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I picked up a lot of vocabulary and some phrases from anime and VNs. Tried to read some VNs in JP using AGTH and Atlas translator but got filtered, my reps were lacking too much at the time.
As for reps I learned kana long ago, I think it was at least 8 years ago. I just stumbled upon names of characters from an anime I watched written in kanji and in kana. I knew it's based on syllables already so I was like "ah, so these kana symbols mean these syllables, got it". Then I learned kana really fast but my reading pace was always pretty bad. Reading chat and Twitter posts from chuubas actually made it skyrocket, I can read kana almost at the same pace as English (not my native language).
I've been in and out of learning grammar, vocabulary and some kanji since I learned kana. Never actually made it past some beginner books until chuubas. Shortly before getting into chuubas I watched some anime on Animelon though, pretty helpful.
I got introduced to chuubas in early 2020 and it didn't even occur to me to try finding some EN chuubas (or chuubas speaking in my language, god forbid). I kinda bruteforced it at first, found out that I sucked hard at reading and understood maybe 10-15% of what was said. I picked up my reps so had a combo of listening to chuubas + reading chat and tweets + brushing up on grammar (Cure Dolly videos were really helpful, may she rest in peace) + lazily learning a bit of new vocabulary and kanji (but I actually picked up quite a bit of basic kanji just from reading chat and Twitter regularly). Now I think I understand up to 80% in simple game streams and up to 60% in zatsudan streams, given that I always keep jisho open to quickly check info about new words I hear. Still have a long way to go, these percentages can drop quite a bit when chuubas are talking about niche topics, talk faster, use more vivid vocabulary, make some puns and references etc.
