what is being said, and will likely help you achieve your goals faster!

[@hulloh]

Thanks for the suggestion! I have, briefly, listened to podcasts in the past but unfortunately could never really get in to them as I found them a little stale. Maybe I'll give them another go in the future if I find one with an interesting topic.

[@KY-ki1vt]

If you live in the US, you could visit some Japanese dense places like Seattle's Japan town

[@UCantNinjaMe]

i wish you best man

[@cubic_regent]

I'm just over a month into learning Japanese. I'm focusing completely on the spoken language (but yes I can read and type hiragana/katakana by now). I am kanji illiterate at this point. My studying is daily but not as rigorous as I could make it (which im alright with). About over a week ago a friend invited me onto VRChat to practice speaking on a language exchange server. The people are INCREDIBLY nice. My listening is still better than my speaking, but I'm able to really enjoy conversations with people and also making new friends. Grammar, verb conjugation, and pronounciation isn't much of a problem for me anymore, but at this point my bottleneck is definitely my vocabulary. I'm learning new words and expressions every day from music and speaking with native friends, so despite the slow progress, I'm happy to be able to see my improvements. 今日本語勉強しているみんな、頑張って！！！

[@andrewaverbah4809]

What's in it for natives though? And what is this server?

[@cubic_regent]

@andrewaverbah4809 the natives are learning English. It's a language *exchange*. Search for EN-JP language exchange and you'll likely find multiple.

[@marco2771]

​@@andrewaverbah4809I would like to know that too, but I don't think his gonna answer anytime soon

[@derpauleglot9772]

Thank you so much! Some of these resources will come in handy :) By the way, how’d you find the clips you used in the video? Some of them were quite fitting and finding them manually would take a lot of time.

[@e.n.t5551]

Super happy I found this video, my goal in learning japanese is to read light novels and seeing your journey has really given me more motivation. I am curious how you were reading manga in the beginning of your journey. Did you have physical copies or did you have a site where you found the digital versions?

[@hulloh]

That's a nice goal to have, finding new LN's to read and progressing towards them (if they're too hard right now) has unexpectedly been the most enjoyable part for me while learning Japanese! Unfortunately, I didn't read any physical manga as they're quite expensive to buy here in the UK. TheMoeWay has a good resource list on their website which shows methods for digital manga as well as how to use Mokuro to read them (makes it easier to do dictionary lookups).

[@ahyes589]

What was your study process for grammar? I know you said you did a little bit of Genki and then stopped so I'm just curious. I did Genki 1 and 2 and I'm almost finished with Quartet 1 after about a year of studying so I've been getting more into immersion and word mining lately. I'm probably N4 to very basic N3 level.

[@hulloh]

Apart from quickly reading through Tae Kim's and watching some Cure Dolly videos I haven't studied grammar, although I definitely feel like doing some more when I first started would have helped a lot. Sounds like you've got a really good foundation, I imagine it's been quite a smooth transition into immersion since you've already done a good amount of study!

[@ahyes589]

@@hulloh Oh ok thanks a lot for the quick reply. Yeah for the most part I did basic Anki like Tango N5 and N4 decks, Kaishi 1.5K, etc. Wasn't a fan of the core deck just throwing a bunch of words at me but mining is way better. You might've heard of it already but for mining I started using "Animebook" chrome extension that can create Anki cards in 2 clicks. Thanks again for the response btw, the video was very helpful.

[@rlaouse]

back from the dead

[@aqurial]

Weren't the reviews too overwhelming while doing 100 cards of anki ?😭😭 how much reviews did u have to do everyday

[@teleotter2833]

ik he has to be lying because there’s no way by week one he’s doing at least 500 cards a day and then he says it only takes 30 minutes

[@teleotter2833]

my 250 cards takes an hour and a half 😭😭

[@teleotter2833]

and i’m only doing plus 10 cards a day maybe 5

[@aqurial]

@@teleotter2833 yeah lol i do 20 cards and i have like 120 reviews everyday it takes me like 20 mins lmao

[@hulloh]

I'd already "learnt" this deck a year ago which is why it didn't take long long to finish daily, I only did 100 cards a day until I started to not recognize the majority of words (after a week or so) and then eventually settled on 20 daily until I finished the deck. Of course, if I was doing 100 new cards a day I'd never seen before, on top of reviews, it would take me hours. I've kept track of all my times so far and the highest it's been was 35 minutes (first day of starting again).

[@Thomas48484]

How hard would you say it was to watch boku no kokoro yabai yatsu? I absolutely love the anime and want to give it a go at one point without subtitles, but I've just started learning japanese (very basic grammar + 500 words on the core2.3k deck), and I don't want to watch something that is far out of my reach.

[@hulloh]

It'll be harder without using JP subtitles but it should be okay, it's been a while since I watched it but it wasn't too difficult at the time. I'm guessing you've already seen it in English which should help since you'll already know what's going on with the story. When you're just starting out I think pausing often and trying to understand most of what they're saying before moving on is a good way to go about it, even if episodes take 30+ minutes this way.

[@apdo6107]

hype

[@princemannic]

How long do you think a brand new person should take to get to the point where they can listen to audiobooks??? I wanna listen to the official bookworm audiobooks but they come out WAYYYYYY to slow in english😅

[@hulloh]

Pretty hard question to give an accurate answer to and I'm definitely not the person to do that, but a very rough estimate would probably be 1000+ hours of listening immersion. Sorry I couldn't help more!

[@carlosmoran1920]

Does someone know where to see ”僕の心のやばいやつ“?このアニメは本当に見たいんだでも字幕付けだけで

[@hulloh]

You could try hianime, you'd probably need to use asbplayer and download jp subtitles for it though (probably from jimaku)

[@Fremex1]

Could someone tell me how tf a beginner can use the core 2k/6k deck with all the new vocab and kanji

[@Oldbettie]

Just start with like 4-5 new cards a day and just do it. It sounds daunting but once you get the hang of it it's fun. I'm upto 8 new cards per day which puts me about 3000 words per year. I also do a few sentences for reviews it takes me about an hr every day

[@Fremex1]

@@Oldbettie so just brute force? You actually find you remember all that new stuff

[@Oldbettie]

It's not brute force it's doing something you want to learn and immersing in it. We learn by doing, if we don't do we can't learn. I don't remember every single kanji every day but over time they add up

[@Hoppitot]

Illegal recommendation: Just full send hiragana only untill you get 2k or so vocab then start whatever kanji method you want. Japanese has so much front loaded difficulty so removing kanji helps a bit.

[@くうそうか]

Kanji isn't even that hard. It gets easier with after like 500 vocabulary words.

[@GloriaTheAnimator]

what kind of manga did you read? i cant seem to find any manga i can really understand without having to look a new word every 3 minutes

[@hulloh]

I still have to look up words a lot while reading but thanks to Mokuro + Yomitan it's not too bad compared to using Jisho or another dictionary. Some easier manga are からかい上手の高木さん, レンタルおにいちゃん, ルリドラゴン and of course よつばと!

[@Hoppitot]

@@hulloh You should check out Dorohedoro, its so cool how the mangaka decides to use the alternate kanji writing at every possible opportunity :)

[@s14tam]

Some KZbinrs have claimed that learning to read before immersing in listening is detrimental to language learning. I'm skeptical of this claim. Do you have any thoughts on this since you seemingly have been focused mostly on reading?

[@hulloh]

@@s14tam Hard to say but from my own experience I could see that being the case with things like pronunciation, it's inevitable to pronounce some words incorrectly if you're not listening to how it's properly said first. I guess I'll see in 6-12 months if it's an issue long-term. I have also seen these claims recently due to Matt Vs Japan stating you shouldn't read early on as his latest "new method", even though he himself read a lot early on which is immediately contradictory. I'd take these things with a grain of salt, usually one or two people make claims and then it spreads down to more people regurgitating the same info without knowing the basis of the claim.

[@cod4148]

to state the obvious: your listening hours are very low. what are your thoughts on passive listening in the background? Khatzumoto says every moment you should be listening to Japanese

[@hulloh]

I have done a lot of passive listening (for most of the 200 hours of reading manga I had a stream playing in the background) but now that I'm reading novels I can't really focus with any talking or songs with lyrics in the background. I'm already spending almost all of my free time actively immersing so there's not much room left to add passive in. I also feel like I saw more improvement from 10-15 hours of active listening compared to 100+ hours of passive so it's not really a priority for me at the moment.

[@j5679]

the volume is a bit low but apart from that cool video

[@ganqqwerty]

Podcasts maybe help you with listening a bit, because you can do simple chores or walks during listening while still being concentrated

[@Hoppitot]

Hard disagree, unless you pick a learners podcast (which is usually boring af) it's gonna be too difficult. I'd recommend listening to a cut audio only version of an anime you've previously mined.

[@menzoie643]

goal is to reread punpun in japanese haha

[@Hoppitot]

Bro XD... 8:24