One thing I’ve found myself doing lately when studying Japanese is saving a bunch of really hard words. Watching things like Gundam, playing games like Final Fantasy, and watching some educational videos and documentaries. The backlog of words can fill up pretty fast and get overwhelming at times. On top of the fact that I’m still knee-deep in WaniKani, neck-deep in Bunpro, and building what seems like a mountain of words in Migaku, willingly pulling myself further and further away from the summit. But you know, something happened recently; I watched Nichijou and it changed my perspective on a few things.
I often preach that learning should be fun, enjoyable, and that you shouldn’t have to force yourself to do it. Otherwise, unless you absolutely need it, it will be excruciatingly hard to learn. More and more, I do feel that a lot of Japanese learners view the language not as an experience to be had and savored, but as data to be acquired. Manga is not a form of storytelling that you can’t find anywhere else; it is reading and Kanji practice. Anime is not the characters one loves and the moments that bring emotion and joy; it is content to mine sentences. Watching Japanese YouTube videos is not an opportunity to learn cultural context and history; it is simply immersion. Of course, I know that these things can exist as many things simultaneously, but it is easy for them to become cannon fodder for one’s acquisition of data. I’m certainly not free of this feeling either, as watch sessions have sometimes degenerated into sentence-mining drills. And of course, this comes with the territory of moving on to harder and harder material.
But as mentioned earlier, my partner and I were trying to figure out what to watch one night. Recently, I’ve been bad about watching Japanese media, but she decided to put on Nichijou. Something that is more slice-of-life and easier to understand. As usual, we watched it with no subtitles and, lo and behold, I just had a really good time watching it. I didn’t try to look up words, didn’t try to mine, just kicked back and enjoyed it. I did answer questions when my partner didn’t understand a word or the context, but for the most part, we just kinda enjoyed the show. We then watched Yuru Camp and same thing—easy enough for me to understand most of it with no lookups.
I then threw on some older JapanesePod101 lessons, and since it had been years since I listened to them, I had improved plenty since and just enjoyed them. I still learned a few things, but was able to treat them as a fun listen. I know some learners think that listening to things you previously learned is a waste of time, but if they watched an episode of an anime or drama and understood everything, that is generally not looked at as a waste of time, but as reinforcement of what you already know. So I look at those lessons the same way.
So yeah, without becoming too long-winded here, it’s nice to put the hard stuff aside for a bit and just enjoy some easier books, movies, or even lessons. It not only serves as genuine entertainment, but reminds you of how far you’ve come. That not everything has to be labeled as “immersion, mining, and practice.”
