Hi. So after reading a lot of things from my last post about using anime for Japanese, I had a couple of questions. So I’ve done a bit of research into things like doing Refold, Matt vs Japan, Aussieman, and other sources.
I had a couple of questions that I wanted to ask.
1. Should I be immersing from day 1, provided that I also do things like read textbooks (I’m choosing tae kim) and doing vocab/kanji alongside it? (I have a good vocab and kanji deck in anki ready to go).
2. So obviously, comprehensible input is how people learn languages, and immersion is just a way of getting comprehensible input, but does that mean I should be using comprehensible input all the time? I watched a video from Matt vs Japan on whether or not input has to be comprehensible, but I wanted other people’s advice. Here is the video btw: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeOmc1nRGG4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeOmc1nRGG4)
3. I’m confused on what I should actually be looking out for during immersion. My idea is that with comprehensible input, I should just aim to understand as much as possible, but also be on the look out for i+1 sentences as this is how people progress.
With that, I also have a routine developed that I wanted to ask if this is okay.
I’m still a major beginner and haven’t really touched grammar books all that much yet, but I have been grinding anki for vocab (about 500 words in now). I tried sitting through a VN session because I had a bunch of VNs downloaded and tried them out and I found that a lot of the ones that I had (being romance VNs) were pretty easy to digest and I could catch onto what they were saying if I looked up every unknown word or grammar structure in that sentence.
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My routine:
1. I guess read through tae kim and do anki (20 words)
2. Reading my VN for however long I can. The VN is an easy romance one that I think I can digest since I’ve read it before in English.
3. Watch anime with Japanese subtitles and do as few look-ups as possible, only looking out for what I can understand. I also want to combine this with comprehensible input videos on YouTube. If any of you people have any good channel recommendations, that would be lovely, thanks.
How I read when it comes to VNs (This isn’t that deep, but I’ve been sort of stuck on how to actually do intensive reading:
Open up my VN, yomichan, texthooker, etc.
Read sentence by sentence. I then look up everything unknown to me.
If I understand it, I move on.
If I don’t understand it even after a minute of trying to decipher it, I move on.
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That’s pretty much my routine and all the questions I had. Thanks for reading.
6 comments
Read the rules, check the starter guide, get some guided plan like a textbook, and stop listening to exposed internet conmen who even misrepresent their few citations. That’s the better plan.
Your routine looks nice, I wish I started what you’re doing earlier.
> Should I be immersing from day 1.
If you want to, there’s no harm in it, especially if you find stuff you understand.
> vocab/kanji
If you know 500 words with kanji and are fine with it, you probably don’t need a specific anki deck for kanji. Though, you’re choice
> I should be using comprehensible input all the time?
No matter how strong your foundations, a lot of input, especially listening, will be incomprehensible. I can read a lot with comfort, but since I have barely done listening I still struggle with a lot of even simple shows despite knowing every single word and rarely being uncomfortable with grammar. The only thing I can do now to improve it is to listen a lot, even though I will miss a lot more than I would like to admit. Though, nobody can tell you the exact value/time of your listening input, there aren’t really studies or evidence pointing to either way. I guess in summary, ymmv with incomprehensible input.
> I’m confused on what I should actually be looking out for during immersion.
The main thing is just trying to understand. If you have to spend too long on something to understand it, chances are its not useful for learning from and you should move on.
Anyway, you’ve motivated me to listen more
In case you have not found it yet, [TheMoeWay](https://learnjapanese.moe/) is pretty much the current reference for this kind of study approach.
Honestly, it’s not that difficult. Well, Japanese is, but [the learning process](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) isn’t.
Learn Hiragana & Katakana, get a decent starting vocab (~1000 words), do some basic grammar study and then read and listen to content. From the content you’ll get a whole lot of vocab to learn and new grammar to study. Then keep doing that for a looong time.
Content with copy-able subtitles is ideal as that makes it easier to look up new words, and means you can stop and analyze stuff in detail.
You’ll know when you find stuff too easy and you can then move on. Forget all that i+1 nonsense.
Check out [Refold](https://refold.la) or TheMoeWay (haven’t used it so don’t know the link but it’s mentioned in another comment
It’s all about the time and effort you are okay putting in vs actual learning taking place. There is a certain amount of new Japanese a persons brain can take in before it just sort of throws out all the new information still being taken in.especially at a very beginner level, I think you are wasting a lot of time with you current setup. Just my opinion. I don’t think you are actually acquiring much actual learning vs time you are putting in because of the comprehension gap.