I have as of yesterday reached 450 hours of CI on the site.
this is my methodology, and progress. Please ask any questions!!! I want this to be an example to follow for potential CI students, and it is what I had wish I had found prior to CI.
My rules: only speak words I can come up with naturally (no looking up words).
Generally no speaking until 500 hours unless necessary. This was exempted while I was in Japan.
All content should aim for 70% comprehensibility. While it may seem low for many, I found it to be very very useful for me.
Timeline:
May :70 hours
June-August- in Japan, 10 hours sparsely spaced. Had no time. I consider this time I was not studying.
September1-December14 - 370 hours
Definitions:
comprehending- I can tell you what happened in the story, and most details.
Understanding the words: I can individually understand the particles, words, and sentences pieces. This would what. I could understand with light visuals.
Parsing: the ability to “parse” out individual words, grammar, and at times- phonetics of a word.
I divide my watching experience into the two categories.
Prior to comprehensible input: I did about 15-20 hours of anki, and basic sentence stricter, and some study of the Genki textbook. This was while I was also researching the optimal way to learn Japanese.
Hours 1-70 - super beginner.
The goal here was to test CI to see if it actually worked. I consdiered it a success for the following reasons:
-From June-August I was in Japan on an internship. At the internship one of the other guys was a Japanese college student. In practical usage, at only 70 hours of CI, I was able to match his level (minimal, mostly scripted sentences or single words.) I consider myself having improved none in the time I was in Japan, as I did it do any study or make any effort to expand my knowledge. I was very busy and 98% of the time was English.
-At 70 hours my vocab was maybe 30 words I could produce, and 120-150 I could understand. I could only understand the particles は(wa)、が(ga)、and の(no)。 I could only produce baby sentences, or put 2 words together. (Example: toore doko) The pinnacle of my Japanese usage in Japan was saying “dashi ga doko desuka” to a stranger and having them help me find it in the grocery store.
Words I learned in that first 70 hours, when repeated, were easily understood by Japanese natives.
Hours 70-150: these were mostly beginner and super beginner hours. All I did was watch at 70% comprehensibility.
This stage has been primarily about vocab growth and beginnings of parsing the language. I could consistently recognize particles, and fully understand simple expressions equivalent in English to:
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“That is a ball.”
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“He is going to the store.”
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“I am drinking soda and eating a cake.”
“I like cake, but not chocolate cake.”
I did about 4-8 hours a day here. This was the most studying I have done. It was most of my time. I found myself able to make rapid progress.
Here is my theory why:
At 1 hour a day, It would be about 23 hours before I would be listening again. By doing 4-8, I reduce the in-between time to 20-16 hours. In addition, I found it took sometime 10-30 minutes for my brain to boot into “Japanese Mode”. So, if you do an hour a day, progress will be slower. Again, this is just my theory and it’s hard to tell at this point how true it is.
By October 4th, I had achieved 250 hours of CI.
At that stage, my listening ability had noticeably improved. I could follow beginner-level Japanese at a comfortable pace and was beginning to grasp segments of low-intermediate material—though much of it still felt “slushy.”
My comprehension sat around 80–90% for beginner-level content and 40–60% for low-intermediate videos. This puts the words I could understand at 50-60% beginner level, and 20-40% low-intermediate. This is of the low intermediate on topics I was more familiar with, such as cooking. I could then follow beginner short stories or dialogues without relying on visuals as heavily, identifyingthe topic and general emotional tone even when I missed key vocabulary. I noted that my big road block was a lack of vocabulary. This is a theme.
The preceding 100 hours had focused on parsing faster speech, and beginning to chunk sections. Sentences that I had not been able to understand 100 hours prior then felt automatic in comprehension. I felt that I had not gained much vocabulary (though I certainly had gained) and feltlike I had plateaued a little bit. The improvement over the last 100 hours felt much less than the previous 150. I was then at the point where the hill had become a mountain.
I could easily follow sentences like:
Dinner yesterday was curry.
It’s a bit warm today, nice weather, isn’t it?
It was my birthday yesterday, and my friend gave me a present.
I noted that sentences were more dependent on vocabulary knowledge on lower videos. I could understand the occasional longer sentence**.** I noticed frustration from the lack of noticeable progress compared to the first 150 hours. Another big issue is that though I could understand many sentences to comprehensibility, I found that there were many in between words that I could not understand that felt very foggy.
By Noverber 8th, I hit 350 hours.
My comprehension sat around 90–100% for beginner-level content (60-80% of words known) and 60–80% for low-intermediate videos (40-70% of words known) Vocabulary continued to be a road block, and I had also hit a temporary cap in grammar structure. I was able to parse much better, and at times could follow with no visuals at all.
I did hit fatigue in that phase, and began to supplement by watching anime with subtitles. I countedthis as 10-20% CI, as that was about how much I felt it was contributing to acquisition via auditory and visual matching exposure.
The preceding 100 hours had continued to focus on parsing faster speech, and I had noticed an ability to chunk sections. I could listen to very, very basic videos at native speed (speeding up the CIJ videos) and follow along. Sentences that I had been able to understand 100 hours ago now feltautomatic, and less foggy. There was a noticeable reduction in processing time for familiar sentences and structures. This has been the biggest change. I still felt that I had not gained much vocabulary (though I certainly had gained). This is partly due to testing “stretching” my brain by feeding it 50-65% comprehensible input which certainly helped with parsing but gave me little to no vocab help. I cannot tell if it is beneficial or not to do this, it felt like an even trade of less vocab gain but more parsing ability. The improvement over the last 100 hours has felt the same as the previous 100 - slow but steady.
Example sentences I can now understand:
There is food on this table. The food looks delicious. I had this dinner with friends. It wasa lot of fun.
Everyday I make coffee. I have 3 cups a day, however sometimes I have 4.
I was going to the store, but then it started raining
On December 14, I hit 450 hours. This last hundred has felt like the biggest jump since 150. I have begun to catch and understand particles that used to breeze by me. Some examples are “Kara, naru, and yori ”. I can’t tell what they are exactly all the time but natural understanding is becoming consistent in some versions of the usage.
The biggest change came at the same time I started shadowing. I began to notice a lot of words that I understood but never explicitly parsed. The best example is “yori”, which I had caught a few times and knew general meaning, but saying then when shadowing locked it in much more. I also noticed that the “silly sentences” I make up in my brain for fun spontaneously have become more diverse and natural. A good example : I spontaneously can come up with the sentence “毎日、私の猫はテーブルの下で寝ています。かわいい！あと、私の猫は牛肉を食べます“
English: everyday my cat sleeps under the table. Cute!! After, my cat eats three cows.
This is after 12 hours of shadowing over 15 days. Shadowing started just before 400 hours.
One final note: I am going to experiment with the idea of “CI in a bottle” in which I create flash cards that are on one side: the word verbally spoken in a small sentence
And on the other
A self drawn image of the words meaning.
This is “CI in a bottle” because with the visual cue, I will understand the meaning of the sentence, and thus the word in that first exposure context, and can expand the meaning as I have expanded the meaning of all other words I pick up with CI. I have done this for 5 minutes but it did cause me to pick up 1 word.
I can understand the Japanese equivalent of these sentefes:
He became very small
We are going from Japan to China.
I bought a very expensive mug.
Everyday I eat breakfast, however, my plate is smaller than my sisters.
I am writing this to give a mostly pure CI idea of gains when doing
-no anki (except a few hours when I first began to study. A small note: I am a proponent of doing a few hours of anki and grammar study in order to reach the lowest of super beginner)
-only active watching, following the idea of “you understand the language when you understand the method”
-minimal passive listening
-high quality CI
-high input (average 3/4 hours a day)
I’ll write updates every once in a while. Please ask any questions you have and I will answer them when able.