I'm currently at the point where I am consuming native material, but it's still a slog, even when I rewatch things that I've mined all of the unknown vocab and grammar for. I know at this point it's mostly an hours game, but I'm interested in the experiences and takes of people who finally made it to the point where they can consume content without needing to pause at every other line when watching things in Japanese.
I generally break it down into:
Watching: letting the show run without pausing to read the subs, but just doing my best to keep up or even slowing the video speed a bit.
I currently still miss a fair bit if it's a very long sentence (even when I know all the vocab, however it doesn't feel too far away from being accessible oddly enough). Some shorter sentences I catch everything since I mined everything in it, but it takes a lot of time to process.
"Reading": Watching a show with auto pause to read each line of dialogue before it plays so that I can then follow that line easier. Essentially this is reading but with little bits of listening while reading mixed in.
"Reading" things I have mined and covered in Anki is still mentally taxing. Even reading graded readers isn't a walk in the park yet, but Satori Reader is helping with that.
I suspect that both are helpful and imagine that both are also necessary to some degree, however, I'm hoping to determine which of the 2 deserves a greater percentage of the finite time I have to dedicate to learning Japanese each day.
My question to those who've reached escape velocity is, "Which did you find more helpful for getting there?"
by linkofinsanity19