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. I made sure to leave at least 30 minutes in the day to have my undivided attention, and the more I understood, the more I wanted to listen. Languages are always a great escape, because no matter how many hours you put into them, you don't feel guilty about wasting your time.

This culminated in me 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’.