qeadz wrote:I'm interested to know how you rate your first-time comprehension for regular Japanese programming? If you pick up a random not-too-serious drama and watch the first episode without having had any exposure to the language or characters in the drama, how well are you able to follow it?
I tried the first 17 minutes of Ns'あおい (since the obvious place to find it on the net splits it up that way). Obviously it's about a nurse; it seems that at least some of the doctors around her in her new post in what looks like an expensive private hospital seem to be somewhat hopeless. She, on the other hand, seems to have helped save a patient early on. Once the medical jargon started to flow I had no hope, but for the rest of the conversations, I think I caught quite a bit (except when things got excitable or the there were quite lengthy speeches).
I think my comprehension varies quite a bit. I've watched the whole of おとこめし without subtitles, and I could follow along quite well I think. I've no found EN subtitles so I'll re-watch it and see how much I missed. With 潜入捜査アイドル・刑事ダンス for example, I was mostly all at sea: I could pick up short snippets but I had only a vague idea of why anyone was anywhere. 偽装の夫婦 is the one I've been workign through in some detail and 6 episodes in I could watch an episode for the first time with no subtitles and catch the major plot points.
qeadz wrote:Then as a follow-up question, if I may, if you were to give a rough estimate to how many hours you've spent studying Japanese - what would it be?
Overall, about 7000 hours in just over 5 years. I don't have a detailed breakdown but if 2016 is anything to go by then 35% is listening to audio (during the commute or while walking/cycling etc), 40% is reading (but this includes Anki), 15% is watching native drama or anime and maybe 1% would be grammar work or textbook work of some sort. Kanji study was about 20 hours, so basically in the noise as a percentage.
I think my passive vocabulary (when reading) is in the 8000-9000 word range. I need to speed up my reading, but what I really need to do is to up my listening comprehension. So I'm now focussing on working through dramas in some detail and then just watching carefully when I get too bored with slogging through a given episode intensively.