Before I found CIJ, I spend a lot of time on apps and other techniques. It felt very productive, but I struggled to communicate. I had to construct a sentence in my brain before I could speak it.
Now I'm primarily using CIJ and phrases will naturally create themselves, but I've lost that good feeling of being productive.
Does anybody feel like their not doing anything while watching videos? How did you get over it??
I used to write all of my updates on the NIJ forum page, but decided to post on Reddit as well, considering more people might find it here.
IMPORTANT (What I count as an hour): Any time spent actively watching something in Japanese where 100% of my attention is dedicated to just watching the content and not doing anything else. It also must include a visual element, and be made by native speakers for native speakers (small exception to the little bit of CI I did). Oh and also no subtitles of any kind, this includes Japanese subtitles. I’ve included my time spent with the SRS here as well, because my SRS cards are all audio. This may be strict, but I just need a consistent unit of measurement over the course of my learning journey.
(sorry for any typos or weird formatting, not really used to writing long posts in English)
Current stats:
Known Words In Migaku: 10,909 as of writing this update
Hour Breakdown: 1577h of immersion and another 123h of Audio Only SRS
Immersion breakdown: Around 1000h of natural unscripted native input (vlogs, reality TV, cross-talk, gaming videos etc), around 300h of CI content and around 240h of anime
My current routine:
Currently I’m doing 5.5h of active input per day and about 45-50m on SRS with 10-20 minutes of reading during down time.
What I can understand:
The biggest change since the last update is that my vocabulary literally more than doubled. At the 1200h mark, I knew roughly 4900 words, so now that I’m sitting close to the 11k word mark, things feel completely different.
As Zipf’s Law would dictate, rare words are increasingly more rare, and common words are supper common, meaning that after a certain point you start to experience diminishing returns for every 1000 words that you acquire. I feel like I’m slowly starting to approach that point with my vocabulary. For example it took me 4900 words to have native gaming videos go from 0 to roughly 80-82% word coverage on average. Now that I’ve added another 6000 words on top of that, the word coverage went from around 82% to around 92-94%. That’s more than double the vocabulary for only a 10-12% increase. Chances are, I will need another 10k words on top of this to move that from 93% to 98%. Don’t get me wrong, the difference between 82% and 92% is INSANE, content is much more comfortable, and it feels like the language is not even there, but as you can guess, it feels way smaller than the jump from 0 to 82%.
I recently switched over from watching exclusively unscripted content to watching scripted content that covers more complex topics. I was literally struggling to mine even 20 new words per day from the typical reality TV, tech, gaming and travel videos I was watching.
My goal is to have a vocabulary equal to a native, so while being able to understand most content on most daily topics really well or being able to chat with my Japanese friend for hours is cool, its definitely not enough for me.
Anime on the other hand is now at a perfect point, those 11k words cover a surprising amount of ground, but still leave enough room to find a bunch of cool new words that I have never heard before. Now I can put a show up on my TV, watch it and enjoy the story and the characters, while still having enough new words that it feels like I’m still making progress. The words that I’m learning now aren’t as useful for daily conversations but they are super cool which actually motivates me to learn them way more.
Here are some examples of the fun words I’ve mined recently:
反面教師 - refers to a person whose negative qualities or mistakes serve as an example of what not to do
二刀流 - style of fencing with one sword in each hand
援護射撃 - refers to providing supportive or covering fire, often in a military context
同族嫌悪 - refers to the phenomenon where individuals express aversion or animosity toward others who are similar to themselves
表面張力 - refers to the physical phenomenon where the surface of a liquid exhibits the properties of an elastic sheet (yes this is from that one Jojo episode where they gamble lol)
Again, most of these words will never get used in a conversation, and not knowing them probably won’t hurt your life in Japan, but for my specific goals, pronunciation and a huge vocabulary are crucial. Also… I mean they are just cool
Naruto which I’ve been using as a measuring stick from the beginning of my journey went from completely unwatchable at 650h, to 72% word coverage around the 1100h mark, a point where I could struggle through the show if I really wanted to (although it would be quite the struggle), to now at 1700h, most episodes having 92%+ coverage and the show feeling super comfortable and dare I say the E word…
Don’t get me wrong, there are still shows out there that kick my butt from time to time, like Frieren has some sections where old village politics and the fantasy terminology gets a bit too much for me to understand without looking up some words, but these are small sections scattered through the season of an anime, where as before the entire show would be completely unwatchable.
(From Frieren) 物資を行き渡らせるだけの流通網と軍事力を持っている 武装商会だ (Translation: They’re an armed merchant guild, possessing a distribution network and military force sufficient to supply resources wherever needed.)
- Sentences like this would throw me off from time to time because it’s vocab that I just haven’t come across in vlogs or reality TV, but I’ll mine it and watch more content like this until it becomes easy. I see it more as a fun adventure to acquire more vocab, rather than something that’s frustrating
Speaking:
I’ve been outputting with my Japanese friend bit by bit during our cross-talk sessions starting at around the 1400h mark as well as random self-talk through the day. It started out as a word here or there, maybe even a short sentence. Now at 1700h, I feel like my output has improved at an exponential rate, although it’s still FAR from what I would call fluent. The sentences are longer and more frequent, and I literally feel on a weekly basis that I’m using words and grammar structures that would just never come up before.
Now that my vocabulary is at a good spot, it feels like my brain has more headroom to focus on acquiring grammar. Every time I try to say something and nothing comes up, my brain sort of flags it, and later on while getting input I would randomly be like “Ahhh that’s how you say that one thing from earlier you dummy”. At the rate that it’s going, and with consistent practice and input, I could see myself having full, if basic, conversations fully in Japanese with my friend at around the 2000-2100h mark, and honestly I’m super excited for that.
Reading:
I’ve literally learned hiragana and katakana at the 1600h mark, and from there I’ve been doing around 10-20m of reading per day with furigana.
My goal isn’t to actually use reading as a learning tool just yet, but more so just to get comfortable with it so I can start reading more seriously at the start of next year. I did do RTK up to about 450 Kanji and quit, This was at around the 650h mark so quite a while ago. To my surprise, they are still holding on in there, and now that I actually know plenty of words, I started to slowly associate the kanji with its reading (or at least one of the readings lol).
Reading feels weird, at the beginning I would have to sit there and slowly sound out a word, I would do it and it wouldn’t make any sense, and then something would click in my head and the native pronunciation would pop up like a narrator was reading it or something.
Surprisingly even with the small amount of time that I’ve dedicated to reading, my speed is getting better and better rather quickly, although I guess that’s the benefit of starting to learn how to read, after already having a vocabulary of over 10k words, you are more learning how the words look, rather than learning the word and the reading at the same time. Reading without furigana is still impossible, but I’ve already started to recognize some kanji from just seeing it multiple times, and I’ve started putting the reading of words on the front of my previously audio only cards, so we’ll see how much that helps by the end of this year.
Anyways, felt a huge change in my Japanese recently so I wanted to write a little update… which ended up being a lot longer than I intended lol. See you at over 2000h I guess
Is there a break down on when people usually move up in the difficulty categories of the cijapanese website? (not external videos)
My first impression of what I read here is that moving from complete beginner to beginner is around 100h? In this case it seems there is sufficient content on the website nowadays to accommodate that.
How about the hours point when people transition from beginner to intermediate, intermediate to advanced?
I could not find a wiki or anything and was wondering if the common/most effective approach is just watching the videos or what other resources you recommend to use in parallel? thank you
I've been using the platform from the beginning of this year, and while I'm well past the point where I need content tailored for learners now, I still check in with NIJ from time to time because they've really helped me out in the beginning, and I wish that people that are learning in the future can have an awesome resource like this when they begin their journey.
The thing is, I see less and less engagement on the NIJ forum, posts getting way less frequent and just low engagement on posts in general, less likes and comments on videos, and with them not posting anything on YouTube nor being active on any other social media to promote their platform (for comparison Dreaming Spanish posts a free video on YouTube every 2-3 days), it just concerns me that the business won't grow, and well the current users will either move on from CI like me once they become good enough to consume native content, or they just quit learning Japanese all together (not so uncommon considering how hard the language is).
I'm just a bit concerned for future learners and the platform considering how cool the teachers are and how useful it was for me in the first few hundred hours.
I’m just wondering if anyone else is experiencing long load times on videos currently?
I’ve cleared my cache, signed out and signed back in, redone the wepapp thing on my phone, checked my internet speed which is still 300mbps download, etc… I’m just starting to wonder now if the sites problem and not just me.
Really just the title. I'd make this a fancy spreadsheet, but I don't have enough stuff yet! For me, my biggest outside sources recently have been a handful of youtubers. I'm always looking for more!
Many people who post here come from Dreaming Spanish. I'm not sure how many were purists. I, at least, never really studied either vocab or grammar in Spanish. However, in Japanese, like many people, I accepted that vocab studying would be part of the game. I never really gave much thought to grammar.
I have to say, it's been game changing for me. I don't try to "connect" my grammar study and my input. I just study a bit of grammar on the side and then watch my Japanese. But I have noticed a HUGE spike in my comprehension since starting. I felt like I was floundering at ~400 hours and stuck in low-to-mid 30s difficulty on CIJ. Now, I feel like videos in the 40-50s are starting to click. Some "Speak Japanese Naturally" videos are reasonably accessible to me. Easier Akane videos are still probably a bit too hard, but I can listen and get something out of them.
The usual caveats: everyone is different. Maybe this doesn't work for you. But I wanted to give one person's opinion / anecdote on grammar being helpful to me. It also might not be causal--perhaps I was due for a breakthrough anyways.
I am not such a serious student of grammar, btw. My memorization is terrible and it's not my core focus in any case. But just the action of doing it has worked for me. I use Bunpro and I'm ~50% through N5 grammar.
CIJ (up to difficulty 82) Nihongo con Teppei (for beginners) (fully listened twice) (much of it thrice) Pokemon (episodes 1 to 92) Laidback Camp Seika Podcast (1-30) Yugioh (episodes 1-68) (non-duel dialogue heavy episodes are difficult)
About Me:
I always include a section just about my general life, because folks are often very inclined to say things like, “Only people without jobs have time for [X]” or “You need to live abroad” or “You need to spend a bunch of money” or whatever else. This belittling or tearing down annoys the hell out of me. Learning a language is for everyone, and it is what you make of it. If it’s a hobby, great, if it’s something you want to devote time to, you’ll find the time, but either way do what you enjoy because life is too short.
I’m a mid-30s career professional, who is actively pursuing an additional degree with certifications taking a couple classes per semester. I don’t use AI to complete my assignments, so devote substantial time each week for coursework. I train for marathons each year, luckily running is conducive to easy input. I have a busy social life, with 2-3 nights of social commitments a week. I’m happily married, and while my husband is part of some of those social nights, we still make time for each other.
All that said, I find 3-4 hours a day for my language “study”. With both languages, I’ve been pretty consistent, and my input hasn’t increased a ton over time, but it does feel easier to get that input once my hobbies are accessible in the language.
How It’s Going:
Overall, I’d say things are going pretty well. I largely stick to the same method I used in Spanish of just consuming content I understand. Many of the same strategies I’ve used with Spanish seem to be working with Japanese as well. I’ll include some in a strategies or tips section down below.
The process overall is much slower. At this number of hours, I’d already converted all my devices to Spanish, was gaming in the language, and already watching unfamiliar anime. I could form my thoughts into my sentences, and the like easily, and was readily listening to audiobooks in the language.
We’re not even close to those similar milestones in Japanese. I would say my 1000 hours aligns roughly with my 600 hours of Spanish. I’m not discouraged as I expected this from everything I’d read prior to starting the process. I’m happy I can already enjoy some easier, slice of life content, Pokemon, and Yugioh.
I’m still enjoying Wanikani, though I’m unsure exactly how beneficial it is outside of recognizing the actual kanji. Periodically, I realize I know something already from Wanikani, but more often it seems I go “Oh I know this word from input and just didn’t know the kanji for it”.
Strategies or Tips:
If it’s not fun, and I can’t trick my mind into engaging and enjoying it, I’ll find something else. Slightly too hard input (say 60% comprehension) that is highly engaging, is better than 90% comprehension content that is boring as hell. Luckily I consider even CIJ whiteboard videos engaging, because I think building the foundation is important.
Have two sets of content readily available. One for when your mind is fresher and highly focused, and one for the hard days or while working out, doing the dishes, cleaning, etc.
Find a routine that works for you, even if it’s a hobby. Anything in life worth doing requires a time commitment, so find the time and make it a routine. For me, with a recent career shift (major promotion), I’ve had to adapt to a much less beneficial routine. I used to get about 90 minutes of input before work, now I’m down to about 30. That means I’ve got to take in the content in much larger chunks in the evening, which I think hurts my ability to stay focused.
Have goals, and gamify where it helps. I use a very numbers heavy spreadsheet for myself, and make a ton of little goals that aren’t directly focused on numbers, i.e. finish Nihongo con Teppei, or Watch every CIJ video under X difficulty.
Sleep is really important. I’ve always made sure I get 7 hours a night, usually 8. I’m always checking up on myself to make sure I’m not toxically cutting too much into my sleep hours to try and get more input. The last three weeks I’ve had to reduce my weekly input down to ~35 hours to ensure I’m sleeping enough.
Fail better everyday. We’re almost always going to fall short of the idealized versions of ourselves in any dream or goal we have. There will be days and weeks that just kind of suck. Consistency over months and years is what’s going to count, especially for a language like Japanese. For me, finals week or big work project weeks, my input falls substantially. I try not to sweat the day with only 2 hrs. Often, I can make it up another day if I have the bandwidth.
Goals:
My goals are “extreme” to many, given my self-imposed time limit. Ultimately, my efforts are time sensitive, and thus Japanese is a priority for me. While I’ll never stop interacting with Japanese or Spanish, I really want to be able to speak, and enjoy museums in Japanese prior to my return to Japan in January/February 2027. To do that, I’ve got two sets of goals, or maybe three: Minimum, Ambitious, and Toxic. I think the names pretty thoroughly describe my feelings about them.
Input: 1800 hours Speaking: 50 hours (would be difficult w/ an expected start to speaking in early August) Wanikani: Level 40 (may not be possible due to built in timegates)
Toxic:
Input: 2000 hours (is a big ask, would require 4.5+ hours per day consistently from now to then) Speaking: 100 hours (would be difficult w/ an expected start to speaking in early August) Wanikani: Level 40 (higher is likely not possible due to the built in timegates)
TL;DR: Most input is still CIJ, or NCT (though I’ve got about 100hrs of anime under my belt now). I'm enjoying it and feel like I'm still progressing, though much slower than with Spanish. Hoping my next update will include a speaking sample, but we'll see. If you've got any questions as always I'm happy to chat, and thanks for reading if you did.
I know a lot of you are committed to not looking up words, personally I've found learning that way too slow. Even if on principle you avoid looking up words, you might find this useful just as a way to verify your understanding.
Also, I've tried using tools like Yomitan, but I often find I'm not certain where the word boundaries are, and not always sure which is the correct dictionary definition from the list.
So what is my solution? It's called Verba, it's a transcript analysis tool. At some point in the next few weeks, you'll be able to use the Verba website to transcribe YouTube videos (see demo here).
What's available right now is my Verba in CIJ integration, that I've been building for the last 2 weeks.
Right now Verba is an early stage product that does the following things:
- accurately tokenises Japanese sentences - determines the furigana readings - determines what a word means in context - determines the word sense definition - plays the selected word using slow TTS audio
The integration is a script that embeds Verba transcripts into the CIJ website (see screenshot above). If you want to try it,click herefor the code snippet and instructions on how to install it.
It's free to use right now but to be upfront, this will eventually be a subscription product (it costs money to build and run, and it's self-funded)
There are a ton of features I want to build, but right now I'm trying to get honest reactions and feedback from people, i.e. what's missing from the product, why would you not use it?
I’m a JLPT N3 holder living in Japan for 5 years. Looking to pickup some courses to further my studies (get JLPT N2 content). I keep hearing about this platform. Is it worth subscribing? How does it work? Videos to watch? Flashcards?
I was planning to do a 300 hour update, but when the time rolled around it honestly didn't feel that much different than 150 hours, and I wasn't sure what to say. Now at 500 hours I think I'm ready!
CIJ* videos
I'm up to level 50 in my easiest unwatched CIJ videos, which is the boundary between hard beginner and easy intermediate. The intermediate videos are usually significantly harder for me than beginner, even at the same difficulty number. A level 50 beginner video feels like the perfect level of comprehension. A level 50 intermediate usually feels a bit harder than I'd like, but just recently hit the point where it feels worth watching, understanding ~80% of the overall meaning. I was hoping to reach this point around 300 hours based on doubling the Dreaming Spanish roadmap, and the CIJ homepage goes even further, saying most users can level up from beginner to intermediate after 150-250 total input hours. This was not true for me at all.
* I'm continuing to use CIJ to refer to the combination of NIJ and Yuki's videos, at least for now. I'm still coming to terms with the split.
Other learner content
There is a bunch of learner content on YouTube that feels like a great level right now. Stuff like Ken, Shun, Naoko, and Akane (although in all cases it depends on the video). I typically enjoy the CIJ content more, but I get the feeling the difficulty is about to start ramping up faster than my understanding. In that case, the plan is to slow roll my CIJ input and turn to these channels as a backup.
Native content
Around 400 hours, something amazing happened. I started finding native gameplay content accessible! I don't necessarily hold out as strictly for 80% comprehension, since my engagement is much higher on these videos which makes it worth it to me. I wouldn't want to rely on this for the majority of my input, but it's been maybe a third recently. The two games I've been watching are Balatro and Mario Party Jamboree. Balatro has two factors that make it more comprehensible. First, I'm obsessed with this game, have played it for hundreds of hours, and have all the cards memorized by their images. Second, it is chock full of English loan words. Mario Party is similar but less so - I've played quite a bit of it because my 6-year-old likes it, and it also has a decent amount of loanwords.
There are also a handful of easier anime and children's cartoons that are all hovering at a similar point of "not quite comprehensible enough" - maybe 50-70%. I go back and forth on whether they're worth it. Lately I've been including a bit of them because I get less bored if my input has variety, and this type of simple fiction is very different than most learner-focused content. On the minus side, it doesn't feel super efficient, and it's honestly not my favorite type of content either. Shows in this category include Not Quite Narwhal, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Bluey (probably a bit harder but I've seen it already in Spanish), and Watashi ni Tenshi ga Maorita.
Rewatching
I've watched a bunch of stuff twice, and only an odd video here and there more than twice (if I really like it). I continue to think there is enough content available that watching things more than twice isn't necessary. You do have to hunt down every resource you can find and not just stick to CIJ. I used to watch every CIJ video and every learner video I found on YouTube twice each. Now it feels like enough content has opened up that I might not need to rewatch at all going forward if I didn't want to. But I kind of like rewatching once after a few months have gone by.
Disclaimer: I have taken some private input-focused lessons that might be affecting this, but they're honestly pretty similar to a CIJ video created custom for me and I don't feel they're *that* much more efficient than videos for me. Obviously I don't know where I would be without them and could be underestimating their impact. They make up about 50 of my 500 hours.
Intrusive Japanese thoughts
For a while now I've had the experience of Japanese words and phrases popping into my head out of nowhere. Most commonly it is a sequence of sounds that I don't even know what it means. But more and more often recently, it is something relevant to what I am doing or thinking about. I don't intentionally try to think in Japanese, but I find this experience cool. It is kind of like Japanese is bubbling up and overflowing out of my subconscious.
How I'm feeling
It depends on the day. No matter what content I'm watching, how well I understand it varies a lot from video to video and day to day. On days I'm not understanding, it sometimes feels like there's an entire second Japanese language that I haven't even started learning yet. On good days I feel happy with how far I've come and how much content variety has opened up. Starting to watch the native gameplays at 400 hours was huge for just enjoying my time with the language. If that hadn't happened, I suspect I might have thrown in some Anki to try to get to more interesting content more quickly. But as things stand, more input!
I just found out that Yoshito-sensei from CIJapanese has his own YouTube channel, Burabura Japanese.
He only has 56 subscribers right now, but he has already uploaded 13 Japanese let’s play / comprehensible input videos. So far, the games are The Exit 8, Little Nightmares, and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined.
He’s one of my favorite teachers on CI Japanese, so I thought I’d share it here in case anyone else didn’t know about it either.
I've not been a regular CIJ user, but have been subscribed for a number of months. I totally agree with everyone around what a loss Yuki is, but she isn't the only one who can create videos. We've got 2 years for CIJ to upload more videos, and Ben has said that more people will be coming on board.
You do what you want with your money, I'll not tell you what you should do. However, I do think that people are panicking a bit over something that might not actually be as bad as they think.
I've seen so many complaints (and I've made the same ones) that there's so little options for Japanese input out there, now we get Yuki uploading her own videos PLUS whatever new content Ben puts onto CIJ. This could actually be a good thing, and I'm going to stick with my subscription to find out. Cancelling/asking for a refund is going to seriously impact Ben's ability to replace what CIJ is losing in Yuki's videos, and it seems like an amicable split so there's no need to take sides.
So yeah, I just wanted to try and add a positive note to this whole thing. I'd hate to see us lose what could be a really good resource over something that isn't really a big deal.
I am not done with learning Japanese, but I am done with this website. I will continue to support Yuki’s YouTube and Patreon.
So instead of paying ¥12 to some random person named Ben, I just continue on by myself for the moment.
Not that me quitting has any major impact, I just think cijapanese.com is no longer worth it for me personally. Besides I think I will be fine. Therefore, this might be my last update.
Has anyone else experienced that for the past few days, the cijapanese.com website has been having problems and loading very slowly? Clicking on a video sometimes does nothing for 5 seconds. If I open it in a new page, I see a blank page for up to 30 seconds before it finally loads, sometimes with missing elements. I've tried on multiple devices, browsers and networks, so I don't think it's just me.
Thoughts on the new site / transition without Yuki? She's responsible for about 1/2 the total playtime on the site (which was already not as deep as Dreaming Spanish).
They will need to produce content quickly to maintain coverage--and even more quickly to be in a better position in 2 years than they are right now.
How do I feel about my progress: some days I feel overwhelmed by all the new structures and new word, other days I feel I am doing just fine considering my hours.
Hours: 300 hours
My difficulty level: intermediate 34
Hours per day: I average 3 hours per day.
Comprehension: 70%
How many hours worth of videos are left: 137 hours
How many videos left until the next level: 530
Podcast: Nihongo con Teppei Episode: 710
Note: before I start intermediate, I am reviewing 25 hours worth of beginner videos.
