You’re studying to NOT understand - best thing to study before coming to japan 

This is so true. If you were like me and kept learning vocab and grammar and kanji but was always thinking “when will I understand?”. The. I just started consuming irl Japanese content creators with no subs or minimal Japanese subs and actually tried extremely hard to really listen. You think you are listening but you are not, you are listening the way you listen to English. You gotta try really hard and focus then slowly you will find that you don’t have to try as hard and so on. All of a sudden you will start hearing way more vocab you know. It was always there. You just had no listening skills.

The algorithm reccomended this video to me. Nice video, the view is so beautiful, I would love to just be able to live there.

I totally understand not wanting to go back. I moved to Japan (Kyushu) and have lived here for 15 years at least. I agree that immersion is critical. I don’t have the discipline to just study grammar and flash cards all the time. Language acquisition accelerates with actual experience.

Good advice. I'm a bit burnt out from immersion recently because I've been doing it on and off for 6 years now and I'm still not as fluent as I'd like to be, but I'm getting there. This was good encouragement for me to keep doing what I'm doing, so thanks for that. Beautiful scenery too

Your idea about changing your identity or aligning your identity with what you want to accomplish really resonates with me. The first time I read about that way of thinking was in Atomic Habits by James clear, where he argued, and heres just an example, if you want to always have a clean room think of your self as a clean and tidy person, because would a messy person spend that 1 minute making their bed or folding their laundy. And the more you think of yourself as a clean and tidy person the more you clean, and the more you clean the more you think of yourself as a clean and tidy person, creating this wonderful positive feedback loop. Great insight into language learning (and change in general)

0:52 not yet, but honestly I bet we're not that far off from having that. realtime AI translation tools like whisper are pretty good already, pair it with directional mic that only picks up the speaker you're facing and you'd probably do decently in comprehending most every day situations with zero language skill, although it'd probably be given as audio instead of subtitles ..and while speech synthesis is getting better too it's going to still be a bit awkward to first having to speak in your language for it to translate it

my name is ryan too :D i have found that i can understand a lot more when i have japanese subtitles with japanese audio but its so much more difficult with just the audio itself

Hi ryan i lived for one year in sasebo kyushuu. Best time of my life. Really enjoyed just walking around the city like you do.

Awesome scenery

Dude the view looks awesome where is it from the part of Japan