Need advice on how to get the best result from immersion

4 comments

1. By not using machine translation

2. Stop use that machine translation. Read the sentence, search everything you don’t understand, vocabulary, grammar, after that read that sentence again. Still don’t understand? Read again slowly, if you still can’t understand, move on, you don’t need to understand 100% when you start immersion, I say last resort is find the eng ver and read that dialogue, don’t try compare word to word between the japanese sentence and the english sentence, you read the eng sentence just for the general idea meaning. Than move on, grind and repeat.

   Machine translation is helpful when you high level enough and have the concrete foundation, and know what are you looking for. At low level it will damage you more than it help, and I don’t call it immersion if you read native material with a translate like that, you learn nothing.

   Go here for how to setup yomichan with Anki.

   https://animecards.site/yomichansetup/

3. Kanji don’t have a single specific meaning. Learning them as though they do will just make things needlessly difficult for you further down the road. If you feel the need to associate any given kanji with a specific keyword, then just follow one of the systems with a more structured radical-based approach like RTK or Wanikani.

4. I don’t know Final Fantasy 9, but I did pretty much the same thing using Steins Gate, Sominium Files and other VNs.

   1. I started by watching the Steins Gate Anime and using a pre-made Anki deck for the Anime along with the MorphMan add on which lets you focus on the most common words first. I recommend this step because it saves a lot of effort creating cards and gets you to high comprehension in minimum time.
   2. Then I went line-by-line through the decks for maybe half of the show. I don’t recommend this step. It’s tedious and slow and just helps to focus on the least common words.
   3. I played the game using ScanScan to capture unknown words and macOS’ built-in dictionary to quickly lookup words or translate phrases then made Anki cards manually. I don’t recommend this step too much. It slows down these already slow games and the whole point is to keep things fun and interesting, so it’s counterproductive.
   4. Finally, I continue to read VNs and just skip past unknown words. This keeps it fast and interesting. The way I think about it, I’m here to practice words and grammar that I know, not to learn new words. If an unknown word is very common in the story, I’ll end up picking it up from context without any special efforts. If a word is not very common, then it’s not worth special efforts.

   Try to be as physically comfortable as possible. Eye strain or holding a Nintendo Switch will drain you. Work on your inner game. Being able to skip past unknown Kanji’s without getting stuck conserves brain power that’s better used extending your play time.