This website works really well!

Comprehensible Japanese Suggestions & Feedback
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I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and watched 132 hours of CI Japanese videos since then (out of the 162 hours on the website).

I’ve listened to 60 hours of CI Japanese audio on repeat (of videos I have already watched). Now, I can comfortably watch many Japanese YouTube videos such street interviews or travelling videos (about 70-80% comprehension).

My friends who went to language school for 3 months were really impressed with my progress because they still can’t understand the same YouTube videos.

I’m really surprised by how well the comprehensible input method and this website works.

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This is amazing! I thought it would take a much higher number of hours to reach this level.

Do you want to watch the videos again to catch some of the language you missed the first time? Or will you start reading right away?

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Me too! I think not all hours are created equal. At the beginning, maybe 100 hours of Comprehensible Japanese videos is equal to 500-1000 hours of random Japanese YouTube videos? It’s hard to know. I can see the case for why a video here can be 5-10x more comprehensible than the average Japanese video. But maybe not 50x more comprehensible.

Anyways, I’d rewatch videos at the start because I had a hard time discerning between different Japanese words. But since then I stopped. Maybe. I’d make more progress if I watched each video twice? But there isn’t a good way to track rewatches yet.

I lookup words on videos that aren’t obvious (using Yomichan and JMDict) or words I can guess the meaning of but I’m not confident in my guess. And usually, if I liked the video, I’d download the MP3 onto my phone and listen to it when eating or walking and when I’d hear the word I looked up again, I’d remember its meaning.

I’m not practicing my reading skills now as my goal is to be listening dominant (Matt v Japan talked about this before). But I can read hiragana and katana and I have what Matt v Japan calls “kanji fluency”.

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That’s awesome! When I first joined this website, I was curious about what it would be like to start CIJ as an absolute beginner.

By the way, what is “kanji fluency”? Is it just the ability to read Chinese?

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Yes, it’s been great. There was a step-up from the beginner to intermediate but I made it.

As for kanji fluency, Matt vs Japan described “kanji fluency” as the point where kanji no longer look like scribbles to you.

He said in a podcast (I think), if he showed you 3 kanji then 3 days later, he showed you 3 more (2 new ones, 1 from the previous 3) and if you’re able to identify the one you’ve seen before then you likely have kanji fluency.

I went through kani flashcards everyday for the 3-4 month period and learnt 1,600ish kanji before getting bored. But I realised I reached kanji fluency and I’m hoping to just learn the rest of the 常用漢字 through immersion.

It’s why those fluent in Chinese often save 100s of hours. They had years or decades of kanji fluency.

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