Background: I took 2 years of Japanese in high school over a decade ago. I have forgotten most of it but remember some random vocab and very basic sentence structure. I just started getting back into Japanese this week with some cure Dolly grammar videos and have relearned hiragana and katakana (mostly memorized, a few mistakes on the extended charts (kya, shu, cho, etc) especially the extended katakana ones. So you can say I’m basically starting at 0 or at least under 0.5.
I have a few slice of life shows I’ve been wanting to watch but never got around to binge. I figured these may be good for immersion with Japanese subtitles as their difficulty is 3/10 or less after looking them up.
My question is, what is the best way to go about this? I’m using animelon which has Japanese, romaji, and English subtitles as well as a lot of tools to review lines, look up words, etc. I imagine I’ll run into more things I don’t know than I do know which could make a 20 minute episode take hours. Is it worth trying to pause every line and look up what I don’t know this early since I lack the grammar and vocabulary? Would I be better off just listening and reading the Japanese subtitles, reading the English, and moving on just to get used to hearing and reading? Any tips appreciated for immersion in week 1 basically.
9 comments
It probably depends on your patience levels. It can be extremely exhausting and frustrating if not demotivating to look up every unknown vocab, especially in the beginning where kanji and vocab knowledge is still low. Pausing an anime after every sentence and mining the vocab is, in my opinion, even more tedious than working yourself through classic textbooks like Genki 1+2. Not to say that easy anime or immersion as a beginner are completely useless, but it shouldn’t be your only source of input. Especially not as a beginner.
What would probably benefit you more are comprehensible listening videos over on yt and get your grammar foundation with Genki 1 and 2. I’d recommend checking JLPT N5 and N4 kanji and get those down before you test your waters with immersion again — it’s more fun if you can read at least a few sentences or chunks of texts without needing a dictionary or grammar guide. Graded readers and easy manga are well-suited for this.
The sub sidebar has tons of resources linked as well, so I recommend to check those as well.
Speaking from my own experience, there isn’t much of a point to active immersion learning if you don’t already understand large parts (or even most) of the content you’re consuming. That’s why even the more hardcore proponents of immersion learning generally tell people to first build up some basic grammar and vocab knowledge (usually ~2000 words) before starting the process.
If you constantly run into sentences where you need to look up not just one, but multiple words and/or grammar points, then your time would probably be more efficiently spent doing something else. Whether that’s immersing with easier content or using some other method (textbooks, graded readers, pre-made Anki decks or whatever) depends on your goals and preferences.
You need more grammar and vocab; otherwise, you’re just playing a really inefficient game of dictionary lookups rather than actually understanding what you’re reading or listening to.
I’ve started labeling things around my house with the kanji/hiragana/katakana of the object on sticky notes! I even stuck one that said ‘neko’ onto my cat for lolz.
It’s like a treasure hunt, but you’re walking around finding things to translate!
It’s completely possible to do this with lookups and if you do it for several hours and find it enjoyable due to improving then it’s great.
If it is boring and you are not focusing on remembering each piece of vocab and not testing yourself on what you are picking up (aka false sense of progreession or very slow progression) then this method can become very toxic very quickly. I personally think immersion can be useful at any stage if done right but the issue is doing it ‘right’ depends on the person and takes a bit of experience and testing to find how to retain the vocab accurately in a way that works for you.
Due to this complexity ultimately it’s up to the person to figure this out for themselves – when do you start immersing? In what way do you do it? What strategy do you use? How enjoyable is it for you?
No one can answer these questions since the very nature of immersion itself is very personal, however there is one thing that always sticks true for every person: if you are not actively trying to learn vocab and grammar your language learning life will be hell.
If you’re willing to spend more than an hour per anime episode (and have the mental stamina necessary) you can very well go with anime. If you don’t maybe it’s better to go with reading.
Even with reading though, I don’t know which light novel or book or manga to recommend that’s fairly easy and still a good read, so maybe anime is better.
That being said, I would put something like Satori Reader higher than anything on the list. The only reason it may put you off is that there’s only original stories in there, but a lot of them are quite fun reads. The reason why I think it’s so good is that it provides a lot of translation notes and translations in general in a very smart format, and also has the option to sort by difficulty. Maybe any graded reader offers the same experience but I only have experience with Satori.
I’ve only recently started with immersion myself, after going through Genki 1 and 2, and Cure Dolly videos. It think it depends on your comfort with not understanding the plot of the show fully. With Shirokuma Cafe, I started with Japanese subtitles for 5 episodes and now I’m watching fully raw without subtitles at all. I understand maybe half of what’s spoken, the rest I get from context or I just move on. Since there isn’t much plot to begin with, it doesn’t matter to me.
I wouldn’t do this for anime where the plot matters or where every bit of dialogue is important. For those I’m still using English subtitles but I try to practice active listening.
I don’t intend to mine from anime, I’ve tried before and it’s incredibly tedious pausing and mining every sentence. I’m going to mine from reading instead. I just subscribed to Satori Reader and it’s great.
Best advice I’ve heard is watch every episode twice: first is in Japanese w/ English subs, then once more with either Japanese subs or no subs. First watch creates the comprehension but you want to pay attention to what’s being said and connect to what the sub text is showing. Really great when you start running across words/phrases you already learned. The second watch is super important as this is the full immersion backed with recent comprehension. you’re anticipating what will be said and how it’ll be said.
The goal here is volume. Watch lots and lots of material and have fun doing it. Don’t worry about looking up stuff you don’t know and just enjoy the story. Note that there are ways to STUDY using media (Language Reactor is great for this as it can give you a glossary of words sorted by frequency/fluency groups), but that is studying and not immersing. There’s overlap but it’s a different mode. There’s also as mix of the two where you pause to look up unknown words. That’s something to use if your level gets to a point where it’s an unknown word every few sentences.
If you use Language Reactor, it lets you skip the pauses between sub lines to speed up the first watch. I recommend this as you skip over the montages or non-dialog parts making the rewatch much more enjoyable. Don’t speed up the video though as you want to enjoy
At a level where you just (re)learned kana, don’t feel bad about watching with English subs. You’ll never learn Japanese this way but it still has value as a supplement until you’re farther along and can transition to Japanese subs.
You don’t want to get burnt out looking up every other word. And it’s especially tough not knowing the grammar patternd.