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.
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”.
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.
The reverse of kanji fluency would be kanji blindness. I had really bad kanji blindness the first week of learning Japanese. It felt a little bit like that disorder some people have where they can’t recognize faces or tell them apart. Luckily I cured it by doing about 250 cards of RRTK.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. This is my first time hearing the terms kanji fluency and kanji blindness. (Funnily enough, I actually do have some degree of facial blindness lol)
If you don’t mind me asking, what was your experience using RRTK?
The experience was great, but also very shortlived! I did it really intensely for just a couple days and then I transitioned back to studying words rather than kanji (which is what most learners should do).
It’s a bit of a funny story, but while I was doing RRTK and learning Japanese in the beginning, I was living next to a Chinese graveyard where I’d often go for walks (it’s not that weird!). At the beginning, I’d look at the tombstones and they’d look like scribbles, but after doing a couple hundred RRTK cards, I started to recognize a ton of the Hanzi (Kanji) as well as the radicals and I no longer felt “blind” anymore. I deleted the RRTK deck a day or two after that.
I wasn’t the one asked, but I might be able to contribute some view point as well, as I finished RTK book 1 and 3 some time ago.
It took me about a year and half and I can say that I feel it was absolutely worth it, however I am still nowhere near a point where I can fully read native level japanese.
What I did achieve by doing so, is that I roughly know the meaning (or at least one of the meanings) of most common Kanji, so often if I see new words I can kinda guess their meaning, even if I did not encounter that word before.
Also I feel like I often can remember words faster, compared to before doing RTK, if I encounter them in the wild.
The second book, which offers a method to remember the readings of the Kanji however, did not really work out for me, so I skipped it at some point.
For readings, I agreee, that it’s much more effective to just learn vocabulary, instead of trying to memorize them seperately.