I have discovered Rakuten Viki an asian entertainment website for movies. Many of the movies are for free and so I have seen “an incurable case of love” and started “Isekai Izakaya Nobu” which work with english subtitles for me still but I hope to get used to the japanese tongue after some time. 
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Man, so is anyone else motivated by the new site update to suddenly want to watch stuff? I was thinking about it, and there isn’t a single watched thing in Japanese I could add to my library. 
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Good day Natively WATCHERS, I hope you are all enjoying the new audiovisual update!
This thread is finally relevant. I haven’t been watching too many shows lately (it’s mostly been youtube for me), but now I am motivated to try and get back into them now that the update is finally here. Right now, I am watching Rosario + Vampire | L25 since it is one of the first anime I watched with english subtitles. It’s the same ecchi garbage I remember it to be, but this time without the subtitles!
What are you all watching today?
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I am currently watching カノン S1 | L19
Mainly because I want something were I can comprehend enough without subs that I feel comfortable logging it in tadoku. But it has been more entertaining than I expected.
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Gives you more opportunity to focus on the plot, amirite.
I’ve got a couple of wishlisted shows; mostly stuff that I already own and bought to watch in English, but work just fine for actually watching in Japanese. Granted, I can’t imagine most are going to have a Japanese sub option, which may or may not be a bit rough; we’ll see. I was looking around our current levels to try to get a sense of what show/movie might be decent to start with for a noob, and 猫の恩返し | L23 caught my eye. I’ve never seen it before, but Ghibli’s usually solid. Anyone know if that level 15 is at all accurate?
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So I went ahead and moved all those < 20 lvl items without any gradings up to lvl 20.
I just want people to be able to grade things and the easiest things should have grades imo.
Very well may be easy, just wanted to let you know. There are some people who’ve watched it that could potentially grade it 
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Thanks brandon! Makes complete sense to me to shift those all higher for now, especially if they don’t have any gradings. It actually kind of levels the playing field for me looking at options now, too, given that level 20’s acting as a baseline.
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Oh, I watched that (and a bunch more Ghibli movies) actually! I completely forgot about them.
15 feels really low, especially considering the speech patterns of the cats.
That being said, the plot is really easy to follow.
It was harder than pokemon, which is temp level 23… So maybe 25?
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Thanks for the thoughts, Naphthalene. 
Might still be worth checking out; does anyone have any recommendations for easier shows/movies? Pokemon actually might be worth looking into; I’ve always enjoyed the games, at least…
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It has a ton of reboots too, so it’s easy to just pick the latest series. It’s aimed at kids, though, so it may be a bit boring for an adult (I am watching with my kids and their reactions do add a lot of fun).
In terms of easy shows, I think sports related stuff like ハイキュー are really easy. Once you know the related vocabulary (I knew nothing about volleyball when I watched it), everything is self explanatory.
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Ah I was just about to ask about this! Because I noticed the show I’ve watched get moved up and I was confused because nobody’s graded it, including me since I’ve only watched one thing. But this makes a lot of sense! L20 seems like a good baseline for everything
リラックマとカオルさん S1 | L19 is pretty easy, and it’s a Netflix Original so it has JP subs 
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Forgot to say in my reply what I’m watching today! I’ve been going through Netflix trying to find stuff with subs that I can actually watch at my level. So all of these are with JP subs 
First tried アグレッシブ烈子 | L30??, but that’s definitely too hard for me right now, even with subs + watching it in English before.
極主夫道 S1 | L20 is an obvious choice for me given my reading history, but watching it I’m worried I’m just relying on previous knowledge of the manga. I’ve only read each volume once, but I still remember everything that happened, so I’m not sure how helpful it is for me to be watching this right now. It’s pretty interesting going back to the beginning chapters (in the form of the first episode) and seeing how much I understand with the subtitles now! I remember struggling so much with the book club during that first volume, but now I look at the subtitles and go “oh hey I get this now!”
So I am also watching something I have never watched or read before, which is カードキャプターさくら S1 | L19. Just one episode in and I’m finding it easy to understand, although I’m not sure if I like it so far. But it’ll be good listening practice at least
Right now I’m noticing my main problem is I think I’m focusing too much on reading subs when this is supposed to be listening practice. But I barely understand anything at all without subs! Not sure how to deal with this.
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I wouldn’t worry too much about this. The listening will come in time so long as you make an effort to listen to what is being said as well as read it in Japanese. Right now you’re using your stronger reading skills to hook into the spoken word - give it time to catch up
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That’s why I use English subs instead. I hesitate to recommend it since it seems to be generally not regarded as listening practice at all, and it is true that it’s easy to relax and just read, but I find that with Japanese subs all my efforts go into reading (and reading fast!), so I completely miss the audio, when with English subtitles I can just take them in at a glance and focus on the audio much better.
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Don’t know why I haven’t written here before. Guess I’ll change that now.
AniList has something called Anime Watching Challenges (AWC for short), and one of the challenges they have is the Seasonal Challenge, where you’re required to watch 7 anime from the season. Been doing that since Spring 2022, which is when I started watching seasonal anime in Japanese.
Been slacking off a bit with Japanese this year, so I’ve only started 4/7 anime so far. Shouldn’t be too difficult to catch up, since I would only need to watch a little over 2 episodes a day to catch up by the end of the month, and that’s not even taking into account the two weeks of leeway they give after the season is over.
So far, I’ve watched:
転生王女と天才令嬢の魔法革命 S1 | L30 3 episodes watched.
Pretty cute. The political vocabulary is quite difficult, as well as whenever Anisphia goes into the technical details about her magic tools. Probably the hardest show I’m watching this season.
トモちゃんは女の子！ S1 | L25 6 episodes watched.
Going by AniList for the episode count, because for some reason TMDB split the episodes up, despite them being combined everywhere else I’ve seen. This one’s also cute. L25 is definitely way too high for this tho. That would put around the same level as shows like Chainsaw Man and Another, which are definitely way harder, imo. Currently, you can’t grade an anime unless you’ve finished it, and this anime is still airing, so nobody has finished it yet, so that’s probably why the level is so inflated. Probably would put it around L21-22.
ヴィンランド・サガ S2 | L31 2 episodes watched.
Don’t know why I haven’t watched more of this, it’s probably the best anime this season. Much different tone than last season, which might result in the difficulty being different. Although, that’s kinda hard to tell just from two episodes.
お兄ちゃんはおしまい！ S1 | L30 7 episodes watched.
Cute. The difficulty on this is also super inflated, imo. Would say it’s around the same difficulty as トモちゃん.
Once I’m caught up with おにまい, I’m probably going to start 2nd Attack | L20. Really enjoying the manga for that, and I also really enjoyed the adaptation of the first season, and the series gets better as it goes along, so I’m probably going to like this season even more than the first.
At some point, I’d also like to start Buddy Daddies S1 | L30?? as well. Not sure what I’ll do for the 7th anime this season, but I might go with 久保さんは僕を許さない S1 | L25.
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Does anyone have any recommendations for more serious shows? Having a hard time finding them. Maybe genre-wise mystery, crime, thriller, fantasy or scifi would be nice. I don’t mind some comedy, but I really want to avoid the drama style overreacting acting style.
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Paging @cat for this question; they may have some good recommendations!
I’m in the same place you are. 
I figure time and exposure are really the big things here, but it’s tough when it’s hard to measure your own progress…
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my tastes are known 
Overacting is a kind of hard thing to avoid across the board, and I suspect it’s because even some serious shows will cast idols who may or may not have any acting chops because…idols get viewers. 
That said, here’s a few I can think of which aren’t so bad:
最愛 S1 | L32 - I haven’t yet finished this but I adore what I’ve seen so far. It’s currently on Netflix. It’s about a woman and her younger brother, and a man from the same hometown, and murders that twist their trust for each other.
密告はうたう 警視庁監察ファイル S1 | L34?? - Adored this show. A police officer grapples with the death of a colleague while on duty, and after the event he is transferred to an internal affairs type roles which (in addition to people thinking he got his partner killed) leads to him being outcast. Then he is given a project.
桜の塔 S1 | L35?? - Also haven’t finished this one (I’m really bad at finishing things, I have way more ‘in progress’ than I admit to on Natively 
) but it’s a grittier cop drama about corruption and power.
ソロモンの偽証 S1 | L35?? - Slightly more overacting here because the cast are ‘high school students’ but it’s not too bad because the focus is on a suicide (or is it murder?!) at school, not romance.
MIU404 S1 | L34?? - More of a comedy, but the serious scenes are serious. About the relationship between two police officers who have to learn to trust each other
シグナル 長期未解決事件捜査班 S1 | L32 - This is a remake of a Korean drama actually. A man with a troubled past joins the police and comes across a walkie talkie that lets him speak with another cop who went missing years before.
うきわ ―友達以上、不倫未満― S1 | L29?? - it’s none of the genres you asked for, but it is a serious show and I loved it. Great story telling, great emotion. About two people connecting when they realize their partners are cheating on them.
That’s all I’ve added to Natively that I think fits. I can’t think of anything fantasy I’ve seen that doesn’t have the overacting. I’ll add one more that I haven’t added to Natively, and it’s because I saw it so long ago I don’t remember how hard it was. What mostly stuck was how emotionally brutal the show was: Red Eyes (TV Series 2021- ) — The Movie Database (TMDB)
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I got to learn about this new video tracking feature of Natively very recently, and am so grateful for it, as before this I had no concrete way of keeping track of anything that I have watched with only Japanese subs (which mostly included YouTube videos only😅).
Thanks to this feature, I finally ended up diving into the anime 3月のライオン/March Comes in Like A Lion a couple of days ago. I’m currently watching it on Animelon with JP subs and enjoying it, with occasionally switching on the English subs when encountering a difficult sentence.
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To be clear, we all only learned of this new feature very recently… it launched on Monday!! Very fresh and you’re on the cutting edge
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