Always interested in people’s progress and testimonials. Acquiring Japanese is a “grind” for lack of a better word and hearing others share their experience helped me.
My current status is 241 hrs tracked on the site. I’ve watched well over half of the intermediate videos and a small handful of the advanced videos.
Now I did take a school year’s worth of Japanese in college almost 10 years ago. I probably got very little input. It was all memorizing hiragana, katakana, vocab and grammar rules. That foundation helped because I started on beginner videos. But I do think the recommendations of when to move up a level on this site is accurate from my experience.
I moved to intermediate after 110 ish hours of beginner videos. The intermediate shift was tough. This is where watching a video multiple times helped me the most. I also did a lot more translating of sentences here and there when I felt it was necessary. Or I looked up a word that helped me better follow the story or message. It’s not a great habit and can interrupt flow but it was needed for me.
After 20 hrs ish of that, intermediate felt much more comfortable and the amount of ambiguity I was able to tolerate was a massive part of it. Don’t underestimate that aspect. You don’t need to know 90% of a video’s content to watch it and you don’t need to know 100% of the beginner content before going to intermediate. That’s my two cents anyway.
Sprinkling in difficulties across the tiers as you go is helpful. Don’t feel like you have to stick to a certain level or difficulty score. I tried to stick to the difficulty score through beginner but quickly learned it wasn’t a huge factor for me. Jump around between the scores, new and old videos, into different tiers as much as you want / need.
Also don’t make the same mistake I did by not reading at all. For some reason I never used the transcripts to read. Mostly because I figured I wouldn’t be able to read kanji anyway. But it actually helps keep things fresh. I particularly like reading transcripts of much easier content. It keeps things fresh and you build the habit of recognizing kanji. Reading has been important for me in the intermediate stage.
That said when you watch a video just watch it. Don’t look at subs. When you read just read, along with the audio of course. But there were times where I’d turn on subtitles and I’d find myself reading or being tempted to pause to look up words. Getting distracted by doing either or was a mistake I made plenty of times.
The other thing I’ve noticed is the video game play through videos, when the teachers aren’t reading dialogue from characters in the game, are much easier than their score indicates. There are so many pauses and gaps between when the teacher is talking. And they repeat similar phrases all the time. I used the video game play through videos when I wanted to watch something easy and give my mind a break. But it’s great that you still are engaging with the language.
Another thing that helped me was driving while listening to videos I’ve already watched. It was a process to move away from visually assisted listening to pure listening. Now I can listen to podcasts etc. The travel videos are easy to listen to without images because the vocab is approachable. It’s always “here is this shop I went to and this is what I bought.” Or “this is what the weather was like that day, it was fun.” The teachers describe photos anyway so you can get what they’re talking about even without seeing the video.
I will say that I’ve pretty much exhausted the intermediate videos but the advanced videos don’t have as many topics and there’s less videos there. Also the advanced topics are super serious and don’t have as many “fun” topics. I’d like to see that change in this site. The beginner content has all these stories and folk tale summaries but when advanced hits it’s all videos about money and politics. So I’ve branched out to a ton of other content like podcasts, books, and shows. Erased is actually a very easy to understand anime / show. I’m interested to see where this site goes especially with Yuki leaving (cry) and plans for the teachers to make more content.
I hope that anything I’ve shared is helpful and possibly hopeful that you can push up into intermediate sooner than you think. And just stick with it even if it seems there’s a lot you don’t understand. If anything because of my background maybe I had an extra 50 hrs of input and basic expectations of grammar that helped me move up quicker. That said some days you feel better like you understand a lot and some days you feel like you aren’t getting anything. But consistency, self regulating, and choosing topics and videos you like is truly the key.
Also I tried to do Anki when I first started but quit very quickly. I had no parsing ability to understand the vocab word so you’d use other clues in the sentence to remember what word you’re trying to “learn.” I’d say vocab cards are possibly more useful once you’re at the intermediate stage because vocab is a bit of a challenge. But watching beginner videos will definitely get you a solid ish foundation of easier vocab naturally. Without needing to go memorize anything. Good luck everyone!
