My CI Japanese Experiment

Hi there,

I’ve just started my CI Japanese sessions and I’m only at 10 hours of input.

I started with Spanish CI a few months ago and have 150 hours of input. I’m amazed at how quickly I’ve made progress without any previous experience. I can already understand beginner videos and am now starting with intermediate videos.
With Spanish, however, it probably helps that I can speak German, English and Russian.

I’m curious to see how my progress in Japanese will be, I’ll probably need three times as long or more to achieve the same level of success.

Next year in March I’m also flying to Tokyo for the first time and I’m trying to have 300-400 hours of input by then. Let’s see if it helps me there. :grin:

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初めまして、sese!

Nice to meet you :slight_smile: I joined CI Japanese recently myself, and have studied here for around 45 hours now - its been so much fun so far and I hope you enjoy it too!

It’s great cool to hear about your success Spanish CI, congrats on your progress :es: :tada: It’s inspiring to hear you’ve made it on to intermediate videos there after 150 hours, that’s awesome :smiley: Progress with Japanese might be a bit slower but I think it’ll be totally worth it for your trip to Tokyo. I hope you’re able to hit your goal before you travel next year, がんばってね!

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Nice to meet you hanna! :slightly_smiling_face:

Good work with the 45 hours.
Had you studied Japanese in any other way before or just CI?

The beginning is always difficult, but as soon as you have passed the complete beginner phase, it gets better. Hopefully it’s the same here :sweat_smile:

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thank you! :pray:

I first tried studying Japanese in my spare time when I was at university, but I found the workload with my other classes a bit overwhelming and I stopped :sweat_smile: At that time I was mostly just using textbooks, the main one I remember reading was Japanese for Busy People. It was hard work. How about you? Have you tried any other methods of learning Japanese?

I have definitely being finding CI a lot more enjoyable, it feels more like a hobby than studying :slight_smile: I’m looking forward to one day getting past the beginner phase, but I’m gonna focus on enjoying the journey!

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Hi sese,

I started doing Spanish CI one year ago, and I am at 650 hours right now. It has been amazing for my listening comprehension. I live in an area with a significant minority population who speaks Central American Spanish and I can understand most of the everyday conversations that happen around me. At this stage, however, I still struggle to speak coherently. Still, I am sure I will improve with practice and more time.

I am only able to listen to a little Japanese CI right now because of my greater need to learn Spanish. When I was in my early twenties, I lived in Japan for a year and did “acquire” some of the language, but now I am in my forties and I have not used Japanese in so long that I find many of the intermediate videos only partly comprehensible. But I want to encourage you because Japanese is really an interesting and fun language to learn, and I think you will do amazingly well having a few hundred hours of CI if you combine that with some basic knowledge of sentence structure. And I think we learn a lot about manners and culture on this channel. I wish I’d had such a rich and wonderful resource when I was living in Japan. Have an incredible time on your trip!

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For Spanish, I worked with classic apps like Babbel for about 30 hours until I switched completely to CI. Now in Japanese I only do CI.

CI is better for me and I have more motivation and I can integrate it well into my everyday life.

Good work with your Spanish CI.
I grew up bilingual as a child (German/Russian). So I have done thousands of hours of indirect russian CI. But I never spoke in Russian but only answered in German.

Now as an adult I have the listening comprehension of a native speaker. But that doesn’t mean that I can speak Russian fluently.
You have to invest hundreds of hours in speaking practice after CI. So it’s quite normal to struggle at the beginning, even if you’ve already had hundreds of hours of CI.

Thanks, sese. You are right. Speaking in Spanish feels very awkward right now. I am more comfortable speaking in Japanese, even if I’m not very high level, but that is because I have a lot more speaking and conversational practice. When I was in Japan, I worked in a setting where I heard Japanese spoken most of the day, but native-level conversations could be hard to follow. I don’t know what my true CI level is, but I consider it to be a few hundred hours. (I’ve only tracked 50 on this site.) My indirect exposure to overheard Japanese would be 2000+ hours though.

Thanks for sharing your experience growing up bilingual. You speak many languages already, so I am sure you will do well with Japanese! :slight_smile:

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