I don’t know why I write updates every 600h or so, but here is another one!!
Background: Serbian native speaker, but I’ve acquired both English and Spanish along the years just by consuming a bunch of fun content!!
Changes since the last 650h update: I decided to add SRS with Migaku to my daily routine as an experiment (gasp I know, how horrible of me), but uh… it seems only have upsides so far and I’m enjoying it a lot, so I’ll talk about that too.
(sorry for any typos or weird formatting, not really used to writing long posts in English)
Migaku: I painstakingly added about 1000 known words by hand and with the help of Claude, and then when I would sentence mine or watch videos, I would mark words as “known” if their meaning was obvious to me.
Migaku says I currently know about 4950 words, which seems to be true, but of course a decent chunk of these are Katakana loan words, numbers, particles etc, so the number is probably a little inflated. I think adding an SRS after first doing pure immersion is the right play, most people that start an Anki deck from the beginning either miss-acquire basic words, make a habit of translating everything in their head from the beginning, or they end up hating SRS because their retention is crappy. By adding in an SRS at around the 700h mark, I found my retention to be way better because I could actually find i+1 sentences to mine at this point, and my brain already realized that it doesn’t have to translate everything it hears.
My card structure is:
Front: Audio word + Audio Sentence
Back: Audio word + Audio Sentence, Chat GPT explanation of the word in context, screenshot from the content, and the word and sentence written out (I’m not reading until I reach basic spoken fluency, but just seeing the characters every time has really improved my ability to recognize them as well as hiragana)
My routine:
Currently I’m doing 6h of active input per day (this is less than in the last update, but since my reviews take anywhere from 45-50m I’m basically doing the same amount of time as before).
My daily split is 4-5h of native YouTube videos (mostly tech, travel vlogs, gaming and skin care videos), 1-2h of anime (surprisingly mostly romance anime, but a shonen anime has snuck in from time to time), and 30 new cards in Migaku + reviews.
What can I understand:
In the last update I talked about how well I understand SoL anime and Pokemon, with YuGiOh being challenging but fun and Naruto being basically impossible. It’s not that I lied in my last update, I was just misinformed lol.
Back then, I definitely understood my SoL animes and Pokemon on a conceptual level and on the general plot level, but watching those shows now at 1200h, I see just how many details and words I missed. Migaku says that my word comprehension on these anime is now 85%+, and I would tend to agree with that.
i+1 sentences are literally everywhere, and acquiring new vocabulary, as well as mining sentence cards is soo easy. To use an analogy, watching Non Non Biyori at 650h felt like I was watching the video in 240p. While you can definitely make out general movements on screen, some segments really need that detail to be enjoyable, right now watching the same Non Non episodes feels like I’m watching them in 720p, it’s just clear enough to where I can enjoy it, although I would really prefer 1080p or 4k 
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Tech and gaming videos also mostly land in the 80%+ range according to Migaku, and this is also lines up with my personal experience, these are super comfortable on a word per word level, and it almost feels like I’m just consuming YouTube, it’s still not there yet, and I think that once I venture outside of the few niches that I’m currently binging it will defiantly get harder, but I could see YouTube getting to that “just open it up and click on a video that I want to watch level” by 1800h.
I find myself just binging certain niches, and then rotating what I obsess with on a bi-weekly basis. This made YouTube much more enjoyable because I can learn the core vocabulary that’s important to that niche much more quickly (Migaku has been huge for this too).
Naruto also became watchable, it’s still much harder than I expected, but most episodes are in the 72%+ word comprehension according to Migaku, with some of the filler episodes being really comfortable and above 80%. I’m mining all the ancient and political vocab from this show, and I plan to watch the original as well as Shippuden just for fun
Output: I do a bit of self-talking when Japanese thoughts pop up, I’m not forcing anything and it’s also really rare, so no formal output for now.
My favorite YouTubers if you are looking for stuff to watch:
Plan: just keep doing this until 2000h
