I’m the same though, I have little self confidence so I know where you’re coming from. I’ve been able to overcome this by not striving to learn Japanese, but striving to create/maintain an immersion environment.

Currently, I’m slowly piecing it together. I figure that by next Friday, I’ll be completely immersed. So That’s my goal. Once completely immersed, my goal will be to maintain the environment. It seems to be a way more manageable goal then learning Japanese.

And also, for those skeptical to being able to maintain the environment, the reality is, if you build it right, you won’t want to leave it once you’re in! (My best example of this is that I used to be unable to sleep with any audio on. For the last week, I’ve had Japanese audio on every night, and now, I would feel strange going to sleep without it.)

I keep VLC player open and just throw new stuff in it so I can keep it playing all the time. I save the playlist when I need to close it that way I don’t lose my order or forget what shows I had added. I have a dual monitor set-up and keep VLC player up on monitor 2 while I’m doing school work or what have you on the other, otherwise I just move it over to monitor 1 and black out the 2nd monitor so I can sit back and watch TV.

I have gone a couple of days without Japanese material; I immediately felt myself beginning to slip, understanding less of what was going on when I did spend time with the material.

It made me realize just how important the method is. If Japanese becomes this thing you do, on the side, after everything else, it becomes very difficult to stay interested, and impossible to be immersed.

Japanese books, video games, television, music; these are the things that I have been integrating into my life. I have limited material at the moment, but day by day, I am gradually increasing it – no excuses! When I realized I did not have the expendable income to spend on some of the books I wanted, namely Remembering the Kanji, I found a solution doing odd jobs on a website, and using the credit on Amazon. When I realized I did not have many DVD’s in the Japanese language, I downloaded KeyholeTV, and watch it instead of regular TV. Even mundane things, such as changing my iphone language, or using chopsticks to eat all of my meals, though they seem fairly inconsequential on the surface, have been important tactics.

Thank you for sharing all of the information. I didn’t want to immediately start commenting about how your site has changed my life – but it literally has! There is a hell of a lot more Japanese in all aspects of my life, and a lot less of everything else. And it has been a great experience so far.

You see, this is essentially what I’ve got out of AJATT: you don’t try to learn (spoken) Japanese, you just plug into it and go from there.

The problem with this is, “go from there”???!! What specifically do you mean???! The “learning” process has been so drilled into me from school, that I found it really hard to break free of it. But that’s what I have now finally been able to do. The reality is that you don’t have to do anything else but plug in. You plug in, listen, and your brain will take care of the learning process.

As stated in this post, your job; find input. Your brain’s job; figure it out.

I think that having this article earlier would’ve helped me a lot, as it seems to be the article stating AJATT that’s fine tuned for me.

Even though I have lots of Japanese music, dvd’s, games, books etc, I found that I wasn’t really using any of them because none of it was being pushed in my face the whole time.

Because of this I recently re-arranged everything.
I made my access to everything Japanese effortless, and my access to English materials harder.
For example, all of my Japanese books used to be underneath my English books, but now the Japanese ones are piled up on the English ones.
My dvd’s used to be on a shelf on wall, now they are sitting next to my dvd player.
My Japanese music used to be split up all over my iPod, now it’s in a playlist.

I made the supply of Japanese something that I don’t even have to think about anymore; It only took 1 hour of my time to do it all, and because of it I am learning a lot more, and as a result of that I’m having more fun with each passing day.