If you haven’s already seen it “Hot Spot“ is great. It’s a lot less… traditionally acted… than most J-dramas.
Unfortunately it appears to only be available in the US via Netflix (I was hoping that it might be available via JME TV, but no such luck).
Too many streaming subscriptions already, not going to add Netflix.
Yep. Just idle curiosity here, but having lived in Japan for a long time and knowing quite a few other folks that have as well (all in the 20 years or more range) why aren’t they all fully fluent by now? A very few are, but those folks all attended language schools/lessons and studied diligently for multiple years.
It reminds me of the old tales from my childhood which some believed in. I know people that actually slept with text books under their pillow in the belief that their brain would absorb it while they slept.
I kinda stopped asking myself how some people are so bad*, and am more interested in how others are so good!
For the latter, I think the answer is what Omar said in The Wire:
(* There’s a line from Bodyheat:
“I hate people like that. I’m like that.”)
Happy Christmas!
They aren’t fluent after 20 years because they didn’t need to be. The brain is only going to adapt as much as it needs to. You can whitenoise 10000 hours of listening and not learn hardly a thing. Similarly you can say the same phrases over and over for 10000 hours and hardly learn a thing. The quality of time put in is just as if not more important than the quantity. And in language learning, quality is largely determined by the effort you put in to understand or produce things that aren’t immediately obvious to you.
Small children naturally put in a lot of effort to understanding because their L1 is like their only tool of communication. Especially in school we like require kids to learn and construct more complex thoughts in language. For adults, it’s a lot easier to just get by and minimize struggle. Want to try to say something outside your comfort zone of complexity? A lot of adults will just choose not to to save themselves the embarrassment.
Tons of hours but little progress is very common in all skill progression and is often just the “OK plateau”. You get to a level you can get by with and stop pushing yourself to improve so you stagnate
What did He say? I don’t understand him.
“a day at a time I suppose” 
In this simplest terms, you learn something by doing it repeatedly. There is no shortcut to this. Listening to random Japanese does help, but only to an extent. Babies listen to Japanese 24/7.
But also, babies are dumb. You, as a however old you are, have learned a lot about how to learn new things, so you can practice and learn something much faster than a baby can. For example, going through a Japanese textbook, will teach you much faster than listening ever could. Studying kanji on WK or wherever will teach you them much faster than randomly running into them in the wild.
So if you’re say, going for a jog, sitting on the train, etc, then yes listening is a good way to augment your immersion. But you’re not going to learn Japanese by listening to it an hour a day. I say, if you have “free time” to be studying Japanese, you should do so strongly. With things like textbooks, kanji, speaking tutors, etc. You’ll get the best results that way.
I didn’t want to post anything because everyone is being so defensive about this video, but no one did, so I’m doing it.
The video is simply right and basically the only thing i would add is the dimension of time, because it will take *very* long regardless.
The only way to “acquire” language is by reading and listening in that language, and that should be 80 to 90% of your time “studying” the language. You also don’t need to study very very much before starting to read, it make things less painful but not by much (mid N4 + 2000 vocab is more than enough to start manga and easy LNs).
Now how long it will take? The TMW discord server has some data on this, that should be taken with a grain of salt because of survivorship bias, but taking in consideration other random sources online, it’s safe to consider ~2000 hours of immersion on average to pass N1, or 5-10 million characters read. A person doing 1-2 hours of immersion per day will take 2-4 years to reach that. Anki seems to reduce this almost in half if done correctly I would say.
So don’t be afraid, listen to a ton of stuff, don’t be afraid to whitenoise and understand only 20% of what you’re watching, read a ton, overuse yomitan and make some cards if you want or not. Do what you need to get those hours in. It is simple, just very long.
This is the least egregious video made by that dude. You guys should check out his video on kanji 
Just watched the Kanji video and nothing really seemed off to me as someone who’s studied for a very long time and known people who have more or less done what he recommendeds. It’s what I did too for 1000+ Kanji I’ve encountered, but I started off my journey with some wk so I had a foundation.
He misses that it’s easier to start off with just familiarizing yourself with each individual Kanji, but he’s right that it can be skipped. It’s not useless knowledge, but it’s not necessary.
I respectfully disagree.
A lot of these immersion purists claim that structured and targeted learning is useless, because they only started speaking and understanding the language after 1000s of hours of immersion.
What they conveniently ignore or leave out is that the structured learning allowed to build a foundation to immerse and acquire new vocabulary.
Without any formal training, it would take years or decades to learn something with blind immersion that can easily be learnt within a few months of targeted learning.
I’m not sure what you disagree with, but I agree with you.
I think what you’re missing is I’m not an immersion purist, the guy in the video isn’t an immersion purist, and 99.9% of “immersion learners” aren’t immersion purists.
You can see the person in the video explicitly say he learned and suggests other people learn by using srs on anki and using reading to solidify that knowledge. That is targeted learning. It’s not just blind immersion hoping things stick one day.
Immersion learning advocates are really “immersion centric learning” advocates. I wouldn’t get too caught up in the semantics. Almost nobody on the internet actually just learned purely by osmosis from the get go
At the risk of stating the obvious, listening to Japanese speech will certainly help you learn to understand Japanese speech. If your goal for learning the language includes being able to understand Japanese speech, it makes sense that listening to Japanese speech should be a component in your plan.
Same goes for reading. And writing. And speaking. If they’re important to you, they’re probably something you want to practice. When, how, how much, and in what way are all details that will be up to the individual. Things like grammar and vocabulary are sort of the skeletons around which those other components get grafted on (maybe more an armature than skeleton unless you’re into that cyberpunk lifestyle).
I suppose a heavy dose of immersion works for some people. I presume it doesn’t work for others. But a video “What’s the best way to learn Japanese? Whatever works for you!” is not likely to pull millions of views, or else I’d… nah, I wouldn’t make one still. 