Hey everyone,

I am 1,5 years into learning japanese and I recently realised again that I almost can't do anything in japanese (even though it might be quite okay for only 1,5 years)

What I did so far:

- completed RTK 1 and did reps for another 3 months
- completed 90% of Genki 1 and 2 Anki deck (1300 cards)
- did a couple 100 cards in Nayrs core and core 2k on and off
- did 70% of Tae Kim
- try to engage in japanese conversation when I can

and most importantly:

- did random immersion on and off

So I guess, consistent immersion, like 2 hours everyday would be beneficial (unfortunately I don't have the time resources to do 10 hours of immersion)

Where would you start?
Listen to 10 Episodes of a J-Drama over and over again?
Or 30 episodes, or only 5?
What would be a good Drama to start with?

How effective is daily immersion, even if you don't understand 80-90% of what you listen to?

Thank you

I can't really answer the first set of questions because it doesn't fit with my experience of immersion. For me, keeping it genuinely fun and not a chore/study was the most important thing. I didn't listen to the same thing 'over and over again'. I didn't pick things that were 'good to start with' just because they were easier, I picked what sounded the coolest to watch. Mixing up different kinds of media kept it fun for me as well: drama, anime, news, podcasts, variety shows, comedy...

Quote:How effective is daily immersion, even if you don't understand 80-90% of what you listen to?

Was effective for me. Even not understanding 90%, you can still pick out words you hear, look them up, stick a sentence with the word in Anki. Also the 80-90% of not-understanding quickly comes down because your listening gets better, you pick up common phrases for different situations, you pick up words which keep coming up.

I think most importantly with immersion you learn what natural Japanese sounds like (the music of the language), how people react in Japanese in different situations, the natural usage of words, natural pronunciation of words... all the little stuff that stops you sounding like a foreigner in the end basically lol.

(2016-03-10, 7:31 am)maxwell777 Wrote: How effective is daily immersion, even if you don't understand 80-90% of what you listen to?

Not very, in my experience. You should find something you understand at least 50% of. Maybe watch stuff with subs, and then take the audio and listen to it again a few times.

This wasn't your question, but a very effective way to get better at listening is to do Nayr's sentence deck, with the audio in the question. I think if you do the whole deck, you will get good enough that you don't have to use subs for immersion anymore. And, depending on your current level, when done with the audio and the Kanji sentence both in the question, the 5000 sentences might actually take you less time to SRS through than 2000 RtK cards.

Listening to Japanese music is a GREAT way to start! I listened to a lot of Japanese music even before I started learning the language seriously, and my brain subconsciously remembers some of the words.

For starters, what sort of music do you listen to?

I have never been very convinced of the value of listening to things one understands very little of, though I know some people seem to find it useful.

My method was based on using anime with Japanese subtitles. You can do the same thing with drama. You can find Japanese subtitles for drama here . The page is huge and full of different-language subtitles. Just scroll down to (or do an on-page search for) Japanese Subtitles and you will see that there are several hundred.

No I am not off on a tangent. I personally think this is the best initial approach to listening. Once you have been through the episode with Japanese subtitles and put at least a portion of the unknown vocabulary in Anki you are able to watch/listen with a high degree of understanding. It is a good idea to add the soundtrack to your iPod so you can listen to it on the go.

Basing your vocab deck on what you are actually immersing in has the huge advantage that you are encountering the words in use and not just in Anki. You learn them as living entities. Actual encounters are more potent than Anki reps and the combination of the two is a 必殺技 .

I would definitely agree with the advice to listen to things you are genuinely interested in. It is sensible to start with the simplest material you actually enjoy.

Listening to the same thing too often can get boring, but putting it on iPod helps a lot. "Casual" listening while you are doing something else is very valuable. You may not pay full attention but you will keep finding yourself noticing things and getting caught up in the story.

Again, using something you actually enjoy is important or your mind will tend to tune it out.

I am at a similar level to you and intending to start mini-immersion in about a month.  I'll basically be listening and watching 1-2 hours throughout the day/night.

My intention is to follow the advice of some of the others here and watch/listen to things that interest me the most with Japanese subs, but with one important difference - I will be pre-learning the vocabulary before I listen.  I have a few anime with subtitles and some song lyrics which I will scan for translations, study with anki and know every word before I watch or listen.  I might augment this with subs2srs if needed.  I haven't tested this method yet, but IMO it seems to solve the problem of "even if you don't understand 80-90% of what you listen to".    I'm expecting that after watching and re-watching a few anime, there will be less and less unknown vocab until I can finally watch new episodes without pre-learning.  At least that's the plan.

I have a mix for me.

For active listening, I am watching unsubbed anime I know like the back of my hand and love. Great as everyone speaks pretty normally and there are 99 episodes (宇宙兄弟/Space Brothers). After I get through this I'll probably move to Big Windup as they also speak normally and I enjoy it.

Honestly I wish there was a way to have Japanese subs on Crunchy, but I'm ok with no subs.

For passive I just put on a few podcasts I've found that I like. I may catch very little but getting used to the speed, pronunciation and banter of a conversation is nice. I also listen to audio of Let's Play of games I like (going through the 逆転裁判/Ace Attorney series right now).

I am pretty early level but I'm enjoying it. I don't go 100% on immersion but I try to do an hour a day at least.

I've found an easy variety to follow even without japanese subtitles, it's called "Saturday Night Child Machine".
I've written something about it here. I suggest you to watch the first episode and to jump direcly to the section with Paruru, I don't know if idols is you cup of tea but give it a try, it's really easy to follow and I admit I find it really fun to watch

About the Anime method with the help of japanese subtitles, I did exactly as yogert909 said (the one described in CureDolly's blog):
I wached the first 10 episodes of Sword Art Online I, with the srt file open into firefox and Rikaisama activated.
I stopped at every unknown word and I saved it, I added it to Anki and I studied it.
But after 10 episodes it became frustrating because that particular anime was too difficult to me to follow, too many fight words, especially as I find really stressful to my eyes to read Japanese on a computer screen. So I put it away and I went into reading easy novels with my Kindle, which I find more enjoyable to do. Obviously it is useless for listening comprehension, but after months and words learned by reading, I gave another try to SAO I, and many words were now already known to me because I encountered them during reading. Even without Japanese subtitles it was relatively easy to follow the first episode, where 2-3 months before it was like unintelligible noise to me.

So I think the anime or drama subtitle method is effective but it needs some effort in the beginning, and I think the concurrent use of japanes subtitles and Anki is really effective, but obviously you need to stick to it. Make cards (check Epwing2Anki), review them etc.. So it's best to start with easy content first, like the variety show I suggested in the beginning.

Hope this helps!

I only started immersion after I found AJATT, when I was around high-beginner/low-intermediate level. That said, watching kids programs can be useful. I'd go here:
http://www.nhk.or.jp/school/program/ and pick 学年 (school year) > 小1 (grade 1, elementary school), and then see how much you can understand.

[Zgarbas]

I just watched stuff i liked (subtitled). I'm lazy and don't like doing things that feel like a chore. Your level is steadily advancing thanks to your study and reps, watching'listening to japanese media just reinforces your interest - picking things up as you watch is a bonus. Once my skills got good enough for me to feel confident reading authors that I wanted to read I moved on to that. The only immersion I forced upon myself was NHK easy news (and then the regular news) - i tried listening to news podcasts in the morning but tbh I spaced out for most of it so I doubt it was that efficient.

My tuppence is that anything that keeps you engaged and interested in the language and culture is 'the best way'. In the end what matters is that you will still want to do this next week, and that you spent time on active study.

I took a 'reading first' approach to learning, so I'm not sure what would work well for a beginner beyond that...

However, as risu_ also mentioned, I listened to some Japanese bands even when I was only first starting to study seriously (I was reading through AJATT at the time, got inspired to immerse); I didn't really find it helpful for vocabulary, but it really helped my ear and pronunciation. I'm probably terrible at singing, but I like to do it during my commute to keep from dozing or going mad, and I found that it really helped my pronunciation, even though I didn't know what I was singing most of the time... I found the ラ行 much easier while singing, and it eventually became easier to speak.

Like I said though, I went for reading first, because that's what I wanted to do the most; I went head first into Core6k after I got through RTK. Even as early as learning the kana, I was 'reading' everything while playing Pokemon as a way to randomly test them without a chance to lie to myself (too easy to go 'oh, I knew that' with flash cards). Eventually I started reading manga with furigana, started reading VNs while hooking the text for easy look-ups, etc.
Point being, I highly recommend extensive reading; even when you're only picking out words and phrases here and there, it's pretty helpful.

With listening, I jumped almost immediately into things I was interested in. I attempted to study with subs2srs, but since I usually study at times where sound is inconvenient or unwanted, it never really happened.
I watched some let's plays by from 兄者弟者 on YouTube, I watched some science videos from jstsciencechannel, I listened to some news, etc.
My listening still isn't great, but it's been pretty easy to develop since I already know a lot of vocabulary and phrases.

Thanks guys for the great and insightful posts.

Stansfields, I certainly want to make Nayrs Core with Audio my next main deck, that was what I planned to do next anyway.

As for general immersion, I will try some of your suggestions.

CureDolly thanks for the link with the japanese subtitles. I've been wanting to try that for a long time, but couldn't find useful site.

Yogert and Cophnia, prelearning vocabulary and the listening for it is definitely a good tip.
Is there a really easy basic tutorial for subs srs? 
I am really not tech-savy with Anki, and just don't have the time or nerves to learn about it. I tried reading the subs2srs site once, but found it too complicated for my personal needs.
Stopping at every unknown word and entering it manually seems like an ordeal that would quickly deplete me of my energies.

As for J-music, I haven't found anything I liked. I usually listen to pop music that I find musically interesting (Radiohead, Jeff Buckley, The Police...) and contemporary jazz music. Most mainstream J-Pop that I have listened to is extremely simple and quite superficial, musically speaking, and I can't really listen to it.
If someone has a suggestion based on what I listen to I am happy to hear it!

Everyone else, again thanks a lot for the helpful thoughts (listening to media that are entertaining or interesting, reading first, listening closer to current level etc...)

[Zgarbas]

It took me ages to get into Japanese music. It doesn't help that a lot of the bands of the genres I usually like sing in (terrible) English. Try out

ゲスの極み乙女
indigo la end
和田明子
Cubetone
サカナクション
在日ファンク　<- Japanese James Brown
吉田卓郎 <- the moment you say you like this guy every Japanese person of any age will instantly act baffled and say 古！ but I don't care, he's awesome.
Hiromi!

and a bit different from your style but...
９mm Parabellum Bullet　<- Best Band in Japan imho ^_^
DOES
Mongol800

Also, Learn your anime music and karaoke classics in preparation for the karaoke that is to come if you ever want to make Japanese friends

Jazz, huh? I don't particularly listen to Jazz but you should definitely give Masato Honda a listen. He's a very good saxophonist according to one of my friends who plays it. Hajime Yoshizawa has a couple of jazz albums that are very pleasant to listen to too.

GUIRO is one of my favourite bands -- the vocals and playing are all very smooth and relaxing. I linked one of their songs.

This isn't related to Jazz by any means but I discovered this band earlier today. The sound was so fresh and unique that I was totally blown away! Best Japanese album of 2015 by a huge margin!

Yeah and I totally agree with you about a lot of J-Pop and anime being uninspired, boring as hell or just plain bad. Thankfully, you don't have to dig very far to find stuff you like!

I really only listen to rock and metal most of the time, so I don't have any suggestions for jazz and such, unfortunately.
For musically interesting though, I really like 陰陽座; most Vkei bands don't really do anything for me (because most of them aren't that good at playing), but 陰陽座's music is right up my alley most of the time. They also have over sixteen years worth of stuff to listen to, and have dabbled in multiple musical styles.
六三四 is good too, but didn't do very many tracks with vocals... (Un)fortunately, they moved on to working on anime music (probably a much more lucrative business), so they only ever produced three albums and a collaboration album with another group; quite unique mix of traditional Japanese instruments and electric guitars.

Not really what you're looking for, but it's all I've got... I'm fairly picky about music myself, and have only found a few bands to listen to at all, let alone Japanese...

> How effective is daily immersion, even if you don't understand 80-90% of what you listen to?

Very effective if you are actively learning new vocabulary via anki or something during the same time period, because you'll start hearing the words you are learning and reinforce them. It will also improve your ability to make sense of the sound of natural spoken Japanese. (In fact, you may already have the knowledge to understand more than the 10-20% you think, but you can't properly parse out the words yet, or comprehend the grammar on the fly. Immersion and/or conversation is pretty much how you become able to do that.)

(2016-03-11, 2:21 pm)kendo99 Wrote: > How effective is daily immersion, even if you don't understand 80-90% of what you listen to?

Very effective if you are actively learning new vocabulary via anki or something during the same time period, because you'll start hearing the words you are learning and reinforce them. It will also improve your ability to make sense of the sound of natural spoken Japanese. (In fact, you may already have the knowledge to understand more than the 10-20% you think, but you can't properly parse out the words yet, or comprehend the grammar on the fly. Immersion and/or conversation is pretty much how you become able to do that.)

Immersion may work better for certain people, but I have gotten a fair amount of immersion and I really don't think it helped much at all.  Sure, it might reinforce some of the words I know already if I can pick them out of the stream of words, but for the other 90% of the words, I might as well be listening to swahili. For myself, I really think the benefits of listening multiply with the number of words that are intelligible at speed.  On the rare occasion where I understand an entire sentence, I feel I am getting so much more from the experience.  This is why I feel it will be extremely useful to pre-learn the vocabulary I will be listening to.  

I guess it also depends how much benefit you think makes it worthwhile, as I do this I can get a tiny benefit from immersion while understanding very little.  But the benefit is so much less than other things I could be doing with my time, I don't find it worth the effort until I know the majority of the words I'm hearing.

(2016-03-10, 7:31 am)maxwell777 Wrote: How effective is daily immersion, even if you don't understand 80-90% of what you listen to?

I just remembered an Italian word which I picked up some 28 years ago from a (Head&Shoulders) commercial: "forfora".
Decades ago, no Anki, never needed, nothing interesting about that word and still there - amazingly effective.

I did not know a lot of Italian at that time, but still thought that watching TV was enjoyable & helpful. It won't harm - if you do not enjoy it and do not get anything out of it you will stop it anyway.

As a study habit, I never found it very useful. My attention span, while never great, tends to wander even quicker when I don't understand what is being said, and as a result the stuff I don't comprehend usually fades into background noise. That being said, I did find that actively studying things that I didn't understand (mainly songs), and picking out words I recognized and looking them up later was a good way to practice listening as well as expand my vocabulary.

Pocoyo in Japanese is pretty easy to follow. No subs though but its not difficult to figure out what's happening in the story. It is a children's show in various languages, even in English! So you can refer to the English (or possibly your native language if available) version for clarity of the plot. Each episode is less than 10 minutes so it's not too overwhelming. Also, if you want more listening immersion, you can rip the audio of the videos and load it to your desired listening device (ipod,iphone, android, etc) and listen on the go! It's best to rip audio for episodes you've already seen as you can recall from times you previously watched it before what is happening in the story.

Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJX9iNFD-6M

Hope this helps

turn your computer/phone to Japanese mode. look up things on wikipedia in Japanese (usually there are pictures to help!)

these really build up over time though they aren't big commitments

(2016-03-14, 11:59 am)Dovetron Wrote: turn your computer/phone to Japanese mode. look up things on wikipedia in Japanese (usually there are pictures to help!)

these really build up over time though they aren't big commitments

Excellent advice, though Wikipedia might be a little tough at this stage (Japanese Wikipedia seems to have considerably fewer pictures than the English version). So don't feel too bad if you can't always manage it.

Switching your devices to Japanese really helps. You might want to look at this page (and bookmark it) for a handy guide to the Japanese you will see on menus etc. However, everything on your device will be where it was before (only in Japanese) so that makes life a lot easier.

Thanks for your awesome tips guys. The AJATT guy also mentioned changing the language on devices like PC, phone etc, certainly a good hint.

As for immersion, I was wondering, is there such a thing as an absolutely amazing J-Drama that blew some people away?

I got hooked on two TV shows in my life, one was Game of Thrones, the other Breaking Bad.
I just couldn't stop watching those two, because the storylines and characters were so deep and fantastic.

I have had this experience with some Anime too, but with J-Drama, I have been disappointed so far.
I have tried a few, but nothing ever got me hooked.

I understand that there is probably nothing like "Game of Thrones" or "Breaking Bad" out there, especially in terms of production standards, but did any of you ever find a J-Drama that you just couldn't stop watching?

Thanks for any recommendations.

What anime series did you get hooked on? I confess I've never really watched much TV in English, besides some documentaries, because books are generally my preferred way to be entertained, but in Japanese I do like some anime & dramas.

Some dramas I've watched and found addicting:

Thriller/Mystery:
探偵の探偵 (Lots of violence, but good pacing, and nice mysteries)
http://mydramalist.com/14451-tantei-no-tantei

Mystery:
Galileo (2nd Season's better than the first IMO, so much so that I might recommend starting with it first after reading the summary. Lots of fun mystery-solving with science)
http://mydramalist.com/278-galileo
http://mydramalist.com/6730-galileo-2

Comedy:
五ツ星ツーリスト (Has a lot of Kyoto dialect, but as a fan of Kyoto I couldn't resist)
http://mydramalist.com/13029-five-star-tourist

ドンキホーテ (Turned out to be much better than I expected. Ended up binge-watching the second half of the series. Great acting too!)
http://mydramalist.com/2663-don-quixote

信長協奏曲 (Funny, has good battle scenes, and ended up being the thing which turned me on to historical dramas)
http://mydramalist.com/10067-nobunaga-concerto

Game of Thrones is a medieval-style fantasy right? If so, then you might like historical shows, but the vocabulary is often harder. Very epic storylines though.

I second Nobunaga Concerto, it was very entertaining.

I also liked Jin. It's about a brain surgeon who ends up in the time period towards of the Edo period, and gets caught up in the events of that time. Now that I think about it, it's similar to Nobunaga Concerto like that, but with a different time period/character base. It was funny and interesting, and I even learned a bit about Japanese history (although with a bit of a fictional spin on it given the show's nature)
http://wiki.d-addicts.com/JIN

A lot of people recommend Trick, although I have only seen a few episodes. It looked interesting but I just didn't have the time to go through it/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trick_(TV_series)

I liked Hero. It isn't as much about the overarching storyline as it's more of an episodic drama that revolves around a prosecutor's office (think something like Bones in the US, minus any larger storylines, as arcs are 2-3 episodes max).
http://wiki.d-addicts.com/Hero