The best way to learn Japanese: https://mvj.link/pQnqd

英語字幕出して聞いていても、知らん単語がちょいちょい出てくるなぁ。

あいも変わらず英語学習者日本人の私にもタメになる話
日本人だからこそマットの日本語の凄さがマジでわかるから尊敬しすぎてめっちゃ話聞ける学校の先生の話より真剣に聞いてる笑笑笑

It is worth noting that there will always be some things you don't understand. Even in my native language sometimes someone will say something to me and I don't really understand it because they mumble or I wasn't paying attention or they just use a word I don't know. Of course you can and should strive to become native level and be a functional adult in a language but you shouldn't feel too down if can't understand literally 100% of the language. Also dialects can make a big difference, I can drive like 2 hours and find people I can barely understand because of their local accent.

マットさんが誰かと飲みや飯食いながら喋ってるだけのただゆるい動画でも全然いいので日本語のチャンネルにも動画お願いします！笑

I've been learning Spanish for 6 years. After 5 years I was pretty confident in my comprehension. I then got a job speaking Spanish in a call center. My comprehension now after a year at the job is on a whole other level.

Talking to every variety of accent. Whether young or old, educated or uneducated, screaming or whispering, all while trying to understand through phone quality, just cannot be replicated in a typical learner environment.

Now my comprehension feels very close to English NL.

The more you understand, the more that what you don't understand stands out.
The good thing is that there is a threshold to where you get to a point where your can intuit words here and there that you don't understand, so completely missing something becomes rarer and rarer.

That reddit comment is SO TRIGGERING, and is just simply NOT TRUE. I'm a second language 'learner' of English for about the last 11-12 years, I'VE NEVER been to an English speaking country, and my comprehension is probably better than a lot of natives. If you are not challenged, you are not going to improve no matter how long you've been doing it.

Fantastic advice. A bit embarrassed to say even after a decade here, I still haven't completely solved the comprehension problem. Hearing this really motivates me

Great advice! I first learned Japanese when I was 20ish. Now that I'm a few decades older I look at things a lot differently. I've been around a lot of people who've learned English (my native lang) as a second language. People almost never sound native in a second language they didn't learn as a kid. I just haven't seen it out of hundreds of people. Some get very good. Some fumble around forever and don't seem to care. Many people doubt their secondary language ability - even sometimes when they're very skilled. This is human nature. Imposter syndrome and the likes are common in every domain amongst a good portion of people. Be patient with yourself and just do your best.
I LOVE that Matt said he has a better vocab than some Japanese people. I'm not there yet. I read somewhere that Japanese consists of a higher number of common words than English, for example. So that's an accomplishment, but doable I'm sure. Reading books has helped me a ton, too. I still remember learning to speak on the telephone. It was terrifying at first, but I learned to love it.
Last of all - I used to want to have perfect Japanese. Now I think that's a mistake. I want to get really good and always progress, but I'm not trying to toss  my "gaijin card" anymore. In my experience, wanting to be accepted as a native Japanese causes repulsion. The closer you get the worse it backfired for me. I'm happy with myself and my identity, and I love interacting with Japanese people and learning from them. Learn to enjoy the journey and the experience. Keep working and trying. Don't worry about being perfect.

One thing that might help with situational conversations is ASMR content. For some reason, Japanese ASMR has a ton of situational roleplay that typical Japanese media simply will not linger on. It's supposed to be relaxing, so the speakers aren't going to push themselves to get the words out quickly. And yet it's still for natives, so they're not going to slow themselves down or simplify their speech. For better or worse, they'll be whispering or mumbling into high quality mics, so there's still a bit of an added difficulty compared to clearly enunciated anime recorded in a studio.

The funny thing is, for the longest time while watching english content (which is my 2nd language), I‘ve been watching on 1.5x speed to „save time“. Now I can‘t go back since normal speed sounds way too slow (on youtube, in real life normal speed is fine lmao)

As someone studying Spanish- this is great! Thanks

英語のマットかっこよ！

TLDW: keep がんばれ-ing

I blame all of the bs "How I learned Japanese in 6 months" titles all over YouTube. It's very alluring, but so deceptive. But also I think it's the fact that a language like Spanish would actually make that somewhat realistic, whereas Japanese is just so different from English.

Thanks for your tips. I'm not quite a high level learner yet but it's always nice to know what to focus on next so I never plateau.

I remember reading that post a few days ago, I didn't know that it would appear again in this video

Yep. Sometimes you just have to focus on a certain domain for a while cause well, you never have focused on that domain. I also agree about the passive vocabulary and learning more than natives pretty easily if you just keep studying every new word. Same way in English people not a lot of people read a wide amount of material a lot so they don't pick up weirder words either and you can tell they don't understand you if you use them. Vocabulary is probably the biggest part of the puzzle, and then once you have that, the rest falls into place over time as long as you're honest about what you've actively practiced listening to/understanding. If you haven't, then just practice it. You wouldn't know your native language at a higher level either if you just never read books or did things like watched other people go to the bank/doctor etc. I also remember even in English I couldn't understand heavy accents from places like Scotland at all when I was a teenager, but later as an adult I just could. Eventually you just understand, with more and more exposure to the language in general and how your brain can fill in the gaps. 2 especially, but even 10 years, isn't necessarily a lot of time in the grand scheme of things.

カッコイイ

Great video.