Table of Contents
The Immersion Hurdle: Why Does it Feel so Hard?
Japanese Immersion is widely touted as one of the best ways of learning Japanese. It's likened to how babies learn a language. Watching anime, dramas or Youtube videos should be a pretty powerful way to learn. Yet, a lot of language learners find that it doesn't work for them.
It can feel like being thrown into the ocean without knowing how to swim. It can get discouraging pretty quickly. Is the video too hard to understand? Is it boring? Does it even work?
These are the common questions that pop into people's head.
The truth is, without the right tools and approach, immersion can definitely feel like it doesn't work. But what if you could tailor your immersion experience according to your level, interest and learning style?
Common Roadblocks
Does any of these sound familiar?
The Boredom: You start watching some random Japanese Youtube video because it was suggested by someone else. You find it uninteresting. Feels like a chore. You start thinking, "maybe immersion isn't for me."
The Overwhelm: You found an interesting piece of content. Perhaps an anime you love. You try to watch and learn the language. But you're bombarded with too many difficult words and grammar. Your brain hurts, frustration adds up, and eventually you hit pause...permanently.
The Context Craving: You recently learned a new word from a street interview video and you want to see more examples of it being used to better grasp its usage. But you only like to watch street interview videos. You watch more of those type of videos but you don't know how long it will take to see that word again.
The Review Disconnect: You're a big fan of sentence mining but not a fan of image and vocab based review. You wish you could review with the actual video clips. But in anki, you could only attach images with flash cards. It feels like there's a bit of a disconnect.
The Mining Fatigue: You find sentence mining tedious. You wish you could review all the words you've encountered while immersing in Youtube without manually saving every single sentence. But you still want it to be targetted based on specific videos you've watched.
The Chicken & Egg: You want to watch videos you love, they're too hard. They say to learn the the most frequent vocabulary and grammar first so that immersing becomes easier. But then, it's easier to learn words if you see it in a video. So, how do you break this cycle and still learn the most frequent words first from videos?
The key to sustainable immersion
Imagine being able to design your learning path in way that's tailed to your level, useful, and still enjoyable.
HayaiLearn is built around this philosophy. It's a platform that is designed to help you:
- Discover videos you love that's right for your level
- Understand challenging content with AI tools
- Focus on vocabulary and grammar most relevant to you
- Review words effectively using video contexts
By understanding how to leverage our powerful features, you can design your learning flow in a way that's fun for you and turn it into an addictive language learning habit.
Personalization tools for learning
Here are some of the most important tools in HayaiLearn to help shape your immersion experience.
Words
Words are the building blocks of a language. We know how important it is to be able to choose which words to focus on.
There are several ways to choose words to mark for learning:
- Words page
Vocabulary words are arranged by order of frequency so that the most frequent words appear first. There is a filter for JLPT level as well. And when you can't find a word from scrolling, you could always use the search bar in the words page. Just type the japanese word, or the english meaning of a Japanese word to look for it.
- Hovering words in a subtitle of a video
When watching a video, the subtitles can be clicked/hovered over and we show a popup dictionary with the word's meaning and other stats. It will also include buttons for marking a word as learning or known.
- Going to the stats page of a video
There is a bar chart icon when you hover over a thumbnail of a video in the video library page. When you click on it, you'll see the stats of the video, as well as the word list. You could choose to mark words for learning from this list.
Sentence Mining
This is the process of saving sentences in order to review them with words later. Why this is so powerful is because by you get to review words in proper context. And by selectively choosing useful sentences to review with, you reinforce the usage of that word.
You can sentence mine by simply clicking the star icon next to a subtitle.
We also let you save notes along with the saved subtitle. That way, if you have more questions or notes about the text, you could remember it for later. We have a page to show all the mined sentences, so that you could quickly refer to it. A useful tip is to add notes for asking a tutor/teacher later if something is still somewhat unclear.
Albums
This is where the magic begins. I know organizing videos into albums sounds simple. But because it's integrated in so many of our core features that it's so useful. We'll show you later in this article how you could use albums to your advantage.
The basic idea is you could group your favorite videos however you like, and use them together with your search for example sentences, or for customizing quiz materials.
One nifty feature is that we also show the aggregate video stats for an album. This gives you a quick overview of your progress within an album.
You could save videos to albums either from the video libraries page, or on the video page itself. On the video library, the upper right corner of a thumbnail will have a bookmark icon, that when clicked, let's you save that video to an album.
The videos page have a "Save video" button as well to directly save that video to an album of your choice.
You could also access your import history
Core learning workflows
Now that you understand what tools there are, let's go through some powerful learning workflows.
Finding comprehensible content you resonate with
Handles: The Boredom
A common question people ask on reddit forums is "How do I find Youtube videos that are good for beginner? or for intermediate level?"
Motivation is highly correlated to the type of content you immerse in.
Our platform offers several ways to help you find vidoes that resonate with you.
Filter by score
All videos in our library are graded with a score between 1-10. The lower the number, the easier it is.
You can then filter videos in our library by Score.
Filter by Search
If there's a specific content you want, you can use the search bar and type relevant keywords (eg. "street interview", conan, school, science, etc.). Use double quotes if you want exact match of search terms (eg. "hikrau no go")
Chrome extension
Can't find a video you like in our video library? The HayaiLearn Chrome Extension let's you import any Japanese Youtube videos into our platform where it gets analyzed and integrated with the platform's learning tools.
Bridging the Gap: Making Difficult Content Comprehensible
Handles: The Overwhelm, The Chicken & Egg
Popup Dictionary (Contextual Meanings) - Hovering words in a subtitle will bring out its contextual meaning. Unlike other dictionaries where it gives you all the definition. This cut through the noise and help you understand the meaning faster.
AI explanation - Understanding subtitles on a video can be tricky if you're only looking up each individual word's meaning. That's where our AI Explanations next to a video comes in super handy. Because it ties the individual parts together and explains it for you. It makes content above your level way easier to understand.
Targeted Word Learning - to focus on learning the most frequent words. Use the words page where things are already sorted by frequency and filterable by JLPT level. Mark those frequent words for learning. Click on the word card to open up a dictionary page. Here, you'll see video examples of a word.
In fact, you could even filter examples based on meaning if a word has multiple meanings.
Remember sentence mining? You don't have to wait to see a word in an example to mine it. You could play an example sentence and save it directly.
Essentially, you could focus on seeing as many video examples for a given word quickly and sentence mine at the same time!
And if an example sentence is not perfectly comprehensible immediately? No worries, there's already an AI explanation provided to make you understand better. Click on the cross icon to open the AI explanation for any subtitle from the the video example player.
Deep Dive: Mastering Words in Relevant Contexts
Handles: The Context Craving
It's not too much fun if you're being thrown with random video examples. Ideally, the example sentences are also from your favorite kind of videos!
Remember the albums you've created and stored all your favorite videos? This is where they come in.
In the dictionary page for a word, you could filter example sentences by albums. This way, you're finding fun video examples to study with!
For example, if you mainly learn from street interview videos, here's the step:
- Search "street interview" in the video library search bar. Or find some from Youtube and import with the chrome extension.
- Save videos you like into an album (eg. "street interview")
- Now, go back to the word's dictionary page, under the "Examples" section, choose your album for the album filter.
- Click play on the sentences that are comprehensible yet meaningful, and save/mine the sentences if desired
With this workflow, you could concentrate on learning words under a very specific context. You could do this with either vocabulary words or even grammar words!
Reinforce Your Learning: Video-Based Sentence Review
Handles: The Review Disconnect
Let's say you have a bunch of sentences mined already and wish to review them with videos.
That's pretty straightforward as well. Each quiz type lets you review words in a sentence context.
There's an option in the quiz settings to source the sentence from your mined sentence. This way, your review is very curated. And during the quiz, we also play the video clip where the sentence was being used.
This makes the learning a lot more visual and fun.
Curated Review Without the Hassle: Album-Based Quizzing
Handles: The Mining Fatigue
If you're not a fan of sentence mining, there's a convenient way to review words in a curated way.
Quiz with Album Sentences - Instead of selecting "Mined Sentences" in the Quiz settings, choose to source sentences from one or more Albums you've created. The quiz will then pull sentences containing your learning words only from the videos within those selected albums. This lets you focus your review on specific content (e.g. only quiz words from your favorite anime album) without the need for extensive manual sentence mining.
Closing notes
Immersion can be daunting at first. With the right tools and setup, it can become a motivation fuel for your language learning. We know how important it is to make the process fun and easy. The workflows above should make video immersion a much more sustainable activity. Happy immersing!