Everyone always says to do immersion, but nobody ever actually says how, or where or what to do specifically. Let’s say you’re at, round and about N3 level, what would you do? Okay manga and anime, but what else is there? I can think of maybe books, or I dunno japanese social media or something? But where would I go? What would I use? Also, wouldn’t social media with it’s ultra colloquial language be too hard?
Basically, I would like some kind of list of things I could do and places I could go to interact with the japanese language outside of studying.
What do you do every day? Surf social media? Use it in Japanese. Watch Netflix? Watch it in Japanese. Read news? Read it in Japanese. Listen to podcasts? Listen to it in Japanese … You get the idea. No matter what you usually do or listen to or read or play, there’s a good chance that the same thing exists in Japan, and you can do the same in Japanese.
Visual Novels (There’s a book club for that here too)
Steam games list what languages they support. Some of them support Japanese. You can also watch playthroughs of these games online, instead of playing them yourself.
What are you interested in? There’s probably a Japanese resource for it, whether that’s a youtuber posting cooking videos or a book explaining knitting patterns or something.
In general I find things that are viewed in my browser are easier to read with 10ten/yomichan/yomitan extensions than reading an image/physical media. Sure I have to look up most slang words, but I have to look up tons of vocab words regardless. At least 10ten recognizes a bunch of them.
It’s easy to learn with visual novels since you can extract unknown kanji with “Textractor”.
I’d delay paper manga, light novels etc. for immersion until later.
For speaking practice, VRChat (works on PC without VR gear) is a great option. Some Japanese worlds are locked behind puzzles/kanji quizes to solve because people on the internet are obnoxious and shout anime references at Japanese users…
So whenever I go there I try to look around, listen, find someone who shares an interest or find a fun conversation starter. Best time to log in would be Friday night when people go drinking to VR xD
I’d say I’m interested in games and streams, series, including anime of course. I don’t really have many interests tbh, I’m rather boring I did try watching anime (New Game!) with japanese subtitles. It’s extremely exhausting, so I thought I should maybe start with something easier, something where I don’t have to commit 20 minutes of intense mental focus at a time. You know?
That 10ten extension seems pretty good though, makes looking up words a lot easier than copy&paste them into jisho x’D
Why delay manga? There are plenty of accessible manga at ~N3. There are many popular manga with a low-20 rating on Natively that should be fairly readable at that level.
I found anime really hard too, even “easy” anime. Manga is much easier at a comparable difficulty level since you have no rush (but then, no listening practice either).
Videogames/VNs that let you advance dialogue at your own pace while being voiced is a very good compromise I found.
Yes, japanese listening comprehension without subtitles is so difficult for me too. I enjoy reading a lot more, if it’s a text I can actually read rather fluently without too much looking up to do.
I meant only paper manga.
I started reading Bocchi the Rock a few days ago and it’s tough luck. Every few panels I hit a wall and can’t remember a word… so I have to pick up phone, look it up and continue reading again (this takes me almost a minute)… with digital content it’s just a copy paste to Jisho which takes 5 seconds.
Watching anime at full speed is native level speed. It’s exhausting in the beginning because your brain is going full focus to try to keep up. I’ve been watching Romantic Killer in the anime club here, and I can usually get most of the main points of an episode, but if I stop focusing for 30 seconds I have to rewind because I’ve lost the sentences entirely. I try to watch a second time with English subtitles just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I just keep telling myself that listening won’t get easier unless I spend time listening, so I’m trying to keep going with it.
Youtube playthroughs of games are nice because you can pause them, but keeping up with natives speaking is going to be just as hard.
There are games that let you advance text at your own pace. I’ve been playing one for 3 months now where my English playthrough was 12 hours and my Japanese playthrough so far is 80 hours.
I try to read my manga/books online because worst case I can use ocr to help look up words faster than searching manually.
Oh I see. I’ve always done it that way so it doesn’t bother me anymore (maybe because I started studying foreign languages in the late 90’s before all these tools were available).
I also find that having to look things up manually can be beneficial, both because it actually forces me to really try to remember if I know the word/kanji and also because the very act of looking it up increases the likelihood that I’ll remember it later. It certainly adds a lot of friction though.
That said I have also been reading Bocchi the Rock (I finished the first chapter yesterday actually) and it’s certainly pretty difficult and requires a lot of lookups.
It is at first. But then so is anything really where you’re pushing yourself.
In general easy things have low per-hour efficiency for learning, and hard things are more useful, so do the hard thing for 20 mins, and then switch to easier things as you need to.
Easy manga, or alternatively children’s book with sparse text, or light novels with very short (but a lot of) chapters, might be accessible.
Games or visual novels with manually advance text (perhaps with voice) might be a good idea. Japanese voice in VN might be easy to pick up than anime with similar EN sub.
If you feel energetic, anime with JP sub, but be prepared to pause/rewind a lot. YouTube transcript / Language Reactor sidebar might be convenient for seeing previous lines (i.e. backlog), as well as rewinding.
Colloquialism might not be too hard, if the text is sparse enough and there are visual cues. Maybe read up Tae Kim or Japanese the Manga Way for preparation.
Another thing that may help is Graded Readers Level 1-3. (I probably never got to 4.) If it is easy enough, dictionary lookup might be rare to begin with.
Also, if you say you don’t have many interests, maybe it’s a good point to reach out and maybe find new things you can develop an interest for.
Language learning is also learning about the culture, so maybe try to read articles about history or festivities or regular culture and once you get a bit more accustomed to that… books and other native material. The world is vast and there is a lot to learn and get excited about.
Maybe you can find something that you learn to like, too!
I would like to add with a lot of these suggestions with manga, anime, games, and whatever, to consider starting out with material you’re already very familiar with.
For instance, if you’re super familiar with Chrono Trigger, it’s worth replaying it in Japanese. So that even if you kinda lose your way with the language, you’ll still know what should be happening from past experience.
Same with manga, rereading something you’ve already read before. Or even better if you’re really lacking in experience, going back and forth between editions each chapter to see how much you got. (This also depends on translation quality for obvious reasons, I don’t think English translations of Japanese manga are particularly good.)
Another option is setting your social media accounts to Japanese to familiarize yourself with how the language is used in that context. You probably know where everything is from frequent enough use, so you can go to all the pages you need to without actually looking and never really get lost that way. But it’s a good reading exercise. Same with changing your phone’s setting to Japanese. Just make sure you take screenshots of where the menu options are to set it back if you’re afraid you might not be able to quickly find your way to those in a new language.
Last bit of advice, don’t sweat not fully getting everything too much. Even in your own native tongue, you’ll have momentary confusion understanding things. It’s totally normal. But with a new language you’re much more likely to be self-aware of this and cause a negative spiral over it. There’s nothing wrong with taking a while to understand things or blanking on things “you really should know by now.” It happens to the best of us.
If you really want to be hard-core about it, change your iphone to Japanese, your google preferences to Japanese, your computer’s language to Japanese, etc. Do Google searches in Japanese first. Talk to Siri in Japanese, and try to interpret the answer.
When I’m in Japan, it’s not the textbook scenario interactions at restaurants, etc.that are hard. It’s the “uh oh supermarket self-checkout machine, what buttons do i press” type of mundane stuff. Looking for a ryokan I might like - I do it in Japanese and learn tons of words that way.
If it’s important not to screw it up, I check myself in English afterwards
I did try watching anime (New Game!) with japanese subtitles. It’s extremely exhausting, so I thought I should maybe start with something easier, something where I don’t have to commit 20 minutes of intense mental focus at a time. You know?
