I know that users of this site have noticed this, but I would like to share my personal opinion.
Personally, I find the difference between the super beginner level and the beginner level to be very significant. It’s like starting from scratch.
While I understand almost everything at the complete beginner level, at the beginner level, it’s quite the opposite. In my opinion, this is due to the richer vocabulary. The teachers don’t speak that quickly. In that respect, it’s fine.
What I’ve also noticed is that a complete beginner video with a higher level than a beginner video is easier to understand.
For your information, it took me about three months to understand the complete beginner videos. Currently, I’m two months into the beginner level. I can understand some parts. I’d need to watch the first few videos to know if I’ve actually made progress.
That’s my comment on the subject. Please share your experience with me as well.
Yeah, I filtered out all vidoes and watched several times only Yuki Sensei´s whiteboard videos first. Restarted Beginners after that and some are still too dificult so I will probably go through all of them again later. Also, I have kind of got used to not understanding a lot. I am watching one of Yoshito Sensei´s videos right now and basically do not understand 80%. For the context, I have around 700hrs of CIJ behind me now.
It must be extremely hard for teachers to make it linear. I’ve seen a similar post where someone was complaining about a complexity jump of Beginner → Intermediate level the same as you did here.
It seems like some videos got into a next tier just because of their length, while they may have only a little of new words.
What I do is I just relax about not understanding 100% and continue going forward.
Typically I’m adding videos to “Watch later” list if I am not able to understand many parts of it. After some time I rewatch them and reevaluate. I’m spending a day rewatching old videos ~ once a week.
Note: My only focus is on overall meaning. Often I find it difficult to translate particular words, but that’s fine for me as I hope to pick them up later.
I find it varies a lot depending on the subject and teacher as well. I recently finished Intermediate and just started Advanced and I found huge variations in understanding between videos that were both in Intermediate with the same difficulty ranking. For example, there could be two videos with a 90 difficulty score at the end of Intermediate and I’d understand almost everything in one and only 50-60% in another.
For now as long as I can generally follow the video, I’m completing it and going forward and then when I’m done with all the Advanced videos I’ll come back and go through all the Intermediate and Advanced videos I wasn’t fully comfortable with and re-watch them since I have them saved.
I would like if they attempted to implement a similar system to what Dreaming Spanish did with video ranking. That drastically improved the learning path where even within a few weeks, there was never a video that was too hard if you stuck to sorting by easy.
There’s a difficulty ranking now though? I am not familiar with Dreaming Spanish - what does their ranking system do that this one doesn’t? And maybe the team can implement it?
I think it was about a year and a half to two years ago that dreaming Spanish implemented their ELO system. After each video, there is a question that asks "Which one was harder?” and you choose between the last video you watched and the video you just finished and select which is harder. I am not a programmer and I don’t know the exact functions they are using to calculate it, but it has been extremely effective. It also goes to show that the criteria being used to put the videos into levels, while seemingly objective, does not completely match the user experience. If you sort videos by difficulty in dreaming Spanish today, there are some super beginner videos that are harder than some intermediate videos and you essentially have a straight path from 0 to the end with little struggle.
It took me 100 hours rather than the 50-75 suggested to transition to beginner videos.
I too found it was teacher dependent. I had watched a lot of Yuki videos and found it easier to transition to beginner with her. Yoshito specifically I really struggled with. I had to rewatch from level 15 to 25 again to be able to punch through the gap.
A few months on and I’m on the precipice of transitioning to intermediate videos and I’ve found for me it’s now topic dependent as I’m more comfortable with different teachers voices. I’m also at 270 or so hours, which is again much above the 150-175 suggested transition time.
I watch a lot of the cooking series for example as I love cooking and I can comfortably watch a few levels up on that. As for Yoshito videos, my best comprehension is on his game series now, so that struggle I had with him early has perhaps totally inverted!
Keep pressing on, I have weeks where I feel like I’m going backwards and then suddenly there is a click. It can be refreshing too to just deload a little bit, lower the level for a week or two and then come back.
I have personally settled into a structure whereby I watch between filtered levels (32 and 37 currently). If things are feeling tough, I might stick to the lower limit for a bit, if things are feeling good I’ll increase the upper limit.
