What's your immersion?

Yep, that’s me :slight_smile:

My junk deletes itself after ten days, could I trouble you to ask your teacher to send again please?

And send my apologies - last two weeks have been very busy for me (family schtuff)

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All right, I’ll relay the message, but you could also send another inquiry to them yourself, of course!

Glad it was you, I wasn’t sure if maybe someone else decided to write to them without mentioning it here. And then I’d have no clue at all who to tag :joy:

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Haha, well you got it in one :wink:

I love your new profile picture by the way, strokes are so clean.

You know what, absolutely. I don’t know why I put that on you, it’s my problem haha.

In any case, I just sent the email!

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I’ve started taking online group classes because motivating myself is hard. Either I go full in and exhaust myself or I don’t do enough and disconnect from it. Classes are paced for me so I don’t have to worry about making my own schedule. I’m just not that great at independent learning. But, I like to learn with people as well. Bouncing off people is very important for me.

That being said, Wani Kani is an exception because it is paced for me. The lessons are given to me in stages. It’s been almost two weeks and I don’t feel at all discouraged or worried and anxious.

Other than that, nothing else so far. Those are enough for me right now until I’m more naturally immersed. I do love watching Terrace House. Seina and Noah from the recent season has their own Youtube channel now and everything they say is subtitled in Japanese :). Later on, I’ll be listening and reading to their videos.

I used to write my shopping lists in Hiragana and Katakana. I will start doing this again.

I do also read NHK easy with a Chrome extension. I will often read the articles out loud for pronunciation practise. I’ll typically read each article twice. Once to get a feel of it and twice to speed up a little bit. Sometimes I will go very slowly in order to pronounce each syllable or combined furigana with as much a Japanese accentuation as possible. Some simple words can be really hard! ‘Desu’ is hard. My Sussex British accent comes through so much on that word!

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Definitely video games, this medium usually has it all: moving pictures, written speech and in newer titles voice acting.
They’re too hard for a beginner such as me for the most part, but I enjoy games I already know well. Or watching other people play them in Japanese and explain what’s going on.

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I recently found a new way of immersion for me.

Of all gaming, RTS is the one that I loved the most. Nothing beats the experience of crushing your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women (as if they ever have one)!

I’m aware that RTS genre is not that big in Japan but I want to try to find one nonetheless. At first I looked at Age of Empires III with its recently released Definitive Edition remaster as it has the Japanese as one of the playable factions. However, upon checking the unit voices in Youtube, they only repeat the same phrases like 直ちに and other archaic words.

Luckily, the OG Starcraft (and its Remastered edition) have a Japanese version. They have full Japanese voices for both Terran and Protoss units (because Zerg grunts and farts doesn’t translate well into Japanese). The campaign has lots of pre and post game dialogue/discussion so you can listen and read what they’re saying. Sadly as my knowledge of Kanji and vocab is quite low, most of the discussion flies over my head. At least I’m already familiar with the story and have something to replay once I’m decent with Japanese.

For anyone who want to try the free “non-remastered” version of Starcraft, it seems to have a bug with changing languages. Even though I’ve installed it with Japanese as the default language it still displays text and plays voices in English. Only after I’ve purchased the remaster was I able to simply switch to Japanese.

Anyways, it’s really fun to play Starcraft in Japanese. So far, the Japanese voice actors were chosen well.

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wow, i’m now on my 4th of these! it’s still super confusing to me (i just figured out what ko-threats are and what the tiger’s mouth is), but i refuse to look anything up and just let it wash over me :stuck_out_tongue: i’m currently watching a game being commented by Cho Chikun, he’s making it super fun to watch

so thanks for the recommendation ! :slight_smile:

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For listening, VTubers!

Amano Pikamee especially helps a lot with my listening - she’s hilarious for one, but she’s bilingual, native Japanese speaker who lived in the US for a bit. Her English streams are practically half in Japanese, but she repeats the same thing in English afterwards and I think she keeps the language pretty simple so it’s fairly easy to follow along most of the time. Definitely my favourite tea kettle.

Hololive is pretty good too, and varied enough to have someone for everyone. Plenty of subbed clips around if that’s your thing, and enough members to always have something for you to watch. Their English speaking branch also recently launched (about a month ago I think) and aside from being very entertaining they offer some listening practice too - Kiara and Ina are fluent I believe, and Mori is at a pretty high level, and sometimes has Japanese practice streams where she does things like JLPT practice tests or Duolingo and walks through her reasoning as to why she answers the way she does, or just JP-only chat streams where takes a shot every time some English slips in. I know the other two are currently learning Japanese but not yet at a high level so maybe they’ll have some more beginner-friendly Japanese in their streams soon-ish? One of the Hololive JP girls mentioned wanting to do a collab but needing to get the language barrier out of the way first, so maybe if they both learn a bit of each other’s language that could be interesting.

As for reading, I’m still at a level where a page will take me a pretty long time to get through, but I enjoy reading manga anyway, so I’m struggling my way through よつばと! at the moment. Not exactly easy going, but it gets noticeably better over time so that’s motivating, as well as the manga just being downright adorable.

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I also second this. I believe it’s good practice being able to watch people talk to each other casually in Japanese. Also a good way to pick up Japanese internet slang. Watching the Japanese vtubers practice English and the English vtubers learn Japanese inspired me to start studying seriously myself.

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Welcome to the community, @Chsales1421!
This is a great hub for learning the Japanese language. Hope to see you around!

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Just a small note, Ina’s not fluent, but still lovely to watch (especially as a fellow artist)! She did a stream where she took JLPT practice tests, but it doesn’t seem to be archived :cry:

I love vtubers as well :two_hearts: Coco is another one to look out for since she’s bilingual too. Her first language seems to be English, but most of her streaming is in Japanese. She plays up the weirdness of her Japanese a lot, but that makes it really fun to watch! She also does silly segments where she shows English memes to the other Japanese members and has them try to guess the meaning. It’s really interesting to see their interpretations, and to listen to Coco’s Japanese explanation of what it really means.

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Funny thing, I watched that JLPT stream and she did mention Calli’s Japanese is better than hers. Not sure where I got the idea she’s fluent in the first place.

I’ll second Coco, definitely. The meme reviews are hilarious, what with people trying to rile her up with broken Japanese and Japanglish. Watching her absolutely lose it over “yamete kudastop” had me in stitches.

I’ve also noticed some Indonesian streamers speak both English and Japanese, for some reason. I know Moona Hoshinova (Holo ID, plays a bunch of Minecraft on the Holo JP server) and Hana Macchia (Nijisanji ID) do, and use both languages in their streams (though for Hana it seems to be mostly English). Hana is a blast to watch too, seems super wholesome but has to consciously lay off the swears for the public streams - also her dad joins her on stream sometimes and their dynamic is brilliant. Not necessarily the best VTuber for Japanese immersion but definitely worth watching.

Also if you’re looking for a good laugh, watch Hana react to her first stream. Happens to be (partially) in Japanese too, so it might even be educational!

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I had my first lesson today @Saida san - I really enjoyed it so I’ll be continuing. Naoko-sensei is an excellent teacher.

FYI I told them I have known you since January because that is when I started using the forums - in case they ask haha

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my immersion is definitely novels. i’ve recently just picked up reading and it is like jumping into a whole new world. it’s really hard to explain how uniquely japanese sentences come together to create a distinct feeling that could never be translated. learning new words and phrases gives me a dopamine rush since it feels like i’m a pokemon trainer catching all these rare and peculiar (from an english speakers standpoint) pokemon. even simple expressions like 光に満ちていた puts me in a special kind of mood that i’m not sure english has. to me, it’s not reading just for the enjoyment but to learn about how feelings are conveyed through japanese. i just finished reading キッチン and the author writes about loneliness from losing your loved ones. now i am curious about how horror novel would be written, or what would it feel like if the husband you thought you loved was actually a completely different person? :flushed: i want to know!

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Hahaha, great! I heard, already. Will you keep doing the afternoon class?

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I think it will depend on the day, but I didn’t actually know (or may have forgotten) there were multiple lessons a day. What are the times usually and which ones are you usually joining?

Karuta 百人一首 is one of my guilty plessures.

After watching Chihayafuru I bought a karuta deck, a book with the translations and important pointers on the meening behind the poems.

I also watch matches on youtube, even though I have a hard time finding new matches.

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I have never actually seen this played for real. Fascinating. :slight_smile:

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