Immersion: What did you watch lately?

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)

8 Likes

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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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.

2 Likes

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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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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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:

  • きみ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
  • スーパーのうらでヤニう二人 (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きみぼく (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番目ばんめ可愛かわいおんなともだちになった (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:

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

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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

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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.

1 Like