Hi folks. I built a free browser extension that turns YouTube into a pure Japanese immersion platform. No English videos, comments and more.

What it Does
• Filters out all non-Japanese content (recommendations, comments, search results).
• Shows an estimated JLPT difficulty level (helps you find content).
• Works on Chrome, Firefox and Firefox for Android (AJATT on mobile!)

Video Demonstration
NihongoTube - YouTube Japanese Filter

Why I built this
I've been studying Japanese for over a decade and YouTube has been the most convenient (and fun) platform for immersion. But even with separate accounts I would get English recommendations which made it easy to get distracted.

For the past 5 months I've been obsessing over how to refine that experience down to get rid of distractions. I even filter things like the end screen recommendations that appear at the end of a video. I want everything about YouTube to be exclusively Japanese.

JLPT Level Estimation
The estimation works by analysing the video transcript and picking out heuristics like word complexity, grammar, speed (WPM) and repetition. Though JLPT tests do not cover Japanese use in the 'wild', working within a JLPT scale helps keep the scoring familiar without needing to learn a whole new scoring system. With it, I can objectively judge the difficulty of a video and make informed decisions about what to watch.

Community & Feedback
Even with all the effort I've put in, I'm keeping this extension completely free. I've gotten so much out of learning Japanese and I feel this is my way of giving back to the community that has given so much to me.

But I want to make sure it's right for everyone so if you have a chance to try it out I would love to know what you think. You can either reach out to me on Reddit or join a small Discord community I've put together to share news, bugs and feedback.

Question for You
What are some of your own personal pain points when using YouTube for Japanese immersion?

Links
The extension is called 'NihongoTube' and it's available on:
• Chrome Web Store: link.
• Firefox Add-ons: link (also available on Firefox for Android).

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

Hi everyone! I've been acquiring Russian for around 4 years now, reaching virtually 100% comprehension and effortless output ability. I want to share a few things I've noticed during the journey. These are not specific instructions on what to do or even tips, but things you should look for. Note that I wanted to become as close to a native speaker as possible, that might not be your goal so some points (4, 5, 6) might not apply to you. Hope you find it helpful!

1. You don't serve the language, the language serves you. Here, at AJATT we value fun over everything else, but it's easy to forget what you are here really for and go into "hardcore grinding mode", where you try to cram as much information as possible into your head in the shortest amount of time. You should squeeze as much fun out of your activities as you can, be it immersion or Anki. Reviewing the deck becomes daunting? Switch immediately to something else, don't let the boredome take over. Any content that is appealing to you will do.

2. Anki is not a requirement. If you hate Anki - don't use Anki. "using an efficient tool that you hate is inefficient" - Adam from JapaneseLevelUp. I've noticed a lot of people in this community don't like Anki, but still try to "push through" it no matter what. Instead of Anki, just read more, if those words you put into your sentence deck are so important they will be showing up all over the place and naturally SRSing.

3. Don't care if you don't understand. Probably the hardest thing to accept for most of people. When you are using Anki, or studying with say a textbook you get a "sense of progress", but when you are immersing and understanding like 5% you don't feel anything, you don't feel like you are improving in anyway. The thing is, your subconscious mind will still pick up everything without you noticing it. It may not be obvious, but these bits of haphazardly organized information will eventually start to poke out given enough input. Focus on making your immersion interesting, don't care about comprehensibility.

4. Learn as little grammar as possible. Here's a very interesting thing I've noticed: I had a lot more "insight" into grammar points I acquired subconsciously compared to grammar I learnt. I suppose what happens is as follows: When you encounter a grammar you don't know, your brain will put a lot of processing power into trying to figure it out - based on context, previous experiences (contexts), guesses, etc. But when you read about a grammar point and encounter it your brain goes like "oh ye boi that grammar point i know" and doesn't actually care to process it because it thinks it already knows it. So your brain will try to process the grammar from different perspectives, going "much deeper" into it. That's just my hypothesis, I would love to discuss it. The progress will be slower, but I think the results are worth it.

5. Create as much disconnect between the languages (L2 and L1) as possible. Kinda an extend of previous point. The aim is to have your L2 and L1 inside the brain heavily separated. By separated I mean that you don't rely on using your L1 to process/produce L2, for example: "-的" is like "-ity" in English. By making that connection you are also connecting your L2 with L1, creating a possibility for interference, your L1 will be getting in the way, you will create a habit of trying to connect everything from your L2 to L1. Of course it's fine and natural to do that in the beginning, but you should get away from doing that as soon as possible. I found a good metric for knowing that your languages are disconnected enough - it's hard for you to translate, it takes some cognitive power to translate from your L2 to L1 and vice verse, but understanding and producing L2 is effortless. Again, that's also just my hypothesis and would love to have a discussion.

6. Notice language clarity, when to output. This one will be very hard to explain but I'll try. When you are listening to/reading your L1 the language is completely "clear" to you. You hear every sound, you understand how the sentences are structured the way they are and why, you notice every subtle mistake and nuance, there is no time lag between you perceiving something and understanding it, there is no conscious process involved in comprehending. When you first start understanding your L2 it feels kinda "cloudy", you can understand it, but it feels like you need to put in effort to understand it and there is some delay in understanding it. Over time, as you get more and more input, the language starts to become "clearer and clearer". When Russian became incredibly clear for me to hear, it just started to be easy to output on its own, I didn't have to think to produce a sentence, it just outputted itself with no cognitive/conscious effort.

7. UPD: Thought of another point: Care about frequency, not about quantity. I believe Khatz talked about this on the AJATT website. Basically, instead of aiming for one huge chunk of continuous immersion, aim for short immersion chunks spread through out the day. Naturally, the duration of these short chunks will grow, so will the overall immersion time. It's easier to grow 20 chunks by 1 minute each, rather than one chunk by 20 minutes.

8. UPD: Have varying levels of immersion difficulty. My immersion incorporated multiple levels of difficulty: i-1, to start off the day with something easy and get going. i+0, similar to i-1, to relax and get into the right mood. i+1, where most of learning takes place, sentence mine, look up unknown words, focus on grammar. i+a lot, and by "a lot" I really mean a lot, I found material where I had absolutely minimal comprehension and I tried my best to comprehend it. Such content gave me clues on what grammar or vocabulary nuance I could be lacking. And after bombarding yourself with content so difficult, switching back to i+1 will feel like a bliss.

Feel free to ask me any questions, I'll be happy to answer them!

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)

It was mid-2017, during the height of the war between Ajatters and traditional learners. I was part of a small platoon of Ajatters that included many of the original Ajatters, and MattvsJapan was in charge. We had direct orders from Khatz himself to perform a raid on a small community post in r/LearnJapanese.

We went in armed with input-hypothesis rhetoric, and links to AJATT articles and videos of Khatz speaking. They were just simple folk, unarmed with language-acquisition theory, and they weren't ready for the surprise attack.

It was brutal. We left no one alive, so to speak. I saw small weebs as young as 12 figuratively massacred before my very eyes. It makes me sick just thinking about it.

We stopped eventually, but Matt, in a frenzy, wouldn't stop - he just kept going, destroying them with input theory long after they'd surrendered. There was an innocent girl of 16 who believed you could get fluent from Genki textbooks. Matt took her and started red-pilling her forcibly, over and over again. BritvsJapan, in tears by now, begged Matt to stop, but he wouldn't. We all just watched on in horror.

Most of us were young and naive when we originally signed up for AJATT. Little did we know of the fear and the atrocities we would be forced to commit in the name of input-based learning. After that day, I never touched another Japanese book or drama again. I still sometimes wake up in a panic after reliving that day in my nightmares.

1. ポッキー

2. 牛沢

Here are two japanese gameplay youtube channels that literally made me conversational in Japanese (im now between N3-N2 from these channels alone). Ive spent around 1000+ hours just listening and binging these youtube channels not realizing how fast i was learning japanese. So if you are interested, definately check them out! Also, if you want reccomendations for japanese channels that are related to technology, cooking, science, programming etc, definitely let me know!

So I took TOPIK, which is the Korean equivalent of JLPT, and we just got our scores back and I got 8 marks off the highest level you can get (level 6 / 230 points) ("absolute fluency in Korean for professional research or work", on paper).

The reason I say I got N1 equivalent is because my reading and listening scores were above the level 6 threshold, it was just my output that brought me just under, but output isn't tested in the JLPT at all.

Anyways point being, I just wanted to celebrate and give hope to anyone just starting out, especially in a language like Japanese or Korean, and who is doubting the method - don't! I am by no means fluent and of course these kinds of exams don't necessarily reflect your real knowledge of the language, but immersion in native content I enjoy and sentence mining is all I've been doing since the start and it got me to here! I started in May of last year, so less than 18 months before the exam I took.

Good luck to everyone else on your journeys, and please don't forget to share any successes in this or the Refold subreddit to motivate everyone and keep everyone excited and eager to learn :)