First of all, I'd like to say that my experience and impression of Refold is excellent. The roadmap, the advice, the resources, and the community have been incredibly valuable in my language journey, and I'm very thankful for them. I've been following Refold's roamap for 2.5 years with great success.

It's only out of love and appreciation that this post is focused on some negatives. Criticism is a healthy thing if done correctly, which I hope I've done here.

Just to reiterate - I like Refold, I do my best to tell people about it irl and on reddit anywhere I can, and I generally believe in the roadmap and methods. So now some issues.

• I don't think the majority of the community has read the Roadmap (either version), or know what it says.

• A large portion of the community joined from MIA or AJATT and already have their own language learning methods, or perceived ideas of what MIA, AJATT, or Matt taught. They assume Refold and their beliefs match.

• There is a heavy Japanese skew from the community and Matt, which means there's a lot of poor advice, or advice that worked well for Matt and won't work for the average person, or non-Japanese language learners.

• An earlier emphasis on speaking and a greater emphasis on reading is probably necessary.

A large portion of the community didn't read the roadmap, or any of the updates. I've gotten into multiple arguments where people were saying to never study grammar, even though the roadmap actively encourages it. When I linked the part of the guide advocating for grammar study, they just ignored it and said grammar study isn't necessary anyway. Even Matt has encouraged grammar study (just not drilling), yet there is this perception that "grammar bad".

The whole community has their own perceived idea of "this is what refold says/is", and it's usually wrong or misinformed. Community members say incorrect things like "speaking is banned/will ingrain bad habits", "reading is discouraged/will lead to bad speech", "sentence mining is the end all be all", etc. These are not direct quotations, just the general sentiment I've seen in the community.

Matt's experiences have tainted the Roadmap. He was actively studying Japanese in high school and college, did a ton of reading, and all his experience is based on Japanese. So MIA, and the first versions of the guide, are based heavily on his experiences. But his experience is not universal, and as we are seeing, may even be a bit of a unicorn.

Biggest example is the idea that "immerse enough, and eventually output will happen and with light practice you will speak fluently". This is clearly not true, as the stage 3 and 4 parts of the guide have taken years to write. There is also a sizeable amount of advanced learners who should be outputting fluently, but are really struggling.

The Japanese influence is also a problem. For example, the glorification of sentence mining and monolingual definitions. Sentence cards and monolingual definitions make more sense in Japanese, which is so different from English that direct translations fail to get the actual meaning across. You basically have to think in Japanese before you can understand Japanese.

But for European language learners who already know a European language, this is never necessary. Euro languages are incredibly similar at a macro level, as they almost entirely come from the same language family, have similar cultural backgrounds and history, and have borrowed from one another.

There is almost always a direct translation for a word or idea, and target language to native language vocab cards are super easy and useful. That's where things like frequency decks on Ankiweb come into play - they are readily available and do an amazing job with little work.

I can speak from my own experience on this, as I've gotten to a Refold 2C or a CEFR B2/C1 in comprehension solely using vocab cards, never sentence mining, and only using frequency decks. But this also comes from Yoga. In an old MIA podcast, he talked about how learning Portuguese was very different (and far easier) than learning Japanese. Possibly part of this was due to him knowing the language as a child, but he assessed that most of it was that translating Portuguese to English at a word and sentence level was extremely similar. Expressions and turns of phrase might be the same, concepts and abstract terms are the same, there's almost always a one for one translation. Why use a monolingual definition for the word "cryptic" when the words are used similarly in both languages? This is the Japanese blindness.

Matt's experiences, as Refold has found out, doesn't exactly translate for everyone else. There's a large portion of advanced learners stuck in limbo afraid to talk because Matt gave them brain worms, thinking that "output will just come naturally, it will pour out of you". I doubt this has ever been the case for anyone - output is hard as hell at first. Matt had to practice outputting. It's a massive mislead that does a lot of harm and may cause anxiety in some. And I think Matt underplayed how much practice he actually required to output well.

There are plenty of people who learn languages to fluent and higher levels who speak right away, of at least far earlier than what Refold recommends. See people like Luca Lampariello, or the non-Japanese interviews Matt has on his channel. There's usually a silent period, but somewhere around the intermediate stage (Refold 2A, CEFR B1) people start speaking.

The obsession over pitch accent and sounding native or fluent, immediately, is exhausting for me, and I really think it's hurting members in the community who don't realize outputting is really fucking hard and takes practice.

It's also just baffling to me because it's most prevalent in the Japanese community. But even if you have a native level accent, Japanese people are still going to see you as a foreigner unless you look Japanese, so whats the point in obsessing over accent perfection?

The community just generally repeats bad advice, bad information, false interpretations of the roadmap, etc because they don't know any better. They haven't lived through the experience themselves, they aren't thinking critically, or they don't know any better.

Years later, Refold is now realizing some of these flaws, and are trying to plug the holes and fix the misconceptions, as they have hundreds of people getting to the final stages and seeing they're missing something. Ethan and Co have talked about using their coached members as great anecdata to modify their Roadmap and methods.

The Refold community has an obsession with watching TV shows and movies, and isn't nearly interested in reading. And a lot of the reading that they do is manga, visual novels, and generally not traditional reading materials. The visuals are great for beginners. But eventually you need to reading longer form content, more advanced stuff, without the visual aids.

Refold also considers subtitled content more reading than listening, and I disagree. Watching things is nothing like an actual reading experience. Newspapers, books, blogs - all much more enriching and difficult than visual novels and subtitles.

We have lots of evidence that reading is one of the best things you can do for language learning. Having to picture an entire scene in your mind via your TL is immensely powerful for memory creation and learning. TV shows and visual novels take away the entire imagination process. TV shows move forward at a set speed and read the selves aloud.

I'm slowly realizing that I should have spent more time reading and less time watching subtitled shows - the gains you make from traditional reading are enormous. I think the Refold community at large, and even the roadmap, overvalue the visual aspect of comprehensibility. You can overly depend on body language, visual storytelling, and generally figuring out what's going on while the language takes a back seat. This is fine as a beginner. But not for intermediate or advanced learners.

Here's a recent comment I made about the whole i + 1 idea behind sentence mining. tl;dr it's description of how language learning works, it's not a formula you must follow exactly. Yet the community obviously thinks i+1 is very important.

Some general thoughts as a pseudo-conclusion from this essay:

First, read the Roadmap. I read it, or at least skim it, at least once a month. Not only to refresh my memory so I don't say things incorrectly, but also to check for updates. In some ways I think the abbreviated Roadmap is even better than the detailed one. Call people out when they state things that the roadmap doesn't actually say.

When giving advice, be very explicit about what is advice Refold gives, and what advice is your own opinion. I'm very careful in stating "this is what refold says, and this is what I recommend" and then why I recommend what I do.

Two, realize the roadmap isn't dogmatic. It's a guide. You're encouraged to follow the parts that work for you, drop the parts that don't, and modify any as needed or desired.

Three, if you're a non-Japanese language learning, make your voice be heard. Yes, the largest portion of the community is learning Japanese. But the majority of the community is not. European languages can be treated differently than Japanese (heck, I think other Asian languages should probably be treated differently than Japanese).

Four, Refold, Matt, myself, any human being - we are all fallible, we all make mistakes, we all give imperfect advice. Everyone is learning and trying to build upon incomplete information. Everything Matt says isn't gospel, Refold very likely gets a few things wrong, I could be talking out of my ass and only giving advice that worked for me and won't work for others. So if someone disagrees with you, that's totally okay. Discussion is healthy, and differences of opinion aren't personal attacks, and doesn't make someone stupid.

Five, if you have found techniques or tweaks that worked for you, say something. Share the knowledge. That's the only way others might find out. Talk about your successes, things you did and do differently. It's how we grow and learn as a whole.

If you read this far, thanks for reading. I hope it provoked some of your own thoughts. Feel free to share them below.

So as the title says I've invested over 2200 hours into Japanese the past year, this averages out to just over 6 hours every day.

Here's the breakdown of my stats:

 Reading: ~520 hrs. Average of 90 +- 45 minutes per day

 Listening: ~1350 hrs. Average of 3.5 +- 1.25 hours per day

 Anki: ~6600 cards (not including RRTK), ~335 hours. Average of 45 +- 15 minutes per day

 Speaking/Writing: 0 hrs

Here is a rough timeline of my previous year with Japanese.

1. Month 1

Grinded out a lot of beginner material with Anki by doing 100 new cards each day: approximately ~2 hours per day 

		Did Recognition Remembering the Kanji (~1250 cards)

		For vocabulary I went through the Tango N5/N4 decks (~2000 cards)

		For grammar I read through Tae Kim's grammar guide

	Started reading NHK easy articles once I finished Tango N5 and Tae Kim near the end of the month

2. Month 2-3
	Continued grinding out material with Anki at a reduced pace of 25-35 cards per day: ~90 minutes each day

		I sentence mined the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar and about 1/4 of the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar. (~700 cards)

		Went through the Tango N3 deck (~1300 cards)

	Made the monolingual transition

		All Anki cards now used Japanese explanations for new vocabulary/grammar

		Started using Japanese dictionaries in Yomichan when looking up words on the fly

3. Month 4-6

	Started sentence mining from Native Material (Anime and real news articles from NHK)

4. Months 7-9

	Started to read Novels and Light Novels

5. Months 10-12

	Nothing of note- continued immersing and doing my anki each day. Focused on reading novels.

6. Continuous

	Throughout the entire year I was immersing in Native Japanese materials for hours every day, even from day 1 when I understood nothing.

	For listening this includes: YouTube videos, anime, drama, movies, podcasts, audiobooks.

	For reading: news articles, blogs/web articles, wikipedia, novels, light novels, SNS comments (I haven't ever really read manga).

Here is my subjective basis on my current level:

1. Reading

	I can read and understand most novels, news articles, light novels, etc. if I can use a J-J dictionary with Yomichan. 

		Based upon Refold's 6 Levels of Comprehension, most novels are somewhere between a Level 4 and a Level 5 in terms of comprehension; I would describe this as, "with effort (Yomichan), able to understand the content- main plot, dialogues/monologues, and descriptions- with some details lost".

	Obviously some books are easier than others, and difficulty of books can vary even when written by the same author. 

		For example here are some of the books that I've read with near full comprehension：

			ペンギン・ハイウェイ

			NHKにようこそ！

			キノの旅

		Here are some books that I thought were quite difficult when reading them:

			人間失格

			四畳半神話大系

			狼と香辛料

	Without a dictionary I would wager that my reading ability for novels is a solid level 4: "able to follow the main plot of a story and the majority of the ideas that are presented despite occasionally missing details of the story".

2. Listening

	I have pretty much full comprehension of most Slice of Life anime while listeing raw. 

		Anime that fall in this category would be the following:
			けいおん！

			月刊少女野崎くん

	With Japanese subtitles I am able to understand a variety of shows at close to full comprehension, occasionally having to look something up to fill in a gap.

		Example shows include:

			Fate Stay Night (I've seen this like 4 times though so that does contribute to my knowledge of what is happening)
			Terrace House

			俺の妹がこんなに可愛いわけがない

			黒子のバスケ

		Some anime that I feel were particularily challenging were:

			食戟のソーマ

			幼女戦記

			四畳半神話大系

			ドクターストン

	My raw listening ability really depends on who I am listening to and how much I have listening to them before hand.

		I am able to follow along with most YouTubers, albeit I might miss some details here and there depending on how much I have listened to them before. 

		Here are some example of people that I feel comfortable listening to (level 4-5 comprehension):

			Utaco 4989

			キヨ。

			牛沢

			フジ工房

		Youtubers that I struggle with (level 3-4 comprehension):
			メンタリストダイゴ

			ひろゆき

3. Writing 

	I haven't worked on handwriting at all so it's fair to say that I'm not able to do it. I'm honestly not worried about this becuase most everything is typed nowadays anyway and I don't live in Japan and won't for the forseeable future.

4. Speaking

	I have never had a conversation with a native Japanese person; I am able to form some thoughts naturally (ie. without translating), but I doubt I would feel comfortable in a conversation with my current level.

What are my plans going forward?

1. Continue getting lots of input, focusing on reading novels

	During the summer I am going to aim for the following:

		Listening: at least 2 hours per day

		Reading: at least 2 hours per day

		Anki: reviews + 10-15 new cards per day (~30-40 minutes)

	I am currently reading the following books:

		１９７３年のピンボール

		娘じゃなくて私が好きなの！？

		幼女戦記

		魔女の宅急便

2. Work on output starting in 3-6 months

	I think that I have built up enough of a foundation in comprehending the language, and I would like to convert this latent ability into producing the language in a natural manner.

	I would like to be "fluent" (ie. able to hold a reasonably well paced conversation with a native on a variety of everyday topics without needing any help) by the end of my second year.

3. Work through some JLPT prep books for the N1 test so I can take it at the 18 month mark (December)

	I bought the 新完全マスター N1・N2 books for grammar and reading comprehension and I am just going to make sentence cards for unknown grammar points or vocabulary I come across.

	This will be ~30 minutes of my reading every day.

Here's my stats from January-April:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SWPsuQoEYohIpfKoAk4Cv0JGj520srx1EnkiOWN5rfY/edit?usp=sharing

Here is a link to my new spreadsheet where you can see a detailed breakdown of my stats, the books I've read, and the anime/drama/movies I've watched (only May so far):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15mvLXPRiU6Mokz1G65V1xQZqiRLkuo8948nmaw_5WP4/edit?usp=sharing

If you are interested in using this spreadsheet for yourself then here is the template:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18uPz-xQvAH1shTXr6Wj3feHCJkF92G-3y7pHlEgA0To/edit?usp=sharing

If you want a detailed breakdown of my timeline with Japanese and my (semi-regular) monthly updates then here is the full document:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B6GiHIhRq2kjyYbc9iXgIR-d1X1zQSkSuYAF9Z4zHb0/edit?usp=sharing

If you are interested in the method that I use then here is my google doc where I break down all the theory from common immersion learning websites and give you resources specific to Japanese for each step along the way:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LH82FjsCqCgp6-TFqUcS_EB15V7sx7O1VCjREp6Lexw/edit?usp=sharing

Background

I took 5 years of Spanish in middle school and high school. I took two semesters of German in college, back in 2010/11. After that, I did at most 3 weeks total of DuoLingo over the years for both German and Spanish (usually for a few days), and have done nothing else with the language since.

The amount of German I remembered before starting Refold was very little. Basic numbers, basic entry-level words, present tense conjugation, I knew cases/declinations existed but did not know specifics, random phrases still stuck in my brain(I have a sandwich, which came from early DuoLingo), but not a lot of fine details or nuance. I'd estimate I was about a few weeks into a German 101 college course.

Anki

I would now recommend the following, as of November 2025:

Vocab: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1431033948

Conjugation: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/778251741

General grammar: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1272878976

I grabbed the Anki deck "Deutsch 4000 German Words by Frequency" and started with the recommended settings from the Refold site. I have never used Anki before, so there was a very small learning process. About a week in I realized I could study ahead, and my daily reviews went from about 90 to 320. This was mainly to jump-start my vocab (a lot were coming back to me fairly quickly, just needed to see the word and definition again). About a week later the reviews were stable at around 150 a day. I can't get exact stats, but it was taking me 10 minutes or less. After the first month, over the next 12 weeks I was consistently inconsistent with my Anki. On average I was only doing it every other or every third day, commonly doing 300 reviews in a session, culminating about 6 weeks ago where I had 782 reviews after about 1.5 weeks of not doing them. I started out with 10 cards a day and then switched to 20 about a month in.

The deck is pretty good. There's audio for every card, and 95% of the time it is great quality. A few are less than perfect, but still manageable. I really only use the audio on new cards to practice my internal pronunciation. The words themselves have been in a decent order - a bunch don't show up in kids shows and are more "adult" words (think stuff like: contract, law, business, member), so it's probably a frequency deck based on news or written German rather than spoken German. My only real complaint with the deck are the example sentences - most use other vocabulary that is intermediate or advanced, sometimes with complicated sentences. I don't normally use the example sentences if I can help it, possibly for this reason. It's not a huge deal to me. Would recommend the deck to others.

I exclusively use Anki on my phone. I pretty much don't use computers at home unless I can help it, and AnkiDroid is everything you need.

Some things I do differently than what Refold suggests:

No Leeches

At first I used the leech function with Refolds settings, but I still felt I needed to learn these words, and unsuspending cards is annoying. So I just completely turned leeching off. So far I've had no issues - sometimes a leech kind of word will be stuck in the beginning learn phase for a week or two, but eventually my brain latches on and starts to remember it well and graduates. It is not a big deal to me to fail a card all the time - I accept that every word is remembered at different speeds, some I immediately remember, and some don't.

TL to NL and NL to TL

I go both ways translating. My theory is that it makes a better mental connection, and at this stage of my language learning I'm just doing direct translations from one language to the other. I will likely discontinue this practice when I make the monolingual transition and/or when I start sentence mining. NL to TL is more difficult, but both notes graduate at basically the same rate, just delayed slightly.

Because of this, I do 20 words a day, and use the feature "Bury new related cards". This makes it so I only see one direction (NL to TL, TL to NL) for new cards in a day.

Speed

When reviewing, I review very quickly. I average about 4 sec/card, but most I try to rate instantly. My logic is as follows - during immersion, you don't have 10 sec to remember the word, by the time you do, lines of dialogue will have gone by and you'll need to catch-up or rewind. If I don't immediately know a word, I give myself one moment to think it up before I fail it.

This has worked well for me. In recent weeks I've steadily been doing ~225 reviews in ~15 minutes. Failing newer cards multiple times doesn't really affect the length of my review sessions - if it's failed 5 times in a session that's really like 25 sec, while if I was taking 10 sec each I could only fail it 2.5 times.

Stats

I've studied 26/30 days recently, but only 86/138 (62%) of days overall. I currently have 1074 (12.76%) mature cards, 581 (6.9%) Young+Learn, 89 (0.19%) suspended (cards that are too easy), and 6660 (79.1%) unseen. Remember that I'm doing NL to TL and TL to NL, so you can divide those numbers by 2 for actual words. Basically, I'm about 20% of the way through this deck in ~4 months of very inconsistent studying.

Immersion

YouTube

Immersing has been super easy. The first thing I started with was YouTube, after creating a German language account. The first thing I watched was a channel by Kathrin Shectman who does Story-Listening for young children, based on Krashen's work. Super comprehensible, but extremely low level (aimed at 2nd grade or lower, I think). I watched about 4 of those videos and felt pretty comfortable. Then I snuck in two Kurzgesagt videos, which were surprisingly comprehensible at this stage - lots of cognates when things get scientific and technical.

Next I watched ~10 episodes of Super Wings, a children's cartoon show with 10 minute episodes, all on YouTube with subtitles. I tried to watch Bernd das Brot, but the YouTube episodes lacked subtitles and I really struggled without them.

The biggest asset so far for comprehension has been Extr@ auf Deutsch, which I watched next. It's a simple sitcom style show aimed at German language learners. It's very comprehensible while watching, completely subtitled in German, and is actually pretty good and funny. I immediately binge watched it, and then watched it 2 or 3 times immediately after (13 episodes at 24 min each = ~300 minutes each watch) over the next week or so. If I ever didn't have something to watch, it was old reliable.

Other content I watched in rough chronological order: Nico's Weg, 1 hr 45 language learning filmed at the A1 level; MrWissen2Go, a channel that explains Politics, History, and News events (aimed at natives and not super comprehensible at first); Deutsch Lernen, a channel with a bunch of German graded readers at the A1-B2 levels uploaded with the text and audio narration; ZDF Heute-Show, German equivalent of the Daily Show; about 11 hours of a Gronkh Let's Play of the newest Assassin's Creed (fairly dialogue heavy, and Gronkh speaks slowly and clearly); and recently nightly news segments from TagesSchau (15-30 min each). I/ve watched a few episodes of the Easy German Podcast in video form, which are completely subtitled.

ARD

One of the public broadcasting conglomerates in Germany is ARD, and they have tons of TV shows, movies, and documentaries to watch for free, anywhere in the world (although some are locked to within Germany). I don't have a history to look at with ARD, but I remember watching a mini series called Deutscher, 4 episodes 40 min each, and a season of a show called [Last name] vs. [Last name], but I can't remember the title anymore.

Now I almost exclusively watch a daily soap opera Sturm der Liebe. It's a bit of a slice of life, very easy to follow, and mostly comprehensible to me.

Netflix

The issue with Netflix is that only for native German shows do the subtitles and audio match up. Because of this, I haven't used Netflix too much.

I watched 2 seasons of Dark, but I think they were with English subtitles. I watched “3 Türken & ein Baby”, a comedy movie, and both seasons of "How To Sell Drugs Online(Fast)" in German with subtitles, but that's it. There are maybe 5 shows left I have any interest in watching that are native German. Once I'm better at listening and I'm at a higher level, I'll try to watch dubs. I tried watching the Community dub (a show I've never seen) but with mismatched subtitles it's too much right now.

Listening

At first I didn't have dedicated listening practice at all - it's was always YT or television shows with subtitles. Only recently have I been doing listening only.

My current job lets me wear headphones all day, so I've been listening to a lot over the past 2 weeks. I use NewPipe to download YT audio to my phone and play in the background. Again I've been using Extr@, along with some of the graded readers on YT. I've also started listening to the Easy German Podcast, which has been great. My listening ability has been progressing fairly well. If I ever want to turn my brain off, but still kind of use German, I've been listening to German singer-songwriter music, where the focus is more on the vocals than the music (usually).

I've listened to two audio books so far. One was Cafe Berlin, this week, which was way below my level of comprehension. Other than a few vocabulary words it was almost boring (the audiobook was spoken very slowly, which didn't help). The other was the Little Prince, one of the most translated books ever. I do NOT recommend any beginner to read or listen to this book. I got the general gist, but there was a shit ton of vocabulary I had no idea about, and it seemed a lot deeper and reflective than your typical children's book. The fact that it gets recommended for beginners a lot is baffling to me.

Grammar + Textbook

I kept my college textbook from back in the day, and read about a chapter every other week. I read through the grammar sections but don't actively study them. The chapters have short conversations, vocabulary lists, longer readings, and just interesting info to peruse through. I probably need to spend some more time reviewing grammar each week, like looking at older chapters, but because I don't plan on outputting any time soon, this isn't a priority for me.

German grammar is definitely necessary for outputting, but for inputting I've had basically no issues understanding everything. The main tricky bits that every German language learner struggles with are the different cases, and those I will definitely focus on when I get closer to outputting.

I have an Anki deck just for the vocabulary in the textbook. If I haven't had the listed words in my frequency deck, it gets added to the textbook deck. I manually enter these on my phone which is tedious, and why I'm progressing so slowly through the textbook. At first I was only going one direction with these (TL to NL) but then I just recently figured out the ability to go both directions, which doubled the size of this deck last week. The following stats may seem a little wonky because of that.

25/30 days studied, 76/130 (58%) days overall, 66.3 reviews a day, 3.5 min/day 294 (35.94%) Mature, 274 (33.5%) Young+Learn, 232 (28.36%) Unseen

Reading

I've done very little reading. I was going to try to read the Little Prince, but I first listened to the audiobook and I will not be reading that for a while.

No, like any good reddit language learner I started with Harry Potter. So far I've finished 3 chapters, over the course of 3 months. I haven't been very motivated to read lately, in English or German, and I want to change that. The chapters I have read have been fairly comprehensible - obviously there's a ton of new vocab to learn.

My strategy for reading, when I do read, is as follows. I read through without pausing for long periods of time, I don't do any word lookups, and just let it flow. I then go back with a fine tooth comb and grab a few words per page I know get used more than once or just seem important to the story. I write these down on a sheet of paper. I manually look up each one, and write down the definition on the paper. Later, I add these to another Anki deck, with the idea being that vocabulary in the book and the rest of the series will likely repeat. Then I reread the chapter with the piece of paper and translations handy for immediate reference. This reading is somewhere in between the two previous ones, a nice Goldilocks zone for comprehension.

The Anki stats for the HP reading deck are as follows: 166 (44.62%) Mature, 189 (50.81%) Young+Learn, 17 Unseen, 25/30 days studied, 75 out of 129 (58%) days overall. Like the other Anki deck, I only recently figured out how to review NL to TL, so the numbers are a little funky. I average 38 reviews a day in 2 minutes.

Summary and Conclusions

Average Day

So what's an average day like? I work from 7am to 5pm four days a week, and can use headphones nearly the entire day. On Wednesday I did 568 minutes (~9.5) hours of listening, and on Thursday I did 0 (just wasn't feeling it for some reason). I think I will consistently do at least 3 hours a day going forward.

After work I take an evening shower. Beforehand I sit on the toilet and usually bust out my Anki reps, which averages about 21 minutes a day. After showering and eating, it's usually about 7 or 8 pm, which gives me two hours or so. Recently I've been trying to watch at least one episode of the German soap each night (50 min), sometimes I watch more if I'm feeling up to it.

On the weekends I have more time to actively immerse, but I also have to focus on my outside life as well, so it can be hit or miss. This is when I watch YouTube, when I will read more, and when I will probably watch other shows.

Logging

I only just started logging my immersion hours this past Saturday. In future updates it will be far easier to tell you what I've been using for content and for how much time - most of this is just off the top of my head, using YT watch history, googling show names, and roughly estimating.

What Refold level am I at?

For most of the content I currently consume, I'm at least a Level 3 (Gist), I feel most of the time I'm a Level 4 (Story), even a Level 5 (Comfortable) at times. But I recently watched and read other people's updates and they seem far more conservative with their self-grading. Some examples might help explain.

The German soap I watch nearly every day: I follow all the story lines. I miss a lot of detail, and there are plenty of words I don't know. Sometimes entire conversations are just Gists to me. But a majority of the time I'm watching very comfortably and have no real question marks. (And some of the question marks are because soap operas have long term story lines and complex histories which I don't have the background knowledge for, having really only started watching a few weeks ago). Let's call it a 3.5

For the Easy German Podcast, listening only: Gist for sure, and usually a 4. I miss a lot of their jokes for some reason. Some topics are easier than others. This varies a bit more, maybe a 3.25-3.75

When I listened to the Little Prince audiobook, that was a Level 2 (Bits and Pieces) to mid Level 3.

For the evening news: Gist for sure, but again miss a lot of details, rarely am I Level 5.

Random YT videos aimed at natives: somewhere between 2 to 3.5

Areas for Improvement

Listening to 3 hours a day at work will likely be a huge boost going forward. Listening is definitely my weakest point, and I'd love to not have to use subtitles for everything I watch. I probably could start doing it now, but it's so much more comprehensible, and using subtitles also gives me some extra reading time too.

My vocabulary holds my comprehension back a lot. Very rarely are sentence structures or grammar causing my comprehension to fail (although maybe I am comprehending incorrectly). Instead, what usually happens is that some noun or verb is used that isn't a cognate or similar to a word I already know. Example, a recent episode of the German soap had the word for a Proxy, someone to represent you at a company board meeting. After that scene I had to look up the word because the whole board was surprised when one character said the other was their proxy. What's the solution to this? Keep doing Anki until I feel like it's useless. So far I've been seeing about half of the words I've been learning in the frequency deck in my immersion, but really difficult to estimate. It doesn't feel like a waste of time yet.

As I've said earlier in this post, I need to buckle down and read more consistently. I should really plan that I read for X amount of hours on Sunday or something. I could also go back to watching graded readers on YouTube, but this time just mute the audio to read instead.

Looking Forward

What are my end goals? Long term, eventually I'd like to pass the C1 test for German. Short term, depending on the Covid situation, I hope to do a Winter Semester in Germany this Dec/Jan. Being at a level where I can hold a basic conversation with natives would be nice before I get there, and being able to function somewhat independently without relying on English would be cool. Sometime in the fall I will likely hire an iTalki tutor or something similar to start outputting and working on my speaking. Writing I'm not worried about at all.

If I could project my growth for the next 90 days: another 500+ words from the frequency deck, I'd like to finish HP 1 which should be another ~400 words, and another ~250 words from the textbook. So far my comprehension has been very rapid - going from a German elementary school setting, to kids shows, to soap operas seems incredibly quick for 4 months of inconsistent study and immersion.

I may start sentence mining going forward. I'd really need to use some automated tools though, manually doing sentence cards (especially on mobile) sounds miserable, so any advice would be welcome in that department.

Right now I'd estimate my reading/listening abilities at around an A2/B1 level. It's definitely not intro, I comprehend a crap ton, but I'm missing a lot of nuance. I think I'm borderline intermediate. I'd have to look at practice A2/B1 exams and vocabulary to really estimate more accurately. Getting fully to a B1 level in 90 days would be a high bar to set.

Conclusions

Immersing feels amazing. The first time I started watching German content, I was blown away at how much I understood. The first time watching Extr@ was absolutely wild - the fact that I could understand most of what they were saying, and knowing that it wasn't completely dumbed down German was exhilarating. Watching episodes of the German Daily Show soon after, and realizing "I understand like 20% of this, wtf", later on watching German shows and understanding even more, it's really exciting.

Honestly I take a lot of pleasure realizing that I'm understanding what I'm watching/listening to/reading. It's wildly different from anything I did in 5 years of Spanish class and the 2 German courses I took. I remember doing the textbook readings in those courses, and now when I read them I understand absolutely everything, it's mind boggling.

I don't really have any critiques so far of Refold (other than my modifications to the Anki settings/techniques). It's kind of hard to critique something telling you to immerse more. As I said previously, I think the German grammar is pretty tricky, and spending a decent amount of time practicing it before outputting will be beneficial, but maybe by the time I get to that stage all the immersion will have paid off, and I will need to practice less than I currently think.

I'm surprised at how similar to English that German is. Many times things are phrased the exact same way in both languages, there are many common figures of speech, and a decent amount of cognates. German sentence structure is also completely wild, word order matters for some things, but for other things it doesn't, so sentences can seem completely backwards if you directly translate them to English but are completely intelligible in German. The German part of my brain will completely accept it, but if I start translating to the English part, my English brain throws up red flags.

I am still actively translating everything I hear into English in my head, most of the time (at least to the best of my knowledge, this is kind of hard to gauge during immersion, since having meta thoughts about how you are immersing kind of ruins the immersion aspect). This is easier to experience when I only know a few words in a sentence - my brain basically grabs on to the few words I know.

I think choosing to basically never pause content is really helpful. Just letting the content flow and not breaking immersion let's me consume more, doesn't give my brain time to think actively, and helps nail down the language patterns better. I still need ways to supplement my domain specific vocabulary so I can comprehend more though - there's always a trade-off.

If you couldn't tell, overall it's been a fantastic experience, and way more interesting than anything I did in school. The only hard part is making time for immersing - life gets in the way, or sometimes I just don't want to watch a German TV show or YT. I don't force myself to do it during those times, I'm comfortable taking days off here and there.

Doing Anki daily is now becoming a habit, and I'm far more consistent now than I had been before. Because i do my reps so quickly resulting in only 20 minutes a day of Anki needed, it's very easy to do daily. I might not always feel like watching a German TV show, or reading, or watching YouTube, but I can always do my Anki instead of browsing reddit or killing time in other ways.

I would definitely recommend it to anyone learning a language on their own. I wish I had known about Anki and how easy it is to immerse back when I was in high school and college - I would already be 10 years deep into two languages instead of four months of one! I think active classroom instruction plus Refold techniques would be completely OP.

Alright, this is probably long enough now. I wrote more than I expected. I'd love to hear any questions or comments you might have. Thanks for reading this far!

Here are some resources for those who are not sure how to get started learning French with Refold. Just ignore the mention of MIA ;)

Make sure you read the Refold website before doing anything else.

How to do basic vocab and grammar

Basic Vocab Anki Deck - 533 words

How to quickly make anki cards without a lot of special tools

A structured guide to reading novels

justinmeister's 18 month update, explains some theory

justinmeister's 23 month update

GoSuloz's update #1, beginner/intermediate level

GoSuloz's update #2

perry dimes 3 month update

There was a post over the weekend asking how many shekels it cost me to buy the Refold community from Matt.

This was obviously an antisemitic troll, but I figured I'd give an answer anyway: It cost me thousands of hours of my life.

• Dozens of hours coaching Matt.

• Dozens of hours counseling him when MIA fell apart.

• Hundreds of hours interviewing him to understand his thoughts on language learning.

• Hundreds of hours writing the Refold roadmap

• Dozens of hours designing the Refold community.

• Dozens of hours interviewing admins and moderators, then training them.

• Hundreds of hours in the community, answering questions, helping learners, and banning trolls.

• Pretty much my whole social life. My nights and weekends have been spent building the community from 1,500 people on day 1 up to 40,000 people 2 years later.

If I were to go back in time 2 years knowing everything that I know now, would I make that trade again?

100% yes.

I'm passionate about solving language learning, and I'm passionate about helping learners achieve their goals.

I pity those who feel so powerless in their lives that they need to blame race or religion for other people's success.

You're not powerless. Every person in this community has the power to change their lives and achieve their goals.

The entire purpose of Refold is to empower language learners, and we'll keep pursuing that mission as long as there are learners that want help.

Here's a glass raised to everyone who's ready to kick some ass in 2023 🥂

I'm pretty excited right now so I just had to share this. Hopefully it might provide motivation to others too.

I've been following MIA for 8 months now (on 2000 sentence cards, 2200 Kanji PRTK, 1/3rd through Tae Kim). I just watched a new episode of an anime I've been watching for a while now with TL subs, and I pretty much understood everything. I had to pause to replay dialogue and re-read subtitles often, and I had a few dictionary lookups, but it's definitely been my best comprehension to date. I could really feel that I was understanding which honestly feels incredible.

It's quite a milestone, and I still have a very long way to go but just wanted to share!

Since Project Uproot seems pretty sketchy and overpriced, I want to recommend this guy's vid

https://youtu.be/4lB9_3pe0DA

He explains Olle Kjellin's method(The same method Matt and Ken say they would use) just skip to 5:18 to hear it

There is also this

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285234145_Quality_Practise_Pronunciation_With_Audacity_-_The_Best_Method

If you want a more in-depth look into Olle Kjellin's method

To give some motivation to those starting out, or others, I thought I’d make this post about my “challenge” for reading manga in 2021, and a little bit about my journey with Japanese so far.

A bit of context

Long story short, I started learning Japanese (quite slowly, like a bit of duolingo and random grammar video everyday) at the end of April 2020, having learned English mostly through immersion in the past, which gave me some bases regarding language learning. I really started immersing at the end of 2020 after doing the usual MIA/refold/ajatt beginner stuff throughout the second half of the year. Starting with 01/01/2021 I decided to log my immersion (especially reading) to have an overview and a trace of what I had “achieved”. My immersion comprises mostly manga, also some anime or drama but usually <1 episode a day, I’m much more of a reader (and that’s why I decided to start learning the language, as a lot of manga that seemed interesting was untranslated, on top of wanting to get a more pure experience). I am working a day job, which usually takes my time between 09:00 and 19:00, the rest is mostly free time as I live on my own. No holidays this year so far so only weekends were free.

The numbers

For the first half of the year, I have read approximately 215 volumes of manga for a total of just over 38 000 pages, which amounts to around 300 hours accounting for my reading speed. I do not time my immersion as by the end of the day I have had enough of timers, and it’s a hassle as I sometimes take breaks etc., plus knowing if its exactly 319 or 287 hours is not interesting. This averages to just under 2 hours a day of manga, and you can add 15 minutes of anki everyday as well as 22 minutes of anime 50% of days for about 2.3 hours of japanese a day on average. Needless to say, even though it needs to be said, my understanding has improved massively over just 6 months, especially in reading without furigana and understanding wordplays or classic expressions, nuances, and slang which don’t have good translations. I generally picked what to read to be at my level, so it’s hard to calculate how much better my understanding has gotten, but by revisiting older content especially it really jumps at me. I also have around 4000 custom anki cards on top of tango n5 and rrtk1250.

Awards ceremony (it doesn’t have yotsuba)

So having read a fair few series, I thought I would make some (personal) recommendations for anyone looking for manga immersion or just curious. All the advice is given with immersion value taken in consideration as well as general quality of the manga. Also names in cringy romaji cause I can’t be bothered to switch keyboards, sorry about that.

Best beginner manga: karakai jouzu no takagi-san . Beating a dead horse but it has easy sentences, simple but extremely useful vocabulary, and the story is funny and cute (I liked the series before going into japanese). The spinoff からかい上手元高木さ is also good and might even be easier, plus it’s not translated so you get to show off your knowledge in secret manga. I am still waiting for the doujinshi which links the two series together. Knowing tango n5+a few words should be enough to get started with it.

Easiest read manga: Kakegurui Twin. A lot of people like to shit on it but anyways, I think all the kakegurui series (yes I’m a simp), and especially this spinoff, are good immersion material. It is harder than takagi san, there is random specific vocabulary, and the sentences are a bit more complex (there is also more self-thoughts which can be a challenge). There is also more text in general. But the pacing and the games makes the chapters fly by, I remember one evening not being particularly motivated to read, picked up a volume, and read 250+ pages before I knew it.

Best manga with furigana: Ijiranaide Nagatoro san. I love this series (and watched the raw anime this season afterwards), it just makes me grin for hours, and it’s a pretty easy read. Just a tad more complicated sentences than takagi san, there is a ton more slang though so you better know what yabai, doutei, ukeru, kimoi, mean before starting out. Honourable mention: kanojo, okarishimasu (it’s a bit harder though (no pun intended)).

Easiest Seinen manga (so no furigana) to start with: Kubo san wa mob wo yurusanai. I think that’s the title anyway, for sure the MC is called Kubo-san though. Basically the same as takagi san but without the furigana. If you want to see how you do reading kanji words in their natural habitat, but are scared of novels or Vinland saga, this is the best option. Check out the free first chapters on tonari no young jump (goldmine of a website by the way). Honourable mention: Yancha gyaru no anjou san. This one is just like nagatoro with no furigana (what do you mean you’re “starting to see a trend”??)

Best cultured manga: Nande koko ni sensei ga?! Yes, I said it. There is a great variety of characters and different yakuwarigo, and it is not too hard to read if you just started to get into seinen manga. The plot is easy to follow as it takes up most of the cover and many of the pages. Shame about it going on hiatus but it is what it is. Honourable mention: kiss x sis (starting to get bored of that one after volume 18 though).

Favourite seinen manga/manga without furigana: Boku Girl . Lots of laughs, easy to follow, the art looks good, and I really liked the story and the characters. Vocab isn’t too difficult either. An underrated series IMO, but that’s not the point. Honourable mention: Kawaisou ni ne, Genki-kun. This one is a bit more difficult to read but it was an experience, I binged it in 2 days I think.

SAQ (sometimes asked questions)

How do you read? With my eyes, and manga either shipped from amazon.jp or scans on an ipad (app is “Chunky”) because I have limited space lol. Note that if you order >12 volumes at once buying from japan generally works out cheaper than translated version.

How do you make anki cards? Lately I save all the words I looked up (app: “Japanese” on ios), and every now and then I’ll import them onto my computer and generate example sentences+full audio. Not the most optimal method but it takes too long to use full sentences. I do 10 new cards a day as I burned out doing too many in the past.

You have such shit taste; how do you sleep at night? I’m well aware but my bed is ok so I manage.

Why so little listening immersion? Someone told me you’ll have a terrible accent, or even die!! I just watch what I want in japanese, no more no less. And I learned English mostly by reading and still lived, it may not be the most optimal method but I like it and it worked for me once already.

Any recommendations aside from slice of life? Chainsaw man

Can you speak yet? Mostly no but also yes, I have never had the chance to have a conversation, nevertheless I speak to myself in japanese more and more and it’s also been popping up in my dreams more. Also what I remember reading in Japanese, English, or my native language is getting more and more mixed up in my head which is a good sign (not sure if this makes sense lol)

Monolingual transition? Mostly no but also yes, if there is a decent 1:1 translation I just take that but for finer understanding, nuances, idioms, slang, I look it up in japanese on google and find articles or hinative posts. I am not too fussed about it.

Can you understand anime? Well this year I watched horimiya, nagatoro, higehiro as they were airing, and recently oreimo. And for example. I watched the latest raw episode of HigeHiro with almost 98% understanding (i.e. not noticing it was in another language for most of the episode), and I did no particular mining for that show nor reading of the source material. So reading+anki massively boosted my listening comprehension, as I expected (same happened in English where I did tons of reading for a year or two and then a ton of listening with no issue).

Any useful words I should learn right now? 連れしょん , my new favourite japanese word. Also ウケる ; 連中.

Any more objectives for 2021? Transition into reading more novels, I’ve got a few on my bucket list, for now I still have a heavy manga focus and I’m happy with it.

Final piece of advice? If it says “usually written kana alone” you better learn the kanji for it.

Like, comment, and subscribe to my onlyfans

TL;DR at the end

Hi everyone, I just want to share with you a discovery I made that can be helpful for fellow language-learners, especially those who are studying, like me, a little-known language or a language that doesn't have much online resources for immersion.

In my case, I'm studying Tagalog (the Philippines' official language, with native speakers in the southern part of Luzon island). Unfortunately, it's hard for me to come across material for immersion online, because Filipinos tend to write in English and when they speak they tend to mix a lot of English with their Tagalog. So, finding videos and articles in "pure" Tagalog has been frustrating for me at times.

Well, I found out that the website of Jehovah's Witnesses, jw.org, has thousands of articles and videos in practically any language, even obscure ones - as an example, they have material in four (!) Quechua varieties and two Swahili varieties.

Important disclaimer: I am not a Jehovah's Witness, I am not even religious (even though I like studying other cultures and religions) and couldn't care less about anyone's faith. I am aware of criticisms made against Jehovah's Witnesses. What I am sharing here is just a tool for language learning, in particular immersion, that hopefully will help many of you as it is helping me.

All the jw.org articles also have an audio version, which is helpful for hearing the correct pronounciation. You can click on any given paragraph and it will be read out loud. They are usually written in a simple and schematic style that makes it easy to follow and contextualize. The website also provides many videos, some of which include subtitles (depending on the language).

For those of you who are put off by the religious nature of the website, be aware that many of their articles are in fact on everyday and secular topics.

Some examples:

Video: The Shark’s Skin: Learn fascinating design features of the shark’s skin.

Video: Be Social-Network Smart: Learn how to avoid the pitfalls of social networking.

Article: 5 Ways to Improve Your Health

Article: Fresh Air and Sunshine—Natural “Antibiotics”?

Article: How To Manage Money

That's it! I hope that those of you who are finding it difficult to come across language immersion resources will find this post helpful. This discovery was too good to keep it to myself!

TL;DR - jw.org is the site of Jehovah's Witnesses. I found out that they have thousands of articles and videos (not only on religious topics) in hundreds of languages, including obscure ones and those with very few materials online. The articles have audio versions too to practice pronounciation and many videos are subtitled.

Hello language learners. It has been 12 months since I started learning Korean through immersion learning. I hope this post is helpful for other people who want to start learning Korean, or are learning it.

Scroll down for "Comprehension and thoughts + Anki stats" if you want to skip the detailed stuff

Months 1-10

Starting:

• learning Hangul through a random website, paying attention to the sounds, scribbling letters and words to a notebook

• Reading /u/retroagv 's Korean language learning blog, gaining wisdom +100, roughly trying to follow his advice, watching other immersion learners' advice and tutorial videos in Youtube

Grammar: 30-60 min a day, later ~10min a day, to a random encounter

• 30-60 min day. Talk to me in Korean (TTMIK) levels 1-7, doing 2-4 lessons per day. Simultaneously using LingoDeer (level 1-2) mobile application, 2 lessons a day. Around level 2 TTMIK, I started reading and skimming, quickly previewing future lessons way beforehand for exposure

• For a while (TTMIK levels 1-4), I used to write short notes down to a notebook but later levels just made grammar cards and put them into an Anki deck

• 10 min day. When reached TTMIK 7, switched to Master Korean book series by Darakwon, starting it from level 2 out of 5 just to find out any grammar patterns that TTMIK and Lingodeer didn't cover (not that many). Made grammar cards for new grammar patterns

• Dropped the formal grammar study at the beginning of Master Korean level 5 (month 8~) -> googling and mining new patterns if found during immersion

Vocab: Anki 15-25min

• Using TTMIK's My first 500 Korean words -book along with Anki deck made for it (by /u/retroagv) + Korean Vocabulary by Evita deck. Used the decks until total of ~1100 unique words and then switched to sentence mining (mostly from graded readers for an easy i+1)

• Mined words were put into sentence cards until ~2000 cards, then switched to vocabulary cards with the i+1 sentence on back

• Using Refold Anki settings, adding new 8-20 cards a day (less in the beginning, more later)

Reading: 2-3h

• TTMIK's My first 500 Korean words,TTMIK Easy Korean Reading For Beginners, Yonsei reading 1-3, Reading Korean with Culture 1-4, 외국인을 위한 한국어 읽기, Darakwon Korean Readers 1-3 and bunch of other Korean graded readers

• Having ~2500 mature vocabulary cards in Anki, switched attention more to translated manga: Dragon Ball and Detective Conan

• Reading the entire Dragon Ball manga series (+200 chapters?) REALLY boosted comprehension

Watching: ~60-120min

• Movies/dramas - mostly slice of life. English subtitles at months 1-4, dual subtitles at months 4-11, pure Korean subtitles at months 11-present

• Youtube prank videos and travel v-logs, dual subtitles if possible

• Rarely japanese anime with korean subtitles/japanese audio - weird experience

Listening: (passive) 30-45min

• Repetitive (passive) listening from graded reader mp3's (Darakwon, Yonsei), TTMIK Iyagi Beginner podcast, later TTMIK Iyagi Intermediate podcast

Outputting:

• Tried the "write something a little bit everyday" for two days at month one (...what I wrote was full of mistakes...), other than that no

Months 11-12

Grammar:

• If new a grammar pattern is encountered during immersion -> Google, maybe make a grammar card for it

Vocab: Anki 20-30 min day

• Mining important feeling / easily understandable / funny / many times seen words i+1, making a vocab card

• Vocab card: Korean word in the front - Back has explanation in my native language, especially if noun / + the sentence itself and audio / + Korean explanation from Naver dictionary / + Hanja character(s) / Sometimes only monolingual Korean explanation

• Anki: 15-20 new cards a day, trying to keep 1-2 days worth of backlog

• Retiring Anki cards with atleast 1 year interval

Reading: 3-6 hours day (~1h intensive, looking up every word, rest of it freeflow)

• Youth books such as Harry Potter, sometimes Naver Webnovels or translated manga

Watching: 30-90min day

• Korean subs in movies/dramas, trying to concentrate on slice of life genre

• If using PotPlayer videoplayer, I like to use "Skip to next subtitle line" to jump over the quiet scenes

• Korean subbed Youtube prank videos, traveling v-logs. Rarely just some random v-log/past stream without any subtitles

Listening: (passive) ~3-5h a day

• Repetitive listening... TTMIK Iyagi Intermediate, higher levels of Reading with Korean culture / Yonsei reading mp3s, time to time random podcasts

• If using computer but doing something else than Korean -> listening to a random youth audiobook from Youtube

Outputting:

• Only if there is a need to use a search engine

Comprehension and thoughts:

• Comprehension depends entirely on the realm of the consumed content. Currently somewhat comfortable in subbed slice of life or travel v-log

• Vocabulary is never enough, but at ~4500 mature cards immersion started to feel easier

• Difficulties in understanding some words that I see nearly daily, especially adjectives are tough / + Mining is starting to be difficult: I don't understand some common words but less common easier words are maybe not quite worth it to mine

• Spoken style causes problems in dramas/movies -> "I know all the words but can't understand the sentence"

• Quite comfortable reading longish sentences in not-so-difficult novels (Harry Potter is notorious for this I feel)

• Difficulties understanding drama/movie without subs, even if the sentence itself is easy to understand. This is most likely because the repetitive listening I have done is TOO clearly spoken/read to the listener

• I don't feel like there is yet need for outputting and I don't feel ready for it

• Since starting Korean immersion learning, my second language (English) has somewhat deteriorated :)

Big thanks to /r/Refold , /r/AJATT , /r/languagelearning , /r/korean language learning communities

Anki stats at 1 year:

• Mature vocab cards 5460

• Young vocab cards 741

• Mature card retention rate: 91.8%

여기까지 읽어주셔서 감사합니다.

Hey guys. I found 2 websites that allow you to generate subtitles and transcripts and even translate them to other languages for free. This is useful for shows that don't have matching subtitles or don't have subtitles at all (Often dubbed shows and Youtube videos).

FreeSubtitles.ai: It has a free verison and a paid version. The free version uses Whisper AI's 'medium' model to transcribe and 'Open Source M2M_100 Model' for translation. The free model is decent, but contains mistakes. It's best to use it for Romance languages (Tried it with Japanese and it gave alot of mistakes)

TranslateMom: It's much more accurate than "freesubtitles.ai". It even supports DeepL translations. Althought it is better than "freesubtitles.ai" , it still contains mistakes.

I was able to generate subs for an Anime that I noticed didn't have any.

Maybe we could even create a repository for language learners to post and access AI generated subs in different langauges. What do you think ?

On this day one year ago, I started to learn and immerse in German because my wife got a job in Bonn and we had to move there.

Since I've done MIA with French & Japanese, I knew this stuff worked and I knew exactly how to approach the language.

Immediately started immersing with Easy German podcast, watching dubbed shows on Netflix and wathing Let's Plays on YouTube.

I managed to mine a bit more than 1000 cards with Anki and I gave up because it was taking up too much time (but I started again a couple of days ago). Regarding grammar, I didn't bother too much with it, I figured stuff out as I went.

By the time I moved to Germany, I had 5 months of immersion and could get by fairly easily. I got a job in a German company and did the B1 Prüfung (which I passed with 267.5 out of 300 points - I lost a lot of points on the writing part).

While working I had to communicate with my colleagues in German, which was very hard as I could barely speak. Unfortunately I had to use the language before getting enough input, so I kinda broke the rule about not speaking before reaching a certain comprehension level (many people here don't speak English).

When it comes to reading, I've read 3 or 4 books in German (Brandon Sanderson books are easy enough ) and I plan to read more this year.

All in all I am pretty happy with my level, I will try to be more serious about Anki and reading this year as I noticed that I improved more when doing those two.

All I can say is this stuff works, all you need is to find enjoyable content and let your brain do the work.

I've already shared this on Reddit but figured this may be useful to some of the members here. I'll copy and paste what I wrote.

I'm now 1200-1400 hours into my Japanese studies. It's been quite the journey but I'm happy to say that I've made a breakthrough and consider myself conversational (and can also read intermediate material).

Besides staying consistent, what has helped me is achieve my goals is finding content I enjoy and using LingQ (full disclosure, I work there).

Japanese transcripts with audio have had the BIGGEST impact on my reading and listening ability.

However, finding this kind of content is a bit of a pain and requires a bit of digging.

Over the last year, I've done A LOT of digging and would like to share the 50+ resources I've used so you can save time, discover new content, and improve your Japanese reading and listening ability.

Japanese Transcripts

These are ALL FREE to use.

Good luck!

I just finished my first year of Refold. It is actually still the smaller part of my journey (unfortunately) and I want to explain where the rest of the time went, so if you’re only interested in the Refold days you can skip the first two sections and jump to section 3.

Before this long rambling post though, here are my basic overall stats:

Watching: 853 hours

Reading: 242 hours

Total: 1095 hours

Avg/d: 3.00 hours

Graph: https://imgur.com/YapXwVz

1) The beginning:

1210 days ago I was spending an average of two hours every weekday riding the train to work. I would typically scroll through Reddit during that time and I thought it would be better if I was more productive during that time. It was that day I started the Japanese course on Duolingo.

Soon after I spent some figuring out what else I should be doing to learn. Anki and RTK got recommended a lot so I jumped into that. It’s kind of a distant memory now, but I believe I spent something like an average of two hours a day for five months until I got past 2000 cards and enough reviewing to wind that down. I still did reviews on them after that but for much less time. I started dabbling with other decks and also some very limited video immersion with English subs but nothing really stuck and became a habit other than a core 1k vocab deck which I completed after a couple months of maybe an hour or so per day. I also went through Genki 1, but it just wasn’t really working for me. One last win for me though was buying a keyring of cards for every Hiragana and Katakana character, even the ones like きょ missing in most decks I had seen. I manually put them all into Anki and spent a month drilling them in. Really glad I went through that early on.

Anyway, I kept going without much of a clear direction and at some point I got burnt out or for whatever other reason I just did the bare minimum for about 8 or 9 months which basically was keeping my streak going in Duolingo.

2) Getting back into the groove:

A lot happened since I started learning. The pandemic came and my original purpose for learning was now gone (no commuting). I had a lot of other major changes going on in my life. New house. New relationship. A lot of adjusting to new situations. Despite being on a huge break from the hours of studying I was doing, my passion for Japanese wasn’t gone. In fact it had grown in a way I hadn’t expected. I still kept myself exposed to the culture through videos about Japan, listening to Japanese music, and watching the occasional show. I was getting more and more fascinated by Japan and the language. I think by this point I had been exposed to AJATT/ MIA but was too intimidated to start it especially while in the funky break I was in.

At some point, about a year and 4 months ago I decided to start taking things seriously again. I needed a way to ease back into building the habit of working on the language every day again. I decided the easiest way was to just go all in with Duolingo. I had paid for it from a sale at the beginning of the year and so had about 4 months left. I decided to make a goal of finishing the entire course by the end of the year when my subscription would be up. It was a tall order because I was only about halfway through at that point. I spent about 3 hours a day grinding for a few months and eventually reached that goal, a few weeks ahead of schedule. I know app time like this pales in comparison to time spent immersing but I’m still glad I did it because it got me back into studying and making goals again.

3) Enter Refold:

By this time Refold had come out and it was an easy choice for my next step. I was already sold on it and its predecessors awhile back. I decided to make another goal. I would watch and read for one year and try to get in at least three hours a day. I would find out this would be a tough challenge with a full time job and many other responsibilities.

4) Watching:

I started out very heavily leaning towards watching. Almost all my time spent was on Animelon and Netflix. Sometimes I would try to get into Youtube but it never stuck. I eventually started watching Shirokuma Cafe and luckily was one of the people to really enjoy it. I learned a ton from that show. I have probably watched through all 50 episodes at least a half dozen times. I still remember understanding almost nothing of the first episode, and below it was a comment from someone who was so excited because they understood it all. I was so jealous. By the time of writing this, I’m no longer jealous.

All together I spent a total of 853 hours watching shows, the vast majority of it being Anime, which I didn’t care for when I started my journey. Much like many other things about Japan, my love for anime grew the more I got familiar with it.

I have to admit that I did have a policy where if I was watching something for the first time I would keep English subs on as well as Japanese subs. I never watched anything with only English subs, but I do understand the quality of many of my watching hours wasn’t optimal because of that. Fortunately I am the kind of person that can rewatch things over and over, as I indicated before with Shirokuma.

I mostly stuck to Slice of Life anime and my ability level is generally pretty good. With an entirely new show I can understand at least half of everything, but there is still too much I don’t understand. Of course it depends on the show. For easier content like Shirokuma, I can understand almost all of it. For some of the episodes I understand everything easily except for a few words, even when it is just playing in the background.

Aside from the first run TL+NL subtitle thing, I typically jump back and forth between raw and TL subs for rewatching.

All together I am pleased with how much better my listening ability has gotten. It has gotten to the point where I am enjoying shows a lot more just because I understand a lot of it without effort. Even when I do have NL subs on I tend to stray from them and then notice I’ve stopped reading them for awhile.

5) Reading:

I think I took too long to get into reading but then again it never really interested me in my native language. I’m not the kind of person to go buy a book and then lay down all afternoon and go through it. I much prefer visual media.

Once my listening caught up with my prior couple years of learning vocab, I knew I had to try to get into it, especially because I still couldn’t really get back into Anki. I eventually ended up deciding on using Lingq and after going through the beginner material started importing the subs from shows I was watching. Shirokuma was the first one I did. The first episode has very little going on, not a lot of vocab, and not a lot of text anyway. It took me two hours to read that episode. By the time I got to episode 50 it took me a half hour to read an episode. I read through all of it at least one more time since I was rewatching that show a lot.

The effort paid off a lot. I was picking up vocab at a fast pace and it was constantly clicking while watching because it was the same set of words, but I wasn’t too trapped in a limited set of words because the series is so long and has at least 6k unique words overall.

In this first half of the year I also read a few other shows like Yuru Camp. I also read my first light novel which was book 1 of Konosuba. I didnt know how to buy books and convert them and import them yet, but someone else had done it and shared it on Lingq. I loved the anime so I thought it would be a fun read. It was but oh man was that difficult. Much like my other reading experience though, it got a lot easier towards the end.

About halfway through the year I got burnt out again and ended up taking time off doing the bare minimum Duolingo again (just getting legendary status everywhere cuz i didnt do those when completing the course).

Fortunately I got myself back into the swing of things by watching a lot more anime with TL+NL subs and then got myself back into reading again. At this point doing the usual anime sub reading for shows I was already familiar with was getting too easy and boring. I decided more light novels should be what I focus on. I figured out how to buy Japanese books and import them into Lingq and then started spending the majority of my time going through them.

I recently crossed a half a million words read in Lingq, a quarter of them being in just the last month. Im about to finish my fifth light novel and I’m actually having a lot of fun doing it. My vocab has been ramping up again and I can definitely feel it when I go back to watching.

There are still sentences full of words I haven’t understood yet but it’s starting to get rare to come across “blue words” (words i havent seen before). The amount of sentences full of known words has absolutely increased a lot and explains how I can get through chapters in a half hour now as opposed to an hour or two when I started.

Altogether I spent 242 hours reading. Not a big number and I have a long way to go but the vast majority of the hours have come in just the past few months and unlike watching my entire focus is there on Japanese when I’m reading. If there are any low quality hours while reading they are few and far between, like when I’m falling asleep or just bored to death from some part of the book.

6) Output:

I occasionally text and post in Japanese but I am purposely avoiding putting much time into output because it seems to be a waste of time considering how much i struggle with listening and reading. I believe this part of the Refold path makes perfect sense and I hope to start focusing on output in another year or so.

7) My future plans:

I am definitely a goal driven person, so I'm sure I should keep that going, but honestly I dont think I need to change much. This is clearly working for me.

Maybe I should watch less NL subs but that seems to already be naturally happening, and I still like to enjoy a first pass of a show knowing everything that is happening. I might just let that drop off when I already understand most of it regardless if they are on or not. Still, it will be my goal to continue to be more mindful of how much I’m doing that and so I plan on minimizing that much more than I have this past year.

For reading I want to continue to spend most of my time there. I am still better at listening at this point and my vocab still needs some gains until I can freely jump into new content and be comfortable and consider myself to be at Refold 2C. I also want to finish 30 light novels over the next year, which should easily be possible at the rate that I am going.

8) Conclusion:

I’m definitely not one of those wild success stories and I don’t have any JLPT certificates or any other notable trophies for all my work. I did manage to reach my goal though, 3 hours of immersion per day on average, despite taking around a month off. This doesn’t count time spent doing Anki, which still comes and goes for me, or time in Duolingo which I still do every day (only keeping my streak going so I know how long i've been doing this and also to make sure I'm always doing at least something every day), or time spent chatting or listening to music or any other Japanese related activity. I also don’t include time spent watching credits in shows. So overall my total time in the language is much higher but it felt overwhelming to track everything so I slimmed it down to only actual active immersion (granted with NL+TL subs sometimes)

I’m really proud of my progress and can’t wait to see where I am in another year!

Hi all! This is a continuation of my previous post on this subreddit detailing my experience of 600 hours of immersion in German (240 hours in the classroom + 360 with Refold). I've now gotten that number up to 800 hours, so I feel like it's time for another update.

What I've been doing:

I've spent the last 200 hours rather similarly to the first few hundred. However, I've been casually upping the difficulty of my immersion content:

• A lot (if not most) of my previous immersion came from dubbed/animated content, or from native content with subtitles. I have casually switched a great deal of my immersion now to focus on native content with no subtitles.

• I've started focusing much more on novels. So far I've completed 10 novels, but have started a few more. In total, I've read around 5,000 pages. Again, still while listening to the audiobook at the same time.

• In order to get a feel for casual speech, I've started listening to unscripted podcasts (mostly Gemischtes Hack). At first it was rather difficult, but after a couple dozen hours it feels relatively comfortable. I will continue doing this relatively often to improve my conversational comprehension.

• I've also started to venture into more technical domains. For example, I found it weird that I didn't know how to read things like 2 + 3 = 5 or 2^3 = 8 out loud, and so I started watching some recorded video lectures on YouTube. I've watched through the following series on theoretical quantum mechanics (this still counts as comprehensible input, since I am a physicist).

In terms of pure time spent, I've bumped up my daily average from 1.5 hours/day to almost 3/day (and sometimes more than 4/day if I'm particularly motivated) by introducing more passive listening. I'm not sure if anything more is sustainable for me in the long-term, but for now 3 hours/day feels comfortable.

In addition, I've started using Anki slightly more. In my last update, I had roughly 700 words in my sentence-mining deck. Now I have around 1,000. This is not a lot, but I'm still finding that simple exposure and occasional lookups is enough for me to acquire a lot of words without Anki. Based on my reading ability, I'd estimate my vocabulary to be somewhere around 7,000-8,000 words, although it certainly could be less.

Also, as I mentioned last time, I've also been doing a decent amount of output (although the ratio of output to input is like 1:10). I had a huge win a couple of weeks ago at a party, during which I spoke to a group of German people. About 5 minutes into the conversation, they asked where I was from and I told them, and they refused to believe I wasn't German. I'm fully convinced it was because of the loud music (and a bit of alcohol), but the compliment still gave me a boost of motivation like never before.

Results/comprehensibility:

I'd still say I have roughly a level 5 comprehension with almost all media that I regularly consume. However, I'm starting to notice that I'm picking up on more nuance where I wasn't before. For example, I recently rewatched a series that I had seen at around the 500 hour mark, and even though I still understood most of what was being said then, I was able to pick up on the subtle jokes/interactions between characters that had previously gone unnoticed.

I've also gotten much better at understanding literature. The number of unknown words per page of any given book now fluctuates between 1 and 2, whereas previously it was closer to 3 or 4. This is likely due to a jump in vocabulary from being exposed to more and more literary language. I've also become much more comfortable with the grammar that is unique to literature (Konjunktiv, Präteritum, etc.) and I'm starting to build intuition for irregular past tenses and conjunctive conjugations.

Output has gotten a bit easier as well, although I have noticed that if I spend a couple of days not outputting, it gets really difficult to get back into it, and I need a "warming up" period to get back to speaking fluidly. Once I do that, though, I find that I can speak relatively "fluently" (whatever that word actually means).

Going forward:

I'm still going to focus on getting my comprehension up, in particular by continuing to immerse in more and more difficult media. I've recently started listening to the Game of Thrones books, which should afford me both an enormous amount of immersion material as well as exposure to more flowery language that you won't hear in everyday speech.

A huge gap in my ability is that I cannot understand or follow discussions on politics or the news. I may try to remedy this by watching the news in German every morning or every few days. Hopefully that will be enough to give me a good introduction to more "topical" domains that people tend to talk about.

My goal is still to reach 1,000 hours of Refold (so 1,240 hours total) before I start learning another language. However, since I've started spending more time per day with German, I might reach this goal before I expected to. In that case, I'll simply keep immersing until I'm happy with my level of fluency.

I'll put out another update at 1,000 hours. For now, have fun, keep immersing, and trust in the process!

Hey guys.

I literally just found this and wanted to share it with you.

Access the github page of the creator to configure it. Hope it helps.

(A little in-between post before my 1000 hour update.)

I've been using Refold for a little over a year now (roughly 900 hours) to learn my TL (German) after an unsuccessful attempt to learn it through formal courses and speaking-early methods. As a result, my comprehension ability has skyrocketed. I've also done quite a bit of output (I live in a country where German is spoken), and that has also gotten significantly easier.

This last week, I decided to put my language skills to the test and go on a date entirely in my TL. I was incredibly nervous beforehand and was worried that we'd end up switching to English within just a few minutes, but other than a few words here and there, we never really switched. And on top of that, I never felt like the conversation was shallow or that there was something I wanted to say that I couldn't express in my TL, and I also never felt that she was simplifying her language for my sake.

I had my doubts with Refold at first, and even still had doubts after a few hundred hours in, but now I can safely say that immersion is basically magic. I would have never been able to hold a compelling conversation with a stranger in my second language for that long without Refold, and so I wanted to share this story for people who have doubts. This stuff works!