I still don't understand how people here don't know even a small bit of Japanese. I'm ESL that started watching, reading and playing things in English early on and I can't remember having problems with understanding something after middle school, I assume there are a lot of ESL here who've done pretty much the same. So why is it not the same with Japanese? I started watching vtubers with prior experience of watching anime with subs for years, knowing kana I learned early on (you can literally learn kana in a week max, do it) and some popular kanji, but not a lot of them. I found out I understood not a word once in a few minutes like people here say, I understood around 15%-20% already, every sentence had some word or grammar structure I recognized. My reading was shit though, very slow and too few kanji. After more than a year of watching vtubers, reading their tweets daily (all of the Holo girls and a bunch of people from other companies or indies) and very irregular reps done on my own (mostly grammar, some extra kanji and vocab but not much) I can understand up to 80% when they're playing a simple game or up to 50%-60% when it's zatsudan. Live translators make up for it, besides I can always look up a word I hear in dictionaries. So I just watch the ones who are more entertaining, no matter the language. They are all foreign to me after all, chuubas who speak my native language are all bottom of the barrel cringe who I'd never touch.
