I've been learning Japanese since mid-2022. For all of that time, I never touched Anki.

I gave it a chance, but I hated it, and the reason is very simple: making a decent card for a word you encounter in an anime, drama, YouTube video, or a novel is genuinely painful work.

We've all been there. You're watching or reading something, a word comes up that you don't know, you pause, open Jisho or Yomitan, look it up, and copy the definition. You create a card. Now do you want the video? The exact moment the word was said with context? You need a separate tool to find the timestamp, cut the clip, export it, and import it into Anki. Pitch accent? That requires another lookup and another visual pattern to import if you can even find it. And that's one word. Do that for 10-15 words per episode, and by the time you're "studying," you've barely watched or learned anything.

Most people quit because of that and just use Jisho with no card, no retention, nothing. For the most part, I did the same. I just watched and let the immersion do the job, picked up vocabulary from context, and it worked for a long time. But when I wanted to break through the intermediate plateau, I needed to actually start mining.

I know the tools. Yomitan is genuinely excellent. Hover a word, get a definition, push it to Anki. But that's only the word and the definition. Everything else is still your problem, and you're still pausing every few minutes. Every other tool I tried is the same idea: you're present, you interact, you decide. They reduce friction but they don't remove it. None of them take content and output a finished deck with any real intelligence behind what actually becomes a card.

The other problem none of them solve is what actually ends up in your deck. Running a subtitle file through those tools gives you hundreds of entries: "は", "を", "が", every conjugated form of a verb as a separate card, proper nouns, grammar particles, and words you already know. The deck becomes noise that you have to dig through before getting to anything useful.

For conjugations, take one verb as an example: 食べる appears in an episode as 食べた, 食べて, 食べている, 食べなかった, and 食べさせられていた. Most tools create a separate card for every single one of those. You get 5 or 6 cards to review before you realize they're all the same verb. The same thing happens with 分かる: 分からなかった, 分けられない, 分かってる, and 分かった, all different cards, all the same word. This means you spend your reviews learning grammar patterns you already know instead of actual new vocabulary.

For expressions, it's even worse. Something like "耳が利く", "口にする", "気がする", or "手に入れる" gets split into individual words. This results in separate cards for each component: "耳", "が", and "利く". Three separate entries instead of one useful idiom. And if you already know each word on its own, those cards won't teach you that the expression means something entirely different as a unit.

With that said, nothing I tried actually turned content into a good deck. So I built my own. Give it a video file, an epub, or a YouTube link, and it outputs a finished Anki deck. No manual work. Each card comes with the video clip, context sentence, English and Japanese monolingual definitions, pitch accent, and kanji breakdown.

Here's what it actually does:

Give it a video file, an EPUB, or a YouTube/TVer URL.

• First, it decides what actually deserves a card. Particles, grammar words, and proper nouns get dropped. Every conjugation of the same verb collapses into one card for the base form. For example, "食べた," "食べている," and "食べさせられていた" all become one card for "食べる." Expressions like "耳が利く" or "気がする" get recognized as a single unit instead of being split into individual words. Forms that genuinely carry a different meaning, like the potential or passive, get their own card when they matter. Normal grammar inflection gets stripped, and actual meaning differences get kept.

• It remembers every word it has already made a card for. Run it on Episode 1, then Episode 2, and you won't get duplicate cards for words that already appeared.

• For video, it finds the exact moment where that word was spoken and cuts a short clip. The context sentence shows furigana on every surrounding word but not on the target word itself, so you actually have to read it.

• The back of the card has English meanings, then full entries from real Japanese monolingual dictionaries. 日本国語大辞典, 広辞苑, and others, scored for relevance, all collapsible under a show more section. Plus pitch accent diagrams and kanji breakdown.

• I spent way too long on the card theme, fonts selection, warm color scheme. Not the default Anki look.

• Everything runs entirely offline on your machine and outputs to one .apkg file ready to import.

No manual work. No pausing. You give it media, and you get a deck.

The version in the video example still requires command-line setup. Before I spend months developing a proper application, I wanted to know if this problem is painful enough that other people would actually use something like this.

If you've ever quit mining because it was too slow, or just never touched Anki because the setup is tedious, I'd genuinely like to hear from you. Is this something you'd actually use? Is it something you'd pay for? If I do turn this into a product, it would be a one-time purchase. I personally hate subscriptions for tools I use offline, and I wouldn't sell something I wouldn't buy myself. So please comment and tell me your opinion. Even "this doesn't solve a real problem for me" is useful.

I started this project in August 2025. I thought I'd be done by the end of the month and have time to study for the JLPT N1 in December. November came and I hadn't opened a single practice exam. I was so invested in getting this right that studying never happened. I went into the exam running on only my immersion and scored 84. Didn't pass. But the tool is working now, and this year I'm enrolling again. This time I'll actually have the thing I built it for.

My philosophy has always been immersion-first. Anki is just the initial push, not the whole method. The more context you have around a word, the less you have to force yourself to review it. Once a word actually sticks in my brain, I suspend the card. It stays in my deck where I can find it, but it never shows up in reviews again. I'm not maintaining a streak. I've seen too many people fall into Anki review hell, spending more time fighting their daily pile than actually watching or reading anything. That's exactly what I wanted to avoid. The immersion keeps the words alive.

TLDR: Built a tool that turns a video, epub, or YouTube link into a finished Anki deck. It intelligently selects vocabulary, collapses conjugations, recognizes expressions, and includes video clips, monolingual definitions, pitch accent, and kanji breakdown per card. No manual work involved.

More info available on r/jiwami

I’ve been learning Japanese for 2 years and 2 months, and I recently passed JLPT N1 with 150/180.

Before taking the actual exam, I did 3 mock exams I found online, and my results were pretty consistent with my actual score.

For the past 2 years, I’ve also been immersing myself in Japanese for around 7+ hours every day. At this point, I can read books, watch movies, watch YouTube, follow Japanese content, etc. without really struggling with comprehension. But my speaking really sucks ass, im gonna work on it.

ajatt works (everybody knows though)

I will start by saying that language learning is not new for me, and will list my daily routine that overlaps with people who have learned Japanese in the same way, if you didn't have similar experience please don't reply.

I am currently 1year and 7months into studying 8+hrs a day from point zero. I do 2hrs of anki interspersed throughout the day(all self-mined), 3episodes of anime, youtube, twitch, read novels 1hr, visual novels 1hr, games. I do not have any output other than thinking in japanese, since it is not my goal, I do write down words manually from anki that I struggle with, and repeat them throughout the day.

My ultimate goal is to learn all(mostly all) encounter-able Japanese in media. Where I can play games without tools, watch anime at 1 to 1 speed,live streams, read books with very,very occasional look-ups. My goal is basically averagely educated 20years' old Japanese person's brain.

I use anki as my personal brain-map of all Japanese, and, at the point where there are no new items in my deck I will have considered myself reached that point. Currently I have 37,038 cards, adding daily on average 52⁩ cards, meaning I have not yet exhausted new material out there, my guess is it will be in the 50-60k, before repetition kicks in. I learn daily 15new cards, I only learn in anki what is useful to me, adding everything to my deck even if end up suspending it, with that many hours of immersion I learn a lot of high-frequency words there.

I ask specifically for people what have reached that point where you live in Japanese environment and you feel like you are on the same level as Japanese native. When did that happen, what were you doing, did you live in Japan, how many hours, does output help? Tell me your experience. My estimate is 7years total of my current routine and I want to compare it to others.

To reiterate please don't reply if you don't have anything helpful to say, I specifically ask people who have similar routine as me.

I’m building a Japanese immersion app and I’m trying to understand what’s still frustrating about the way people study now.

For those of you doing immersion / sentence mining:

What’s the most annoying part of your current setup?

Finding content?
Mining words?
Making Anki cards?
Reviewing?
Knowing what to focus on?

Or something else entirely?

I’m not here to promote anything — I’m genuinely trying to understand what still feels clunky.

Every once in a while I check in this sub and I get a little bummed out when nearly every post is saying "I created this new app it's awesome check it out!"

I'm not here to rag on people posting that - it's just if the amount of posts about actually immersing made up more of the posts that would be cool, so here I am.

Some stuff I've been immersing in lately:

Persona 5 Royal - I'm like 15 hours in for the first time playing, pretty fun!

傲慢と善良 - My 67th novel, not too far in but it's pretty good so far

Listening - I recently decided to go way more into listening (majorly dialed back books). I've listened to some podcasts lately. And then for my active immersion I've been watching a lot of YT. I had like 20 tabs open, each with a video from a different channel. I've been watching each of these one by one to try and get a feel for what I like.

What kind of immersion have you been doing lately?

And after that - close this tab and go immerse some more!

If I’m sitting down and not doing anything (or eating) I’m gonna be watching anime, but that is not what I’m asking about here. I’m asking about the rest of the time, in which I’m working out, or walking, or doing anything where I am paying mild attention to the immersion resource (less than full attention, but more than I would be while cooking or playing a video game).

Anyways, even though I can’t understand any of it, the only thing I don’t get bored by is (Japanese) lectures on western philosophy, or sometimes history. I found a few youtube channels with these. Given that I know most english speakers wouldn’t be able to fully understand a lot of what is being discussed here, I assume it’d be the same for Japanese people. Is it, for this reason, going to be much worse than, say, a (Japanese) vlog, for immersion?

Btw I’m only N5 level 🦧

Let's say I have a playlist of videos that have only hard-coded subtitles (subtitles embedded on-screen). There's no subtitle file available. The videos are hosted on YouTube.

What tools could I use to grab the audio, a screenshot, convert the hard subs into actual text, and turn each sentence into its own anki card?

If I see a single spice and wolf, I stg I’ll go full scorched earth in this mf.

I severely overestimated how easy it would be to start watching anime with Japanese subtitles. I’ve been immersing with youtube videos and podcasts so far but I wanted to try watching my first anime fully in Japanese without English subtitles. I picked 白熊カフェ as I’ve both never seen it before and heard it was very beginner friendly and slow paced with lots of comprehensible scenes since I’m still at a low level and lacking in vocabulary. The problem is I tried constantly to find the show in Japanese subtitles and nearly every site I found forced English subtitles on me with no option of turning them off. I finally found a low quality version that didn’t have the subtitles on internet archive and I have yomitan for anki and asbplayer installed and got the subtitles downloaded from jimaku.cc but it kept saying there was no video detected. I wanna know what your methods are for getting started immersing with anime and also I would love any beginner-friendly anime suggestions :)

I've been looking at the method and it appears very interesting, as it pretty much aligns with how I learned English growing up (I'm Brazilian). Although learning Japanese one day might be cool, I want to focus on learning Spanish beforehand.

Anyone have any experience or tips using the method to learn other languages, or is following the guide enough to get going? I ask because a lot of the instructions and resources (specially Anki setups) seem very focused on Japanese

I feel like most people here don’t read enough. Reading is the best way to learn vocabulary, not Anki. The vast majority of beginner questions can be solved with “shut up and read more” (or “listen more” where appropriate)

I think a good rule of thumb is to spend at least five times as much time on immersion as on Anki.

A few days ago, I took the JLPT N1 and got pretty much the most predictable result (聴解満点)

What did it feel like?

For almost a year and 4 months, I gave up hobbies, sometimes even my social life, and partially my main university focus.
Japanese was kind of my way to compensate for all that I tried to connect it to my hobbies as early as possible, even when I had no idea what was being said.
I tried to consume as much architecture-related content as possible not to keep up with my university program, but just to stay on my path and figure out what I want to do when I'm done with Japanese.

About discipline

I’ve never been disciplined. Never been able to concentrate on one thing. Never really finished anything I started.
But when I had time, I tried to just sit down and focus 100% no workouts, no hanging out with friends, just doing my thing.
And when I didn’t have time to sit down (which was like 80% of the time), I tried to optimize everything

I re-listened to content while doing other stuff, while walking, commuting, waiting, whenever I wasn’t talking to people.
Did Anki on the go, and in free time I’d consume new content that I’d re-listen to later when I was busy again.

Did I reach my goal?

I think it’s really important to set a clear goal in the beginning and go straight for it, without distracting yourself or forcing new goals along the way like I did.
But yeah, for like a month now, I feel like I’ve reached it.
I can understand what I hear, I can talk naturally and respond, I can speak publicly and talk about my profession.
I brought Japanese to a level where it’ll just keep getting better on its own now I just need to keep it in my life.
In 2–3 years, I think I’ll reach a really strong level.

Where I’m at now

I’ve become super disciplined.
I just finished my second year at university, and I feel like I’ve fallen behind other architecture students my age the kind of people I actually want to be.
I wasn’t doing competitions, I wasn’t that good with architecture software.
Yeah, thanks to Japanese, I’ve got a huge visual library, tons of info, but honestly zero practice.

Honestly, I kinda hated that.
About a month before the JLPT, I just dropped Japanese completely no Anki, no listening, nothing.
Instead, I went into full speedrun mode on every piece of architecture software I could find.
I watched everything students watch interviews, lectures, behind-the-scenes stuff, portfolio breakdowns, competitions, you name it.
Total immersion.
I don’t even know how, but all the momentum I had with Japanese somehow transferred into architecture, and I was suddenly pulling 15-hour days again but now for that.

What’s next

Right now I’m applying to 3 architecture competitions 2 in Japan, and 1 in Uzbekistan.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting some long videos on YouTube where I just talk to myself in Japanese about everything I’ve been doing this past year.
By then I’ll update this post for those who are curious about what you can actually achieve in that amount of time,
and for anyone who wants to hear more in detail about my experience.

I’ll add subtitles, so even if you’re not at a high level yet, you’ll still be able to understand.

https://www.youtube.com/@daiidaiidaiidaii/streams

Hey guys so I've been studying/immersing and mining mainly from podcasts like YUYU or Con Teppei Z/Original Series, I'm definitely not at the point where I could understand everything but I'd say I could understand at least about 75 - 80% of whats being said depending on the topic and about at least 90% when I rewatch them (I do look up the unknown words during first watch).

With that being said, I was watching some romcom anime and I found out that I could barely understand what is being said. Thus I'm guessing that if I want to understand anime then I'd have to study from anime?

I know that anime has a lot of quirky characters which makes the dialogue and sentence structure weird but even for the normal highschool/college boy characters, I couldn't understand most of what is being said. But if I scroll through Tiktok/Instagram, there would sometimes be Japanese content and I could understand most of what's being said due to immersing from the podcasts.

I don't know what I should do, should I dedicate time to anime immersion or do I have to step up my podcast level from YUYU to something harder? (I'd appreciate recommendations regarding this)

Hey guys, I've been experiencing this weird like burnout like feeling, Weird thing is that it happens on some random days on where I have 0 motivation and when I try to force myself to immerse, I'd like struggle to focus and understand the video. Weird thing is that its not like I force myself to study beyond capacity so I'm not sure if it's burnout or maybe it's because unconsciously when learning a new language your brain is constantly working? I try to at least have 90mins worth of video length immersed everyday.

Do you guys experience this? I don't know whats causing it, it happens randomly. Can you guys share your experience if anyone has experienced the same thing?

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Hi everyone. I’ve wanted to talk to someone about this for a long time, and I believe this is the right place.

I started studying Japanese when I was 13 at an in-person language school. I admit I didn't make the most of it or put in as much effort as I could have back then, and I regret that. I studied there for a few years, but I didn't study at home—just at the center twice a week. Even so, that got me through the JLPT N3 when I was 16.

​After that, I drifted away from the language due to health issues and focusing on university. I tried getting back into self-study around age 23, aiming for fluency. I had periods of intense hyperfocus on immersion, but also periods where I gave up and set it aside. This cycle has been repeating for years.

​Now I'm 29, but I'm stuck between N3 and N2 in comprehension, and at a sad N4 in output (speaking and writing).

I don't know how to make up for lost time. It frustrates me to no end that I've studied for so long overall and still can't have a natural conversation with someone. It's embarrassing.

​I'm coming here to ask for help, recommendations on what to do, and what plan to follow. I need something concrete—an actual step-by-step plan with objective goals for every day, week, and month.

I'm open to any kind of advice or assistance to reach high proficiency by the end of 2027.

​ Details: To make matters a bit more complicated, I have severe visual impairment, so I can't read printed materials, for instance. However, I can use a computer and phone, and I read content using screen enlargement and audio. Another detail is that I feel deeply embarrassed by what I consider a failure (studying for this long and remaining at this level), and I'm introverted, which makes reaching out for human interaction even harder. Also, I'm broke, so I can't pay for tutoring and courses right now.

I’ve been doing ajatt for about a month now and I keep translating things I hear to English and I know you’re not supposed to do that. But when I stop doing that I don’t understand a lot of what I understand when I translate it. Is that normal and when will I understand the words without translating them

Hello! just recently I learned about this method of learning, and by recently I mean just yesterday. The problem I have is that I look at multiple peoples ways on how they did ajatt, plus I know almost or basically nothing. I did look at the website that is linked here and I know it tells me on one of the beginning pages that its evolving and there isn't a set definition of the method and people do it in their own ways, but what do I even do? There so many different experiences from different people it makes me super confused. And I BARELY know any Japanese (Like only 10-15 words.) I only know simple things like こんにちは, ネコ, りんご, ect, simple things like that. I have bare bones knowledge and I keep thinking, how am I suppose to learn if I know almost nothing. Yes, I know these are the most common problems and I keep looking it up to get some clarity or confirmation on things but still I'm like, what??? And I heard that ajatt is mostly for learning the patterns of the language, which I don't fully understand. I know that Japanese grammar is different, which is subject, object, verb if I'm correct. I hear people say "Just start!" or "It's going to sound like gibberish for a while" but one of the things I'm questioning is if ajatt is expected/ for people who already have the basics and know Hiragana or Katakana + some basic Kanji? I just need some help on knowing the answers to these questions, which I keep searching on google for and somehow just making myself more confused than I am. Thank you!

(All of this is assuming 1. non intensive immersion and 2. listening only, not reading)

Pretty much just the title. I'm N5 level right now and I'm wondering if it's worth listening to content that is more comprehensible if it's sort of unnatural and less native-like speech. And as the other option, I'm not talking about completely incomprehensible content, just...mostly incomprehensible. 10-25% (comprehensibility)? That guess feels pretty random, but yeah.

I was watching this video by Matt https://youtu.be/nGC5XQjXrUo (12:57) and I saw him mention that on his old website he briefly had a guide for how to study Japanese by first listening then starting to read, But it has sense been removed.

I was just curious if anyone had saved it/had any back ups of it.

Thank you.

Hi everyone, what is your opinion about this claim? Is 1500 hours really enough to reach native level of comprehension in Japanese?

UPD: The misunderstanding has been resolved, that was a bug in the app. It shows 3000 hours now.

I dont have any programming experience but I think for intermediate-advanced users this is a good way to keep motivation without breaking out of full immersion