So today I was watching a video in japanese for immersion.
But I couldn’t understand anything in the sense I knew individual words and vocabs But not able to understand this type of form of japanese.
The japanese I encounter in anime is more easier than the japanese I encounter in youtube. I’m very interested in transforming from netflix to youtube but I feel like it’s completely different ballgame. They are not the same. 
Anybody have any tips to become better at immersion in youtube?
Did you watch any of the Japanese reality shows on Netflix? It’s not anime and you are more exposed to the way people talk in their everyday life, so it might help you transitioning from anime to a less scripted more natural way of talking.
That’s strange. The video you shared has standard Japanese. Doesn’t use any weird slang or complicated grammar. She’s speaking quite clearly but perhaps a bit fast.
One reason you find anime easier to understand is that you’re more used to the frequently used in anime words and phrases.
What kind of anime are you comparing to?
Personally, I find some anime quite hard to understand compared to regular everyday japanese and youtube videos.
If you’re indeed able to understand most of the words in the video, than it’s a matter of practice. Try watching it multiple times. And keep watching similar videos.
I don’t watch that much reality shows. I do watch rom-com sometimes. but most of the times it’s very small pool of vocab.
I usually watch hajime no ippo, campfire cooking , haikyuu, blue lock and many fight anime.
Right, those should be quite similar. Try watching something dialogue heavy and see how well you can understand that. In anime visuals help comprehension quite a bit. So you don’t have to understand the lines 100% to understand what’s happening.
The good news is the difference between anime japanese and “real” japanese is way less than people make it out to be. They’re still the same exact language meant for the same exact group of natives. There’s just a bit of icing on top and anime (mostly all scripted content really) just has a sort of neatness to it that doesn’t reflect the messiness of native pronunciation and sentence construction when thinking stuff up on the fly.
The thing that trips most people up is the latter + general omission of information. I would personally just use subtitles, get what they are saying in front of you, and then try to think it through. It’s mostly a comprehension issue I imagine and I find those a lot easier to tackle when I can get the sentence/context in front of me. Also you could then use that to ask people online when you don’t know stuff.
The way you boost comprehension is the same as reading or watching your anime really. You just keep doing it, trying to understand, and looking stuff up you don’t get to figure it out. Listening just has the built in prerequisite of needing the Japanese at a level of familiarity where you understand it when you hear it near instantly.
That does make sense. But could my lack of comprehension be due to not knowing grammar from n2 an or above. Or is N3 grammar enough to understand youtube vidoes.
We can’t tell you why you don’t comprehend stuff because we aren’t you. We can help you figure it out but you need to do the heavy lifting. Like I said, find something with subtitles, look through it, and see what you don’t understand without looking it up. I or many other people would be very willing to check your comprehension on here if you posted it with your translation.
If you watch through once without subs, especially, then that will give you
Got it. I will transalate it and get back.
It could help you to give it a try. Scripted shows have arcs and characters stereotypes and all that, it is also a closed world, so your ability to predict the next move of a character is pretty high, and everything is very structured so you won’t be able to miss what’s going on.
When people speak about stuff, and you are not familiar with their personality, the way they express themself, it’s harder to understand. It’s not a textbook where you are used to certain structures and certain topics at any given time, it’s just how ever that person talks about the subject of the video. So you either sit with the video, listen, try to transcribe it, or put on Japanese subs, and see what you do know and what you need to learn.
You might realize there are patterns that repeat themselves but you are unfamiliar with them or words that are mentioned a lot but you haven’t encountered them in this context. It’s a learning curve and it demands a lot of work and attention to details, but that’s how you learn a new language.
And don’t be discouraged by how difficult it seems at first. The brain needs x exposure to new patterns before it stops rejecting them as contradictory to what it already knows as a pattern that is associated with conveying that idea in the languages you already know.
It’s not a lot of transalation.
I know like 80% of words in the video and 20% I have never seen.
A lot of vocab I don’t know and different grammar conjugations which trips me up.
I have a good grammar base.
I would like to thank everyone for their advice it helped me reflect my methods for immersing and such…
I need to move to youtube to get exposure to vocab I will never see on anime,
and also need to go back to part I don’t understand.
I took tolerating ambiguity too literally and just didn’t bother to check.
The stationary vocabs are hard.
That’s true , I have found myself many times being able to guess what they are going to say or where this is heading. Since anime’s usually build from ground up.
There is not much things you don’t know about.
The reason I’m not improving my comprehension on youtube might be because of my negligence towards looking up words on youtube as many videos don’t have subs. But I think I need to be more detailed with my immersion instead of letting it through easily.
I easily get discouraged when I don’t understand what they are saying and just give up. Which is my main crux.
Yeah so it definitely seems like our biggest issue here is just a general japanese comprehension level (which is good news honestly). It really pops out to me that you didn’t know しないといけない and just 80% of the words in general. Its going to be basically impossible to understand any speech only medium with only 80% of words known. Also, the good news is that theres really not any stuff that you wouldn’t be able to find in anime.
So, my suggestion is that you just find subtitled content and work through it (including anime) or find something easier and maybe rely on the autogenerated subtitles when you need it (though they are less reliable). It seems like what you need is just more vocabulary and grammar under your belt, which means that you can input with probably just about anything and it will have meaningful progress towards you being able to understand these sorts of videos better.
Maybe use something like language reactor and yomitan to get faster lookups and really try taking it slow and breaking down the stuff that you don’t understand rather than letting it pass you by (if you are). That, in my opinion, is the biggest hurdle with spoken content and especially one with visuals. It’s very easy to just let yourself ignore the japanese you don’t understand since the default state is just sorta sitting back and letting it run. At least with reading its like you can’t go forward without putting in effort. Best of luck in getting over that hurdle and hopefully this helps!
Personally, I don’t believe in throwing yourself into the deep end like that for this very reason. You need to give yourself something that will enhance your ability to deal with what you’re watching, so find videos with Japanese subs. Immersion is not about just listening or watching it’s about maintaining a level of engagement that helps you advance your comprehension. You’ve gotta be able to engage in a meaningful way.
I sit every day with games screenshots and the 30 secs capture, transcribe it and learn new words, which means opening wanikani, midori, GooJJ, and keep on learning grammar. It takes a lot of time and the number of screenshots i deal with a day is tiny compared to my backlog. But my reading improved, I understand more than I thought I would. My grammar is trash, but I’m working on it, which I can’t say is the part I enjoy, it’s hard. It all takes time and effort. I wish I was faster, but I’m only human.
Choosing the right material will do wonders for you. Try to find something that you at least understand some of it so you won’t hit a wall of frustration.
I only listened to about a minute of it, but I didn’t think it would be surprising for someone who is below N2 to struggle to follow it.
My immersion of listening is that it’s possible to go from the other end. Knowing enough vocabularies, while not planning to take too difficult materials (so not too many vocab needed). Listen to podcast or audio drama that don’t have visual cues, and learn to notice auditory cues, like covering for 10% unknown vocab, maybe things like word roots or Kanji reading. After getting exhausted from just-listening, go back to video watching.
About YouTube, many have generated sub. Transcript tab (maybe while disabling sub) can help with rewinding and relistening. Auto-sub can be so bad that it’s unreliable for reading.
The auto-generated captions on this particular video seem mostly pretty good, and should at least help you look up words you don’t know.
I notice that she edited out almost all of the pauses in her speech. This is really common on YouTube to make wordy videos faster-paced and less boring, but it can be really hard to keep up if you are a language learner and need extra time to process what you hear.
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