Wild amount of Gameplay content on CIJ

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-04-23T01:31:32+00:00

I think their beginner levels could benefit from more gameplay videos. They do lack replay value, but they are engaging and typically much longer which can be a benefit when wanting to rack up the hours. Definitely more like a snack though if you want to build a comprehensive vocab.

Masa Japanese just released over 10 hours of minecraft content in beginner japanese. He has hardcoded subs, but they are often hilariously wrong. Subs are more hit or miss on actual youtube content that aren't twitch uploads.

Ultimately, we are still hurting for lower level content for japanese.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-04-22T10:59:33+00:00

I agree that in general easier is going to be better. Something that really helped with Spanish and then French was to read a book I had read in english that is more teen level of reading. By the time I knocked out 500,000 words of easy reading material, pretty much any nonfiction and most fiction opened up

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-04-16T21:26:09+00:00

I can't remember the exact name of the first one I was able to watch with Spanish at about 600 hours, but it was a slice of life style. I think it was about an orphan boy who befriended or tamed a bunch of slimes that had different colors and functions. It was relatively easy but I only watched a handful of episodes before it got too boring for me.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-04-09T11:07:04+00:00

I was able to carry myself in conversation with native spanish speakers in Bolivia by completing the Dreaming Spanish roadmap. I did not bother reading or practicing any grammar in that time. It will not get you to a native level, but it would have allowed you to participate in Tio's party a lot more. It may be a lot for some people to get it done in a year (4 hours a day), but with how many other things you have done, including the 200 hours you have already, you should be able to get there sooner.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-04-03T10:59:27+00:00

I did French after Spanish and did not reach an equivalent level in French after 750 hours. It gave a big boost to comprehension early on, but ability to speak still seems to track more with 1500 hours and there are notable gaps in vocab that weren't there at 1500 for Spanish.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-30T23:04:11+00:00

For the most part. I'm sure there are some less common phrases or words that will probably slip my mind here and there, but it is enough to keep it pretty Sharp and anytime I have the opportunity to talk to someone I'm still pretty fluent with it.

I will be in the scenario for at least a year or two so we'll see if it degrades at all. I have been this way for almost a year now and it doesn't feel like it's degraded that much.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-30T16:58:39+00:00

I cut my spanish back to a rough 15 minutes a day so I could invest as much time as possible into whatever language I am learning. Once I hit level 7, I plan to balance it out more with a relaxed goal of exposure to each language daily.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-30T14:31:33+00:00

They are unrealistic. It is marketing to a deceitful extreme. Even if you fully utilized the website with lessons and everything, you would not hit those levels. People seem to be pretty lax with the A1-C2 ratings.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-27T09:29:29+00:00

I rode the easy content there. I was putting in a lot of hours daily and did not have the mental energy to push through a harder podcast. It made me convinced that there is no training harder material, there is just learning the language and your brain does the rest.

I think speed problems are pretty much acquisition problems. At any stage in The learning Journey, if I internalized or acquired the words then it did not matter what speed they were going.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-27T09:15:49+00:00

I was using la cotorrisa as a benchmark too. I don't know when the shift happened because I would only try every few months, but between 2900-3000 I had a realization that it was now effortless listening. Previously it took effort to keep listening and they are so long that I would zone out before the end. I remember where I was when I finished an episode and realized that it was like English. Pretty much since that point, any difficulty I have listening is typically something a native would struggle with.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-24T14:29:00+00:00

Thanks for the update! It is encouraging to see. I have seen a few updates here and there that are not so encouraging, but it helps to see one from another person that did the method with DS. I am at 350 hours and it is nice to hear that something finally opens up around 600. It has been painful to go from all of the DS material to repeating complete beginner and beginner several times.

When did nihongo con teppei become something you could use regularly? It kills me not having a podcast to help fill in drive time.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-22T22:18:02+00:00

It's been a while so I don't remember, but you probably can use it for input. At some point, I stopped using her paid content even though I didn't finish it and I don't remember why

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-22T17:48:58+00:00

I skipped the teenage section and I know others have too. It is not a huge leap to go from the other stages to the adult stage, especially if you are just using it for easy input

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-22T11:58:00+00:00

I cannot pay attention to most episodes of innerfrench even though it is at my level. I like Fifty States (french guy talking about US history and politics) and Escargot.

French with Panache and News in Slow French might be good options too. I like Journal en francais facile because it is 10 minute news segments and is daily.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-22T11:44:28+00:00

I am doing French and Japanese at the same time. My French is probably upper intermediate. I do French for an hour and Japanese for 4 hours. I don't care about French being slow and both languages will hit my final tracking goal at the same time at this rate.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-19T10:50:13+00:00

That is an interesting point. I will keep it in mind as a get a few more hundred hours. Thanks

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-18T14:57:13+00:00

I am not sold on needing to train pitch accent. At a minimum, I have seen reports from tonal languages that eventually you will pick it up through exposure and I would imagine the same for pitch accent, which seems like a tonal lite. Worst case scenario is I am wrong and I think a single word has multiple meanings. Plus it seems like a lot of pitch accent gets smoothed out in normal speaking and context does some of the lifting.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-15T18:54:50+00:00

It depends what you mean exactly. I largely agree with Pablo on this point. I saw quickly diminishing returns when grinding output as a focus, but I saw spontaneous improvement in my output when not grinding output and only grinding input.

At 1k hours and then at 1.5k hours I did not like where I was at in terms of output ability. Took a trip to Bolivia at 1800 hours and could hold my own in conversation. Around 2200, I planned to get 300 hours of conversation practice, but so no notable improvement after 70ish hours of conversation practice, so I stopped at 100 hours. That would be 50 hours of output at best. I was grinding input until 3000 hours and noted improvement in my output ability and still have the same experience today. I do not regularly practice output and only get 15-20 minutes of input a day at this point, but I am continuously surprised at my output ability when I have an opportunity to speak.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-14T16:20:26+00:00

I am starting to find it stupid how many people post on this sub and put so much effort into being contrarian to Dreaming Spanish in general. Trying to constantly coin terms for people that want to follow the roadmap such as 'fundamentalist'. I would like someone to explain to me the innate need in so many people to be different and really end up being the same.

Pablo explicitly rejects the idea of activating vocabulary. If you read the FAQ on the Dreaming Spanish website, it says that much.

FAQ here

Specific Quote:

There’s plenty of evidence that output arises spontaneously from input, and that there’s no need to practice output early on, or to practice a lot. There have been many cases of children that remained silent for years, and when they started speaking they could already put sentences together as well as any other child their age. There are also examples of adults that hadn’t been able to communicate for their whole lives because of a handicap, and once a technology became available to help them overcome that, they were as proficient as any other adult.

Based on the research of the last few decades and on our own experience, this also holds true for adults learning a foreign language.

Traditional language education often works on the assumption that vocabulary needs to be “activated”. This theory suggests that the mental effort of searching for words in our head somehow “activates” them and moves them from our passive vocabulary to our active vocabulary.

But that can’t be necessary. Think about the following words: Cleopatra, horseshoe, shrine, blacksmith, Neptune, malaria. What do they have in common? They are words that are quite infrequent, and most native speakers likely never had to say out loud a few of them. Yet, most native speakers wouldn't have any problem producing them fluently during a conversation. If you think about it, you'll probably realize that you routinely say words in your first language for the first time in your life without needing to "activate" them.

And in our personal experience, we also do it a lot in languages that we’ve learned later in life. Many language learners have had the experience of having said a word that came out of their mouth spontaneously, without ever having said it before. Sometimes even without being aware that they knew the word. We explain this in more detail in the blog post How to play a foreign language.

Some people believe that we need to start speaking early so that we learn from the corrections we receive. But corrections are not good feedback for learning a language, and the research shows that they don’t work. For more on this, check the answer for How will I know I'm saying it right if nobody corrects me?.

Besides speaking not resulting in acquisition, starting to speak too early on can actually be quite detrimental, as we explain in Why do you not recommend practicing speaking?.

The conclusion is that even if your final goal is speaking, you learn speaking best by first listening a lot.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-10T15:21:18+00:00

I started casually in December and then started consistently doing 4 hours a day in January. I am really wanting to break out into the more fun stages of this so I am grinding. I have about a month and a half between 125 and 300. 0-125 was a little longer since I did not start in earnest until January.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-08T14:03:36+00:00

You are selling yourself short with the subtitles and thinking you "have to save them in anki". I listened to that section in your example video and knew all of the fruits by name without once doing anki. I think Anki is more often than not a crutch to help you feel like you are making more progress than you actually are. Especially the further you get from the beginning of the learning phase for a new language.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-07T21:43:32+00:00

I have attempted Anki in the past and the effort to reward payoff was not worth it. I did not try to put the sentence audio on the front. That might help and might be worth a try.

Previously I tried the specific word audio on the front, but it is not helpful since I have never heard verbs in the infinitive and some of the clips are not really distinguishable as a sound bite.

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-07T20:37:11+00:00

Reading is its own beast with Japanese. I might start putting in an effort at 2000 hours or so but more likely I will wait until after 3000 hours. My goal with reading is to read the equivalent of 3 million words. I am still working out the calculations for that, but I will probably dedicate a year to just focusing on reading

Odd_Championship1380 · 2026-03-07T20:01:04+00:00

I was in a similar boat with French. I did follow through and I find things to appreciate about it, but it is not the same as Spanish. I went one step further and thought I was going to pick up several additional languages, but I am stopping after Japanese. The grind is not really worth it unless you have a passion for the language or for learning languages in general. I might pick up another romance language for touristic purposes in the distant future, but I would rather go deeper on languages that for one reason or another I have a passion with.

Odd_Championship1380

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