Recommendations for early immersion sources?

Japanese
#3

Thank you, I appreciate the recommendations and I will look into them today. Especially the manga actually looks fun!

One thing though:

Pretty much every immersion-related guide / video / tutorial I’ve seen, discouraged me from considering this to be immersion. I do this a lot, as I still mainly consume anime with subtitles in English (or in my native language in the rare cases they’re available) as my source of entertainment. I do try to focus on what they’re actually saying. But I was told that for the purpose of immersion, watching with subtitles in a known language is not very useful. I’m actually happy you’re saying this because without knowing it any better, I felt like those little wins where I understood half a sentence in Japanese while reading the subtitles felt pretty good and they’re accumulating, slowly. But it’s surprising, because the average youtube-language-learner tells me not to. Not saying they have authority, but this appears to be an input that goes against the usual recommendations.

That said, I think you’re right. It feels useful.

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#4

When I first started immersion I remember it was painful. I started with the OG pokemon anime and for the first maybe 15-20 episodes it was very difficult for me to actually get through a whole episode. But then around episode 20 something just clicked and it became much easier. I still barely understood anything, but it wasn’t agony. Now I’m 500 episodes in and can easily understand everything. It became a nightly habit, and now NOTHING puts me to sleep like an episode of pokemon lol

My recommendation is don’t pause the anime and make sure you know every single word. Maybe every now and again pause it if you hear a word you’re curious about or if it keeps popping up, but pausing at every single word sounds exhausting and not sustainable. In general you need to prioritize studying in a way thats sustainable for you in the long term. If the way someone studies is super intense and tedious, 9 times out of 10 people will burn out and give up.

My advice: view immersion as something completely separate from studying. Make it fun, don’t stress about it, and don’t count it as study time.

8 Likes
#5

People who discourage you from using subtitles in your own language usually focus more on efficiency, cause with subtitles you only get small wins. But it’s highly motivating and fun in my opinion :slight_smile: Some folks focus on efficiency and speed, but others focus on fun :slight_smile:

My opinion: the more you enjoy the process, the longer your motivation stays high. And in the beginnging, with just a few words and grammar, you wouldn’t understand anything while watching anime, that sucks the fun out pretty quickly.

For what it’s worth, I had enough success this way so far. I can already read easy manga without lookups now and I’ve started watching anime without subtitles recently. I never cared about speed or efficiency and focussed mostly on fun and content I enjoy. I’ve finished the N5 content here on bunpro and am currently a third through the N4 content. Early immersion is great! You just have to make sure you enjoy it, otherwise it’s a chore and we tend to skip chores in the long run.

5 Likes
#6

I personally like Netflix over VPN (JP server) with Language Reactor Chrome plugin. You should be able to find some type of JP content there that suits you. I would recommend watching shows with more natural speech. You can use Language Reactor with YouTube too for videos with Japanese or auto-generated Japanese subtitles. A lot of Japanese YT content don’t have JP subtitles though since they tend to embed JP subtitles in the video itself. Auto generated JP subtitles are spotty at best so not great for learning because the sub is often incorrect.

From language reactor, it will pause when you hover over a word in the subtitles so you can see the built in dictionary def. You can also mark vocab as learned or learning. You can also adjust settings for display of furigana. You can also export learning vocab to Anki. Good luck on your journey!

4 Likes
#7

I can highly recommend Japanese with Shun vlogs on YouTube or podcasts on YouTube/Spotify. I have started watching him after passing the N5 exam, and it’s been great both in the difficulty level and being interesting. I started watching his vlogs from the oldest ones, and they are all travel/lifestyle related; he is showing his daily life while living in various countries.

Still, like I mentioned, I started watching him after passing N5, so that’s probably around 1k vocab in, and in the beginning, I had to mine lots of new vocabulary while watching. And I still mine new vocab every single episode, but since he covers the topics that I find interesting, I don’t see this as a problem. The majority of his content is N5-N4, with some episodes being more N4-N2, but it is marked in the video name.

4 Likes
#8

I started using Migaku recently and I love love love it. That being said, I built myself to a point of about 70-80% comprehension prior to even getting it.

At your point, I feel like immersion should be utilized just to pick up the rhythm and pitch of the language. I don’t think meaning should be important at this stage in your learning journey. Just enjoy the content (with or without subtitles) and keep grinding the studying!

1 Like
#9

I’ve also found Japanese with Shun’s beginner podcast episodes to be a great listen, not boring yet easy to follow :slight_smile:

And not immersion per se but I can really recommend shadowing as a means to both improve your listening comprehension and learn/solidify grammar points and vocab, I’m currently going through the Japanese with Kanako N5 playlist which is great

頑張って！

3 Likes
#10

thank you everyone for the recommendations, that’s a lot of new possibilities to look into! :partying_face: they all look super promising

2 Likes
#11

Heads up, anki export

  1. Needs data cleaning.
  2. is a premium future.

I mined 73 cards before the 1 month free trail was up.

#12

I recomend trying a different type than “slice of life”
I think “what is fun to watch if I don’t understand”

For me:
Cooking, fantasy, and cute.
I don’t pause for look ups.

#13

Bluey on Disney plus has Japanese audio but it’s mostly listening only. But it’s good listening practice

#14

TV.

#15

I think the biggest issue here may not be that the content is too difficult, but that you’re trying to understand too much of it at once.

Pausing almost every scene and looking up every unknown word or grammar pattern can easily turn a 20-minute episode into several hours of work. It’s thorough, but probably difficult to sustain.

Something that helped me is “selective mining”:

  • Watch most of the episode without stopping.
  • Only pause for a line that feels useful, memorable, or almost understandable.
  • Limit yourself to around 5–10 studied sentences per episode.
  • Let the rest remain partially understood for now.

That way, the anime stays enjoyable while still giving you real sentences to learn from.

Full disclosure: I’m working on a Chrome extension called Kikugo that was built around this exact problem. On Netflix, you can click a Japanese subtitle to see an explanation of the grammar, slang, and nuance, then save the sentence for later review or Anki. It currently only works with Netflix on desktop Chrome, so it unfortunately won’t help with the InterviewingJapan YouTube videos yet.

Regardless of the tool, I’d strongly recommend not treating every sentence as something you need to solve. At your current level, continuing to watch content you genuinely enjoy is probably more valuable than understanding 100% of a much smaller amount.

#16

I’ll also throw my two cents in and say that a lot of the fear of early immersion stems from people feeling like they should be understanding more. It can be a very humbling experience to see grammar points or vocab that you recognize but haven’t yet acquired, meaning that you may read a sentence or listen to an entire conversation where you know you’ve seen all of the parts together but you either have absolutely no clue what it means or you think that you know what it means but then you go to check and you were completely off base. This is not a failure on your end, it is just the beginning of acquisition. The more you go through the process of recognition → checking → acquisition the easier the process itself becomes and this in turn will turn immersion from feeling like grinding your teeth against a brick wall into being easily manageable and closer to enjoyable.

1 Like
#17

I just watch anime I’ve watched before, without any subs. I don’t understand all of it, but I do notice I recognize more and more of it as I keep learning. I also don’t usually pause, just the occasional interesting sentence or whenever I feel like finding out exactly what’s happening in that sentence.

So personally I say just watch what you like, just hearing the Japanese is useful. Even if you don’t understand it now, hearing it helps build up familiarity for when you do, plus it helps actually being able to understand Japanese at normal speed.

#18

For context this thread is over a year old and by now I actually have a relatively solid amount of content I can use for immersion. gojosama001 only bumped the thread to promote their chrome extension which they have also done in like 5 other threads. Which is a great way to ensure I will simply never try the chrome extension. Which btw does the same as ABSPlayer does for free, except their extension costs money.

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5 Likes
#19

I’m also pretty new to the language. I started with those text/video sources:

Later when you feel like your vocab is something around 800-1500 words you could start with manga based on difficulty that works for you:

Those sources mostly cover topical vocabulary, but sometimes also have grammar being discussed in examples. As always - the more context you get around what’s being discussed - the better.

I would also recommend to try using this plugin in your browser if you’re going to do reading:

1 Like
#20

I think this spreadsheet, which was recommended to me by @Viki in my “How Do You Stay Immersed in Japanese Every Day?” thread, is the best JP media recommendation one could get:

#21

Sadly the availability of Japanese subtitle files online is relatively limited.

It’s a crime that this post has been up so long and no one has mentioned jimaku.

#22

Here’s another comprehensive collection of subtitle resources: