2 Year Japanese Immersion Update (AJATT/MIA)

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-05

[00:00:14]Hi.

[00:00:31]update.

[00:00:37]All right. So, real quick before we get into the video, I did want to talk about my goals and how they've evolved throughout the years. Uh, so 8 years ago when I got into Japanese, uh, I wanted to be the guy who could watch anime without subtitles. I just thought that would be so awesome. Um but then when I started and this was in high school mind you uh I got an awesome opportunity to travel to Japan. So after working through Genki 1 and two and feeling like you know I was at the top of the world I thought I was fluent. So imagine my shock when I get there after all of my classes, all of my textbooks to barely be able to scrape by on surface level daily Japanese. I was crushed.

[00:01:13]Eventually I started to realize I just need to immerse more. And that's where I landed at when I got into AAT 2 years ago. So, it's actually been nearly 2 years since my first video on this channel where I talked about diving into Ajat after 6 years of textbook, college course, and self-study. At the beginning of this year, I set three primary goals for myself, and that was to read at least 30 books by the end of the year, uh read for a total of a,000 hours, and also to acquire a passive vocabulary of 20,000. Knowing that my overarching goal with Japanese is to be able to use it as if it was my native language, that would mean that I need to get cracked at uh reading and listening and speaking.

[00:01:50]Writing is I should probably learn it at some point, but with Kihen Khan, it's not actually like super crucial for me at this point in time, but maybe I'll have a writing arc next year. During my last update video, I shared that my listening skills I had found were way ahead of my my reading, my vocab, and grammar knowledge. So, I decided that this year I was going to read and interact with the Japanese language as much as I could. Uh, so that led me to read for at least uh 3 hours each day.

[00:02:17]Uh, and I was I'm mining. Shouldn't do this. Shouldn't do this, but I've I've been mining every unknown word I see. Or if it's like super rare and obscure, I'm just marking it in Maku. Yeah, don't do it. Look at this. It's on the screen now. 4,000 something. 4,600 cards of backlog. It's terrible. Um, but all the words in there are useful. They're my babies. I have separation anxiety. So, uh, here we are. Hello everyone. Editor Jared here. Ignore everything this bozo is saying on screen right now. I actually just went ahead and deleted my backlog and we are back to a fresh start and it feels so much better. So, yep. I try to be very consistent with my reading, but uh, every night, every other night, I may put on two or three episodes of anime. Now, this ranges from slice of life to action to, you know, stuff like Dandan Kaisen, and those have been pretty good watches. So, I would say that with my listening, there's not too much of a barrier there. It's really just a vocabulary issue, which through a lot of reading, I have noticed that my vocabulary, my known words, has been starting to shoot up a bit, which has been pretty nice. I'm pretty happy with my pitch and pronunciation. But something I've wanted to work on a little bit more is actually putting together Japanese sentences more effortlessly. But without real conversations or a natural speaking environment, this is something that's really hard to improve on. I found that language exchanges with real-time feedback have been massively helpful for me. Especially if your language partner isn't afraid to hold back, which brings me to today's sponsor, italki. For those of you who don't know what italki is, it's an online language learning platform that offers personalized one-on-one lessons with native speaking teachers. And it's something I've genuinely found useful for my Japanese practice.

[00:03:50]on this call.

[00:04:09]I found that this is exactly the kind of speaking environment and personalized practice I was looking for. Reading, listening, and grammar are all important, but at some point, you need a real place to actually speak. That's the gap most learners hit. They study Japanese, but they never actually use it. With italki, you're practicing Japanese through real life conversations with real life speakers. You know, the kind of Japanese that appears outside of textbooks. The teachers on italki create a space where you can actually open your mouth from day one. No pressure, no judgment, and that matters more than most people realize, especially as a complete beginner. One thing I really like is how easy it is to find the right teacher for your level, goals, and interests. You can even use it AI assistant to help narrow down your search. If you want conversation practice, JPT prep or a teacher who speaks your native language to ease you in, it's all right there. Another big plus is the flexibility. You pay per lesson, so there's no subscription or lock in, which makes them easy to fit into your budget and schedule. If you'd like to improve your Japanese or any other languages, then try it out. You can check out the link down in description to start your language learning journey. You can buy $10 and get five off your first lesson when you use my exclusive code, Jared 4. Just keep in mind, this offer is only valid for the first 50 users, so hurry up and grab it while it lasts. Big thanks again to italki for sponsoring today's video.

[00:05:16]Now, in terms of what I've actually been immersing in, here is everything I've read so far this year. You may notice a trend that like 90% of these books are from the same series, uh, Honukino or Ascendants of a Bookworm. Really great series, by the way. It is a bit slow paced. There's like 30 plus volumes, but it is great. They've also got season 4 of the anime coming out, so you should definitely give it a read and a watch.

[00:05:36]Most of the books I'm reading are in Epub format, and I'm reading them on a two reader in tandem with a awesome plug-in, Whisper Sync. It syncs up the audiobook with the physical text in your EPUB so that it highlights it as you go along which kind of makes it easier to keep pace and read faster in my opinion.

[00:05:50]Now, of course, I am still doing some raw reading. I don't want to try to lean too heavily on audiobooks, although they're very nice. I also want to make sure I'm like getting a good balance of non-fiction vocabulary. So, I have been reading NHK news articles on the side.

[00:06:01]On top of this, I do plan to read a series 86 after I finish uh Honukino Honuki, Ascendants of a Bookworm. It's a light novel series that has a lot of artillery, uh, war vocap. I just think that, um, I've been getting really comfortable with the isekai and like fantasy vocabulary that I want to try to branch out into other genres. I think with all the hours I've been putting in this year, I've gotten more comfortable with uh, vocab density, so being able to comprehend and process more words per hour. Um, I kind of graphed out my average reading speed throughout the year here. Uh, so you can see it actually trended up quite nicely. And this is just across all mediums. So that is both visual novels, light novels, and just books in general. a lot of words I struggle with or just wasn't quite getting the nuance of, I found now that they just feel natural to me. And with the content I'm reading, depending on what I choose to read, uh I can go sometimes for, you know, 30 minutes to even multiple hours not thinking in English and it almost feels like I'm consuming content as comfortably in Japanese as I would be able to in English. Is that grammatically correct?

[00:06:59]I don't know anymore. The effects of AAD, it's a really good feeling, but I think it's also a sign that I need to start choosing more and more difficult content. So, I'm looking forward to that and I really want to make sure that I don't get in the habit of choosing to stay comfortable. I want to push myself because that's where I learn the most words. That's where I see the most unknowns, which then can help my brain find patterns and turn those unknowns into gnomes. Other than books, I've also been playing a lot of visual novels. I'm currently doing a run through Persona 4 Golden, and this isn't a visual novel, but a Cyberpunk 2077 in Japanese. Yeah.

[00:07:29]But on the screen right now is my average comprehension for the primary uh pieces of material I'm immersing in. In terms of other tools I'm using, uh, game sentence miner is a really great tool.

[00:07:37]It's what I've been using to plug into Persona 4 Golden, Cyberpunk, for example, and loop that into my Maku clipboard where I can then mine the sentences. Where's the proof? Where's the proof? Can this guy actually read? I don't know. Let's find out. I'm going to read a few sentences here, and then we'll do like a JPT mock like quiz, and then I think that'll be good. I don't want I don't want to take too long.

[00:07:59]Fore is so soaking.

[00:08:49]So yeah, there's a there's a few sentences. Uh let's go on a kanji. Okay, let's run through a quick JPT and one kanji exercise.

[00:09:01]Uh, yes.

[00:09:17]Question three, incorrect. Oh, it was Joey. Ah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, we got that one wrong. Question 12, wrong. It was Moa. Ah, cuz it's in the mo and Moyo.

[00:09:27]Uh, okay. Yeah. So, 10 out of 12 on that one. Not bad. We'll we'll Let's do another one. Uh, maybe this one be fine.

[00:09:52]Uh, this I know this one.

[00:09:56]That's a Gi J. Question nine. Nope. It's Rockuno. Cool. So, it looks got a nine out of 10 here. So, looking at this chart right here from Toggle, we can see that when I do interact with Japanese, less than 10% of that time is spent in SRS, which is great for me. I think since my overarching goal with Japanese is to use it as naturally as possible.

[00:10:16]Then, when I do interact with Japanese, I want it to be in a natural format as much as I can. I've really been wanting to treat SRS as something that fills in the gaps and just immerse as much as possible, get exposure to words in context. The reason I say this so passionately is that uh you may not know this about me, but I used to be an an drone. And the thing is that if you mine a word in the wild, then you make an anar for it and you wrap it, right? But you always see it in that same sentence you mind it from. Some words have nuance. Some people may completely grasp the meaning and acquire the nuance on their first time seeing it. Others may need to see it in multiple sentences before finally getting the vibe or or understanding what it means and how it's used. So, I found that I started to recognize words in the wild, but I still couldn't quite understand what they meant because yes, I knew the meaning, but the way it was being used didn't quite align with my generalized view of what the word meant. So, this year, I made an extra effort to maximize my immersion time and minimize my uh time in the SRS. I'm still doing 25 new words a day, which oh yeah, one of my other goals for this year is to monten the N1.

[00:11:15]Once again, super super high bar. I don't know if it's going to actually happen, but you know, it's a nice it's nice to aim high and shoot slightly lower. I don't think that's a thing people say, but now when it comes to speaking, I am actually planning to do a whole output arc next year, uh where I try to, you know, start off the year at wherever I am and and hopefully get as close as possible to my end goal by the end of the year or whenever that may be, right? It could be 2, 3, 5, 8 years, who knows? But in the meantime, since I have been focusing primarily on immersion, I have been doing shadowing and chorusing.

[00:11:45]So, if you guys aren't familiar with shadowing, that's just repeating after someone in your target language. And chorusing takes that a step further. You record yourself shadowing, then you layer yourself talking over the native speaker. And you just repeat that process over and over again until your sounds are as close as possible to the native speakers. I've also found that the shadowing and the chorus really help with my pronunciation. One thing that will forever haunt me is social anxiety though. Uh it's tough in English and even tougher in Japanese, but I do think I'm starting to get a little bit better and I think that's going to massively improve when I do my output arc next year where I try to speak as much Japanese as possible every day. So, we'll see. One thing I found super helpful this year was to do research on the stuff I was immersing in. So, you may have people saying that a piece of media is like goated for immersion. It's great. It's really easy to read. It's really easy to watch. Um but it's not going to be for everyone. like there's even if something is really really good, there might be that, you know, 3 to 4% of people who just don't vibe with it for whatever reason. So, I found that even if something is recommended to me and it's very good objectively, uh I still like to look into it and see is this something that I would be interested in, like could I see myself sitting down and investing, you know, dozens of hours into this and coming out of it happy. I found that that extra step really helped me get hyped up for what I was going to immerse in and uh helped it make the process much more enjoyable. Another thing that really helped me was time boxing. So, reading for, let's say, 50 minutes, then getting up for 10, taking a little walk, grabbing a drink, right? Uh, this didn't work as well on live streams. So, for anyone watching this video who tunes in to the study with me live streams, I've stopped doing the time boxing/pomodoro timers. I just yapp too much with the chat. One thing I didn't find helpful was, you know, trying to meet a quota, trying to hit that 4 hours, 5 hours a day of immersion, uh, and staying up late and losing sleep. I would say that sleep is probably your best tool for immersion. It recharges your brain, which is the very thing that is trying to learn a new language. So, rest up, rest properly, and don't do what I do and and get like three hours of sleep on average. It's it's terrible. One thing I'd like to mention about speaking really quick is that I did recently do a trip over to Japan. I also documented the whole thing. Feel free to check out those videos down below. But, uh, I did find that speaking was so much easier, this most recent trip than even I think I went like a year ago, a little over a year ago, and it was so much easier. All the words came to me more naturally. I was able to interact with Japanese people in all sort of situations, whether it was renting a car, talking with attendants, starting conversations with random people on the street, even getting interviewed by a news outlet.

[00:14:12]Like, that was crazy to me. Overall, I think I've gotten a lot more comfortable with speaking, and that's mainly because my vocabulary is going up from reading.

[00:14:18]I also want to make these videos a space where you can share your own language learning updates and achievements. So, feel free to leave a comment down below.

[00:14:24]And thank you to these wonderful channel supporters. As always, if you'd like to see your name up here, you can do so by joining down below as a member. And uh feel free to join our Discord. We have hundreds of motivated learners just like you waiting to connect. So, as always, keep immersing, keep learning, and keep reading. And I will see you guys in the next one. Bye.