That‘s so smart! I am struggling to balance my programming course and my Japanese self studies, so I will probably try your method 
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temos um infiltrado aqui! Nice to find a portuguese learner out there haha
何のために日本語を勉強するかと言うと、実はわからない。この段階では、わからなくなるほど、そんなに長い間勉強しているものだ。このごろ、考えずにやり続ける。
Why I study Japanese, I don’t really know. At this point, I’ve done it for so long I forget why I was doing it in the first place. It’s just something I kinda do now without thinking about it.
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I went through all the responses in detail, summarizing responses and categorizing people’s learning styles and attitudes toward immersion. After doing this, I found that while pretty much everyone on this thread spends time immersing (by which I mean consuming materials made for native speakers of the target language, rather than materials made for learners of the language), there were two main sub-groups in how people engaged with their immersion:
- Those who engaged actively with their immersion, and consequently felt the need to restrict their immersion to materials that are at their level (e.g.: watching kid’s shows, presumably not because that is the most enjoyable content for them); and
- Those who immersed passively, and consume whatever media they found most enjoyable, even if they couldn’t understand it.
One rare group was the type that immerses actively (e.g.: looking up words, creating flashcards, shadowing, trying hard to understand, etc. instead of just watching/listening for pure enjoyment), but don’t limit the materials that they consume. I was part of this group, and from the looks of it, the few others who were part of this niche group also felt quite burnt out, especially with the lack of measurable progress.
However, overall, it seemed that most people fell into camp 1. where they immersed actively and preferred to consume media tailored to their level, or into camp 2. where they preferred to immerse more passively without as much regard for the difficulty of the language in the media.
Another overall trend I found was that most people, including the passive immersers (camp 2), did not believe that only passively immersing would be an effective way to acquire the language (which I interpreted to be a rejection of the “input hypothesis”). So those who fell into camp 2. would often supplement with guided resources.
After thinking about all of these responses, I was thinking a cool idea would be an automatic learning roadmap generator for anime shows/TV/arbitrary media. You take a quiz that allows us to estimate your passive vocabulary, and then choose any show you want to watch, and then rest assured that when you come back to our platform, we would have a learning roadmap to extract all the relevant language learnings from that TV episode for you. As you take the lessons, our estimates for your passive vocab get updated, and we can give a better estimate of your progress through an immersion approach.
Also, the cool thing about this idea is that it appeals to both camps. The camp that is currently limiting the materials they consume now have the opportunity to explore any materials they find interesting, and rest assured that they don’t have to understand everything when they watch it, because the learnings they could make from that episode will be extracted into lessons for them. Of course, the people who really cannot tolerate ambiguity could also continue to watch kids’ shows and beginner content, but in either case, they can rest assured that they extract the max learnings possible from what they watch.
On the other hand, it appeals to camp 2. as well because now they can check what learnings they should have made/can make from the show they just watched, and make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. And instead of learning actively with supplementary materials in the hopes that it shows up in their immersion, they can rest assured that what they learn is directly applicable to the content they already consume, because it was generated from that content itself, for the sake of making that content more understandable as quickly as possible.
I still haven’t decided if this will for sure be the final product I work on, but I am excited about the idea. If I had this earlier on, it would have saved me a lot of heartache, because I wouldn’t feel the need to constantly pause the TV shows and would be able to more easily separate my active learning from my consumption for enjoyment.
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Try
https://japaneselevelup.com/difficulty-level-guide-everything-japanese/
he used to have a site called Wakarukana - Find Japanese You Can Understand Now
with rankings of difficulty of different immersion content and reading comprehension.
The recommendations and quizzes were all written by Adam, not an AI. If you asked him, he might sell it to you. He posted on his blog that he’s looking for a buyer.
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Now that you mention it, improvising is easily my weakest area, especially on the piano. I always got that message to prioritize sheet music as a beginner and then sort of thrown to the wolves once I hit intermediate. Even though I’ve practiced banging out ostinatos with my left-hand for a song, even transferring that to improvisation is a totally different skill set.
Really, where I disagree with Refold is, the last time I checked that site, the authors seemed to imply that one shouldn’t start outputting until they can comprehend a high percentage of input. I’ve always kept output as a low priority myself, but now I’m at a point where I’m relearning proper usage and pitch accent for words that have been in my active vocabulary for years, which is frustrating.
I agree that output isn’t terribly important if all of one’s goals are input. But I also believe I’ve had some gains in input that I only got because I was outputting. As with the music example, I regret with Japanese that I didn’t try more things and let my skills cross-pollinate more. I didn’t know better but it’s hard not to regret having made suboptimal use of so much time.
My Spanish and Japanese have both gotten me laughed at countless times. At least now I’m at an age where I have the wisdom to tell myself, “You’re learning a language. You’re supposed to get laughed at.”
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Originally it was video games. I like them, and I long wanted to be able to play games in Japanese. Then I got busy with life after school. I worked for the last decade or so, and have settled into a pretty reasonable professional life.
Now, it’s different. One, I’ve always wanted to learn some second language well, that’s been a dream of mine since I studied Linguistics in college. I’m getting older, and learning a new language doesn’t get easier, and Japanese is the language I’ve studied the most so far, so I’m rededicating myself to that. I’m at a point in my personal and professional life where I really want to try something else for a bit, and so I’m going to be going to Japan to study the language full-time for a year and see how that works.
I’m hoping this also enables me to work professionally in Japan for some time. I think it would be interesting to experience that. We will see. It might not work out; I might not like living in Japan. We will see.
Finally, a minor thing. I used to do some research on Ainu, and the resources in English on it are very limited. I would like to be able to learn more about that, which requires knowing Japanese. It’s also one reason I’m going to study in Sapporo.
Fun stuff.
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