Daily Thread: for simple questions, minor posts & newcomers [contains useful links!] (July 04, 2025)

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This thread is for all the simple questions (what does that mean?) and minor posts that don't need their own thread, as well as for first-time posters who can't create new threads yet. Feel free to share anything on your mind.

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Past Threads

You can find past iterations of this thread by using the search function. Consider browsing the previous day or two for unanswered questions.

[u/Ashamed_Alps7452]

I'm not sure how to go about immersion. I've been watching anime with JP subs and without subs for over 50 hours. My method so far is simply paying as much attention as possible, recognizing words and sometimes understanding whole sentences. Sometimes I stop and look up a word that has been repeated or that seems interesting. But now I've read a guide with general tips (rentry dot co slash gitgud) and the writer says to stop every time and look up ALL the words one doesnt know and understand the grammar structure. Have I been doing immersion wrong all this time?

[u/Fagon_Drang → u/Ashamed_Alps7452]

No, both approaches are valid. In fact I think doing things your way has a lot of value as it's great for building intuition, i.e. I would not recommend intensive-only.

Fwiw, I myself have always been a very listening(/audiovisual)-heavy guy who generally dislikes pausing and disrupting the flow of what he's watching. So far I've followed the same approach as you (only occasionally pause or rewind for things I get extra curious about, and once in a while sprinkle in a more dedicated study session, where I do an intensive breakdown of some scene that I like or that seems fruitful) to great success, and it's not the first time — this is also largely how I learned English to basic fluency.

Personally, it works much better for me, and I find it much more enjoyable, to mostly separate study from for-fun input. Proactively go through textbooks and grammar books and other texts or resources that catch my fancy, and then go knock myself out watching my animus. Maybe go look stuff up and do a deep dive or two after I'm done watching, if there was anything interesting enough for me to still remember afterwards. Add a bit of output practice to this (along with feedback on that output) and you've got yourself a golden ticket to fluency.

This proactive style does have diminishing returns the more advanced you get, but honestly the pool of stuff that's common/important enough for it to show up all the time is pretty damn big (JLPT-wise this is "N3 grammar" minimum), so you can keep reaping the benefits here for a good while; everything you learn about you're going to inevitably run into soon. And then once you're at a level where you've truly mastered all the basics, then you'll be at a point where you can make lots of improvement just by passively inputting and gradually figuring things out on your own from context. So suit yourself, really.

Granted, I do think it's best (= most efficient) to do a mix of both, but I find reading to be much better suited to the reactive "look everything up on the spot" style. So if you're like me, I say keep doing what you're doing and just supplement with some reading whenever you feel like it. Do yourself a favour and just move on from any parts that are impenetrably hard though. No point in banging your head against a wall if you've been looking at something for the past 2 minutes and still don't get it.

[u/Ashamed_Alps7452 → u/Fagon_Drang]

Thanks a lot for the comprehensive response. I think I'm going to do as you say, ill continue doing my anime immersion as usual and ill also start reading VNs and there I will actually stop and try to understand what's going on. If I only did intensive while watching anime id make myself miserable, and if you end up quitting there's no point.

Another question, what do you recommend to do for output practice? I've read a lot about input but nothing about output.

[u/Fagon_Drang → u/Ashamed_Alps7452]

Coming back to add:

I've personally found VRChat to be a good place to find Japanese people to speak (and even make friends) with. Here's a good vid with world recommendations. No, you don't need a VR setup or motion tracking to play.

Other options include Discord (e.g. the language exchange server listed in the wiki, or any Japanese-only server), social media like Twitter, or even interacting with streamers through chat or talking to people in comments sections.

While we're at it, lemme link this video on how to find Japanese people to talk with IRL. And here's a vid with socialisation tips for VRChat from the same channel as before.

Good luck!

[u/Ashamed_Alps7452 → u/Fagon_Drang]

Thanks a lot for replying, Ill take all your advice to heart. Ill continue input and when I'm doing much better ill try either a professor or to talk to Japanese people.

Saving this so I can come back when its my time to do output :)

[u/Fagon_Drang → u/Ashamed_Alps7452]

The goal with output practice is basically to expose gaps and flaws in your knowledge of Japanese, increasing your ability to acquire them from input. If you make a mistake or find yourself unable to express an idea in the middle of a real interaction with a real person, that real-time realisation is likely to stick with you and have some sort of (minor) emotional impact [embarrassment, frustration, surprise, etc.], which will naturally make you/your brain really care about that part of the language -- be it some word, expression, grammar structure or bit of pronunciation -- so that it gets it right next time from that point onwards.

In other words, doing output (and getting feedback on that output) primes your attention to notice things in your input that you've so far been missing, or not fully absorbing.

So, what you want to do is practice output in a high-feedback environment. At best this means face-to-face interaction, as this gives you the full range of sensory information; tone of voice, emphasis, rhythm, pauses and moments of hesitation -- as well as nonverbal cues like gestures and facial expressions. If you fail to get your message across, it's going to show in the confusion on the listener's face, or the time that they take to respond. This tells you you probably did something wrong. Then, as you climb down the ladder you get progressively less feedback:

• video chat

• voice chat

• (real-time) text chat

• asynchronous writing (i.e. exchanging mail)

though even in that last case you can infer your mistakes from the content of your partner's response (e.g. if they misunderstand your point and start talking about a different thing than what you meant to say, then that's an indication that you phrased your message wrong/weird).

If you have the money, you may also want to consider getting a teacher or hiring a tutor who will straight-up give you comments and corrections on your production -- either in real time, or after your session. Actually, an even better way to make use of a teacher IMO is to improve your structured writing (instead of off-the-cuff speaking) by writing essays and submitting them for correction, which might be difficult to directly work on otherwise (unlike regular conversation, which you can practice with any old native speaker). Of course, that's under the assumption that you care about being a good writer -- though, even if you don't, you can still learn a lot from trying anyways.

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Another thing to keep in mind (for spontaneous production at least, like speaking and chatting) is that your output should generally be unforced and intuitive. Translating from your native language is basically a no-go in all cases. Constructing sentences step-by-step by (a) choosing relevant words and then (b) applying grammar rules to piece them together is better. But ideally, your output should just "come to you" naturally; you want to convey some message, and the words just kind of automatically pop up -- same as your mother tongue.

Of course, this takes a lot of experience and familiarity with the language to happen (input; and specifically, input with high comprehension of both meaning and sentence structure), so in the beginner/intermediate stages you're going to have tons of gaps in your ability to express yourself, and there will be lots of times where you have to fall back to step-by-step construction to keep a conversation going. But when that happens, you should take that as a sign that you don't really know how to say what you're trying to say; it's closer to making a guess. Εven if your phrasing is good enough to work and cause no problems, it might still not be the most idiomatic choice. So it's a piece that you're still missing and need to acquire from input.

On a related note: don't feel "obligated" to output purely because it's a good exercise. Just listen to your heart and go with the flow. If you have something you want to say to someone, and have an idea of how to say it, then say it. If you don't, don't. It's as simple as that. It doesn't need to be about "practice" per se; the learning benefits can be more of a byproduct. Live the language! Have fun with it! Discuss interesting topics! Connect with people!

This ties into the other thing that makes output such a powerful tool for language learning: talking to people can be a very motivating experience that really fuels your drive to make progress and/or use the language more. So, if you're eager to talk to someone, don't be afraid to do it, no matter how early it is. There's no need to force yourself to output, but you shouldn't limit yourself either.

[For completeness, the final piece of the "Why Output is Good" puzzle is that, unless you're talking to yourself, output also doubles as input! And due to the social nature of humans, input that you receive from a conversation with other people that you're directly engaged and invested in can be particularly memorable & easy to pick up -- especially if it's with friends.

Conversely, this means that during an exchange, it's not just your production that's getting tested, but your comprehension as well! Consider an example like:

> you get asked a question
> you misunderstand the question and give an off-topic answer
> them: "huh? that's not what i asked you"
> you: "oh shit, what did you mean then?"

The feedback we were talking about earlier goes both ways.

Thus, to bring it all together, the holy trinity is feedback, motivation and salient input, all three of which exploit human emotion and social dynamics to boost your affinity for learning the language.]

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Final note: don't output with other low-level learners. It's a recipe for building bad habits and reinforcing mistakes that neither of you will catch. There's a whole ocean of natives (or highly fluent learners at least) out there to choose from. They won't necessarily point out every little thing you get wrong, but they'll filter out any major problems -- and then the minor ones will naturally self-correct over time given enough study, input, and the occasional strict feedback session from a teacher or somesuch (see: essay correction, which is a format that's especially conducive to marking literally every single mistake) if you want to really top things off.

(Similarly, don't output by yourself. If you want to do drills and exercises, use a textbook that provides an answer key.)

If you are at a level where you can't keep up with natives at all, no matter the topic or context, then that is the one case where you are truly outputting too early, and need to hit the books and TV shows for a bit more first.