r/CIJapanese

I posted my 65 hour update around 2 months ago here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CIJapanese/comments/1rmgumi/65_hour_post/

I've now passed 150 hours of content, but it's been a relatively slow process. I'm managing maybe 30 to 90 minutes a day, with the rare day where I'll manage 2-3 hours. Hopefully this progress report is interesting for those in a similar situation, and I'm hoping to look back on these myself in the future to see how far I've come.

I'm about halfway through the beginner videos. I generally don't rewatch anything, and at my current level I find the complete beginner videos far too easy and painfully slow, whilst the beginner videos start to get too hard at around the 45 score point.

The scoring system also seems to be fairly arbitrary. For example, I can fail to follow along with a 30-scored video when they're using lots of vocab I don't know (e.g. talking about manga/anime characters), but I can then easily follow along with a 50 level video about travel or food. So I'm just picking out random videos that interest me at this point.

The beginner level videos seem to contain a large amount of gaming content with really long videos, and some of these have been a chore to get through. I really didn't enjoy the Shashingo and Little to the Left series, but I enjoyed the Goose series, and all of Yoshito's gaming ones have been interesting and fun so far. I hope gaming series don't become the main form of CI on the channel going forward, and that they keep the content nice and varied.

Outside of the site, I've attempted the following:

1. Ken's N5/N4 videos. All very easy to comprehend and follow. He's a great resource at this point.
2. Japanese with Shun. He's harder to follow at times, but I can mostly get it depending on the content. His Japanese seems a bit more real, so it's good practice, but his videos are also full of music, non-Japanese speakers, etc., so I don't enjoy them as much as others as it breaks the flow.
3. Daily Japanese with Naoko. This channel is superb and her content is great and quite comprehensible. This channel is currently my +1 in terms of difficulty and at a good point.
4. Netflix series... well... this wrecked my motivation for a while haha. I watched some sci-fi series and comedies, but my comprehension is so low (I couldn't understand anything at all apart from the odd word) that I reverted to English subs and just watched them for the sake of it instead of tracking time. The language used in everyday life is so completely different to what I'm hearing on CIJ and others that I feel this will take years to get used to.

My understanding has improved, but it's a slow process and becoming less noticeable. Eventually I'll run out of beginner videos and need to move to intermediate, and the jump there is probably going to be quite extreme in comparison.

I've had a few moments where I've just wanted to quit as my progress feels so slow, only to come back another day and be amazed that I understood some other video. So, it's quite a rollercoaster.

I've been through the same process with Spanish and French, but in comparison, at this level in French, I was already onto native Youtube videos and upper intermediate content. So, I'd say it's 2-3x slower than the DreamingFrench/Spanish roadmaps.

Anyway, I hope this was useful for someone to read. I'll post another update once I'm done with the beginner videos.

My difficulty level: Beginner 41

Hours per day: I average 2 to 3 hours per day.

Comprehension: 70% to % 80

Videos left until the next level: 210

Time frame: one month until the intermediate stage

How I go about learning: repeat and repeat again. I add videos that are at 50% comprehension to a playlist for later re-watching.

Background: I study Japanese in college. I didn’t learn much as you might think. I studied Genki 1 and 2. That’s all. That was 7 years ago.

My thoughts: As of now I just watch every single video and move forward. I do repeat videos if I feel I didn’t understand enough. I do expect intermediate to be much harder. We will see how it goes.

Podcast: Nihongo con Taipei
Episode: 151

I am not consuming anything else at the moment. No tv shows, no anime. Nothing.

My ability to talk:
I can talk. I can introduce myself.
I can have small conversations.

Reading ability: I can read hiragana and katana.

Is there ever a black Friday sale on lifetime?

Background: I’m not completely new to language learning. In the past I learned some Spanish to around an A2-ish level and got roughly ~500 hours of comprehensible input. I also probably spent way too much time learning how to learn languages instead of actually learning them, but oh well.
I recently started Japanese because I’ve wanted to learn it for years. I fell in love with Japanese architecture a long time ago, and I also watched a ton of anime growing up (probably 100+ series? no idea lol). I don’t know how much that exposure actually helps, but I like noting every bit of contact I’ve had with the language.
My personal opinion is that phonetics/pronunciation should be the first thing learned in any language, so before starting immersion I focused entirely on understanding the sound system and basic background info.
What I did
May 3:
Learned general background info about Japanese
Looked into recommended learning methods
Learned about the writing systems
Learned what pitch accent is and why people care about it
May 4:
~5 hours learning hiragana
4+ hours passive listening to hiragana pronunciation
~30 mins minimal pair pitch accent perception practice
May 5:
Basically repeated the same thing
May 6:
Started doing CI-only Japanese
From this point forward, my plan is:
CI only
Pitch accent perception training daily
No grammar study
No vocab decks/SRS
No textbooks
I stopped actively studying hiragana once I learned the sounds and understood which sounds differed from English. My current view is that understanding/hearing the language correctly matters more at the start than memorizing rules.

I’m posting this because I personally haven’t found many examples of someone trying to learn Japanese solely through CI from basically the beginning — especially someone without prior Japanese grammar study, classes, or traditional foundations first.
So I thought it might be interesting to document the process/results over time, whether it succeeds or completely crashes and burns.
Would be interested in hearing from anyone who’s tried something similar, especially with Japanese specifically.

I will make posts every 50 hours of CI not including passive listening daily, but I’ll try and give rough estimates on that

Working my way through the super beginner videos with about 15-30 mins a day. Done about 2 hours so far. Also, I use duolingo, renshuu, and wanikani in addition to CIJ daily. I was a little shocked by the difficulty ramp up from 5 to 7. Not able to understand very much at all. Any suggestions? I probably can understand like 40% of lvl 7. I have not paid for the service yet. Is it worth it to get more videos?