> You can make it better by trying to restrict your entertainment material to the second language, but this usually involves seeking out kids' shows to try to find something comprehensible at your small vocabulary level, and to me it ends up feeling more like work than entertainment.
I suspect I'm probably not alone in this given how popular Japanese anime/games/manga/lightnovels are among non-native speakers, but outside of 1 year of Japanese class in high school where I was taught some fundamentals (could probably be replicated in a 1-month online course), I managed to acquire, pretty much exclusively through media consumption, enough proficiency to consume most Japanese entertainment I'm interested in today, rarely ever feeling the need to reach for translation (watching untranslated anime, reading untranslated manga/light novels, playing untranslated games, etc). In fact today I actually find translated material extremely frustrating and actively seek out non-localized Japanese versions of games to play so I can enjoy the original text.
Though of course I can't really claim to be a fluent communicator in Japanese because consuming media passively doesn't really exercise the brain and face muscles needed to communicate to others. When I went to Japan last year I was actually able to understand pretty much everything that was said to me, but really struggled to formulate responses (luckily I was able to eventually communicate my ideas for the most part, but I'm pretty sure it was dead obvious that I wasn't a native speaker). Writing in Japanese without some kind of IME is as you might guess a complete non-starter for me as well for similar reasons.
I suspect I'm probably not alone in this given how popular Japanese anime/games/manga/lightnovels are among non-native speakers, but outside of 1 year of Japanese class in high school where I was taught some fundamentals (could probably be replicated in a 1-month online course), I managed to acquire, pretty much exclusively through media consumption, enough proficiency to consume most Japanese entertainment I'm interested in today, rarely ever feeling the need to reach for translation (watching untranslated anime, reading untranslated manga/light novels, playing untranslated games, etc). In fact today I actually find translated material extremely frustrating and actively seek out non-localized Japanese versions of games to play so I can enjoy the original text.
Though of course I can't really claim to be a fluent communicator in Japanese because consuming media passively doesn't really exercise the brain and face muscles needed to communicate to others. When I went to Japan last year I was actually able to understand pretty much everything that was said to me, but really struggled to formulate responses (luckily I was able to eventually communicate my ideas for the most part, but I'm pretty sure it was dead obvious that I wasn't a native speaker). Writing in Japanese without some kind of IME is as you might guess a complete non-starter for me as well for similar reasons.