Years ago I idly read Fluent Forever and I’ve forgotten the majority of the book, but the anecdote that stuck with me is the author talking about a woman who learned multiple languages via reading bodice rippers. Now, I’ve found myself learning Japanese via reading mostly crime novels, and among them, a good deal of trashy pulp.
It really is ‘the best method is the one you’ll actually do’ 
To me, it sounds like, either compulsion, habit, or comfort, is required. Otherwise, it seems not so practical for starting out. But it can also be said that habit helps a lot.
Personally I see that, not only amount of exposure and consistency, but also amount of comprehension per exposure, is required.
Yeah! That is one major school of thought, popularized by Stephen Krashen. Called the input hypothesis, you might see the term “comprehensible input” used to refer to the same idea or set of ideas. The intuition behind it is that plenty of adults move to a country and get nothing but natural language input day in and day out for months or years, and they don’t acquire much (or sometimes any!) language this way.
There must be something that explains why this happens, and he points to the idea that you need to be understanding at least a part of the input to get some benefit from it. This seems more than plausible, especially for adult language learners who are using their cognitive faculties to learn a language as opposed to the kind of acquisition that happens during the critical period with your first language.
Other possible explanations focus less on do with what you actually can comprehend vs whether you are trying to comprehend vs not trying to comprehend. Think of how you might kinda turn off your brain when listening to a song in your first language and not actually pay attention to the lyrics, vs actively looking at those same lyrics if you were learning it for karaoke. If you go around with your brain switched off not trying to understand anything, it makes sense that you wouldn’t pick up much even if you were constantly surrounded by input.
There’s other explanations too, language acquisition is important in a lot of different areas of study. Some from psychology treat it more like any normal skill acquisition (where again, consistent practice is important), some from sociology and sociolinguistics treat it more as a cultural thing (where you mainly learn language through active participation in a community)
Likely, it’s some combination of all these things: adult language acquisition is part skill practice, part active comprehension with lots of exposure, and part community participation. Importantly, none of these things really exclude the other and can actually overlap quite a bit! It’s kind of like looking at the same picture from 3 different sides.
But in all of these possible explanations, one thing that stays pretty consistent is that language (especially second language) is really a use it or lose it kinda thing. If you take extended breaks, your language skills will rapidly deteriorate. If you stop practicing, stop reading/listening to stuff, or get cut off from your language community, you will start to lose your proficiency. (It can come back, of course, but only if you start working consistently again!)
November 13 
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I worked through another track of the first バディミッションBOND drama cd today, same method as last time; still going well! I’m having a lot of fun with it, though I definitely get fatigued more quickly than I tend to with other things I’ve been messing with. It’s wild how much wider the language spread in バディミッションBOND feels in comparison to literally anything else I’m reading It’s a very different language experience than ブルーロック lmao. A welcome challenge though 
And then things got interesting So despite my book club dropout status I couldn’t help but keep an eye on the VN club, with the vague inclination that the VN that might drag me back in was BU$TAFELLOWS. Lo and behold, as of this morning it was tied for first place So I figured I should probably check out the demo to see if it actually is something I would be interested in playing and… yeah. Yeah it is, who would’ve thought 
So yeah I played the demo for a while and I really like it so far! It’s very nice and polished, and everything about it is on brand for me so go figure 
So it seems that if the club does go with BU$TAFELLOWS I’ll end up having to join anyway No but as much as I was like “I’m incapable of book clubs during school” I think it’d be fine actually; I think my problem before was that I was trying to do three at the same time and also the listening challenge and also still read other things I wanted to and also school, can’t imagine why that didn’t go well lmao. So we shall see!
Nov 14
かがみの孤城 62% → 64%
I don’t know how it took me so long to discover there’s a dictionary built into Bookwalker 
I have to say it makes for a more pleasant reading experience, especially on mobile lol.
November 14th
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Aria: the masterpiece volume 1 – progress report
Yesterday: read up to page 193
Today: read up to page 206
I read slightly over 10 pages today. That ninja looking guy… is something else. I wonder if we’ll see him again in the next volumes? Given his conspicuous design, I’m almost willing to bet on it.
あらためて another time, again, over again
術 (じゅつ) art, technique
指導員 (しどういん) instructor, advisor
確実 (かくじつ) reliability
もみあげ tuft of hair under temple, sideburns, sidelocks
Didn’t have a lot of reading time today and had a few stressful issues to deal with.
14/11 16 pages Spy Family (finished mission), 2 pages God Bless the Mistaken
This week’s chapter of Spy Family was quite fun.
Nov 14, Mon of Week 8 of Fall 2022
Chapter numbering is arbitrary by me in the first place. I expect the next part (登校) to be longer… Anime song came up just now. Is that an opening theme?
Vocabularies recur. I looked up, and some important ones aren’t remembered yet before.
和らぐ soft and calming
虚空 the void is small, very small (compare 空虚)
脆い stumbling and being fragile like a moron
うなされる unagi is a nightmare, making me groan (うなる)
崩落 crumble into a hole, one direction
滅びる raggy building (compare 綻びる)
苛む opposite of さいわい
無様 Mr. Pig
命からがら “collapsing” (がらがら noise) “from” (から) “destiny”. (からがら barely survived)
桟橋 adjoining 3 bridges to a pier, with a coin donation box. (Probably not worth studying 桟 in depth yet.)
器用 doing well with tools and energy
こびり付く sticking together, and showing out small sparks (also in SHADOWS HOUSE)
Although I say “must”, I aim for just short term memory, and then like 70%. Overdoing a little might just have to be done.
Both chapters are preludes to the next volume, I guess.
Not trying as hard to remember vocabularies here. Probably having Furigana is at fault.
I am considering which manga to read freely, and whether I should continue with next volume of はたらく細胞. Some bookmeter people said I should.
Getting hungry now, and it is getting windy, rainy, and wet outside (暴風雨). Food ran out.
20221114 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 74.91% 
After a little bit more conversation Master’s friend toodles off home presumably for his dindins (these are grownass guys, yet they act like a pair of kids at times). Master retires to his study and has much to think about.
Wagahai-cat kindly narrates Master’s soliloquy for us because he has such omnipotent intellect and Master has all but a hollow skull for a brain, he can easily recite Master’s every thought. Master, all tuckered out from too much thinking in circles, goes to bed and ends chapter nine.
Japanese found under the leaves
唱道「しょうどう」ー Advocacy
脳漿「のうしょう」ー Spinal fluid; grey matter
琴瑟「きんしつ」ー Qin and Se (Two types of Chinese Zithers); but can also mean a happy marriage
(by extension this can be: 琴瑟相和「きんしつそうわ」ー A harmonious couple; being happily married)
Day 45, 14th of November
Read some more 魔女の宅急便. Only two sentences because I went over every single grammar point with a magnifying glass Well, that’s where the joy in reading Japanese for me is right now.
Learned a lot of new grammar points, too, even though I had practically dissected those sentences beforehand. Context is an incredibly important thing in Japanese, and that goes for its grammar points as well!
November 14 
体育館の殺人, 15-26%
体育館の殺人 continued to feel rather lackluster, and at first I couldn’t concentrate at all. Many people in the club seem to be following along with the audiobook, and while I didn’t trust my listening skills enough, I thought I’d at least try and see how it goes. It went fantastically, actually, and it made the reading so much livelier. It also made me read faster or I couldn’t keep up with the audio. Several pauses for lookups and sometimes for the meaning to have time to sink in, but this is not a very complex book language-wise, so most of it went unexpectedly smoothly.
Haven’t updated in a while, oops. Also have a ton of posts to read through when I have time…
November 8
Played ルーパーズ for about half an hour, read a bit of ユージニア and a little わたしの幸せな結婚 (17% → 19%).
November 9
Played ルーパーズ for around 40 min and read a little ユージニア as well as some わたしの幸せな結婚 (19% → 21%).
November 10
Read some ユージニア and わたしの幸せな結婚 (21% → 22%).
November 11
Read some ユージニア and わたしの幸せな結婚 (22% → 24%).
November 12
Read some ユージニア.
November 13
Played ルーパーズ around 40 mins and read some ユージニア. I finished the free sample and I’m definitely hooked so I’ll be joining the ABC soon.
November 14
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神さまがまちガえる 
Can we just forget last week happened? Yeah? Good, thanks!
Was thinking I’d read all of this week’s kamisama today (in fact had hoped to also do the spinoff 耳をすませば short story reading too), but only read about half or slightly more. Still have 10 pages left. Felt a bit dense for some reason. Maybe I was just tired or whatever.
Also, interesting things happening in the VN club. 
Voting ends tomorrow if you were thinking of jumping in. Do realize though that we are probably like intermediate level, also considering the top picks, the reading speed will probably be intermediate kinda amount (or more depending on how easy it is to split up the reading, no table of contents with page numbers on VNs )
…this is why I need books to be tracked on LearnNatively. Here I am, thinking I’m all caught up… Well. I can read the short story tomorrow.
I think the spinoff club is reading 1/3 per week, and this is the second week. The link is here: 耳をすませば 📚 | 幸せな時間 Spinoff
November 14th!
Today I read the second half of Chapter 1 of God Bless the Mistaken.
I was pretty tired, and read バグ as bag instead of bug for the first two pages and was a bit confused.
After that though, I didn’t struggle much, largely because most of the words I needed to look up were already in the vocab list 
Since reading manga on my lunch is out, I figured I would get a light novel and got the first volume of Shield Hero. I binged the anime and was absolutely obsessed with it and after giving it some time since I watched figured it was a good time to read the book.
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November 14
人間椅子 -
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険49
start - 59
In order to meet my goal of completing 50 volumes of manga this year, I’m trying to ramp up my reading. Volume 49 is about 190 pages, so this puts me on track for finishing in about 3 days
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11.14.2022 月曜日
シネマ・コミック5 魔女の宅急便
The part where Kiki helps out the old woman with her fish pie is hitting differently than watching the movie. I feel like this is usually one of my least favorite sections of the movie, but right now it’s the part of the manga that is hitting me the hardest. Whether that’s because of a slower media, slight differences in translation, or just the point I am in my life right now is hard to say.
I feel like a lot of the time I’m reading Jiji as being Kiki’s inner dialogue, like he’s doing all the worry for her so she doesn’t have to. In the english version of the movie he has such a strong personality that he seems completely different. And the japanese voice I find kind of grating. I like the voice I give him in my head the most hahaha
包み - package (I just like the way the kanji looks, and I think this one might be particularly useful for the book and the holidays coming up)
約束 - promise (this kept coming up during the section I was reading and it stopped being a word I had to look up every time)
Nov 14