Basic info before I get into my question.
– I have been in Japan for about 4 years (Okinawa)
– I don’t have any Japanese friends 🥺 doesn’t help that I’m as introverted as them at times.
– I learned the Base of my Japanese in high school from an Japanese class.
– I can talk about daily life (more or less) the weather, order a Coffee at Starbucks and other Misc. and some anime related stuff. Maybe like N4 level but idk. 毎日日本語上手です🙃
Anywho. I recently got back into wanting to improve , despite being here for 4 years I have maybe improved 15-20% more than what my base level was when I left high school (4 years ago)
I decided to go down the rabbit hole and watch some YouTubers.
•Matt Vs Japan
•Dogen
•Tokini Andy
Being the main ones.
I’ve been seeing a lot of the input method. I which sounds great but how do I effectively use it?
I do enjoy Anime and JDramas and there’s even some Japanese Youtubers I enjoy watching. From what I understand having hours and hours of Japanese speech around you, you will eventually start to absorb some of the material, which so far after a day I started to recognize a few more kanji.
However I did start to get frustrated(maybe not the right word) after awhile because there was only so much I could understand.
Should I be extracting parts of the Japanese Subtitles and writing them down to study later?
I also have been utilizing Shadowing in my way to work. A little dangerous, I know but I’ve memorized some phrases. Maybe not all that relevant in day to day conversation but it’s working.
Should I utilize some more Genki Books?
5 comments
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the input method is like, you find input appropriate to your level and you use it a lot
most people do reading but listening is important as well
if you find something too hard, or too easy, you don’t gain as much from it
at your point I think you can do well with books from kadokawa (look for the green border) which you can easily buy at amazon.jp and they are so cheap too
It’s not 毎日日本語 it’s 日常の日本語
I started learning Japanese 10 years ago, but only studied for a year and half at the beginning. Got to a level where I can read light novels and manga slowly. That’s the point where I stopped studying Japanese. I’ve been reading novels on and off for many years. 4 years in between was where I got into Dota and stopped being invested in anime culture completely.
My listening wasn’t great even though I’ve watched around 12000 episodes of anime. Also when I work I can have my earphones in all the time, so I thought why don’t I start Japanese again. And that’s how I fell down the vtuber rabbit hole. I only need to work around 5 hours a day, and when I finish I can listen for another 5-6 hours. In the last month I’ve had around 200-250 hours of pure listening practice. I tried watching anime raw and and I was able to comprehend most things. A massive improvement from a month ago.
I think the difference is when I watch vtubers the language is a lot more natural. And there is no subs for my brain to take the easy way out. Also when I’m actually watching them play video games, I have visuals input which allows me to guess what certain words I haven’t heard of means. And when it’s not guessable I can use a translator. Because there is context those words sticks really fast. Recently I’ve seen a clip of marine senchou asking viewers which part of my body would you suck lol. And the viewer said 口座 which means bank account. That word stuck with me instantly. Just in the past 1 month of pure listening practice, my understanding of Japanese has skyrocketed.
There definitely is a value in immersion. But I think it’s important to watch contents that are enjoyable, which makes you want to understand what they are saying.
Thanks to the vtuber rabbit hole I started paying for italki lessons too. Doing 3 lessons of pure speaking practice a week now. My speaking sucks because I have never spoken Japanese before.
Personally, I learn using only input, i don’t think studying or doing other activies like shadowing is as beneficial. It has to be comprehensible (even partially) but there are ways to boost your comprehension, like reading the episode’s script before watching it and always using japanese subtitles. Depending on the type of input you have to be willing to accept more noise, try to find a compromise that works for you! If you’re interested in my method you can read my post about it, it’s a little bit long for a comment.