I am trying to incorparate immersion into my learning but I don’t feel like I am getting much from it. I’m wondering if it’s too early for me in my learning process to get the most out of it. Currently this is what I am doing for my studies with only access to free stuff
I am currently working through the anki deck “TheMoeWay Tango N5”. I am not very far and I’m not sure how much it is helping. I have been doing 10 new cards a day which is going ok but I’m not sure it’s the right deck for me. It doesn’t feel like it’s n+1 but I’m not sure what a better deck would be to use.
Grammar wise I understand the basics of most of the particle uses. Conjugation’s are hit and miss. If I see a verb ending in た I know that it’s past tense the same as if I see a verb ending with ない I know that it’s negative. I don’t know what the verb is, I just know that whatever it is has already happened or didn’t happen. Most conjugations I struggle to remember still. There’s just so many to remember! I have gone through Tae Kim’s guide but I honestly can’t say if too much of it had stuck. I have also been using some YouTube videos as I have always learnt better from audio/visual content than just reading. If I look at a sentance I can decently pick out the grammar between the vocab as if they were lego blocks. I can’t always remember what the particular peice of grammar is showing though and without knowing the vocabb I can’t use context to help either.
My vocab is basically non-exsistant. I recognize some kanji but not a lot and I don’t always remember their meaning’s. I have tried sentance mining for vocab and making a seperate anki deck but I still very much am at the “I don’t know any of these words” stage with even stuff like よつばと that everyone reccomends. I don’t find it that interesting either but I am trying as it’s the manga everyone says to read first. Reading is what I want to do most in Japanese so I’m trying really hard to get into it but I notice my brain just shut off. I feel like my brain looks at the page and goes “This is jsut a bunch of squiggles” and nopes out. I have to constantly poke it with a metophorical stick to wake it up and just end up mentally fatigued from it all.
I have a youtube account that’s set to Japan and only for watching/listening to Japanese content. I try and always use it when I want to watch something or if I want to listen to a podcast or something while doing something else. I don’t think i am picking up any vocab from doing this but I am listening to the language and sometimes there’s the odd word that I recognize. I enjoy just listening to the language so I when I am playing a game I tend to have a let’s play running on my second monitor instead of background music. I’ve managed to find a vtuber who’s voice I find really calm and relaxing (rather than acting like they have chugged down 50 cans of red bull and a keg of coffee) so it’s nice to jsut listen to even if I don’t understand anything that he’s saying.
So yeah, I’m not sure if I’m jumping too far ahead with trying to do immersion. I’m not sure if I need to just try and brute force through in the hopes eventually my brain will accept it can’t just take a nap whenever I open a manga page. Should I be doing more Anki cards first to build up more vocab? How many would even be good enough?
by GivingItMyBest