[ss3000]

> You can make it better by trying to restrict your entertainment material to the second language, but this usually involves seeking out kids' shows to try to find something comprehensible at your small vocabulary level, and to me it ends up feeling more like work than entertainment.

I suspect I'm probably not alone in this given how popular Japanese anime/games/manga/lightnovels are among non-native speakers, but outside of 1 year of Japanese class in high school where I was taught some fundamentals (could probably be replicated in a 1-month online course), I managed to acquire, pretty much exclusively through media consumption, enough proficiency to consume most Japanese entertainment I'm interested in today, rarely ever feeling the need to reach for translation (watching untranslated anime, reading untranslated manga/light novels, playing untranslated games, etc). In fact today I actually find translated material extremely frustrating and actively seek out non-localized Japanese versions of games to play so I can enjoy the original text.

Though of course I can't really claim to be a fluent communicator in Japanese because consuming media passively doesn't really exercise the brain and face muscles needed to communicate to others. When I went to Japan last year I was actually able to understand pretty much everything that was said to me, but really struggled to formulate responses (luckily I was able to eventually communicate my ideas for the most part, but I'm pretty sure it was dead obvious that I wasn't a native speaker). Writing in Japanese without some kind of IME is as you might guess a complete non-starter for me as well for similar reasons.

[domenicd]

I would love to hear more about how you did this. I've been doing serious, but slow-paced, Japanese studying for the last few years (I've got my N3 certificate; know ~1500 kanji; etc.) but media consumption still feels like a chore.

In particular:

* Most anime leaves me behind. If English subtitles are on, ~80% of the time I can say "oh yeah, that does match what they said". If Japanese subtitles are on, I can't read fast enough. If no subtitles are on, I get confused when sentences get long, involve lots of proper nouns, or just too much unfamiliar vocabulary.

* Reading feels like a chore. I have to look up a word every sentence or three, and longer sentences can get me twisted up on the grammar, wherein I resort to Google-translating the whole sentence or reading the corresponding English translation if available. So it feels like just a very roundabout way of reading the material. I try to mitigate this by adding the words to an SRS deck, but that just increases the feeling of it being a chore.

Any tips from your experience would be much appreciated.

[ss3000]

To set expectations, it's been more than 10 years since I started learning, so I don't want to make it sound like it was an easy/short process for me either.

But regardless, here's a few notes from my experience that might/might not help:

I'd recommend starting out by consuming untranslated material only for titles that you can enjoy without actually fully understanding every piece of dialog/text, and being at peace with the fact that you might not have understood everything, as long as the experience of consuming the content was still enjoyable. Light-hearted slice of life comedies and titles that involve mostly mindless action can be good candidates (you can give the first episodes/chapters of every new title a try without translations to see how it goes). For everything else, definitely keep using translations.

Number one priority should always be to enjoy the content. If you're like me then that's what motivated you to learn in the first place, to enjoy the content more, so be sure to not confuse the end goal with the means you're using to get there.

Slowly, over periods of years, as you watch/read more titles without translations, you'll get better and better at picking up on contextual queues to fill in vocabulary that you don't already know, not by explicitly looking things up, but from pattern matching on actual usage. This will massively accelerate your learning as time goes on, and will also gradually expand the pool of content that you can enjoy without translations, forming a virtuous cycle. Eventually you'll find yourself no longer even thinking about the meaning of words/phrases in English, having learned their meaning from their context in Japanese speech/writing alone.

Some mediums are better suited for this process than others. Anime is especially great because it progresses on its own without giving you time to stress about the meaning of every word of dialog and look things up, which forces you to exercise those pattern matching muscles. Most other mediums let you progress through the story at your own pace, so you actually have to exercise restraint yourself. Of those, manga is probably the easiest to start out with to learn reading since it's still a very visual medium with lots of non-textual contextual cues, and shounen manga especially has furigana over every kanji so you can learn their pronunciation. Visual novels are also great in that they let you exercise both reading and listening skills simultaneously, but are probably not quite as good for beginner-level learning in either area compared to anime/manga. I'd leave fully text-based light novels for last after you're comfortable with reading manga with no furigana and visual novels, as they're pretty impossible to enjoy until you've built up a really solid foundation for reading.

At the end of the day I think there's no substitute for sheer time spent and volume of content consumed, but as long as you keep enjoying the content and the process of learning itself, you'll eventually get there. Have fun!