I speak a little Japanese- nihongo wakarimasu! There are ways to immerse yourself into the culture, I listen to a lot of Japanese music and its helpful!

I really appreciate that. I am trying to find ways to get immersed. I’m listening to podcasts and even trying watching some Anime and turning off the
subtitles for a little while. May not catch a ton, but words and patterns start to jump out. Music would be great. If you have any suggestions for any I might want to check out that would be great.

I a m always posting videos: https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1250

exceptional enunciation.”. 6 seasons. Season 1 is about 24 episodes

Someone told me once that the area of the brain that processes music also does language, so you are getting a double benefit when you combine the two. Doing this greatly helped me with French and Mandarin. You don't even have to consciously listen to words all the time to get the benefits, just put the music on in the background and let it run constantly. If you have a Spotify account, search for Japanese songs, you will find so many different offerings. Children's songs are especially good, because they are slower, and simpler, and more repetitive. I tried listening to Italian radio online, but with most of the stations, every third song or so was in English, so not that helpful. Spotify is great.

at Cornell University, but when I first went to Japan, I realized that there was a lot I didn't know.

Three things helped me up my conversational skills:

1. Watching TV. There were no closed captions in those days, and of course, since I was in Japan, there were no English subtitles either. I found that the easiest shows to understand were soap operas, anime, and song shows. Back in my research student days, commercials were very brief but were repeated three times in a row. Great listening practice!

When I first arrived, I spent two weeks renting a room in the YWCA, where breakfast (toast and two eggs any style) was included in the price. After breakfast, all the guests would gather around the TV to watch the NHK morning soap opera. These run for a few months and usually deal with a topic from the past. It was the middle of the current soap opera, which was about a singer in the 1920s, so the other guests explained what was going on and who all the characters were. I continued watching after I moved into my apartment as each soap opera ended and the others started.

2. Reading manga, which were and still are available everywhere. I was enrolled in a women's college, so I concentrated on so-called "ladies comics." (That's how they were labeled in English.) The great thing about manga for language learners is that they are the only place where Japanese is written exactly as it's spoken, with slang, slurred pronunciation, mistakes in grammar, and sometimes regional dialects. There are manga about every imaginable demographic and interest.

3. Every once in a while, I would hear an expression used in a certain situation, and I would realize that it was the equivalent of an English expression. I kept a notebook of such expressions. For example, I had dinner at the home of a young man who had been an exchange student in our town during my youngest brother's senior year of high school. A few days later, I happened to run into his father at a train station, and his father said, "Mezurashii tokoro de aimashita." (Literally: "We have met in an unusual place," or, to put it into more natural English, "Fancy meeting you here.&quot I also learned how to say "So what?" "No way!" "Don't play dumb" and other useful expressions.