Hello again - it’s been awhile. 久しぶりだね
I started WaniKani 8 years ago now with the cliche goal of watching anime without subtitles. However, it turned out that I didn’t have the time, patience, and interest to make it happen at the time. I gave up after ~1-2 years. Ironically, now, I’m watching anime without subtitles, but now my goal is completely different. Now I want to understand my wife fluently. I thought I would gather some successful tips here and put a brief log together to see if what worked for me may work for you as well!
No one told me that you need to start watching anime without subtitles now and accepting not understanding most of it. I ignorantly thought I could wait until I was fluent before watching native content without subtitles but it is of course exactly the opposite, you will never get fluent without the sometimes painful work of not understanding a significant amount. This is probably obvious to other language learners but for other American folks like me, our foreign language education may not be as good.
I watched this video a month or so ago and although it’s not perfect, it has a lot of the same thoughts that I do so it is a good place to start but I will distill some key points here-
Even though I still didn’t feel prepared at all to watch native Japanese content without subtitles I’ve been listening to my wife speak Japanese for 6 years now (2 years living together) so I forced myself to try. She is pretty much fluent in English now so she isn’t speaking in Japanese significantly every day, but when we started dating that was the case.
For listening practice that I feel has worked well for me, this list from the video above is great, it contains what I’ve been using for awhile - Yuyu’s podcast is great. Something my wife recommended to me (Narumi and Shinobu’s American Life) is also interesting. It’s important that you find something fun. I also love Hanae Natsuki’s YouTube channel, you can watch him and other famous voice actors play games together like this.
For reading/writing, luckily I did pick up a Lifetime membership to WaniKani 7-8 years ago during a sale so I am ready to give it another go. I reset back 5+ levels a few months ago to where I felt confident and I’ve already recovered back to near where I left off.
Best of luck - feel free to ask any questions or provide any other advice/feedback!
いっしょに頑張れましょう!