CI skepticism

Originally, I was more on the sceptical side, having understood French for the great part of my life, but never really being able to output/speak.

It wasn't really until I started VRChat and speaking in both French and broken Japanese that I realized that I could speak a lot more French than I realised (I just needed a bit of practice). It was like for every phrase I constructed, 20 or more words/grammar constructs would start surfacing in my active working memory, fueling a desire to salvage those lost fragments stored in my brain.

Around the same time I had also decided to challenge this scepticism by learning Italian with a listening-only approach, starting with Italian automatico, then a number of other CI (Comprehensible Input) targeted channels.
Finally, I ended up just watching native content through italian dubbed anime.
Even though this has come to a standstill, and I never really got to practice speaking it, I was amazed with the results from just casually listening (nowhere near the same hours I put into japanese). After a few years, I reached a point that I could understand Intermediate conversations quite well.
It definitely helped that I was already familiar with a Romance language already and that Italian is still relatively close to English. Either way, this was a lot more effective than the 1 year of conjugating verbs in Spanish at school (which I still enjoyed).

Although I had started Japanese earlier, my journey was a lot more rocky.
I began with a mixture of duolinguo, flashcards, WaniKani, and textbooks. To say the least, this wasn't effective.
Out of tenacity I carried on for a couple of years. This was until I was introduced to Anki and reintroduced to the wonders of spaced repetition (this time out of a school environment).
I managed to escape the first common trap, to enter the second trap: not supplementing anki with input (listening/reading).
I went through the 2K/6K anki deck, and while it was effective at memorizing the rough English translation to 6 thousand most common words, parsing non simple sentences was not getting easier to understand.

What about the reading?

Reading isn't necessary, but as someone who liked visual novels/light novels/manga, and liked reading in their own language, this wasn’t something I could ignore. Even from a language learning perspective reading is also the most effective way at building your vocab quickly.

The first book I read was Kiki's Delivery Service (a book with very little kanji aimed at children). This was probably the hardest book I completed. Not because it was in any shape or form a hard book. My brain was just adapting to this new way of presenting language. Subconsciously, it felt like my brain was forming a bridge between the written text and the spoken language I was a lot more used to

Next, I read the first book in the A Certain Magical Index series.
This had significantly more Kanji, being a light novel and not a children’s book, but it felt significantly easier.
After a few more light novels I began to read standard novels, and each completion felt like installing a new software update.
The sentences I could construct were a lot more complex. It even improved my listening. The amazing thing was It didn’t feel like much effort. I was consuming things I enjoyed so most of the time it didn’t feel like ‘studying’.