How interesting do you think it would be to watch (or learn with someone) by watching their process from a complete beginner to fluency via livestreams or YouTube videos? For example, they would stream themselves either immersing in a videogame or reacting to videos about the language, etc.
11 comments
Depends – how good looking are they? Are they funny?
Depending on the person, it could be like watching paint dry.
Given that only a tiny percent of people who start studying eventually reach a level that (in hindsight) would have made it interesting to follow their journey, I would not see much value in following a random person from scratch.
I don’t think it would be fun watching one person learn on livestream. It might be fun watching a small corps of language learners (5-ish?) progress as a “class.”
You’ll get to see the progress of 5 different people, get a variety of perspectives, compete, see them all struggle and celebrate, plus the general interaction of these people.
There are some communities where people livestream what they’re playing. I don’t think there’s enough interest in purely watching a beginner that it will get thousands of views or more though. I have seen popular videos of people who have been learning for a few months reviewing what tools they’ve used.
Maybe not what you’re looking for, but I recommend [Livakivi’s channel](https://www.youtube.com/@Livakivi) he has about almost 4.5 years of learning Japanese and has documented his journey. It’s been a great inspiration for me.
Aside from overall progress updates, I’d probably be down to watch learners read a VN in Japanese.
I’ve been toying around with the idea of doing this myself, though focusing more on getting over a plateau of speaking eloquently rather than getting started with learning in general. If I did go ahead with it, I’d read aloud the unvoiced main character’s lines, then have better speakers give criticism and feedback in the comments.
Not that interesting, however making a verbose history of that journey and then creating a compilation summary video of a landmark in progress (1,2,3 years in) would be a worthwhile video to watch.
Depends. If done well, sure
The process of actually going from zero/beginner to “fluent” in Japanese is so long and gradually that I don’t think it really lends itself to a livestream.
Combine that with the fact that we wouldn’t know from the beginning if the person is going to succeed in any meaningful degree and it seems like an iffy proposition.
I would imagine the only way to make this work would be to record yourself over a *very* long period of time, do some expert-level editing, and post a video once you’ve already achieved your goals showing the various steps and “breakthroughs” along the way.
But in general, there is a reason that most language learners / Japanese-learning YouTube personalities “specialize” in presenting a certain aspect of the language. It’s just not feasible to cover everything in some comprehensive way and make it compelling.
Probably as fun as watching paint dry is…
I think it would be boring as fuuuuuck. It’s the kind of thing I’d maybe want to see a ten minute weekly compilation at most. I don’t want to watch some guy do anki for thirty minutes.
As someone else said, it’s like watching paint dry. It could be fun with a timelapse, but in real time it would just be tedious.