TL;DR: I strongly recommend, based on personal experience as someone who willingly – and at times incessantly – rewatches his favourite series while looking words up, that you turn more of your viewings into study sessions. 60 viewings is probably going to be way too much, and it’s not necessarily going to be rewarding from the entertainment and Japanese learning perspectives. Aiming to reach ‘no sub’ level within as few viewings as possible is much more efficient, will teach you tons more words and grammar in a short time, and will also be much more fun in the long run because after that, you’ll be able to watch the episodes while hearing exactly how characters feel in Japanese, which is often more authentic and enriching than what the subtitles provide. (Also, no offence meant to people who enjoy dubs, but because of differences in how each language expresses things and the need to match timings and animated mouth movements… dubs will never procure you the same level of enjoyment as the original. There’s a different feel to how characters behave. You need a language with similar forms of expression in order to achieve a similar feel.)
I guess I’ll just follow this thread because I’m curious how it’ll go. Plus, maybe it’ll be a good place for me to recount my own rewatching adventures! However…
I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but this sounds really hard, even if you absolutely love the series. One of the first anime I’d ever watched, which I really adored, was something I watched over and over for… maybe 6 months? It was Konosuba. I had 20 episodes to go through, excluding OVAs, which I only viewed once or twice each. That makes for 180 days/20 episode = 9 viewings per episode, assuming I only rewatched one episode per day. (That wasn’t always the case though…) All in all, I’m pretty confident that I stayed under 20 viewings per episode, and as my calculations have just showed, I don’t think I ever went past 10. By the time I decided to move on to another anime, I have to say… I was pretty tired. I mean, I still enjoyed the episodes when I watched them, but I finally felt like I had enough. I could visualise what happened almost scene by scene, and I knew exactly what was going to happen next before it happened. (The same thing happened after I had watched Avatar: The Last Airbender a few times though, so perhaps I just have a really good memory for stories I like.) At the time, I was still… intermediate, I guess? I was halfway through my first textbook, and my knowledge was probably somewhere between N4 and N3. The end result was this: I had very good listening skills after all that, because I even fell asleep with episodes playing in my ears, and I could easily catch all the syllables when I started the Tobira textbook afterwards. However… I definitely didn’t reach 100% comprehension, and I don’t think I caught more than 40% of the words that were said in any given episode. Granted, I didn’t really have Japanese subtitles until the end, but see, even then, I didn’t have to time to figure out what was being said unless I paused the video. It was too hard to read everything in time, especially because at the time, I knew tons of kanji (thanks, Chinese), but not how to say them in context in Japanese. I only started reaching 60% comprehension towards the end because I had been studying Japanese with other resources and looking up a few words.
What I’m trying to say with that long story is this: I don’t think repeating it for 60 days, once a day, is going to be very effective or very fun. I have nothing against rewatching: I’m a serial offender, as you can clearly tell, and I’ve seen entire seasons of most of my favourite anime at least twice, if not four or five times. Also, I think that How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? is a really good rewatch candidate, because it’s fun and bursting with energy. In fact, right now, I intend to rewatch it again soon: I feel it would be good workout motivation! However, the problem is that even with subtitles, unless you’re taking the time to pause and study the video as new words come up, and make at least a slight effort to remember them, your comprehension levels aren’t going to increase much. The result is going to be that as the 60 days wear on, you’re not only going to be enjoying the episode less and less because it’s not new anymore, but you’re also going to become more and more frustrated (if you get serious about such things, I mean) about the fact that you’re not understanding much more. Because of the speed of speech in anime, some lines literally can’t be broken down aurally unless you stop the video and learn all the words before listening again. Your brain won’t be able to parse the words fast enough because they’re not familiar, and it’ll just sound like a jumbled mess.
What I suggest you try is to lengthen (if possible) your ‘no sub’ and ‘Japanese sub’ days into vocabulary and grammar study sessions. Pause the video when you can and look up what’s being said. If you want to ‘no sub’ while having a ‘cheat sheet’ in the background for lookups if you can’t catch what’s being said at all, then you have two options:
- Use a site/player that allows you to turn subtitles on and off, and turn them on when necessary
- (This is what I do.) Go see if the anime has been transcribed with screenshots on Anicobin or some other site. For example, you can search「ンベル何キロ持てる?1話 感想 アニコビン/anicobin」and see what comes up. There’s typically at least one site (Anicobin being the best I’ve found so far) that contains screenshots with the dialogue transcribed. You can get up to 95% of everything that’s been said on some anime. Not quite as good as subtitles, but close enough. The bonus is this: you can copy and paste the words directly into a dictionary and look through examples and definitions. I know some subtitle sites and software allow you to use a built-in dictionary, but they’re rarely as good as dictionaries that offer examples.
The point of this approach is that every time you rewatch afterwards, your brain will be looking out for – and will often catch – the words you’ve just learnt. You can achieve 60% comprehension – or even 80-100% comprehension – much, much faster this way. Sure, it makes watching an episode more time-consuming: I think I spent 1h per 20-min episode on Shield Hero over summer, when I was aiming to learn absolutely every word. However, just for some perspective: that was maybe my fifth viewing of the series, and I only looked things up for… 2-3 of those five viewings? I was already deciphering about 80-90% of the words said per episode at that point. I know that you’re probably a bit less advanced now than I was then, but my point is this: with serious study, or at least a few look-ups and attentive transcription reading across 5-10 viewings, at least 80% comprehension should be attainable. 60 viewings is way too many, and you’ll probably get sick of the series by viewing number 20. You’ll have a lot more fun with intensive study and fewer viewings. Plus, believe me: when you’re able to watch without subtitles and understand almost everything, you’ll feel soooo happy. Getting to that point in fewer viewings is much more efficient and far more rewarding.
All that said, whatever you choose, I’m happy that you’re fired up, and impressed by your commitment. 頑張って!