I eventually did try
active immerison as suggested by Ren Tatsumoto, and it is now a prominent part of my immersion. I've noticed a great improvement in my listening and general comprehension of japanese through it, though the first few weeks felt rather awkward because not understanding stuff is a pretty big hurdle for adults and we tend to feel bad about it. When you actually start to just wing it and try and understand as much as possible without focusing too much on getting every little thing, it becomes much easier and you'll start enjoying it more, while also getting quite a lot of gains.
These days I usually immerse intensively in one episode of
anime A (Haruhi Suzumiya for me right now. Yes I did watch all of Endless Eight in Japanese - it's actually better for us since our brain loves repetion in language learning), and then watch two/three episodes of
anime B (I suggest of a similar genre to anime A to facilitate the learning of new words of the same
domain) and maybe another episode of
anime C, if you want to watch something else to get a bit of variety.
I also made some gains in the vtuber sphere: I'm now watching
Kanata's Persona 4 playthrough, and it's been an incredible learning tool. First of all, I know the game by heart so I can discern what is being said by the characters almost all the time, and it also makes it easier for me to understand Kanata's comments. She could be speaking a bit more slowly though, damn it.
Secondly, when the game isn't dubbed, Kanata reads most important dialogues, so it's actually easier to understand than the game itself when it is not dubbed. But the most important thing is you're getting a
constant flow of language, even during gameplay, and sometimes even a double flow of language, which I think actually counts as a bit more gains than you'd expect. Plus, of course, there's motivation - I personally find it easier to follow hours of live content than anime episodes. Weird brain, I guess. I suggest you also try and find a similar type of live content for your intermediate-
ish language learning and above. Maybe a visual novel played by your favorite vtuber? Something like that. Do be aware you will NOT be understanding a lot of stuff and that may be annoying. But, you'll be
free from clippers, so that's good.
Lastly, there is another way of obtaining language gains if you're brave enough. This is
passive immersion. This is when you're doing mindless tasks and have time to listen some Japanese. Personally, I do not make use of this technique anymore, since I've noticed I do not have any tasks of the required type to do (oh, to be young), and I can just do active immersion all the time - which
is better, but some of you might make use of this. Basically, the way I did it was just to put a few episodes of
Anime A - the one you were intensively immersing on (it
HAS to be comprehensible input because you'll get distracted and will need to know what anyone is saying at any given moment, or else it'll just be white noise), listen to them and try to get the gist of it.
There is a few ways to minmax this, though. One is, if you're on linux and tech-savvy, is to use
Ren's mpv method. For us, normal human beings, absplayer has a playback mode that skips all of the time when there are no subtitles on screen (Alt+Shift+O). I do think you have to have the files locally for this, though, since it'll lag quite a bit if you're streaming. You'll have to also adjust offset manually quite a bit, but it's a possibility. Otherwise, just listening to the episode is fine, you'll get a bit more dead moments.
I've also had the displeasure of discovering anime mining of local files, which is a real pain in the ass for specific shows. Basically what happened is, the first season of Haruhi was lagging really bad and made mining a pain in the ass, so I decided - foolishly - to download the whole thing from nyaa. The files for anime on nyaa usually come as mkv. Mkv files cannot be played on chromium browsers (where asbplayer is, mind you), so you'll have to convert them to mp4 with VLC (expect a bit of quality loss). It's a bit of a pain, but that's that. Do remember to turn off subtitles when exporting, since you'll be loading subtitles through asb. Then you can just drag the mp4 in asbplayer's page and it should work fine (unless the codec is weird and you'll have to make a bit of trial and error to get the right one).
If, however, your video has more audio-tracks - as is the case for Haruhi - you will have to insert this line of code: ":no-sout-all :audio-track=n" (with n being the japanese audio track number e.g. 1, counted starting from 0, so 1 is the second one) in VLC in the window I've showcased below.
In short, it's a mess. Do try and use streaming when possible.
If you only need anime that you can't find without subtitles on the most popular streaming sites (for example I had this issue with K-On!), there is another tool. It can technically work with asb too (if you use it in your browser) but it'll lag a bit, so I only suggest it for active immersion if you don't want to rely on warez. It's
Stremio (and its
alternatives), which can basically just stream from nyaa torrent files directly without having to download anything. The file needs to have a few seeders, but it's worked wonders for me. It can also stream on a smart TV if you want! You can select audio, video and subtitle tracks so you can just remove subs (or use JP ones you can import) and enjoy the ride.
As for updates for previous tools, do be sure to use
Arbyste's documentation for JPMN (which has now been updated to
pre-release-16) and also the new version of
AJT japanese made specifically for this note format. Everything else shouldn't have changed. Do remember to update
Yomitan handlebars to the latest version from the docs.
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