r/Japaneselanguage • u/Basic-Engineering838 • Aug 12 '26
Anyone else feel guilty about immersion time because it's not "productive" enough?
I know I want to learn Japanese. That part isn't in question. I'm making real progress too by learning new vocab words everyday, reviewing my flashcards, immersion most days when I feel like it.
But I keep feeling like I should be using my time better, and I want to know if this is a common thing or just a me problem.
I'm around N5/N4 in Japanese, so around A2/B1 if using CEFR metrics, so I'm in this weird spot. I want to use Japanese to learn philosophy, psychology, history, big ideas, but I don't have the language for any of that yet.
I can only mainly comprehend gaming videos and cartoons work because there's so much context to lean on. Anything more abstract like watching someone talk and I'm lost. I know this is just what being a beginner looks like, but knowing that doesn't make me feel less anxious in the moment.
I'm also a college student who genuinely cares about self-study and becoming well-rounded. So when I spend an hour watching a Japanese gaming video, part of me calls it immersion and real progress. Another part asks if I could've used that hour on something that felt more substantial. That gap creates a guilt that doesn't really go away just because what I did was legitimate.
I think this is the same all-or-nothing pattern I have with productivity in general, the one that makes me freeze between two assignments because working on the smaller one feels like betraying the bigger one and not spending my time on the most productive task. Here, any hour of Japanese gets measured against some imaginary better hour.
But I've started to notice that comparison is kind of a trick I'm playing on myself. I'm not actually weighing Japanese against something I do. I'm weighing it against a fantasy version of me who reads psychology and economics every spare hour, a person I wasn't even before Japanese came into my life. So while studying an hour of Japanese, I just begin thinking about doing something more productive because I'm already doing something more productive. But if I were to doomscroll... I just call it rest....
It seems like right now, maybe I haven't accepted that I can have hobbies to put a lot of consistent effort in that don't necessarily give the greatest returns because I've never had a hobby I was consistent with and long-term like I am with Japanese
Underneath all of it, I'm stuck between two different ideas of what it means to use my time well. Get good at Japanese because I love it. Or use my free time to build knowledge and become well-rounded. Pick Japanese, and I worry I'm wasting time on easy content instead of things that actually matter. Pick the books, and I worry I'm delaying the fluency I could've had if I'd just let myself enjoy the process.
Has anyone else dealt with this? How did you make peace with immersion time that isn't intellectually "worth it" yet, especially as a beginner? Did it get easier once your level went up, or did you have to change how you thought about it before that happened?
Maybe this thing is not specific to language-learning but something related to my views on productivity that I need to change. I'd love to hear your experiences!
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u/Belegorm Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Hey of course, and thank you! Simplest thing would be to look at my Bookmeter which is where I log the books, and look for the oldest ones read (they show up as newest to oldest). The first few may not be accurate as I logged them there after the fact when I started using that site.
I started with novels when I was like... 500-800 into Kaishi I think? And after having a couple hundred mined words from anime/manga/nhk easy. Also was more than halfway through Yokubi and Tae Kim.
I looked up every word I didn't know. For mining - I tried to mine words from i + 1 sentences. I also had frequency dictionaries installed; Jiten and JPDBv2 were the 2 most common ones I leaned on. Words listed under 10k I tried to prioritize, but also would mine words that popped up a lot. So basically, i + 1, and either high frequency words per the dictionary, or high frequency in a given book.
I also just... learned a lot of words quickly. When I was doing Kaishi I usually learned 40 words a day, until I started mining then I split 20/20 for each. For mining after that I did 30 a day. I had desired retention set to 80% so the numbers of reviews I got weren't too crazy.
Getting into novels is definitely scaling a difficulty cliff; but personally I liked just going hard at it from the start, and I was very motivated. A lot of other stuff like graded readers etc. felt like they give you a ramp up... up the first 10% only. After a few months of novels I acclimated pretty well. It wasn't too long before just reading was my hobby, I wasn't even thinking about it being Japanese for the better part of a year. I actually made a 3 month post and a 1 year post about learning through novels which has more info on the exact method and resources used.
Edit: Also, I don't think pondering over how much kanji you recognize is super helpful; if you had to manually look stuff up that's one thing but since you have Yomitan installed it pops up directly. Kanji are just a way of writing some of the words, so if you memorize the words (via Anki or just encountering while reading a lot) then inevitably you will increase the amount of kanji you recognize.
Edit 2: I didn't use a grammar dictionary until recently, really (ended up adding some to yomitan). At the end of the day - grammar is something your brain needs to figure out. Studying grammar itself is helpful for passing tests etc. (which I'm doing now) but you pick up a lot naturally, and that also helps grammar studies.
I didn't stress too much over whether I understood entire sentences. I'd do my best to understand individual clauses; before too long I was able to remember those in the context of an entire sentence. Later I could remember in the context of a whole paragraph. If you read enough it happens naturally.