3000 hours of Comprehensible Input in 19 months

Japanese Language
1

You can read other milestone reports here

1500 hours: 1500 hours of Comprehensible Input
2000 hours: 2000 hours of Comprehensible Input

Today I reached 3000 hours of Japanese immersion. We started our language journey 19 months ago - September 2024.

Study Focus
My study focus is everyday communication, listening and to stay in contact with my Japanese friends. I don’t really like anime or visual novels.

My personal study rules
If you don’t know me yet. Here are my study rules:
I only do immersion. No translations, no grammar, no anki, no textbooks. I don’t study pitch accent.

Around 2500+ hours I thought it is time to become a bit more literate and I wanted to decrease the pain daily 5.5+ hours of immersion caused.
In the study rules I had a couple of updates since the 2000 hours milestone:

  • I am allowed to use a (monolingual) dictionary.

  • I am allowed to add Japanese subtitles to movies.

  • I am allowed to read.

I do not believe that this is a superior way or anything - I just see it as a personal experiment.

STUDY STRUCTURE
Multiple sessions spread over the day. If you compare it with previous study plans, I removed all study sessions were I might not pay full attention like during a commute:

  • Early morning: NHK E, NHK G or CIJ

  • Lunch: Disney+, Netflix or italki

  • Evening: Disney+ or Netflix

  • Night sessions: Podcasts, kanji or light reading.

  • Recently I started to add light reading sessions of tadoku readers or CIJ transcripts to learn to read the words which I know.
    Additionally we sometimes have crosstalk / speaking sessions during the day with an italki teacher or language tandem partner.

As you see I spend around 90+% of my time with native content. I stopped to watch every CIJ video multiple times. Until 2000 hours I spend a significant time of my immersion on CIJ, but by now this is not necessary anymore. I only watch them if I am interested in the topic, but yes, I still watch sometimes CIJ and I still enjoy it.

I often receive the question how much I focus during immersion. I always try to focus 100% on the content I am watching.

Hours breakdown

We immerse between 5 - 6 hours per day. On weekends it can go up to 7-9 hours.

  • 2334 hours of watching content e.g. CIJ, Netflix, Disney+ or NHK. We don’t use youtube.

  • 97 hours of reading mostly cold character reading. Most of this time feels wasted.

  • 570 hours of listening mostly crosstalk and a bit of podcasts.

I still don’t speak actively. I have small conversations here and there about random topics in Japanese. However, I never really try to think of how I would structure a sentence. It can happen that I speak fluently for 15 minutes or just stay silent.

In comparison, my girlfriend totally spoke 215 hours in this time. We have 3-4 hours with italki teachers per week, and 1 meeting with a Japanese language learning partner in-person (2 - 5 hours).

NHK
The Early Morning block is one of my favourite immersion sessions and thanks to NHK One I can stream recently aired TV shows. On NHK E I usually watch science or kids shows, on NHK G sumo competitions, baseball games or the morning drama.

Here some of my favourite NHK E shows: Chibikko monsters, Pitagora Suitchi (!!! in my oppinion one of the best shows on NHK E), Wakey Show, Mimicries, Nihongo de Asobo, Tensai TV-kun, Nyan-chu, Kimi mo Bosai Survivor, Gyogyotto Sakana, British Bake off or Gretel no Kamado. Sometimes even shows like Inaai inaai baa can be very entertaining like the recent 30 year anniversary show.

On NHK G the selection is a bit worse so we only immerse with sumo competitions, high school baseball games or morning dramas.

Netflix and Disney+
On Netflix and Disney we usually mix adult and kid movies. Most of it is well understandable except for maybe the law scenes in Extraordinary Attorney Woo.

Netflix: Leon the professional, Friends, Matrix, Rick and Morty (surprisingly understandable), Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Aggretsuko, Atashinchi, The Intouchables, Squid Game, etc.

Disney: Dinosaurs, Zootopia, Wreck it Ralph, Ratatouille, Little Miss Sunshine, The Rock, Toy Story, Mrs Doubtfire, Inside Out, Flubber, Peter Pan, Gravity Falls, Duck Tales, Recess, Big Green City, A Bug’s Life, Inglorious Basterds (that was funny, because only the English parts are translated to Japanese :D), Despicable Me, Narnia, Nightmare before christmas, Fantastic Mr Fox, Starship Troopers, Prison Break, some nature documentaries, etc.

Podcasts
I felt for a really long time that podcasts are not really interesting for me. Finally I understood that I prefer the podcast episodes where people speak with each other. My current favourite ones are the conversations with Miku, Sayuri, Yuyu and Teppei+Noriko.

Light Reading / Kanji
You might have noticed that I added a reading section. I tried for some time to build up a cold character reading habit - however, it never stuck with me. A few days before I reached this milestone I decided that I want to read properly. I tried to read a novel in Japanese, but I didn’t build up yet the mileage to read fluently. So I plan to go first through the Tadoku Levels and then try this again. I will share an update hopefully in 500 or 1000 hours.

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. This is still true. It feels absurd.

  • 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.

  • (New) I often can guess the meaning of unknown words thanks to the onyomi.

  • (New) Counters start to feel natural for me.

  • (New) Even though I don’t have a lot of reading experience, I hear the words like in a movie when I read.

  • (New) My girlfriend feels like a Japanese friend when she chats with her italki teacher. She does not feel like a foreigner anymore.

What can I do now?

  • Watch Disney or Netflix movies if the content is not overly dramatic or political.

  • Have full crosstalk conversations about god, the world and the everyday for 5+ hours.

What’s next?
I would love to read more - let’s see if I can motivate myself to walk down this route. We probably will stay within the 5-6 hours range per day until we feel fully fluent. We want to establish 3-4 full Japanese days once I start to speak - during those days everything would be done in Japanese also when we speak with each other. I don’t plan to force my speaking skills, I want to see at least for at least 1000 to 1500 more hours if it is true that language will just emerge as ALG people usually claim. But who knows, maybe I just don’t care at a certain point and I just kickstart my speaking skills like we we did with my girlfriend: 20 hours of italki.

9 Likes
2

Interesting, can you elaborate more about why you find cold character reading a waste of time and what you plan to do instead?

3

Sure, I will try to answer you. The main reason why I think it was a waste of time, because I had the feeling that I don’t manage to establish a habit with it. It feels good and so on - it certainly helps with ones reading skills, but I never really managed to build a habit with it. I usually did it for 1-2 weeks before I lost my interest again and watched some CI content instead. It was very boring for me.

4

Your story is amazing. I’d like to ask you for more tips. Your opinion on cold character reading might save me from wasting money on materials I’ll never use thanks. Do you think passive listening works? How many times do you watch a video?

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I am happy to hear that my journey inspires you. Thank you for your kind message.

Do you think passive listening works?
I have mixed feelings about passive listening. I experienced a bit with it during my bike commute to my office once per week. This was around 30-40 minutes per week. Somehow I had the feeling that the next day was a bit easier for me. I tried to use it more often, but I realized that I don’t really pay attention to the podcasts. So after the experiments, I kicked it out again of my schedule.

Listening generally is a tough topic for me. During the first 2000 hours I never really had the impression that I enjoyed the listening immersion, and that it would be way more useful to just actively watch something instead. However, my girlfriend excessively used active listening and I always wondered if this is the reason why she moved so much faster through the language. But maybe it was also her keen interest in Japan and pre-exposure to Japanese friends during her time at the university. (even though all of their conversations were in German / English).

FYI: my girlfriend started to speak at 2000 hours. After a 20 hours italki conversation kickstart she was fluent in everday family / friendship conversations and could be fully functional with our Japanese host family with the longest conversations lasting 5+ hours.

**How many times do you watch a video?**

I excessively re-watched videos. Re-watching was my main tool so that I didn’t have to use dictionaries, anki decks etc. It is so useful if you already know the story and can focus more on the spoken language. You will notice a lot of details. You might notice a new grammar concept. I experimented if it is more useful to re-watch the same video again multiple times within a day, or if I watch the same video once per day, but repeat it the next day again for a week. Usually it was better to delay the re-watches over a couple of days. But you have to be careful - after a couple of re-watches you might get bored and stop paying attention. Then it is time to move on. For me this depended on the topic and the teacher - it could be between 3 to 10 rewatches.

I still love to re-watch for instance today we watched a bit of Aggretsuko and Squid Game again during dinner. But it is far more moderate than before. Fortunately we can just immerse with some stuff on Netflix, NHK E, Disney or CIJ now.

1 Like
6

I’m curious with 3000 hours of CI which videos helped you the most and which you often go back to? Maybe I’ll pattern my roadmap to your experience :+1:

EDIT: Did you dedicate time for Kanji?

7

Thank you for sharing this, it is inspiring. I am learning Japanese in “secret” so I can surprise my family when we visit in the next couple of years. That limits my immersion time. I do manage to get in an hour a day, but sure wish I could do more. I really enjoy it!

1 Like
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**I’m curious with 3000 hours of CI which videos helped you the most and which you often go back to?

Here an estimation of video content over time:**

Until 1000 hours: 80-90% CIJ, 10-20% Disney / Netflix
Until 2000 hours: 50-60% CIJ, 40-50% Disney / Netflix
Until 3000 hours: 10% CIJ, 90% Disney / Netflix

On CIJ**
Originally I used the complete beginner and beginner whiteboard videos sorted by oldest on CIJ.
They are really fantastic to build an understanding and the whiteboard drawings help to build up your vocabulary.

For mileage I liked to use the games without any texts e.g. Goose Game. Yoshito produces fantastic modern ones now.

Later I really liked to add intermediate series like Pepper and Carrot. The crazy thing is, I have the impression that one does not need to reach Intermediate CIJ videos to start native content. If you really repeated the beginner videos and understood them well - you can start to include 10-20% of outside content for motivation and adaption.

Outside Content
In my case this was mostly Netflix, Disney+ and a bit of crunchyroll. I cannot recommend crunchyroll except for Polar Bear Cafe. I never really liked to use youtube for immersion - it feels more cumbersome than some series and movies.

Here are some of the things I used in the earlier stages for outside immersion:

Asterix, Brainchild, Queen’s Gambit, Forrest Gump, Jumanji, Ponyo, Recess, Squid Game, Storybots, Totoro, Waffle and Mochi.

On Disney+ I usually watch Bluey, Ice Age and Win or Loose.
Additionally I like to watch Polar Bear Cafe.

Probably one can start with Polar Bear Cafe, Bluey, Asterix, Waffle and Mochi, Ponyo, Totoro as the first native content and as a test if one is ready. If you cannot understand them, then it will be to hard and you better go back to pure CIJ immersion. Ponyo is particularly easy and should be possible early. A bit earlier you might also try Peppa Pig - I had my first episode around 120 hours, which was a bit too optimistic…

Did you dedicate time for Kanji?
No, I didn’t invest any time into reading because I was a (nearly) full listening main until I reached 3000 hours. I refused to use any japanese subtitles anywhere, because I didn’t want to get any listening help. At 2000 hours I could not really read hiragana until I travelled to Japan and a child of my host family proudly showed them to me.
But I could fully understand the conversations around me even if they happened in Osaka or Wakayama dialect.
Maybe a short explanation why I chose this path. I often heard from people studying Japanese at university that they could read books, but they had troubles to understand the spoken language.
Or Japanese students could speak, but did not understand the responses of the other person. But the reason why I study Japanese with my girlfriend are the people - so well, the listening dragon has to tackled first. Then we can take care of the rest.

I don’t know which path I will choose for kanji yet. I probably will read a lot of books and see if they stick.

Maybe I’ll pattern my roadmap to your experience
I appreciate your idea. You probably should consider what is important for you. My path can be painful especially if you go extreme and maybe your language goals don’t align with my goals.
For instance, if your goal is to enjoy anime or manga - you certainly would benefit a lot from earlier reading around 1000 hours. What is your hope / goal for this journey?

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I am happy that you enjoy your journey. Keep the fire burning and focus on a building a habit. You can push your numbers always a bit later :slight_smile: It is a cool goal to surprise everyone!