650h of Comprehensible Input Update!

Japanese Language
1

Quick update at 650h on my overall level of Japanese!!

Background: Serbian native speaker, but I’ve acquired both English and Spanish along the years just by consuming a bunch of fun content!!

I don’t use Anki (although I will use it to learn Kanji in the future), and I have done a few weeks of HVPT on kotsu, but I’ve reached a consistent 100% (on a minimum of 100 examples) on there within the first month of learning Japanese so I’ve stopped since then.

(sorry for any typos or weird formatting, not really used to writing long posts in English)

My routine:

Currently I’m doing 7.2h of active input per day (I know very specific), I’m literally treating this like a full time job and the progress has been amazing. I currently do 1h of CI, 2h of Slice of Life animes (currently watching Non Non Biyori and Flying Witch) and then the rest of the time is filled up with whatever I find fun in Japanese (currently that’s Yu-Gi-Oh GX).

From about 350h until literally 2 days ago, I watched 0 CI videos, all of my input came purely from anime. I started off with Pokemon and watched that for about 500 episodes, then I switched over to Yu-Gi-Oh Dual Monsters, and I had a bunch of random animes in between like Digimon, Pokemon Horizons, and like 126 episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh GX .

Why I added some CI back into my routine:

While I found that my overall level of Japanese progressed really quickly during this period (the combination of really fun and mostly comprehensible content with huge amounts of daily volume really does work well), I found myself missing some of the more basic words. While I’ve acquired words like “alchemy” “sacrifice” “special ability” and “ritual”, I came to the realization that I don’t know the word for “chair” yet (surprise surprise, shonen characters don’t really sit around a lot)… I really find myself drifting off while watching CI, but treating it as my mandatory vegetables for 1h per day is actually working out quite well. I don’t plan to watch any CI past 1000h, but for the next 40 something days I’ll be adding it back in, just to fill out some of those anime sized holes that I currently have.

What can I understand:

Pokemon - pretty easy, I can watch most episodes comfortably, but I still find the odd Team Magma and Aqua plot difficult, and old people speaking still requires me to lock in 150% just to understand anything. Overall, 80%+ of the episodes are 80%+ comprehensible.

Non Non Biyori and Flying Witch - Really easy and fun, the dialogue is really comprehensible, and it’s fun to watch something in Japanese, made for native speakers, where you feel like you understand everything word for word (I don’t understand these word for word, but I understand the majority so it feels like I’m not missing much). The only gripe I have with these is that they are short, NNB is 12h worth of content, and Flying Witch is 4h only, at my current pace I would blast through these in 3 days, so I can’t make them the only thing I watch.

Yu-Gi-Oh (DM and GX) - these are perfect, difficult enough to push my upper limit, but understandable enough that I forget time is a thing. 4h of this feels like I’m just enjoying my favorite show in English. Don’t get me wrong, on a word per word level, I understand Yu-Gi-Oh way less than the Slice of Life animes or Pokemon, but I never find myself lost on what’s going on, and considering how repetitive the battle vocab and the shadow realm talks are, by now I’ve acquired most of the words that would make a show like Yu-Gi-Oh difficult to watch. During the original, the Egyptian lore parts were a hard drop in comprehension, but most of the show was pretty enjoyable, I can’t wait to re-watch this one at 1500h in about 4 months to use it as a measuring stick of my progress.

Naruto - tried it for 30 ish episodes, and while there are parts that are comfortable, there are also multiple sections where it feels like I legit don’t understand a single word (the Chunin Written Exam for example), I’ll leave this one alone till 1500h :frowning:

Plans going forward: I don’t plan to read until I have at least 50h of speaking with natives under my belt, and I really don’t plan to start speaking until at least 2000h of input, if not a bit more. For now, I’m just really happy that I can watch some fun content in Japanese and actually enjoy it for the story and the characters.

While my selection is really limited right now, this was still unimaginable 4 months ago when I started out learning Japanese. I can’t wait to look back on this update in 4 months from now when I’m sitting at 1500h. It’s hard to imagine how much better and more fun the input will be with close to 900 hours of input more, but I guess I’ll see when I get there!!

3 Likes
2

Congrats on the progress! Have you been doing anime from the start? I am surprised at your level of comprehension with anime at this many hours without anki

1 Like
3

How is your previous knowledge of thosn series? Did you watch them before in English etc, or similar stuff?

1 Like
4

No, I started anime at around 350h with Pokemon. Imo it’s the perfect starter anime, since the vocab is pretty Slice of Life oriented, there’s a lot of repetition from episode to episode, the themes are very obvious since it’s made for a younger audience and also there are like 1300 episodes out there so the amount of repetitive input that you can get is insane.

Pokemon was really really hard in the beginning, but because I was watching only that for 7h per day for like 500 episodes, I’ve acquired the vocab and get used to the style of speech really quickly, and that transfers over to any new anime you watch. To put it in perspective, I watched it almost exclusively from 350h and it only got comfortable at around the 500-550h mark.

I think if you are looking to start watching anime, finding something that you’ve already watched in a different language, and finding something that has a crap load of episodes and repetition is ideal. With Pokemon I struggled a lot in the beginning, but around the 180 episode mark, I’ve acquired most of the catch phrases, battle vocabulary, and naturalistic vocab used in the show, which made the following episodes a lot easier. I think domain specific or single show immersion is really OP.

I’m also quite comfortable with ambiguity since this isn’t the first language that I’ve acquired with CI, so I’m much more comfortable with sitting through the first 100 episodes of an anime consistently missing words because I’m confident I will acquire them the more I watch.

5

Yea with Pokemon I’ve watched the original Indigo League and Orange League in Serbian, English and Spanish, but that’s about 120 episodes and everything after that was new.

Yu-Gi-Oh both DM and GX I had vague recollections of since I watched it in English as a kid, but I haven’t watched that anime in at least 12 years, and the Japanese version is a bit different, so I’m not sure how much that helped other than the general outline of the characters and the world. I really felt like I was watching most of the episodes for the first time.

Non Non Biyori and Flying Witch were completely new to me, I was really not into SoL anime before, but I’ve actually grown to like it now in Japanese.

Naruto I’ve watched a million times as a kid, I watched it in all three languages, and I watched it last year in Spanish as well, but it was still way too hard for me, although I’m sure it would’ve been even worse without that previous knowledge

6

Hi. First of all, congratulations on achieving such a wonderful milestone.

I’ve just started (for.. like… the 12th time lol) and in slowly going through CIJ videos. I’d like to ask you a few questions if it’s okay:

  • Is this the first time or had you already tried learning Japanese in the past?
  • Roughly how many words/grammar points did you know at the start?
  • Do you look up unknown words or do you just figure it out from context?
  • Are you in the MvJ Dojo btw?
  • Any tips on how to be consistent?(Honestly this is my biggest weakness)

Wish you the best for the rest of your journey

7

Hi, a bunch of interesting questions here, thank you so much for reading the post!!

  • yea it’s the first time I’m learning Japanese, but it’s not my first rodeo with language acquisition. Japanese is my 4th language overall (counting my native one), so I think the meta skill of language acquisition certainly does help.
  • Literally none, I don’t study grammar nor memorize vocab, I knew a few meme words that every internet weeb knows, like even if you aren’t learning Spanish you probably know Hola and Hasta la vista, but besides that I started from 0. Not to say that maybe some Anki would be bad, it’s just not my cup of tea, and since I didn’t use it for any of my previous languages, I didn’t really feel like starting now.
  • I rarely look up words, I feel like this kills the flow of the content, but for example I did look up a word a few days ago because it kept popping up over and over again and I was picking it out consistently in Yugioh (勇気). This happens maybe once a week if that, and honestly I watch most of my input from the couch and I leave my phone on my desk, so most of the time it’s my own laziness that stops me (also I know I’ll pick those words up naturally, so I don’t really stress over it too much)
  • I’m not in the Dojo, with 7h+ of active immersion I really don’t have any free time to be watching anything that’s not in Japanese, and honestly I have enough experience getting to a near-native level in a language that most of the optimizations that Matt recommends honestly seem like his personal preferences rather than hard set rules to follow. I’m always afraid I’ll become one of those people that spends more time watching content about language learning, than actually learning the language itself.
  • Consistency tips are hard because everybody’s daily routine is different. For me I’ve already successfully acquired two languages with this ALG type method, so for me I know what’s on the other side of a few thousand hours of input and some output practice. This is honestly enough to keep me going (especially through this intermediate hell hole around 700-1500h). The best advice I can give is to not worry as much about optimization, I can imagine that Matt is throwing out all kinds of optimizations that he thinks will work, but the one thing that’s consistent with everybody that’s gotten really fluent in any language is that they spent a crap tone of time, and they had a lot of fun with the time that they were spending. Watch content that you can’t stop watching, when I was learning English I started off with native content that was way too hard for me at the time, but I still got fluent, babies start off with content that’s 0% comprehensible and yet in 3 years they can’t stop blabing their mouths. Optimal doesn’t exist, since you are a human and not a machine, if a certain type of content is optimal, but you hate it, you will quit and just get nowhere. Have fun with the language every day, I guess this is my best tip for consistency. Also legit try to gaslight yourself that just getting more input will help and that you will get fluent if you just do your hours, like brainwash that into your head, because it’s true, even if it doesn’t feel like that in the moment.
3 Likes
8

Great write-up, and thank you for sharing. All the best with the journey and look forward to hearing from you after you reach 1500 hours.