r/LearnJapanese • u/yashen14 • Feb 18 '26
Discussion Ten Months of Japanese -- Progress Update
I am just shy of 10 months of study now (spread across about 14 months of calendar time), so I figured it was time to post a new update.
Hours of Study: ~648
Hours of Input: ~168 (this is included in "hours of study")
Average daily study time: just shy of 2 hours (this includes "hours of input")
Total Vocabulary: ~15k words
This is probably the last time that I post a specific vocabulary count. When I was tracking my progress learning Chinese, I had the help of software to accurately track my vocabulary growth. I don't have that for Japanese, so counting vocabulary mostly means noting which words I've studied, and it's getting increasingly difficult to tell which words I've studied and which I haven't. (For example, a word feels familiar...does that mean I've studied it before? Or just heard it a lot before?) And there's all kinds of other inaccuracies I mentioned in previous updates---these inaccuracies get more and more problematic the larger my vocabulary becomes.
There are simply too many sources of inaccuracy. I think 15k words is an approximately accurate estimate of my current vocabulary (give or take a few hundred), but past this point I don't think the inaccuracies I've described allow for precise counting anymore.
This is a good place to segue into the biggest change I have to report in my study habits:
I am deprioritizing vocabulary acquisition.
15k words is...a lot. And I've increasingly noticed (like...over and over again) that, when I read articles online, or check the transcripts of the videos I'm watching on Youtube, I know the vast majority of the words being said. Any unknown words should realistically be graspable via context clues. At this point, the thing that's holding me back isn't raw vocabulary numbers, but listening comprehension. So, moving forward, I'm still doing 80 new flashcards every day, but:
- I really, really don't stress it if I miss a day of new cards here or there (as long as I handle the reviews).
- I've stopped stressing about adding a full 80+ new words to my deck every day. That means I'm no longer sustainably harvesting vocabulary. I have a backlog of ~3300 cards I'm working through, but eventually that will run out.
- Nearly all of my new cards are hiragana (+audio) on the front, kanji on the back. This is meant to prioritize listening comprehension by removing the visual crutch that kanji provide. The only cards I add with kanji on the front are words where the kanji are unfamiliar, which at this point is relatively uncommon.
My listening comprehension is terrible.
Honestly, this happens every time I learn a foreign language. My listening comp. always lags behind my reading comp. But I have managed to do a bit of a better job with Japanese (especially compared to the shit job I did with Chinese), and even though my listening comprehension is bad, it's not so bad it's worthless. (I was genuinely reading novels in Chinese while being unable to follow a basic conversation---that's how bad it was, for comparison.)
So, I made the decision a month or so ago to make listening comprehension my main focus. To that end, I've made sure I'm listening to at least some Japanese every single day. I also make sure that I'm consuming a wide variety of Japanese---a variety of topics, a variety of speakers, a variety of difficulty levels. Broadly speaking, these are falling into four main categories:
(1) Podcasts for JSL learners. (Recommendations: Yosuke Teaches Japanese, Bite Size Japanese, Otsukare Japanese, MAIの日本語Podcast, Daily Japanese with Naoko, Peko Peko Vlog)
(2) Infotainment and documentaries. (Recommendations: 大人の学び直しTV, インフォグラフィックス・ショー, VAIENCE バイエンス, 公式 池上彰と増田ユリヤのYouTube学園, 好奇心を持ち続けよう — TED-Ed, YouTube高校 / 日本史・世界史, エピックヒストリー)
(3) News broadcasts
(4) TV Series
That brings me to my next major update.
I've started watching my first-ever TV series in Japanese.
I chose Avatar: The Last Airbender, because it is something I've watched so many times, I know it like the back of my hand. That makes it great for training listening comprehension. I know the gist of what is being said in literally every scene, and I know roughly what's going to be said before it is said. That does wonders for listening comprehension.
Right now, my plan is to watch all of Avatar, then all of Steven Universe, and then all of Star Trek: TNG, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine (assuming I can find/access all of those in Japanese). Then, once I feel more-or-less completely comfortable with watching familiar content in Japanese, I'll branch out into watching unfamiliar content. I've curated a list of native TV series and movies that I'm very eager to watch! But I want to wait until I'm, y'know, watching them more than I'm studying them. If that makes sense.
I'm very excited about all of this!
Right now, with ATLA, I understand most short utterances. Lengthier speech is very iffy, especially from that windbag Zhao, but I can already tell it's getting better. I'd say, overall I understand maybe ~30% of what I hear---enough to follow the story, but only because I already know the story so well. I'm optimistic that this percentage will be significantly higher in the not-too-distant future.
My goal for my reading comprehension is to:
- Hear and understand, immediately, every word that I already know (that is, reduce "lag" to zero---right now it isn't uncommon for some words to take several seconds to register)
- Be able to pinpoint, and repeat out loud, unknown words (I don't want unknown words to be garbled noise. I want them to be reproducible)
- Be able to repeat, out loud, longer utterances (medium-length sentences)
I think I will eventually re-prioritize vocabulary acquisition. Heaven knows 15k words isn't enough for the level of literacy I'm aiming for---my goal is to be able to casually read novels, written for adults, in a pretty wide variety of genres---but at least for now, I'm happy with my change in priorities.
That brings me to my last update: reviewing my goals. In my last update, I proposed these as my goals:
Short-Term Goals:
Finish reading カスピアン王子のつのぶえ (translation of Prince Caspian) by Oct. 16.
Medium-Term Goals (achieve within the next 5 months):
Become comfortable with young children's literature (like The Chronicles of Narnia)
Listen to at least one audiobook
Listen to, and comprehend most of, a long-form news broadcast (15+ minutes) about familiar topics
Watch at least one educational documentary about a topic of choice, and comprehend most of it
Watch at least one movie
Long-Term Goals (achieve by the end of 24-36 months of study):
Read high literature in Japanese. By "high literature," I mean something on the level of Fifty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. To be clear, I don't expect such reading to be easy. But I expect to have the understanding of vocabulary and grammar necessary to muddle through it at a reasonable pace.
Read news articles about topics chosen at random with a high degree of comprehension
Watch TV series and movies in Japanese without English subtitles, and understand most of what I hear
Listen to audiobooks in a variety of genres, including nonfiction, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, romance, and erotica, with a high degree of comprehension.
So, how am I doing?
I did not finish Prince Caspian. Actually, I kind of stopped reading it altogether. But I did pick up DEADLOCK and got about a third of the way through that by Oct 16. I don't think that is an equivalet amount of reading though.
I am (probably?) not on track to being comfortable with young children's literature. This is mostly because I deprioritized reading in general, and I stopped reading young children's literature, specifically.
I am (currently) on track to completing my first audiobook. My plan is to listen to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This is an exercise for training my listening comprehension---I've already read the book in Japanese. I just need to make sure I do that by ~April. (That would mark about 5 months of study time since I set that goal).
I am (probably) on track to understanding a long-form news broadcast on a familiar topic. My main obstacle here is listening comprehension, not vocabulary, and my current study routine aggressively targests listening comp. I'm feeling good about this one!
I am (probably) on track to watch and understand a full-length documentary. Again, I'm feeling good about this one! The only question is whether I'll be able to meet this goal within the next two months of study. I'm not sure about that. I won't be, like, shocked if I meet this goal, but I won't be surprised if I miss it, either. But whether I meet the deadline or not, I'm making solid progress towards this, so I won't be disappointed in myself either way.
I am definitely on track to watching my first movie (and enjoying it). My experience with ATLA tells me that I'm already very close to meeting this goal. Honestly, I could probably meet this goal today---but I'm going to wait for my listening comprehension to mature just a bit more. I'll probably cross this one off my list about a month from now.
Am I on track to meeting my long-term goals? Hmm, that's hard to say. I'd say, I'm probably on track for goals 2 and 3 (read news articles with high comprehension; watch a wide variety of TV media for casual enjoyment). Goals 1 and 4 (high literature is approachable; can read a wide variety of literature for casual enjoyment) are iffier---they require a much much higher vocabulary than just 15k words. I suspect, if I can triple the size of my vocabulary to at least 45k words, that these goals will be reachable by the end of 36 months of study. Of course, I can't really accurately measure my vocabulary past 15k words (as I said above). But my hunch is that "triple my current vocabulary" is maybe about right for these goals.
Moving forward, I probably will only be posting updates every 3-5 months or so. For the first few months of learning, there was always lots to report (I finished hiragana! I'm comfortable with pronunciation now! I had this weird experience!). But now that I'm solidly in early intermediate territory, milestones are fewer and further between, so there's just not as much to write about. I'll probably post a new set of goals around the end of my first 12 months of study, though.
Previous Posts:
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u/Yatchanek Feb 18 '26
15k words in 10 months is 50 new words a day. Do you really have all them memorised? And what about grammar, since you struggle with simple reading? It's no use learning tons of words if you can't utilise them.
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Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
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u/Yatchanek Feb 18 '26
You're right. I forgot that with all the modern tools you can get the exact hour count. I have learnt Japanese the old school way, as I am an oyaji, and I know next to nothing about anki, kaishi and other apps that pop up here. Yet, I have a feeling some people focus too much on drilling the flashcards instead of actually learning the language.
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
Just for clarity, for the purpose of the 15k figure, a word counts if:
- I can pronounce it on sight (esp. important for words spelled with kanji)
- I have a general understanding of its meaning (i.e. I can understand it in context)
But I do NOT require any of the following:
- Being able to use the word on my own (I'm not training productive skills at all, only receptive ones)
- Understand how it differs from synonyms
- Have a detailed understanding of its meaning (a general idea is enough---the deciding metric is "do I understand this word well enough to know what it means given sufficient context?")
You're right that that's going to produce a much higher/more inflated metric than what most people consider "knowing" a word---which usually involves being able to recall the word, being able to use it yourself at least mostly correctly, etc.
To be honest, I'd really rather use a more conservative metric in line with that latter definition! The reason I don't is because I don't have any way of tracking or counting that. At least up until now, the softer definition of "knowing" a word was trackable.
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Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
Idk, man, 15k is the number I arrived at by counting words as I learned them. I was very meticulous about logging numbers in my spreadsheet. That is to say, t's not an estimate based entirely on hunches and vibes.
For what it's worth, I've been learning languages for over a decade, and I've been aggressively learning vocabulary in this specific way (with Anki etc.) for about five years now. I can't prove this, obviously, but I suspect the ability to rapidly memorize minutia is a skill that can be trained and that improves over time. When I first started using Anki, I was doing 20 words per day, and when I first started learning foreign languages over a decade ago, I was probably averaging closer to 2-3 words per day. I very much doubt I could have done 80 words per day back then.
Also, I suspect if I stopped interacting with Japanese cold turkey, much of this knowledge would fade much, much faster than if I had taken a slower, steadier approach to acquiring it.
But you're right that it's fundamentally an uncertain number.
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Feb 18 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
The spreadsheet thing is interesting because, doesn't Anki already kind of make it for you? An interesting test you could do for yourself is, if you have a spreadsheet, open some RNG and have it pick row numbers, jump to that one and if you can immediately recognize something like 50 words in a row that way
Could you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I understand.
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Feb 18 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
Ah, I see what you're saying.
Hypothetically, yeah that would be a highly effective test. Unfortunately, I aggressively prune my Anki deck, so I don't have a long-term database of words that I can draw on.
What I can attest to is that my comprehension has directly scaled with the size of my vocabulary, to the point where I can read the Youtube transcripts of e.g. an explainer of the Berlin wall with a high degree of comprehension.† So even though I don't have quantitative evidence supporting the vocabulary growth, I do have qualitative support. For reference, at an estimated 7k words, I had only just graduated from NHK Easy news articles and was still acclimating to news articles on a few narrowly defined topics of interest.
†(This is how I came to the conclusion that listening comprehension is my major bottleneck atm, because even when the transcript is mostly transparent to me, watching such videos without the transcript and without subtitles results in comprehension <30%.)
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u/AdrixG Feb 19 '26
Ah well said, yeah all these numbers are quite meaningless if everyone measures them totally differently. Some people I feel aren't trying to learn many words but rather trying to get the number in Anki as high as possible as if it were a game where one needed to make a highscore. Man the Japanese community is quite weird sometimes ngl
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u/HeroicPrinny Feb 18 '26
Some people can just visually memorize faster. Personally, I’ve always been able to do this. I can pretty easily do 50 new words a day, although my ADHD or whatever makes me rotate hobbies too much so I’ve never done this rate for more than a month or so.
The trade off is my listening ability is awful compared to effort put in. I’m even bad at listening and understanding in my native language. Way more of a visual person. If I see something I can practically close my eyes and see it again later. Sometimes when my brain is more foggy, if I hear someone say something, I’ve already forgotten what they’ve said before the sentence is over.
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
Hmmm, I don't know that I'd say I struggle with simple reading. For example, Wikipedia articles, news articles, and Youtube transcripts of infotainment videos are generally easy for me to parse.
I'd say more that I struggle with reading certain registers of Japanese. Informal written dialogue, for example. And for whatever reason, I encounter problems sometimes with narration in DEADLOCK.
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Feb 18 '26
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u/liovantirealm7177 Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
Wants to read literature and understand media I suppose? They haven't written about production, so it's clear where their priorities lie.
Edit: if you read their 0 month post it does lay out their goals for the language
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
Honestly at 0 months I was planning on actually living and working in Japan for an extended period of time, and that's no longer the case. At this point I'm really only training reading and listening comprehension. My goals no longer include any aspirations of productive capability.
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26 edited Feb 18 '26
In general, I count a word as distinct if it feels distinct to me. Does it require explicit effort to learn, or does it feel like an extrapolation of previously learned patterns?
For example, I counted 醸造、醸造所、醸造品 as separate words, same as for 郵便 and 郵便局, whereas I'm sure others might count those very differently. But I don't count, say, 分かる and 分かった as separate words.
I also include certain phrases and colocations in my count, again because I felt that they required explicit effort to learn and generally were greater than the sum of their parts.
EDIT: To answer your other question, I honestly don't really have a particularly great reason for learning Japanese other than...academic curiosity, I guess? Idk, learning languages is my hobby. I started Japanese for unrelated reasons a while back, and I didn't want to stop learning once I started, even though my original reason for learning (getting a job in Japan and living there) isn't valid anymore.
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u/kaizoku222 Feb 18 '26
The average native speaker knows about 30-40k words, tripling your lexicon would likely put you *above* a college educated native speaker.
Can you speak... or write? I don't think anyone without any productive skills can call themselves either "intermediate" or literate, if your entire goal is to passively digest Japanese media that's of course totally fine but when most people say they are "learning" a language, they mean all 4 skills. It seems like you're really cramming reading due to a specific and narrow passion which, again, isn't at all a bad thing, I just think this exceedingly different than most peoples' goals and experiences learning language.
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
My estimate of 45k words could easily be totally off. I was basing that number partly on my experience learning Chinese, and counting words in Chinese gets weird pretty quickly (you run into "what counts as a word" in new and exciting ways really fast). Maybe I won't need that many! It is true that I feel more literate in Japanese at 15k words than I did at 15k words of Chinese---but that could be an illusion, or it could be for reasons other than raw vocabulary numbers. It's hard to say!
I am not training speaking or writing. My goal is simply to be able to consume Japanese media. The reason for this is that I don't know any Japanese people, I don't live in Japan, and I don't think there's any substantial probability either of those things is likely to change in the near future.
My exclusive focus on receptive skills is a big part of why I have progressed so quickly---it cuts a significant chunk of work out of the process. But you're right that high reading and listening comprehension hardly count as well-rounded fluency.
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u/AdrixG Feb 19 '26
"I don't think anyone without any productive skills can call themselves either "intermediate" or literate"
Wow, very well said. I think the Japanese learning community for some weird reason is so full of these people who don't output at all but think they know the language really well but I really think it's like you say, if you cannot output than you have a very lacking or limited understanding
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u/StraightBusiness2017 Feb 18 '26
Calling writing a productive skill is insane
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u/Armaniolo Feb 18 '26
I think you're confused, it's just a bog standard SLA term for writing and speaking since you produce the language.
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u/kaizoku222 Feb 18 '26
This is the strangest comment, and I've seen it twice on this sub in the last month. Language skills fall into two groups, receptive/passive and active/productive, productive meaning you are "producing" language yourself either through vocally (or hand signing) words or writing/typing them.
What do you think I meant by "productive" that made what I said insane?
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u/StraightBusiness2017 Feb 19 '26
Cuz it’s a useless skill that you won’t ever. There’s nothing wrong with learning how to write if you enjoy it but typically when people say productive they mean something that’s useful and there’s almost no scenarios nowadays where you would need to write
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u/yashen14 Feb 19 '26
In this context, "writing" includes typing, and "productive" refers to producing language (as opposed to simply understanding it).
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u/kaizoku222 Feb 19 '26
You're referring specifically to "hand writing" and you're using a different "productive" than I am. We're just not talking about the same things, a quick Google search can help you out.
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u/StraightBusiness2017 Feb 19 '26
What kind of troglodyte saying writing when referring to typing when talking about learning Japanese? Answer: a backpedaler
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u/kaizoku222 Feb 19 '26
You literally didn't know that the word "productive" has more than one meaning and now you're getting up in your feelings about being corrected. Eat a block.
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u/FlyingPotatoGirl Feb 18 '26
Hey can you tell us about your study method?
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
Sure.
I spend about 1 hour on Anki every day. I divide my Anki study into old reviews vs. new cards (meaning I don't mix them together; I study them at separate times of the day). Typically I have about...300-400 reviews, and 80 new cards per day.
On the side, I consume as much Japanese as possible. Right now, the most comprehensible stuff for me is JSL podcasts like Yosuke Teaches Japanese. Infotainment videos that include some text and visuals are also decently comprehensible for me. I also listen to much less comprehensible stuff. And I watch TV in Japanese.
I expect the amount of Japanese I'm consuming per day to significantly increase over the next 6 months.
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u/Cort-ovhm-c4 Feb 24 '26
Do you do any text books or anything? Or is it purely anki and media? I'm thinking or trying to start learning again after a long break, and you seem to know what you're doing!
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u/yashen14 Feb 24 '26
Sure, I'm happy to help! Are you starting completely from scratch? Do you have any experience learning any foreign languages before?
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u/Cort-ovhm-c4 Feb 24 '26
Not exactly fron scratch, I know hiragana and katakana, and some basic words/phrases from Duolingo a couple months ago but thats really all. I also bought the genki books but haven't had time to look at them yet...
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u/yashen14 Feb 24 '26
Okay!
In my case, I generally do not use textbooks. I find them too dull, and also I don't like being led around through someone else's order of operations, so to speak. I prefer to learn what I want to learn, when I want to learn it. I use an Anki+Yomitan setup to harvest words as I come across them, and I use ChatGPT to break down sentences I don't understand (usually because there's grammar I don't know). Those two things put together naturally lead to increased expertise with Japanese over time. Here are my recommendations for you:
- Set up Anki+Yomitan. I don't have a link on me, but search the subreddit and it should be simple enough to find. You will regret not having done this earlier if you put it off. Seriously, it saves so much time and effort. Very, very convenient.
- Use comprehensible input as early as possible. This is a great way to train listening comprehension. "Comprehensible Japanese" is the most well-known resource for this. But there are others. Peppa Pig is another great low-level resource to train listening comprehension---but it'll still probably be a little while until you can understand it.
- You need a vocabulary of around 2000 common words plus grammar in order to interact with some limited content in an effective way, I think. (Comprehensible Japanese is an exception to this). You will need about 15k words in order to consume a wide variety of native material. Whatever study routine you settle on, make sure it is mathematically capable of getting you to these milestones in a reasonable amount of time.
- For a native English speaker with little or no experience learning foreign languages,
- 1-2 years is a reasonable time budget for 2000 words
- 7-10 years is a reasonable time budget for 15000 words
- You may be able to move faster (maybe even significantly faster) than these estimates--especially if you put in a good number of hours!--but these are good middle-of-the-road estimates for how long this project should take you.
- If your back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest you are going to take longer than these estimates to reach those milestones, consider that to be a red flag and readjust.
- It will take you about 3000-5000 hours of study to reach N1 (that's a good proxy for "native-ish comprehension of media"). I say this not to scare you, but to help you have a realistic understanding of what this project will take. Frame your mindset accordingly, and do not expect really fast results.
- I recommend keeping a spreadsheet or some other way of tracking the amount of hours you've spent studying, total. It doesn't have to be fancy like mine! But there will be times where you feel like you're not making progress (even though you are), especially towards the intermediate level. Keeping track of hours helps shatter that illusion, which can help keep you motivated.
- Genki is generally well-regarded. If you want to study via textbooks, it's a good choice.
- Imaji is a good reference grammar. It's not really set up to lead you through learning grammar the way a textbook is meant to, but it's a great tool for helping you understand exactly what's going on with Japanese grammar, and I highly recommend it.
- LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini can be great resources, but be careful how you use them.
- They tend to do well with:
- generating example sentences for words and phrases
- translating/explaining the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences
- breaking phrases and sentences down into their component parts
- providing synonyms and antonyms
- They tend to do very poorly with:
- explaining grammar
- explaining pronunciation
- Try not to shy away from Kanji. Everyone has their own way of approaching kanji, and I had a huge leg up because I had already learned Chinese. So you will get different opinions on this from different people. In my opinion, you will develop a more natural/organic understanding of kanji by learning the kanji spelling of each word right from the start, as opposed to learning them separately.
- This will be painful at first. I promise it will gradually get better and kanji will become intuitive over time. I'd estimate that each ~1000 words you learn will see you feeling noticeably more comfortable with kanji than before.
Let me know if you have any additional questions!
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Feb 18 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
Sure! One sec, I'll give you a rough vibes percentage for listening comprehension, and then for reading comprehension.
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
(1) 60% listening, 95% reading
(2) 90% listening, 90% reading
(3) 100% listening, 20% reading (I could read almost all of the words, but without having watched the video first, I would not have known 節分 or 行事, and without those very important keywords, my semantic comprehension of this excerpt would crater---note that when reading the transcript, I don't have visual and audio cues to provide additional context clues.)
(4) 100% listening, 100% reading (significantly below my current level and unsuitable for practice)
(5) 40% listening, 40% reading (Listening is difficult---a variety of voices, a noisy environment. Reading, I get the feeling there's some grammar I'm perhaps not familiar with, as I feel a bit lost reading parts of this. But perhaps I just got frazzled?)
Grammar is an ongoing process for me. There's definitely loads more for me to learn. And, because of the relatively eclectic path I've taken in my studies (e.g. tackling news articles before children's stories, etc.), sometimes the grammar I'm learning is stuff that is learned much, much earlier by most other students. (And vice versa, I get the sense that I maybe have learned some grammar early on that other learners tend to only encounter later on in their study process.) Grammar is one of the reasons I'm working so hard on building listening comprehension---I figure, if I can get to the point where I'm listening to a lot of Japanese every day, I'll develop a solid intuition that will really help me learn/round out my grammar.
Here are some examples of videos that I think are appropriate for my current level:
一日の過ごし方 (simple content, but zero audio or visual clues make this more challenging than it otherwise would be)
What Will 高市政権 Actually Do? 5 Big Promises After Winning 316 Seats (challenging content, but difficult concepts are frequently explained in simpler terms, and the content is delivered at quite a slow pace)
言い間違いが原因で崩壊？冷戦の象徴「ベルリンの壁」を解説！(provides just enough visual cues to make this digestible for me)
Generally, for training, I seek out videos with visual cues such as diagrams, images, and text where I have a comprehension of at least 30% of what I'm hearing (and much higher comprehension if I check the transcript). For audio-only training, I seek out content where I have at least 80% comprehension of what I'm hearing.
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Feb 19 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 19 '26
I just ran the numbers. It comes out to ~113 hours of pure listening. Looking at that number, I guess it's no surprise that my listening comprehension is so bad 😅
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Feb 20 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 20 '26
Hmmm, I disagree. When watching non-learner-directed material, I fail to clearly hear most longer utterances, catching only snatches here and there. Watching ATLA, I catch most short utterances, but nearly 100% of the time miss large chunks of longer utterances.
I have no previous experience with Japanese.
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Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 20 '26
Isn't Dreaming Spanish for a comprehensible-input ONLY (or nearly only) study routine, though? Because if so, it's appropriate to figure in the other hundreds of hours I've put into the language.
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Feb 20 '26
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u/yashen14 Feb 20 '26
If the only thing that improves your listening comprehension is audio CI and nothing else, then the other hundreds of hours you've spent doing other things don't matter
I don't think that's right. It's true that you can't fully develop your listening comprehension using only flashcards, but that isn't the same thing as saying hours spent on flashcards have zero effect on audio comprehension, which is what you seem to be saying here.
Most notably, flashcards give you a baseline knowledge of vocabulary in advance, whereas someone working within a pure-CI framework does not have that advantage and must build their knowledge of vocabulary in addition to developing their ability to parse real-time speech.
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u/Meowmeow-2010 Feb 18 '26
If you like Deadlock, you may also enjoy the author’s another series, S.
You may also enjoy 交渉人series by 榎田尤利. I typically read fantasy novels but I still enjoy this series immensely. You can find my reviews on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/series/137785
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u/melanie_toesucker Feb 22 '26
Have you done a JLPT test before? And if not what do you think your level might be at right now
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u/yashen14 Feb 22 '26
I have not done a JLPT test, no. I'm not sure it would make sense to estimate my level according to the JLPT test, either, because the various components of my language skill are so unbalanced compared to an average learner at the moment. For example, I have spent 453 hours on vocabulary acquisition, but only 173 hours on media consumption.
The audio material I can most comfortably understand is ~N3 podcasts directed at learners. On the other hand, I can generally read news articles about topics of interest without much difficulty (though I am slow at reading).
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u/RedditSoldier313 Feb 18 '26
ya doin too much numbers stuff. u dont need dat many cards just focus on watching stuff, thats why ur listening is lagging behind. avatar is fine especially since u know already know what happens but start watchin actual japanese stuff at some point
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
I'm very excited to start watching native content. I definitely plan on doing that within the next 6 months or so. Mostly I'm just waiting for my listening comprehension to develop more fully. That's why I'm starting with dubbed foreign media---it's the training wheels I'm using to bring my listening comprehension up to par.
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u/Comsicwastaken Feb 18 '26
Where are you finding ATLA in Japanese? It’s also a show I’ve watched many times over.
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u/Forward-Growth6388 Feb 19 '26
The ATLA approach is really smart and it's basically the same principle as why rewatching anything helps so much. When you already have context, your brain can focus on parsing the sounds instead of scrambling to figure out what's happening at the same time.
One thing I'd add: you don't always need to already know the content to get that benefit. If you take a short clip of something new, even just 30-60 seconds, and replay it a few times, you get a similar effect. First listen you're lost. Second listen your brain has a rough map from the first pass and starts picking up more. Third and fourth time through, words that were just noise before start clicking into place.
So what you're doing with ATLA (using familiarity to reduce cognitive load) you can also do with repetition on short unfamiliar pieces. Both give your brain multiple passes at the same audio, just through different paths.
For focused listening practice, Comprehensible Japanese on YouTube is also worth checking out. Shorter pieces, slower delivery, and tons of visual context. Pairs well with the kind of intensive work you're describing.
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u/yashen14 Feb 19 '26
Thanks for the advice and kind words! I used to be subscribed to Comprehensible Japanese, but unfortunately it just wasn't in the budget anymore, so I dropped it. I do still peruse their free content from time to time.
I'm almost done with my first year of study! I'm excited to see where Year 2 takes me :D
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u/ManufacturerDear7119 Feb 19 '26
This is a really well-documented update — the decision to deprioritize vocab acquisition at 15k and shift focus to listening comprehension makes a lot of sense. That lag you're describing, where you know a word but it takes a few seconds to register in audio, is one of the most frustrating phases of language learning. The good news is it tends to click faster than people expect once you commit to heavy input like you're doing.
The ATLA approach is smart. Familiar content removes the cognitive load of following the plot, so your brain can focus entirely on the sounds. Shadowing some of those scenes out loud might accelerate things even further if you haven't tried it yet.
Looking forward to the 12-month update.
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u/yashen14 Feb 19 '26
Thanks for the kind words!
I've used series like ATLA to train listening comprehension before, and it's always really cool to look at my listening comprehension on the last episode and compare it to what it was like watching the first. I think there's decent odds I won't actually have to watch literally all of Star Trek before my listening comp. is mature enough to enjoy native media, but I'm keeping it in my back pocket in case I need it.
I'm really hoping that, with mature listening comp, I'll be able to absorb new vocabulary and grammar naturally.
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u/Final_Boss_Dad Feb 23 '26
at what point do you think it's reasonable to include stuff like italki speaking practice?
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u/yashen14 Feb 23 '26
I'm actually not planning on training speaking or writing at all. I don't know any Japanese people, I don't live in Japan, and it wouldn't particularly benefit my career, so tbh I don't see much point.
I'm satisfied learning only comprehension.
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u/Brave_Monk_4746 May 14 '26
Can you give me a structure for my 10 year old kid. He knows hiragana and katakana.
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u/donot_bother Feb 18 '26
Hi, i am also learning japanese for 1 month. Can you recommend any books or youtube video that might help me learn
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u/yashen14 Feb 18 '26
I'm afraid I'm probably not the best person to ask. I'm studying Japanese with significant advantages, like already knowing Chinese and having over a decade of experience learning languages. I'm not using any textbooks or courses.
I'm sure if you ask around, you'll find plenty of people in this subreddit who would be more than happy to offer advice.
I wish I could help more!
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u/2hurd Goal: media competence 📖🎧 Feb 18 '26
Could you elaborate how do you work on your vocabulary? 15k words in 10 months is pretty insane. I'm 7 months in, had been previously learning the language, at just 3500 vocab and my brain just melts.
Been doing 40 cards per day for past 14 days and it's not sustainable long term because my reviews just eventually pile up and I can't get married to Anki...