r/CIJapanese

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?

I just find it easier to get more hours in. I am currently working on nihongo con Taipei. I am on episode 105. It is nice not to have to watch the screen. I can go for a walk. I can do light cleaning.

After I finish this podcast, I am doing Japanese with Shun. If anyone has any other beginner podcasts suggestions, let me know.

https://preview.redd.it/hzb5rb6guuyg1.png?width=1724&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6dad376f24ca6b3ff639e514f5a81ef039c2f95

I wanted to see the number of minutes of video available across the difficulty levels (super beginner, beginner, intermediate, advanced) and difficulty scores (1-100).

The vertical axis represent the number of minutes of video. The horizontal axis represent the difficulty score (1-100) while the stacked bar colors tell you which difficulty level comprise the number of minutes in each bar.

The high peaks at 32, 36, 49, etc. represent long gameplay videos. It seems CIJ tends to release videos in a series all with the same difficulty score and it can take some time for the voting system to move some of the video difficulty scores up or down, spreading the load. The peaks at 99 and 100 are Yuki doing some long literature analysis.

There's about the same number of minutes of Super Beginner (3170m) content as there is Advanced (3709m), while Beginner (8407m) and Intermediate (7946m) make up the bulk.

Personally, I feel there still needs to be a lot more Super Beginner content. I had to rewatch those videos a LOT to get up to Beginner, which I'm still not fully comfortable with.

Sorry the chart is crap, it's the best I could manage in Google Sheets.