On the 5th November 2025 I reached 2000 hours of immersion.
Let’s take a look at my current understanding.
Study Focus
My study focus is everyday communication, listening and to make Japanese friends.
My personal study rules
If you don’t know me yet. Here are my study rules:
I only do immersion. No dictionary, no translations, no grammar, no anki, no textbooks, no course, no subtitles, no reading (only cold character reading).
I do not believe that this is a superior way or anything - I just see it as a personal experiment.
How does Japanese feel for me now
- Japanese feels very light for me and very rhythmical on every word.
- I am often really surprised how little information the written language gives about the song which every word plays.
- I don’t have to think to understand Japanese.
- I often cannot understand single words without context. Everything feels very contextual.
- I often cannot recognise a word based on the infinitive case.
- Often my brain creates random answer sentences when I listen to a Japanese conversation.
- I still have troubles to associate the right days of the week.
- I can understand science videos made for a high school environment.
- I feel when a pronunciation is incorrect.
- I can understand weird voices in movies.
My girlfriend wants to add (she is speaking now):
- I am deeply in love with the CI method. I feel that I start to apply it in other areas of learning which are not connected to language learning. The concept of not having to memorise anything is a big relief for me.
- My teachers are often surprised about the high quality of my pronunciation and my grammar skills. My passive vocabulary is still much better than my active one.
- I am not afraid of conversations anymore, because I am certain that I will understand what the other person tells me.
- I enjoy to listen to Teppei and Noriko as it helps me in my own Japanese conversations.
- A lot has improved in my first 30 hours of speaking. The first 5-8 hours were really tough as I couldn’t find my words.
- When I have the conversations I only think in Japanese - even when I try to find a word. Sometimes a word from another language pops up in my mind, but it doesn’t really help me as I don’t translate and it doesn’t fit to the structure of Japanese.
- When I want to say something, I don’t try to force to construct the sentence in my mind - I just wait and see what bubbles up.
- I have a lot of fun speaking in Japanese. I can make jokes, speak about a lot of topics (including complex ones), for example: memories, religion and faith, family life, dating and relationships, etc.
- I am repeating a lot of conversations patterns which I picked up from Teppei & Noriko when I feel it fits to the situation.
- My aizuchi powers are not fully natural yet.
- My teachers usually think that I lived for a couple of years in Japan.
- My focus is speaking, but when I read I automatically drop into the Japanese language flow.
- Somehow I unlocked weird voices in cartoons which felt impossible before.
What can I do now?
- Watch Disney or Netflix movies if the content is not overly dramatic, political or complicated
- Have full crosstalk conversations about god, the world and the everyday for 5+ hours
Current study structure
After I reduced my daily immersion time a bit from 7-8 hours to 5-6 hours it enabled me to reduce my study sessions per day. I stopped to do any podcasts or immersion during bike commuting. I am very happy about this as it improved the quality of all my sessions. At the moment I do 4 immersion blocks per day:
- Early morning
- Evening
- Late night
- Crosstalk
Additionally I added a 1 hour crosstalk / output (for my girlfriend) session per day.
On the weekend we usually meet a friend for one more 3-5 hours crosstalk session. I try to ensure that my study time does not hit 7 or more hours anymore as I observed negative side effects on my health.
Study focus until 2000 hours
My study focus until 2000 hours was still the basic children / everyday language. I avoided content which was too polite, too official, too adult or too scientific due to this goal. Now I feel that my children Japanese is starting to stabilise and that I can branch out into other domains.
Funnily, this is one of the reasons that I avoided to go big on CIJ Intermediate content. Of course I watched some intermediate CIJ videos - however, I never really focused on them with high repetition.
CIJ Complete Beginner and CIJ Beginner can bring you really far as long as you develop deep listening skills.
People often assume that they need more vocabulary. If your goal is to have real life conversations - the vocabulary from CIJ Beginner will be more than good enough. If harder words appear, your friend can explain them to you in CIJ Beginner language. Additionally English loanwords are super common in those conversations. I think that deep listening skills to recognize the known words + cultural knowledge to drive the conversations are way more important than deep vocabulary knowledge.
A word about cultural knowledge and cues: the immersion of everyday Japanese situations was absolutely crucial to have meaningful deep conversations. It boosted the feeling of unity and connection. I have the impression that every little episode of Atashinchi or Polar Bear Cafe completely changed the game of intercultural chords we could play. One of our italki teachers even said that my girlfriend feels very Japanese to them, like a Japanese friend.
I realised that I increase the difficulty of my native content more and more over the last hundreds of hours. This is certainly entertaining, but I want to focus more again on the easier native content as the learning rate is better. Slower is faster.
Study focus until 3000 hours
Originally I planned to start reading at 2000 hours. But I have the impression that I still have a lot to gain from listening more. I want to repeat the tough CIJ videos more as they now feel like an ideal comprehension level. Slower is faster. Only now I have the feeling that the tough CIJ Intermediate are in the right area for me. (There are easy Intermediate videos as well, which feel more like beginner videos. Let’s not speak about those.) Additionally, I want to continue my cold character reading journey - it is very enjoyful and I notice that my reading is swiftly improving with it.
Additionally I want to work on my Japanese cultural and everyday knowledge. I sometimes have the impression that the (inter)cultural dimension of studying is barely discussed / lost in the
CI-immersion communities. However with my current comprehension rate I feel that this gives me a bigger bang for the buck.
Final words
Finally I want to send big thanks to Ben, Yuki and the whole CIJ team. I really feel like the team took my feedback from the last milestone update very seriously. At least that’s how I imagine it 
