Hello! My name is Priscilla. I decided to post my progress regularly as I figured it may be helpful to others. I am taking a pure CI approach for the most part, aside from the occasional looking up a word in romanji when I’m stuck on something or need confirmation. That means no Anki decks or anything like that, or studying. Like many of you, I am coming here from Dreaming Spanish after getting over 200 hours under my belt and gaining a good command of the language so far from mostly CI. Spanish, I have found to be significantly easier than Japanese so far, especially since I’m a heritage speaker of Spanish. With Japanese, I will be experimenting with a purely CI approach to see how my learning progresses, as I heavily believe in the CI approach. So far, I am only at around 8.5 hours; however, I will ensure to regularly update as I move forward.
Things I’ve noticed:
I have already started to acquire random words, and I am finding that videos are getting gradually easier. My stamina for watching videos seems to be increasing already. Before, I could barely make it to 30 minutes of input before I got really tired. I was having trouble understanding the most basic of videos at level 1 difficulty. Now I am finding I can do my 30 minutes of input without getting so tired, and my difficulty level cap has increased to about 10 or so. I’m able to follow along with videos better already, and I can feel my comprehension is steadily increasing.
One challenge I have encountered is struggling to distinguish sounds and words. They often seem to blend together. For example, the word for glasses randomly popped up in my head today, so I guess I acquired that word. However, my brain was struggling to distinguish the sounds. I couldn’t quite make out what was being said. In my head, it sounded like the speaker had said “mega mega,” but I knew that didn’t sound quite right. For cases like this, what I have to do is look up the romaji for the word so I can see it spelled out. By doing this, I was able to figure out the speaker was actually saying “megane ga”. After clarifying the separation of the words in my head, I rewatched the video the word was originally acquired from. Since Japanese is significantly different from my Native Language (English), I am finding this to be a necessary step in the process. I was also reading online that this is a necessary and normal part of the process with the Comprehensible Input approach and a sign that it’s actually working as it’s supposed to. This was good to read, as I wanted to ensure it would not hinder my Comprehensible Input approach process. I will make sure to post another update at 50 hours. Until then, as our lord and savior Yuki would say, またね!
¡Hola! Sí, entiendo esto ahora, pero antes estoy muy confundido. lol ¿Una Pregunta, tu lengua materna es Español o aprendes español con Dreaming Spanish como yo?
Congratulations on finding CI Japanese at the start of your journey!
I think you guys are incredible for being able to watch CIJ videos for such a long period of time; when I started using this website as a beginner, I really struggled just to fulfill my daily goal of watching videos for 15 minutes a day. (I could blame my ADHD but I’m not going to.) How do you guys do it???
Well I can only speak on my personal experience but I think since I started with CI using Spanish before picking up Japanese I did develop a bit of a tolerance for a lot of input at once. Also, I usually spread it out throughout the day. It all adds up. For Spanish, I find it incredibly easy at my level (Intermediate) to get hours and hours of input in. With Japanese so far my limit has been about an hour before I start to burn out. I’m at abut 10.5 hours now. I actually can kind of relate to your ADHD struggles as I have autism in addition to a learning disability that impacts the language center of my brain. So basically all the annoyances I experience in my native language with my disabilities I experience in Spanish and Japanese now too. Lol
I just have to space it out, listen to my body, and take breaks when I need to.
@jeshyr@musicanimelife I think you guys are right. It’s all about spacing it out and not forcing yourself to stare at the screen when you’re not in the mood. Thanks for taking the time to respond!
Finally getting to an intermediate stage was rough, but I completely agree that it becomes much easier to get input once you hit that intermediate stage. But as a native English speaker, I did find Dreaming Spanich much, much easier just because 1) like most Americans, I took Spanish in high school and 2) Spanish is much easier for a native English speaker ;;
(I also have autism, but I don’t think it affects my learning too much…? At least compared to my ADHD. Congratulations to us neurodivergent people for trying to learn )
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