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.
Nice to meet you 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 It’s inspiring to hear you’ve made it on to intermediate videos there after 150 hours, that’s awesome 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！
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 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 I’m looking forward to one day getting past the beginner phase, but I’m gonna focus on enjoying the journey!
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!
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!
I am now at 51 hours. I’ve watched all the complete beginner videos once and am currently on the second round where I’m repeating everything again but also adding beginner videos to the playlist.
I will now adjust my strategy a little. Before, I usually watched around 1-2 hours a day. During that time, I was always 100% focused on the videos. But I will now try to increase my immersion. As I work from home, I can easily leave the videos running in the background for 3 to 5 hours. I just need more input, as Japanese CI is already difficult for me.
I also notice that I keep trying to translate things in my head, sometimes in German and sometimes in English. I just hope that with more input I will be better at just watching the videos.
Great to hear about your experience with dreaming Spanish. Currently trying it out now actually. CIJ was such a big part of how I’m learning Japanese that I want to give Spanish a go as well. I’m only at about 20 hours but the complete beginning stuff is starting to be pretty understandable depending on who the teacher is haha.
Trying to do a full Dreaming Spanish CI approach and see what happens for Spanish. I’m doing language transfer too just because it’s free I’m on lesson 62 right now.
Do you feel like just by watching you sufficiently learned words and grammar?
good work!
I’m now at about 170 hours on DS and I’m very happy with my progress.
The Complete Beginner phase is the most difficult, but then the jump to Beginner and then Advanced went relatively quickly in Spanish.
Now with Japanese CI I’m not progressing so quickly at all and I’m wondering when I’ll reach that point. But the answer is always: you need more input. But the beginning is difficult.
And yes, you learn everything through CI. Grammar, words, pronunciation etc.
Even if you sometimes don’t realize it at the beginning.
Later you will also have to practise reading and then at some point speaking. That’s also hundreds of hours.
I would say that CI is the main pillar with which you have to combine the other learning methods.
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 inspiring to hear you’ve made it on to intermediate videos there after 150 hours, that’s awesome 
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！
I just hope that with more input I will be better at just watching the videos.