Immersion: What did you watch lately?

Japanese
#1

Since people often ask what to immerse with, and lately I’m really immersing a lot, I thought to start a “what did you watch today” thread. In order to keep it simple and to make things easy to find, I decided to restrict this to “watch” things, hence Mangas / Books being excluded. But someone else can gladly make a thread about reading immersion, too, I suppose. The reason I’d like to exclude reading is that often Mangas have a different difficulty level than Anime of the same work.

The rules:

  1. Post the title and a link to somewhere that doesn’t require a registration to see the details (for example myanimelist for anime, tmdb for movies / series, etc)
  2. Only material that is aimed at native speakers, do not post learning material, CIJ, etc
    2.1 YouTube videos are allowed if they’re not “Learn Japanese”-style channels but simply Japanese YouTubers covering their niche
  3. Describe your current Japanese knowledge in a way that others can relate to it. For example “I passed N5” or “N3 grammar done on Bunpro and 3000 vocab on Anki” or whatever, but keep it short. This way people can relate whether the actual point in time of your Japanese progress makes it a suitable pick to attempt for them.
  4. A short assessment on how easy / how hard it was to understand the content.
  5. I imagine that it’s better to not talk about where to watch things. Pretty much everyone who doesn’t live in Japan has to break some sort of terms of services somewhere to watch most Japanese stuff, and either VPN a service that doesn’t allow VPNs, or sail the seas, or similar. So we don’t get Bunpro into trouble.

For example:

Yesterday I watched
ひらやすみ

It’s a cute, comfy slice of life series. I especially love the random narrator’s comments. There’s also a fairly good amount of casual humor.

Japanese level and difficulty: I’m almost done with N3 material on Bunpro (vocab + grammar) and this was an absolute breeze to the point that I binged all 20 episodes in a row (ca. 5 hours)

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#2

I didn’t know there was an Hirayasumi drama ! I liked the few manga volumes I read so definitely gonna give this a try :eyes:

On my end, I’m mostly watching various Digimon series, it’s been my main anime immersion source for close to a year. It was a real struggle at first but I’m now at a point where I can watch multiple episodes in a row while indoor-biking or something, which makes progress go way faster.

Japanese level : passed N4 last december, 90% done with Bunpro’s N3 grammar and 70% of most-common N3 vocab
Regarding difficulty :

  • the easiest season is probably Adventure 02, given that the kids spend a lot of their time in irl settings, meaning that there is a lot of slice-of-life vocabulary going around. As long as you’ve got the core “Digimon vocabulary” down it’s smooth sailing
  • The og Adventure is harder, as there is a lots of setting changes with associated vocab each time. If you didn’t learn your factory words list beforehand you can end-up pretty lost when they spend 25 minutes running around gears and what-not
  • Tamers is also slice-of-lify for the first half, however there are a lot more discussions around morality and more advanced concepts, and a group doing computer science on the side throwing in a lot of technical jargon. So the hardest of the three if you’re really trying to understand everything going on, but also probably the most interesting as an adult
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#3

I am also at an N4 level and was watching digimon aventure 1 :grin:

I had previously watched it as a kid, and felt it was a good level. Even if I didn’t understand everything, it was easy to get back on track through cotnext. Unfortunately I felt like the series got more boring towards the end and I haven’t finished it yet. I think that re-watching things you watched as a kid may be a good approach (provided they hold up well).

I also recently watched the first season of the Ranma 1/2 remake. A good chunk of the content is above my level and there are jokes non-stop. But nevertheless I really enjoyed it and, again, was able to follow most of the plot through context.

I think that at this level I am looking for things that can keep me engaged, but with a simple plot since I will inevitably miss information.

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#4

today I watched the 見える子ちゃん live-action

difficulty and level: (almost done with N3 material) the manga and the anime are rated fairly easy on learnnatively so I thought the live action would be on a similar level, but I was a little overwhelmed during key-moments explaining the plot and the background of the ghosts, I have 0 “supernatural” vocabulary and while I understand “ghost”, “haunted” etc, everything else was hard to parse. I had to stop a few times and look words up because I couldn’t fill in the blanks. Main reason I watched it is because Nanoka Hara is really cute

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#5

Watching old childhood favourites is all I’ve been doing so far aha. But yeah, I was really into the Vandemon arc and the Dark Masters one felt a bit unbalanced in comparison. There are still good episodes but others feel pretty rushed. From what I remember of Tamers it’s better at maintaining quality all the way, but I’m only 10ish episodes in so we’ll see ! (also early Guilmon is the cutest thing ever)

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#6

Heyo! I’m currently preparing the N2 for December this year so I’d say that’s about where my level is. At the moment I’m reading:

  • 君きみの膵臓すいぞうをたべたい (novel): really interesting read, I’m able to get by only needing a dictionary from time to time, but the literary style does require a fair bit of concentration from me. It’s above the N2 exam reading material I’m studying so I’d say it’s around a N1-2 level. It’s still a really enjoyable read so far (about halfway through) so I’ll probably watch the movie once I’m done
  • スーパーの裏うらでヤニ吸すう二人 (manga): pretty light-hearted slice of life, probably around N3-ish, not much going on in terms of specialized vocabulary and the conversation style is pretty casual

I’m also watching 正反対せいはんたいな君きみと僕ぼく (anime) which is supposedly slice-of-life but I’m struggling a bit more to catch everything than I originally expected. So this might be N2-ish level (I’m generally better at reading than listening)

Right before that I was watching クラスで2番目ばんめに可愛かわいい女おんなの子こと友ともだちになった (anime), also quite nice and surprisingly easy to follow so this might be listenable at a good N3 level?

[edit] Added furigana, just in case people want to look up those works :slight_smile:

#7

Main reason I watched it is because Nanoka Hara is really cute

Lol, me watching everything with Mio Imada in for the same reason

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#8

it may not be the purest motivation but it tends to be the strongest :pensive:

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#9

Today I started watching 来世ではちゃんとします

I’m four episodes in and it appears to be mostly about various people’s to varying degree functional or dysfunctional love lives. So far it’s (barely N3) relatively easy to understand and the ambiguity (of course there’s words I don’t understand) is easy enough to tolerate without lookups in order to understand the plot. It also has multiple seasons and a ton of episodes, so it’ll probably take a moment to finish.

A plus: Fujiko Kojima is kinda cute, too

2 Likes
#10

I watched Summer Wars three times again:

· One time without subs
· One time with subs
· And another time without subs again

K-on! with the same strategy. I’m on episode 4. Each episode will take about an hour with this method.

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#11

Wife is on a business trip and because she specifically picked what we watched last time, I felt like it would be unfair to continue watching without her. Because I was very bored yesterday though, I started

オレは死んじまったゼ！

Estimation after 4 episodes:

I really recommend this one. Humor is often hard to understand for me but here there’s a lot of jokes and puns that I’m understanding without really thinking about it. So if you’re on a similar level, give it a try!

It’s not horror or something, despite the ghost-theme, it’s just comedy

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#12

:wave: My hubby and I are about 80% through N5, so pretty early on our Japanese journey. We wanted to immersion into ‘everyday’ language but with easy storylines… so we fell deep, deep down the Japanese reality TV rabbit hole (no judgement please!)

They are great to get a feel for the language, understand a little bit and simple enough concepts so that even a beginner to understand what’s happening. And it gives insight into social interactions in Japanese society.

Our favourites

Others

  • [=ラヴ上等 (Badly in Love) - Netflix production
  • Final Draft - Japanese-produced physical survival series
  • オフライン ラブ (Offline Love)- Netflix Production
  • Love transit Japan

And yes, the concepts of some of them range from ‘interesting’ to ‘questionable’… but hey, it’s for learning purposes. And we do watch anime like Demon Slayer and such too. Happy watching :slight_smile:

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#13

I’m also just about finished with N3. Recently I’ve been watching ひとりぼっちの○○生活 after just reading the manga. It really helps that the vast majority of the dialogue is identical. The dialogue is clear with a reasonable pace, but there are a lot of subtle jokes, meaning it might be harder to catch if you haven’t read the manga.
I’ve also been watching 日常 which feels like a similar difficulty, but without having read it before and with how chaotic it gets, I miss some of the jokes. I’m watching episodes first without subtitles, then again with Japanese subtitles.
I also watched the Anime film 人生 (2025) a little while ago. The dialogue was surprisingly easy to follow, well articulated, and at a slow pace. Very strange movie.

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#14

(N3ish)

I watched 海辺のエトランゼ last weekend. Not a new story for me as I had already read the manga in French a few years ago, but a pretty easy story to follow with everyday vocabulary. The animation is as beautiful as the manga panels were and it’s only 1 hour long, which is perfect as I still find concentrating on listening for long periods of time exhausting (should have seen me that one time I spent the entire day socializing with my friend’s parents where our sole common language was Japanese…)

Also, it’s more of a listen than a watch but I can’t not recommend the absolute masterpiece that is the Death Note musical. It’s clearly above my current level, but having been obsessed with the English version for years means that I know what’s going on and can parse parts of it. I hope I get good enough to attend musicals in Japanese someday ( :sparkles: Takarazuka, wait for me :sparkles:)

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#15

I managed to get my hands on a copy of 炎上, which in itself was hard enough

Subtitles don’t exist - there’s no Japanese subtitles available and the only set of English subtitles in existence are AI generated and I’m not interested in watching it with English subtitles to begin with. Besides I have zero faith in ChatGPT correctly interpreting トー横キッズ slang. And as it turns out I can barely do it myself.

Background first: this movie is about runaway kids who flee from their country-side families and end up in Tokyo. This is a relatively big phenomenon, but it isn’t really talked about much (because that’s the Japanese way of doing things). The movie is based on research and on interviews with such runaway kids.

OK so here comes the breakdown of the adventure…

Long story short: this movie humbled the shit out of me and in some parts felt similar to my first ever attempts at immersion.

I had major comprehension holes in the spoken dialogue. The visual story-telling sort of carries it so I wasn’t really forced to rewind to get what’s going on, but I did miss A LOT of details.

I have watched a handful of other movies before that dealt with people in socially difficult situations ending up in the less pleasant slices of Tokyo. For instance, I watched:

  • 明日、私は誰かのカノジョ
  • 岬の兄妹
  • 闇金ウシジマくん
  • … and many more

So naturally, having survived those, I thought despite not having subtitles, I’ll probably “somehow manage”. I didn’t expect full comprehension at all but the mixture of heavy slang, speech quirks, implications and emotionally loaded speech made this probably by far the most difficult movie I’ve ever watched raw.

I will say that the movies mentioned above did actually teach me a lot of words that aren’t inside the JLPT decks and a lot of those words did also show up in this movie and were plot-relevant.

At some point I was basically doing forensic Japanese like “OK I understood six words, one girl is crying, one girl is angry, it’s somehow related to money. Excellent, 50% comprehension”

Nontheless it’s a work of art.

I’ll probably rewatch it in a year and see if I understand more.

Bonus points: 森七菜 is really cute! Especially with the Jirai Kei makeup

#16

I am currently working on N1

I am usually not an active anime watcher since I like slice of life, but this season I really love the 2 below (also 僕はタバコを吸わない):

スーパーの裏でヤニ吸うふたり
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37614297/

ヤニねこ
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt39551330/

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#17

https://www.novelupdates.com/series/futsutsuka-na-akujo-de-wa-gozaimasu-ga-suuguu-chouso-torikae-den/

Just finished book 1 and I’m starting on book 2. Easily the hardest book I’ve read so far. I’ve been studying for 3 years and immersing for about 1. I don’t plan to take any exams so I don’t really have a basis for my level but my estimated vocab is around 7k and this will be my 9th light novel.

The series uses a lot of keigo and imperial court lingo as well as many words in the 40k+ frequency range fairly regularly. The writing style is expressive and often uses metaphors and yojijukugo. It is a noticeable step up in difficulty from my last series 沈黙の魔女. But the story is very interesting and not at all straightforward. I was originally drawn to it by the anime which is currently airing.

I’ve really fallen in love with this series because I adore unique premise and skillful characterization, ancient imperial courts and the complex web of politics combined with the unique circumstances surrounding the body swap of the main characters make this incredibly entertaining and intriguing to me.

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