My CI Japanese Experiment

初めまして、sese!

Nice to meet you I joined CI Japanese recently myself, and have studied here for around 45 hours now - its been so much fun so far and I hope you enjoy it too!

It’s great cool to hear about your success Spanish CI, congrats on your progress It’s inspiring to hear you’ve made it on to intermediate videos there after 150 hours, that’s awesome Progress with Japanese might be a bit slower but I think it’ll be totally worth it for your trip to Tokyo. I hope you’re able to hit your goal before you travel next year, がんばってね！

thank you!

I first tried studying Japanese in my spare time when I was at university, but I found the workload with my other classes a bit overwhelming and I stopped At that time I was mostly just using textbooks, the main one I remember reading was Japanese for Busy People. It was hard work. How about you? Have you tried any other methods of learning Japanese?

I have definitely being finding CI a lot more enjoyable, it feels more like a hobby than studying I’m looking forward to one day getting past the beginner phase, but I’m gonna focus on enjoying the journey!

Hi sese,

I started doing Spanish CI one year ago, and I am at 650 hours right now. It has been amazing for my listening comprehension. I live in an area with a significant minority population who speaks Central American Spanish and I can understand most of the everyday conversations that happen around me. At this stage, however, I still struggle to speak coherently. Still, I am sure I will improve with practice and more time.

I am only able to listen to a little Japanese CI right now because of my greater need to learn Spanish. When I was in my early twenties, I lived in Japan for a year and did “acquire” some of the language, but now I am in my forties and I have not used Japanese in so long that I find many of the intermediate videos only partly comprehensible. But I want to encourage you because Japanese is really an interesting and fun language to learn, and I think you will do amazingly well having a few hundred hours of CI if you combine that with some basic knowledge of sentence structure. And I think we learn a lot about manners and culture on this channel. I wish I’d had such a rich and wonderful resource when I was living in Japan. Have an incredible time on your trip!

Thanks, sese. You are right. Speaking in Spanish feels very awkward right now. I am more comfortable speaking in Japanese, even if I’m not very high level, but that is because I have a lot more speaking and conversational practice. When I was in Japan, I worked in a setting where I heard Japanese spoken most of the day, but native-level conversations could be hard to follow. I don’t know what my true CI level is, but I consider it to be a few hundred hours. (I’ve only tracked 50 on this site.) My indirect exposure to overheard Japanese would be 2000+ hours though.

Thanks for sharing your experience growing up bilingual. You speak many languages already, so I am sure you will do well with Japanese!

Hey sese!

Great to hear about your experience with dreaming Spanish. Currently trying it out now actually. CIJ was such a big part of how I’m learning Japanese that I want to give Spanish a go as well. I’m only at about 20 hours but the complete beginning stuff is starting to be pretty understandable depending on who the teacher is haha.

Trying to do a full Dreaming Spanish CI approach and see what happens for Spanish. I’m doing language transfer too just because it’s free I’m on lesson 62 right now.

Do you feel like just by watching you sufficiently learned words and grammar?

Dreaming Spanish I assume? Through DS my spanish is getting to a point where I can get input from basically anything - video games, carroons, books, etc. so It’s becoming more practical for me to start japanese. We’ll have to rewatch a ton of videos or actually get out of the house and meet some japanese people though… there aren’t too many japanese CI videos out there yet

What made you want to learn japanese? It’s very difficult to learn compared to spanish in terms of required time and abundance for resources. For me, I pretty much just really like a lot of japanese animation and video games and need a new language to learn.

Hi Naomi, I couldn’t agree more with the difficulty comparison between Spanish and Japanese. I have been learning Spanish for the past 5 years, and my level is probably as high as it needs to be living in a non-spanish speaking country (Australia). I maintain it through CI now. I recently started both Japanese and French following my ‘success’ learning Spanish. With both English (native) and Spanish (high intermediate)… French kind of feels like ‘easy mode’ compared to Japanese. I feel like I can consume french CI without any other form of learning. With Japanese however I feel like I ‘might’ understand the general message watching the easiest videos… but I could also be incorrect.

I chose Japanese as Japan is such a different and amazing culture that my family want to visit multiple times, and it is within an 8hr travel window of where I live (and therefore we don’t lose a day in transit each way).