I spent a lot of time doing anime immersion starting out, but gradually went away from it over time. After hearing you speak on it I've been focusing even more on finding natural input. I'm finding that it's often harder to focus on anime now since they talk a lot more slowly and there's less dialogue overall, just sitting around waiting for them to talk puts me on edge. I want to conquer comprehending the speed of natural Japanese, it seems like the more time I spend with natural Japanese the better my Japanese listening and comprehension skills become overall.
Yea sounds like a good idea! I could Imagine after a while yea anime wouldnt be too much of a challenge. Definitelly i think you'll find your japanese ability skyrocket when you go fully into immersion with youtube and podcasts tho
Even if you just immerse with almost exclusively unscripted and natural Japanese, you end up being able to understand anime anyway if you get good enough. If you learn exclusively with anime, you can still learn how to speak naturally and not like an anime character if you spend more time listening to natural Japanese. That's how I think it works, those who learn exclusively with just anime is fine in my opinion, they just need to widen their variety.
i started listening to a podcast ( nihongo con teppei for beginners) at work and i did it now for 3 weeks and i already know more then i did in the beginning but no wehere near 80% ist more like a yes that word i know what that is so hes talking abouth that theme ( for example emarikajin so hes talking abouth amerikan maybe other nations and so on) my motivation is the feeling when you hear something you think you know what it mean aka translate it in your head then look it up and its really what it is ( sentences and sometimes words)
I tend to go for things that I don't dislike too much and are the most effective. I just find that if my comprehension is too low or my brain is working hard to understand that artificially makes the enjoyment lower. I find things like news stories are best for effective, but not enjoyable or unenjoyable immersion. Since my reading is weaker than my listening I find middle grade novels are effective for improving my reading speed. After reading some middle grade novels, I found non-fiction books aimed at adults more accessible than before. I did find the non-fiction books comprehensible, but they were too long for me. I find easier books are really good at building my stamina, while harder to read articles are good for expanding my vocabulary.
True. But when I actually thought about it, the “massive-lookup” is literally equivalent to having english subtitles for your immersion. When you’re looking up and pausing every single time for the sake of clarity and 100% comprehension, it’s kinda no different to just translating and writing the subtitles for yourself. Which would be contradictory to AJATT i guess haha
Insightful video as usual mate. All valid points in there in my opinion. In the end, it’s all a matter of maintaining this delicate balance between enjoyment/challenge, whilst tolerating the discomfort from not understanding everything. One thing I was guilty of, especially at the beginning of my immersion, was spending too much time trying to find the “perfect” immersion content for my current level. I think that’s something to be careful of. This time is better spent actually immersing. So you have to accept that sometimes, content may not be as enjoyable as usual, or as challenging as usual. You need a bit of flexibility, which comes with practice. While your target language is definitely a new skill that you’re working on, maybe the same could be said about language learning itself… Quick question, but can we join the discord even if we’re trying to learn 標準語 ?
Yea those are good points honestly. Definitely yea you are right sometimes its a bit of a waste of time trying to find the perfect immersion content especially at the beginner level. Thats true too that language learning in itself is a massive skill and those skills you learn from learning Japanese you can aply to learning other languages in the future Yea go for it! Idk how much you'll get out of it but feel free to join and talk in the general chat or whatever anyones welcome to join!
Hey man I like your video; I think the tips you gave are good advice. I was wondering about tip 5 and what are some personal recommendations of channels or whatever I could look up to see and hear natural Japanese. Much respect and good up the great videos!
Hi, how are you ☺️☺️ l have an important question which is does input HAS TO be COMPREHENSIBLE or it won't be effective. If this is right how can "by native for native" content be comprehensible for intermediate learner like me, and as you said 80% comprehensible that would be a waste of time finding that kind of content 80%comprehensible and l think the most important thing is "by native for native" whether it is comprehensible or not or the opposite l mean the most important thing is "comprehensible input" which is more important than the other, on other words when l try to find content what is the main thing that content has to be or l have to keep in mind when searching for native content please answer my question and l hope you could understand my writing and get what exactly l'm trying to say 🙂🙂
Completely fine i reckon and even a lot of benefits to listening to one over and over again i reckon. Just when you understand everything it gets boring to listen to smth multiple times aye haha
Thoughts on passive immersion? Like from my experience, it doesn’t really seem to have like inherent value in having a background Japanese dialogue when I’m washing the dishes/doing home chores. The indirect 2 benefits seem to be this: 1. It’s easy to really FOCUS on some parts of the passive immersion because it’s always there in the background. Like when it’s always ongoing like that, I seem to be picking up on some *parts* of the immersion when I actually do focus/temporarily active immersion. 2. It sets up the mood/gives me some motivation/reminds me to keep actively immersing. It aligns with the whole philosophy of the intense AJATT that Khatz created. ALWAYS JAPANESE. The principle. Other than that, do you think there’s like actual *inherent* value to passively hearing people blabber in Japanese? Haha just curious
I'm actually gonna make a video on my thoughts on it in the near future but in general I agree with the two indirect benefits you just stated. I dont think 100% completely incomprehensible passive immersion does too much or anything at all tho lol
My experience is that I'm more focused on what I'm listening to if I do chores because it's boring and listening to Japanese is more interesting even if I can't understand everything. But when I just sit down and try to watch something in Japanese it seems to be harder because I have the feeling that I could do more interesting things.
This was an insightful video, even for someone like me, learning Russian. I’m going to go find some TH-camrs speaking naturally and some more comprehensible content at that.
Surely you just watch tamaev and hasbulla vids all day ahaha. I definitely think thatd work well tho watching russian youtubers since my brother got fluent in russian just doing that in like a year
@@oojiman Do you think you would need subtitles in the target language or would you get the same result if you didn’t have any? And I love watching Hasbulla, lol.
How much can you rely on passive immersion? It’s not a super clear question since passive immersion kind of means half focus immersion and also just audio immersion but idk. How much visual is actually needed? Or can you spend 90% of your time just listening, on a walk, on a couch, etc. if the goal is just listening comprehension asap, is visual context or subs/plain reading needed to a certain degree for max optimization? (I mean obviously but how much lol) I can’t quite explain what I’m asking very well sorry.
Nah visual context isnt necessary needed it just usually helps to stay engaged with the content and what is going on so that it helps to get the best active immersion. But that kind of half focus immersion on podcasts when you are walking around I think does actually have a huge effect because I used to do I all the time and felt a big benefit from it.
Hey, so just a quick question then. Genuinely how do you actively immerse without looking stuff up all the time. I feel like I am a god at passive immersion, I listen to Japanese podcasts/news shows every time I drive and whenever I'm doing mundane housework, but whenever I actually sit down to watch stuff I am suddenly at a loss. I can easily get in 6+ hours of passive immersion a day if I don't allow myself to listen to music or English content. But doing active immersion quickly becomes a drag. It's like, when I do passive immersion there's this inbuilt ability to not care so much about ambiguity because it's simply too impractical to look things up while you're driving or in the middle of doing something, and I always notice i+1 sentences in my passive immersion and get frustrated that I don't have anki nearby to make a flashcard. Then I get home and actually sit down and instead of finding i+1 sentences all over the place and being fine with the ambiguity suddenly I'm looking up every word in a completely incomprehensible sentence, or just watching videos like yours instead. Or, recently, I spend ages trying to find some sort of transcript for the news shows/podcasts I'm listening to (to no avail) with the false hope that I will be able to find all the delicious i+1 sentences that popped up throughout the day. Would you say the way around this is just to commit to something, anything, whatever it is, the way I am forced to in passive immersion, and then instead of trying actively to follow along, instead just let it go in and whatever sticks out will stick out like in passive immersion?
I suppose you just aren't used to the ambiguity of concentrating and listening to something that you don't understand yet. Yeah I would just do what you said and devote yourself to it like you have been doing with passive immersion and just kind of force yourself to get used to not understanding some stuff. I think when you can do that you'll be able to get the most out of your active listening too. I think I might of gotten used to it pretty quickly since id like call with Japanese people and there was no option to look anything up id just have to try my best to pick out what I can and respond. So maybe when you do actively immerse just focus all your efforts on understanding everything you can and try to use that to get a full sense of everything thats going on, might make not being able to understand the other stuff a bit more bearable
@@oojiman thanks for your always quick and thoughtful responses! Yeh ok that makes sense. I am not really into watching vlogs and it seems like most Japanese TH-cam is vlog style content, I have really enjoyed immersing with マサル cuz I love nature/survival and I’ve also become fond of some Japanese cooking channels but yeh like you said it’s hard to balance finding good content and actually watching it. I wish there was some easier way to search for content in Japanese without having to know any Japanese because I’ve noticed that to be a bit of a catch 22 that I’ve only slowly overcome by teaching my TH-cam algorithm the kind of stuff I wanna watch.
@@ItaIakinho sorry do you care to elaborate? I definitely don’t feel like passive immersion is doing “nothing”… there a plenty of times where passive immersion has made me notice a new word in context, or re in forced my knowledge of words I recently learned. Maybe I am misunderstanding what other people mean when they say “passive”… to clarify, I don’t just let it go in one ear and out the other. I try my best to listen and follow along but whatever I don’t understand I let it go and also will be semi-focussed on another mindless task like cleaning or driving
@@ItaIakinho thanks for elaborating I do actually sort of agree with that. I definitely think it’s more beneficial to passively immerse in content you have already actively immersed in and get the repetition and reinforcement but I also like to listen to the news every day in Japanese while driving to work and I have learned loads of words especially words specific to current events like the coronavirus I think the problem is if it is completely going over your head then it’s probably not doing much and you need to actively immerse in the content first so it doesn’t go over your head entirely.
To give specific examples, words like 感染、感染者、接種、etc. And these are words I never even created flash cards for I just looked them up once after hearing them repeated maybe 15 times and thinking “okay I’ve had enough of this I have to know what that word means I’m gunna look it up when I get to work” and by the time I look it it’s like I’ve already learned it and every time I hear it again it’s just reinforced and that’s done entirely through semi-passive listening while driving
I spent a lot of time doing anime immersion starting out, but gradually went away from it over time. After hearing you speak on it I've been focusing even more on finding natural input. I'm finding that it's often harder to focus on anime now since they talk a lot more slowly and there's less dialogue overall, just sitting around waiting for them to talk puts me on edge. I want to conquer comprehending the speed of natural Japanese, it seems like the more time I spend with natural Japanese the better my Japanese listening and comprehension skills become overall.
Yea sounds like a good idea! I could Imagine after a while yea anime wouldnt be too much of a challenge. Definitelly i think you'll find your japanese ability skyrocket when you go fully into immersion with youtube and podcasts tho
Even if you just immerse with almost exclusively unscripted and natural Japanese, you end up being able to understand anime anyway if you get good enough. If you learn exclusively with anime, you can still learn how to speak naturally and not like an anime character if you spend more time listening to natural Japanese. That's how I think it works, those who learn exclusively with just anime is fine in my opinion, they just need to widen their variety.
i started listening to a podcast ( nihongo con teppei for beginners) at work and i did it now for 3 weeks and i already know more then i did in the beginning but no wehere near 80% ist more like a yes that word i know what that is so hes talking abouth that theme ( for example emarikajin so hes talking abouth amerikan maybe other nations and so on) my motivation is the feeling when you hear something you think you know what it mean aka translate it in your head then look it up and its really what it is ( sentences and sometimes words)
Great video, thanks for the amazing advice!
Thats all good thanks for watching!
I tend to go for things that I don't dislike too much and are the most effective. I just find that if my comprehension is too low or my brain is working hard to understand that artificially makes the enjoyment lower. I find things like news stories are best for effective, but not enjoyable or unenjoyable immersion. Since my reading is weaker than my listening I find middle grade novels are effective for improving my reading speed. After reading some middle grade novels, I found non-fiction books aimed at adults more accessible than before. I did find the non-fiction books comprehensible, but they were too long for me. I find easier books are really good at building my stamina, while harder to read articles are good for expanding my vocabulary.
great advice ! keep on keeping on
Thanks bro!
日本人のネイティブでもアニメ見すぎて
信じられないくらい不自然なしゃべり方の人おるわw
I'm guilty of "massive-lookup"😳 I just hate ambiguity, but that's something I have to get used to.
True. But when I actually thought about it, the “massive-lookup” is literally equivalent to having english subtitles for your immersion. When you’re looking up and pausing every single time for the sake of clarity and 100% comprehension, it’s kinda no different to just translating and writing the subtitles for yourself. Which would be contradictory to AJATT i guess haha
Yea legit its hard to get used too isnt it
Insightful video as usual mate. All valid points in there in my opinion.
In the end, it’s all a matter of maintaining this delicate balance between enjoyment/challenge, whilst tolerating the discomfort from not understanding everything. One thing I was guilty of, especially at the beginning of my immersion, was spending too much time trying to find the “perfect” immersion content for my current level. I think that’s something to be careful of. This time is better spent actually immersing. So you have to accept that sometimes, content may not be as enjoyable as usual, or as challenging as usual. You need a bit of flexibility, which comes with practice. While your target language is definitely a new skill that you’re working on, maybe the same could be said about language learning itself…
Quick question, but can we join the discord even if we’re trying to learn 標準語 ?
Yea those are good points honestly. Definitely yea you are right sometimes its a bit of a waste of time trying to find the perfect immersion content especially at the beginner level. Thats true too that language learning in itself is a massive skill and those skills you learn from learning Japanese you can aply to learning other languages in the future
Yea go for it! Idk how much you'll get out of it but feel free to join and talk in the general chat or whatever anyones welcome to join!
Hey man I like your video; I think the tips you gave are good advice. I was wondering about tip 5 and what are some personal recommendations of channels or whatever I could look up to see and hear natural Japanese. Much respect and good up the great videos!
Hi, how are you ☺️☺️ l have an important question which is does input HAS TO be COMPREHENSIBLE or it won't be effective. If this is right how can "by native for native" content be comprehensible for intermediate learner like me, and as you said 80% comprehensible that would be a waste of time finding that kind of content 80%comprehensible and l think the most important thing is "by native for native" whether it is comprehensible or not or the opposite l mean the most important thing is "comprehensible input" which is more important than the other, on other words when l try to find content what is the main thing that content has to be or l have to keep in mind when searching for native content please answer my question and l hope you could understand my writing and get what exactly l'm trying to say 🙂🙂
I mean it doesnt have to be 80% just find the thing which is most comprehensible for you at the moment and go with that
Zeus, God of Lightning
Aries, God of War
Hades, God of the Underworld
and Billy from the debate team, God of watching anime without English subs.
Where can I find your recommendations for Japanese youtubers to watch?
Is it okay to listen to the same podcasts twice or tree times etc.? Or do you recommend listening to them once?
Completely fine i reckon and even a lot of benefits to listening to one over and over again i reckon. Just when you understand everything it gets boring to listen to smth multiple times aye haha
Thoughts on passive immersion? Like from my experience, it doesn’t really seem to have like inherent value in having a background Japanese dialogue when I’m washing the dishes/doing home chores.
The indirect 2 benefits seem to be this:
1. It’s easy to really FOCUS on some parts of the passive immersion because it’s always there in the background. Like when it’s always ongoing like that, I seem to be picking up on some *parts* of the immersion when I actually do focus/temporarily active immersion.
2. It sets up the mood/gives me some motivation/reminds me to keep actively immersing. It aligns with the whole philosophy of the intense AJATT that Khatz created. ALWAYS JAPANESE. The principle.
Other than that, do you think there’s like actual *inherent* value to passively hearing people blabber in Japanese? Haha just curious
I'm actually gonna make a video on my thoughts on it in the near future but in general I agree with the two indirect benefits you just stated. I dont think 100% completely incomprehensible passive immersion does too much or anything at all tho lol
My experience is that I'm more focused on what I'm listening to if I do chores because it's boring and listening to Japanese is more interesting even if I can't understand everything. But when I just sit down and try to watch something in Japanese it seems to be harder because I have the feeling that I could do more interesting things.
How do you balance college studies/life and immersion/anki? Thank you the helpful videos!!
This was an insightful video, even for someone like me, learning Russian. I’m going to go find some TH-camrs speaking naturally and some more comprehensible content at that.
Surely you just watch tamaev and hasbulla vids all day ahaha. I definitely think thatd work well tho watching russian youtubers since my brother got fluent in russian just doing that in like a year
@@oojiman Do you think you would need subtitles in the target language or would you get the same result if you didn’t have any? And I love watching Hasbulla, lol.
@@notaleuntold nah you don't need them i dont reckon. Ahaha yeah nice mate hasbulla is king
What do you think about the quality of immersion from shows like Terrace House?
Really good i reckon since you are hearing what is essentially just normal everyday Japanese
How much can you rely on passive immersion? It’s not a super clear question since passive immersion kind of means half focus immersion and also just audio immersion but idk. How much visual is actually needed? Or can you spend 90% of your time just listening, on a walk, on a couch, etc. if the goal is just listening comprehension asap, is visual context or subs/plain reading needed to a certain degree for max optimization? (I mean obviously but how much lol) I can’t quite explain what I’m asking very well sorry.
Nah visual context isnt necessary needed it just usually helps to stay engaged with the content and what is going on so that it helps to get the best active immersion. But that kind of half focus immersion on podcasts when you are walking around I think does actually have a huge effect because I used to do I all the time and felt a big benefit from it.
Is Immersion rly helpful if u are a beginner and learning kanji? I mean u dont know any spoken words from learning Kanji...
Hey, so just a quick question then. Genuinely how do you actively immerse without looking stuff up all the time. I feel like I am a god at passive immersion, I listen to Japanese podcasts/news shows every time I drive and whenever I'm doing mundane housework, but whenever I actually sit down to watch stuff I am suddenly at a loss. I can easily get in 6+ hours of passive immersion a day if I don't allow myself to listen to music or English content. But doing active immersion quickly becomes a drag.
It's like, when I do passive immersion there's this inbuilt ability to not care so much about ambiguity because it's simply too impractical to look things up while you're driving or in the middle of doing something, and I always notice i+1 sentences in my passive immersion and get frustrated that I don't have anki nearby to make a flashcard. Then I get home and actually sit down and instead of finding i+1 sentences all over the place and being fine with the ambiguity suddenly I'm looking up every word in a completely incomprehensible sentence, or just watching videos like yours instead. Or, recently, I spend ages trying to find some sort of transcript for the news shows/podcasts I'm listening to (to no avail) with the false hope that I will be able to find all the delicious i+1 sentences that popped up throughout the day.
Would you say the way around this is just to commit to something, anything, whatever it is, the way I am forced to in passive immersion, and then instead of trying actively to follow along, instead just let it go in and whatever sticks out will stick out like in passive immersion?
I suppose you just aren't used to the ambiguity of concentrating and listening to something that you don't understand yet. Yeah I would just do what you said and devote yourself to it like you have been doing with passive immersion and just kind of force yourself to get used to not understanding some stuff. I think when you can do that you'll be able to get the most out of your active listening too. I think I might of gotten used to it pretty quickly since id like call with Japanese people and there was no option to look anything up id just have to try my best to pick out what I can and respond. So maybe when you do actively immerse just focus all your efforts on understanding everything you can and try to use that to get a full sense of everything thats going on, might make not being able to understand the other stuff a bit more bearable
@@oojiman thanks for your always quick and thoughtful responses!
Yeh ok that makes sense. I am not really into watching vlogs and it seems like most Japanese TH-cam is vlog style content, I have really enjoyed immersing with マサル cuz I love nature/survival and I’ve also become fond of some Japanese cooking channels but yeh like you said it’s hard to balance finding good content and actually watching it. I wish there was some easier way to search for content in Japanese without having to know any Japanese because I’ve noticed that to be a bit of a catch 22 that I’ve only slowly overcome by teaching my TH-cam algorithm the kind of stuff I wanna watch.
@@ItaIakinho sorry do you care to elaborate?
I definitely don’t feel like passive immersion is doing “nothing”… there a plenty of times where passive immersion has made me notice a new word in context, or re in forced my knowledge of words I recently learned.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what other people mean when they say “passive”… to clarify, I don’t just let it go in one ear and out the other. I try my best to listen and follow along but whatever I don’t understand I let it go and also will be semi-focussed on another mindless task like cleaning or driving
@@ItaIakinho thanks for elaborating I do actually sort of agree with that. I definitely think it’s more beneficial to passively immerse in content you have already actively immersed in and get the repetition and reinforcement but I also like to listen to the news every day in Japanese while driving to work and I have learned loads of words especially words specific to current events like the coronavirus
I think the problem is if it is completely going over your head then it’s probably not doing much and you need to actively immerse in the content first so it doesn’t go over your head entirely.
To give specific examples, words like 感染、感染者、接種、etc.
And these are words I never even created flash cards for I just looked them up once after hearing them repeated maybe 15 times and thinking “okay I’ve had enough of this I have to know what that word means I’m gunna look it up when I get to work” and by the time I look it it’s like I’ve already learned it and every time I hear it again it’s just reinforced and that’s done entirely through semi-passive listening while driving
slice of life, shojou and dramas
maybe make some videos using イエーイ and 斉藤さん
Yea thats a good idea actually i might do something like that in the future haha
You could also combine anime/video game immersion with real life immersion, find TH-cam videos of normal people talking about that anime/game
For sure, that sounds like a good idea
Too many tips and tricks but why not showing a little bit of your japanese dude
Maybe watch one of my videos where I speak it 🤡