I just wanted to say shortly hello to everyone, but without a bigger update.
On the 16th of July I reached 3500 hours.
A bit before my girlfriend and I fully switched to Japanese as our daily driving language.
She ALWAYS has to speak Japanese with me, I can switch around like I want which resulted in a weird crosstalk-japanese lifestyle. My girlfriend also asked our Japanese conversation teacher to give a Japanese name to her. It is 和奏 (わかな).
Since we switched our lifes to Japanese, immersion became really easy and even reached a higher speed than before. It is not uncommon now to experience 8-10 hours of Japanese per day. It feels like a hyperspeed learning without a need for a bigger plan, discipline or structure.
Fortunately, we slowly liberate from the screens and use Japanese in many smaller and bigger interactions as there are many Japanese people living in Berlin.
We are planning to continue this path at least until we reach 10.000 hours. There is still a lot to learn and a cultural depth we would like to discover. Who knows, maybe we even will become native speakers - let’s take this adventure.
If our projections are correct we will reach our goal at the end of 2028. Here some projected milestones:
Your story is so powerful and inspiring.
Whenever I feel frustrated I read your posts to get the strength to continue on my journey.
One thing I miss is your insights from the beginning of your journey.
I think it would help beginners to get an idea of what to expect. I realize that everyone is different but reading about the feelings, expectations and reality would be helpful.
Good luck on your journey.
yeah, unfortunately in the beginning I posted my updates just on discord.
After a while I realized that they easily get lost there. So I started to add them here.
I will see if I can find them and merge them in a bigger document.
Thank you for your warm words and good luck with your journey!
Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t use any social networks
When I registered for CIJ/NIJ and got an invite to Discord, I had to search the internet what it is all about. I had no idea.
I barely did any reading in the last couple of months. Now it is so enjoyful to just watch something - so I barely feel motivated to grind down some texts.
Hello again. I was re-reading your milestones, I noticed you mentioned “no subtitles.” Did you mean you watched the NIJ videos without subtitles? Right now in my learning, I feel reading subtitles and listening at the same time helps boost my overall comprehension much faster. But then it would be different skill and would depend on the goal.
This is actually a very important point which you picked up there - for me at least.
Did you mean you watched the NIJ videos without subtitles?
Yes, exactly. I didn’t use any type of subtitles. I also avoided Japanese subtitles for a really long time.
I noticed early that many people cannot understand Japanese without subtitles.
So I forced myself to watch without subtitles even by paying the price that I have to calibrate my comprehension level a bit more precisely than others. I invested a lot into audio quality for instance. Subtitles help a lot to guess - especially if you know kanji.
But then it would be different skill and would depend on the goal.
Yes, absolutely - it is a different skill. My goal always was real life Japanese - not anime or reading or so. So for me subtitles are not useful, I am extremely overspecialized into listening skills. I noticed that I needed a really long time until I heard easy words correctly - e.g. kuruma took a very long time.
However, if you are into anime, j-drama or visual novels. Well, why not - add your subtitles. It will help you afterwards a lot when you start reading.
For me it is still very surprising how things are actually written in Japanese. Not just kanji, also everyday words. I also still have the impression my listening is getting better every week. It seems to be a long journey.
How do you watch your content? I recommend headphones with a cable connection, not bluetooth - somehow this is worse on some computers (=> more silent)
Headphones certainly help with distinguishing sounds, but I intentionally do the majority of my listening without headphones. I used headphones almost exclusively for the first 2000 hours of Spanish and found that my comprehension was very poor without them. Since then I stopped using headphones and my Spanish comprehension improved considerably over the next 2000 hours, though it’s impossible to know if the headphones were really the cause or not. Because of that experience, I decided to try learning Japanese without headphones and with some white noise in the room (fans, noise machines). Not too much, just enough that I have to focus more. This whole Japanese thing is an experiment for me, so I’m not too worried about it, I’m just intrigued by the language learning process.
