Passive Immersion

A HELPFUL TOOL THAT WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE
BUT NOT AS MUCH AS YOUR PARENTS ALREADY HAVE


You probably do other things with your life other than actively studying. Only if your brain can handle it, try having something containing Japanese speech just playing on the background — podcasts, redtube, noflix, dramas/movies, etc. Passive immersion helps your brain to get used to the new phonetics, start distinguishing words from each other, and you’ll even pick up a random word or phrase here and there. All you need is audio, and it virtually doesn’t matter at all what it’s about. Don’t pay much attention to video (unless you want to). If you do though, and if you also try actively comprehending what is being said (without pausing and looking up everything you don’t understand) — don’t get hypnotized into doing it too much. It’s a bit of a time waster on early stages. Let things run on the background for at least a month or two while you get better at reading (or go through some grammar books) before going into active listening. I say do passive listening as much as you can as long as it doesn’t distract you too much. Apply moderation if it does. If you already can’t do anything, even play a game, without some random redtube rant playing on the background — you already have ADD, congratulations. At least you already know how to passively immerse. Might as well do it in your target language.

On redtube or noflix — jumping into Japanese content is pretty self-explanatory (which account’s region to Japan). You can even find a few new-ish TV-like channels on redtube. Finding a good podcast can be a bit tricky but I recommend just downloading iTunes and browsing Podcasts with your region set to Japan — you’ll find plenty of stuff with zero trouble.

If you can’t find tolerable redtube content to watch, you are probably just not ready for it yet. Maybe you should let it go: redtube really isn’t optimal for intensive immersion due to lack of subtitles (automatic ones don’t count) and non-customizable rewind (5 seconds is too much for a quick 1-word re-listen). And for passive immersion — redtube no better than any other option (noflix, podcasts, random torrented stuff). I am a pretty bad source for redtube channel recommendations. Over the years I unsubbed from way more channels than I am currently following. Most Japanese redtubers put the same hellish 5minutecrafts DIY music over every second of their videos, so until redtube/twatch/pornhub starts supporting a video format with multiple audio streams (one for mic, one for music, one for whatever the fuck else depending on the content) and allow viewers to mix them in real time, I just physically cannot watch 95% of Japanese redtubers, let alone Japanese twatchers (even passively) with their text-to-speech chats (not just donations): don’t even bother looking for good ones to have on background for passive immersion. I mostly follow music creators these days, and most of them aren’t even Japanese. What to immerse with, especially passively, is really something you should decide for yourself. If you aren’t really interested in anything… Why are you learning the language, again? If you absolutely need a starting place, I suppose I could recommend a few channels, but you should really find something you like.

I semi-follow 乃木坂46 (nogizaka46) and the rest of the N46 projects. The first 1/3 of their variety show 乃木坂工事中 can still be found on nyaa. The new stuff in on redtube (乃木坂配信中 channel). Everything in-between is lost to history as far as I know (except for a dozen random episodes with 0.1 seeders on nyaa). If any of you knows where to find the entirety of the pre-redtube 乃木坂工事中, plz let me know. I assume it could be on some national Japanese trackers, but no normal people know of them so I don’t have anyone to ask, and web search obviously won’t tell me. I assume if this kind of information is not known in the wider western weeb community, such trackers may not even necessarily exist. I mean, even nyaa — the most popular weeb tracker — is mostly used by Japanese people. And it’s not even that big: most stuff there has either 0, 1, or under 5 seeders (except maybe for big music releases and fresh dramas). So if even the Japanese use what is considered a weeb tracker, there may actually not be anything else better out there.
If you want to get into variety shows, N46’s stuff is one of the best places to start: the content is very much a real Japanese (unlike anime or heavily edited redtube videos), and it will teach you things about real Japanese people and Japanese sense of humor. Of course, for sociological research purposes season one of Terrace House would probably be a bit better, but Terrace House is very artsy: if you “watch” it passively you will mostly just be listening to either American pop music, or to nothing. With N46 content you can learn a ton of Japanese names through repetition, you get a long-running shenanigans with deep lore and history, and generally speaking the amount of content is practically infinite — N46 has been around for a decade. Partial subtitles are essentially built into most TV-ish content (and even basic redtube-ish content, to be honest), which is very convenient for active immersion, too. Also, I find it very appealing that while the show is silly and pointless by itself, it at least has ties to something meaningful — music (you’d be surprised how good it is btw, if you’ve only heard AKB48&sisters).
The show is hosted by a rather hilarious comedy duo バナナマン, and if you don’t know anything about N46 but have doubts about idol stuff based on what you know about AKB48: yes, business-wise the projects are similar, but trust me — they could not have been more different in spirit. N46’s content is borderline wholesome. Compared to 48G — the N46 groups are saint.
Music-wise they are night and day, also: N46 is much more serious about the music part of their operation. I would even go as far as to say that their music is rather good, and not even just in the idol pop scene.
By the way, the previous show 乃木坂46 did was called 乃木坂って、どこ？ and as of now can also be found of nyaa. Grab while you can. In case you are interested in music, the current N46 family is:

All 48G (AKB48-related) projects are not only a collective garbage fire, but their redtube channels don’t even produce any content, really. There is probably some exclusive stuff behind pay walls (mostly softcore porn, I imagine) but I wouldn’t bother looking for an occasional unofficial upload of some of it to redtube. What content they have for free on their respective redtube channels is absolute trash. You can find some daytime TV-style 48G stuff on nyaa, but there isn’t a lot of it there, and I say it’s probably a good thing. Honestly? Don’t bother. If you hate N46, 48G stuff can legitimately damage your faith in humanity. If you like N46 — you will put 48G’s content somewhere between untasteful and disgusting. It partially has to do with direction of course, but also 48G has very big and obvious problems with casting: most 48G members have rather unlikable, entitled personalities (you will immediately question whether the word idol is even applicable there). It’s hard to hate them for that of course — we are talking about children — but why doesn’t N46 have this problem? Better environment (aka better direction, aka better grown-ups in the filming crew), but also better casting to begin with.
I don’t think 48G does any actual TV stuff at the moment. Japan is pretty unanimously done with them at this point, plus their management company went bankrupt and all the different groups are currently being owned by… no idea who, to be honest. Various friends of Akimoto, I assume. Who too have no idea how to keep making money with 48G, I feel like. Remember PRODUCE48? Desperation was strong even back then. Imagine how they feel now that literally all of their “legendary” “talent” has “graduated”. NMB and NGT are actually not half bad musically. AKB, however, is the worst currently active idol group between Japan and Korea, and (maybe except for NMB and NGT) the rest of 48G is not much better (including HKT, the alma mater of the biggest mary sue in both Japanese and Korean idol industries). The whole thing can be described as talent void. It’s rather infuriating, to be honest: it’s a lose-lose scenario. On one hand it creates shit content no one cares about. On the other hand, the girls are obviously not getting payed much (or at all) and getting all the creeps, the hate, the drama, and no right for private life throughout their teens and twenties (which, I dunno about you, but definitely doesn’t sound like a disaster waiting to happen any moment to me). They all graduate at 25-30 with nothing but wasted (and in a lot of cases ruined) life: only top 1% of them may be popular enough to maybe attempt doing redtube semi-professionally. Most likely just porn though. Good luck starting life at 32 with no education, skills or talents, and probably widely known as a whore and a bully thanks to how Japanese press treats young women in entertainment. 48G were pretty endearing up until I would say about 7-8 years ago though (provided you ignored all the Akimoto’s barely legal pedo shit), but I guess that’s what you get when you have one perverted senile producer/songwriter responsible for pushing a dozen identical girl groups simultaneously for 20 years. He still has some good ideas though — the dude clearly knows a few things — but he sells most of those to N46. I don’t think we will never know whether Akimoto had any creative control over the disgusting 48G shit, and whether he was brought in to produce the N46 groups just for the company to look good for the investors (48G was like the most profitable thing in history of music at that point, or something like that) or because he legitimately wanted to start over with better, less perverted business partners. Since 48G and N46 are nothing alike in terms of casting and general level of morality, yet they have the same producer, I assume there was more to the immorality of 48G than just Akimoto’s touch. Or, maybe he is just being really thoroughly checked by his current management (which is pretty much Sony, by the way). Either way, N46 ftw.

モー娘 (that’s how cool people say morning musume) family -related content is mostly boring af but musically I think their label is pretty strong (I keep forgetting their name though, I’m sorry >.<). Maybe not quite as creative as N46, but still very good… most of the time. If somehow you’re a fan, you might find some of this interesting. The groups are:

こつぶちゃんねる is good.

みるるんチャンネル is not bad (as far as low effort content from a lazy ex-idol can get you).
may be the only ex-48G idol-turned-redtuber who has at least some kind of personality

おっ!チャンネル is my spirit father.

ぜぜまる。‘s content is pretty interesting.

遊牧ちゃんねる is occasionally interesting.

ジョイ家 is both annoying and occasionally educational. Features a gaijin though, but her Japanese wouldn’t be especially bad for you: I feel like she’s been in Japan for a long time and she is the kind of person who makes a conscious effort to actually speak the language they are speaking and not just lazily mimic it using the phonetics of your native language (practice know in English as tkyosam’ing). The dude host is great though.

GUNMA-17 is not bad but his channels are more or less dead now.

宮脇咲良‘s let’s plays and streams are actually really good. The channel may appear dead, but in truth it was never all that alive to begin with. She also has a dead non-gaming channel.

名取さな is the only other game streamer I could tolerate for her occasionally-on-point reactionary sense of humor. Not watching streams anymore tho. Too much water. Too much pointless blah-blah just to fill the air. Or the opposite — too much dead air. Annoying. Waste of time. There is way better content out there. Life is too short.

I also don’t watch TV news type stuff anymore, even passively, except for occasional ウェザーニュース: it always delivers. Probably because it’s not a TV news channel. Care to guess what all news are about there days?

All of these channels can be used for active immersion as well of course, but redtube sources (meaning, IRL Japanese) are not as good as scripted shows for it until you are fairly advanced.

Music doesn’t count as passive immersion unless your name is Katsumoto, but from the attention amplification point of view I definitely see how you could listen to music when studying (to help yourself zone out), and to speech when doing chores and stuff. If somehow you aren’t a fan of Japanese music already, check out ヒトリエ, 緑黄色社会, Maximum the Hormone, Perfume, きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ and follow the rabbit hole from there.

For podcast recommendations:

  • Rebuild is by far my favorite one. You may want to skip a few especially gaijin-heavy episodes (and by skip I mean just not add them to the Rebuild playlist you have on constant replay), but generally speaking I love this podcast.
  • If you need more, try さくら通信.
  • You can also try ノウカノタネ, ポッドでラジオ, 愚者の宮殿 if you don’t mind podcasts with one minute-long loops of background music playing on endless repeat.
  • If you ever find ひいきびいき somewhere, make sure you grab it and report to me.

If you are into gaming you should know that IGN Japan’s podcast is mainly hosted by some American dude — not the Japanese you want to be immersing with. IGN is useless everywhere, I guess.

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