3 months of immersion — learning Japanese with NHK News Web Easy
So it has already been three months since the start of my immersion learning journey and one month since I graduated to stage 2B. My progress has been quick so far because of my history with the Japanese language, but proceeding to the next stage on the roadmap will be more of a challenge.
Statistics at the start of July 2023
- 1250 kanji (RTK keywords in Anki)
- 1517 known words (counted by Migaku)
- 94 learning (counted by Migaku)
- 133 total sentence cards created
- Read Tae Kim’s Basic Grammar Guide
- Current stage in Refold: 2B
I like to give myself a new challenge every month to keep my studies interesting. My original plan for this month was to track all my hours spent immersing in Japanese. I set myself a goal of 100 hours immersed in the language this month, but that goal seemed unachievable just 3 days in. Life got in the way. I work full time, have an hour-long commute both ways, and want to spend time with friends and family on my days off.
Instead, I decided to read all the NHK News Web Easy articles that were to be published in July, which seemed to be a much more achievable goal for me.
Reading the news in Japanese for a month
Inspired by YouTuber and Japanese language learner Stevijs 3, who read no less than 300 NHK News Web Easy articles at the beginning of his studies, I set out to read all the news articles that got published this month. I remember trying to read these articles written in “easy” Japanese from when I studied the language at university. I also remember not understanding what the journalists were talking about most of the time.
There were about 80 NKH News Web Easy articles that got published this month. I still struggled with the specific Japanese vocab used in some of these articles, but others were completely understandable after readying the Japaneses definitions of a just few keywords. The website conveniently provided these monolingual definitions itself, all I had to do was hoover over a word I did not get. This month’s reading experience was entirely different from my time at university, in the most positive way.
As there are little similarities between the vocabulary used in anime and in news articles, I experienced a bit of a learning curve at the beginning of this month. It was not until the 13th of July before I was able to understand all the words used in a single NHK News Web Easy article. The next couple of times I hit the 100% comprehension-rate followed much closer to each other, namely on the 27th, 28th and on the 31st.
The types of words I struggled with most were the names of official government institutions and the names of prefectures and cities. I would love to continue reading the news, but before I do, I want to get better at these domain-specific words first. Maybe I will even give the regular news a try after mastering Japanese geography!
Do not let me catch you in the comments stating that I should actually be working on my listening abilities rather than sitting here reading news articles. I know I should, but I just did not feel like watching Japanese TV shows or anime much this month. I may not have read as many articles this July as Stevijs 3 did tat the start of his journey with Japanese, but I certainly had fun reading and learning about current events in Japanese.
Japanese immersion update: July 31st, 2023
This month, I spent less time on Remembering the Kanji than during the previous months. My daily reviews in Anki are creeping up, and I felt like I could not handle more than 100 kanji reviews per day, so I decided to slow down the pace at which I added new kanji cards.
The time I spent not reviewing kanji was spent reading all the Japanese news articles I mentioned in the section above, so my known-words count shot up by more than a thousand words. I think I have never read as much Japanese in my entire learning journey combined as compared to the articles I read this month alone.
Next month, I want to read manga instead of the news, which will probably also introduce me to a lot of new vocabulary. The good thing about manga vocabulary is that it will be a much closer match to anime vocabulary, so it should help a great deal with my listening immersion too.
Now that I am at stage 2B on the Refold roadmap, I am longingly looking at stage 2C, which I can slowly see appearing on the horizon. To reach stage 2C, I have to be able to understand a piece of content aimed at adults at a 90% comprehension-rate. My current level of understanding is around 80–85 percentage wise. This may sound like I am nearly there already, but getting my comprehension-level to go up is a slow, slow process. My goal is to get to stage 2C within three months.
Immersion content
- The Way of the House Husband — Netflix (active + free flow)
- Non Non Biyori — Animelon (active)
- Usagi Drop — Animelon (active)
- Akatsuki no Yona — Animelon (free flow)
- Yotsubato! — Manga (free flow)
- News Web Easy — NHK (active)
- Mai Minimalism — YouTube (free flow)
- Various podcasts — StandFM (passive)
- Active immersion content (passive)
After a month of readying NHK News Web Easy articles, I definitely noticed that these articles were becoming easier and easier for me to read, especially when compared to my other immersion content. I wonder how much of this is related to the fact that these news articles are written in simple Japanese, as compared to my level of general understanding of news article vocabulary going up.
Statistics by the end of July 2023
- 1440 kanji (RTK keywords in Anki)
- 2698 known words (counted by Migaku)
- 251 learning (counted by Migaku)
- 319 total sentence cards created
- Read half of Tae Kim’s Essential Grammar Guide
- Current stage in Refold: 2B
I am getting very bored studying grammar, so I will pause that for a bit. My plans for next month include reading all the Yotsubato! manga-volumes and learning how to read all the names of Japanese prefectures. I will also try to get most of my sentences from anime instead of the news so that I can have more audio on my cards.
One goal that would be nice to achieve is reaching a total of 3750 known words, as this would be considered enough to pass the JLPT N3. Maybe I will do some practice tests if I manage to get my known words count that high. We will see! See you next month.
