Hi everyone, the resources on this sub are truly amazing and they allowed me to do something that would be impossible otherwise with my very limited time, roughly a hour or so daily with some variation, and with this limited time I’ve spent the last year and a half reaching what I would call a “N5+” level with some N4 level stuff being easy as it can be and other stuff being basically too much.
Now, I have started with input quite a bit late, something that I really regret, but I’m currently dedicating some of my free time to input, mostly reading N4 level stuff and watching anime in the slice of life genre with only Japanese subs.
Reading is tough but I get a pretty complete picture of what’s happening but the anime is basically incomprehensible 80% of the time. Unless I stop the video to look things up I really don’t understand a lot but this is not something I don’t want to do, ideally; I’d prefer consuming as much as I can without looking stuff up since I’d be spending more than an hour dissecting a single episode instead of also working on vocab and grammar.
Basically every time I’m stopping the videos I’m feeling like I’m sacrificing my time for something more important.
I’m beginning the second volume of Genki and keeping up with N4 vocabulary in the meantime, it just feels like I’m not doing anything useful if I watch things that I don’t understand most of the time… What would you suggest?
I thought about getting easier to understand input instead of anime but I don’t know if that would be more effective in any way.
2 comments
Personally, anime is way beyond your level. If you understand 80% of written that’s also very low. It sounds great until you realize you lack the informational words, but you can get the basic particles and grammar bits.
[https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like](https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like)
If you are familiar with the language and topic you can start to fill the holes in, but when you lack familiarity you are less likely to guess the unknown. I would personally do the very basic thing of listening to audio in Japanese then hearing the English. Here’s a pretty basic one I used when I started listening practice.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avR9PGMHdwI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avR9PGMHdwI)
Though knowing lots of vocab makes listening easier, so if anime is not your target I would vocab grind and read – aloud preferably.
It’s actually the opposite. You learn when you see what it means. Incomprehensible input has close to 0 learning value, you learn some random bits even in such way, but it’s extremely small comparing to comprehensible learning.
If you want to increase efficiency, focus more on situations when you see something new and what it means. And speaking honestly, if we talk about “I have 1 hour/day and want to improve in the fastest possible way”, then SRS and grammar would be my advise. The only way to learn efficiently with content in 1 hour/day if you put a lot of focus on memorization. Literally if you spend something like 15-30 seconds on every new word and then whole 1 hour would be rather something like reading 1-3 book’s pages volume in a day. Similarly you can use SRS for 15-20 minutes in fast tempo and then read/watch anything you like, but such approach lacks grammar learning and in my opinion grammar is much more important than vocabulary in a lot of cases.
Also if you don’t aim at the fastest possible learning tempo, then I would advice to aim at something that you find interesting. For example, my learning tempo before N4-N3 was in many times faster than after that, simply because I wanted to read books and I became able to do it after that stage. And I’m absolutely fine with it, because it was my goal from the very beginning.