How important is passive immersion?

When you're a beginner, active immersion plays a much bigger role than passive immersion. You need to watch something actively first and make it as comprehensible as possible before reusing the same content for passive immersion. At this stage it is not advised to immerse in something passively for the first time because you haven't worked with the content and haven't comprehended it.

However, when you're already pretty good at understanding Japanese, which happens after around a year if you're serious about pursuing the language, you become able to understand your passive immersion really well too. At this stage you gain a lot more from passive immersion. When you reach this point, you can use completely new content for passive immersion and still understand it close to 99% if you pay enough attention. Because of that, it makes sense to value passive immersion more past the beginner stage.

Tags: faq