The first step to immersing yourself in Japanese is immersing your technology in Japanese. This is awesome, because it only takes minutes to do. Praise the internet! Also, I read about new and interesting ways to immerse one's digital life in Japanese all the time, meaning that there's always something new and rad that I don't know about, so please feel free to contact me if you have any ideas that you think I should share with readers.

I'm not sure how to do this for a Mac, because I have a Windows PC. Maybe someone who's really good at Mac OS could write a guest post on my site about it. Then if we ever meet in person I'll buy you a beer or something. Just think about it, yo.

For Windows, I know, this is a pretty straightforward process. The easiest way is probably just to google something like “change [Windows] interface language."

In my case (running Windows 10), I'll start by going to my Control Panel. One way to get there is to hit “Windows Key + X," and that brings up the interface bar on the bottom left of my screen, and then I click “Control Panel:"

In the Control Panel I go to “Add a Language:"

I already have Japanese installed on my system, so use your imagination, please. You can see that there is an option to “Add a Language:"

Then I just go and find “Japanese:"

Select it, click “Add," then boom. Japanese! After that, I can to go “Options," which is to the right of the language listed:

Here I have my input methods and display languages all set up:

When I want to type in Japanese, I can use the language bar in the bottom right of the screen. Right now mine says ENG, because I'm typing in English:

I can hit “Windows Key + Space" to change it:

Doing so switches it to a weird A and J:

If I right-click the A, it'll bring up the IME options:

I can hit “Ctrl + Caps Lock" or left click the A to switch to “Hiragana" input mode, which will look like this:

When this is showing, it means that I'm typing in Japanese.

日本語(にほんご)で書(か)いています！！

Yay! I would write this in more detail, but your system is probably different… or will be different in a few months. I'll leave the tech to the tech blog writers. For those who are interested though, there is a long list of options for input methods, and you can change lots of hotkeys and all that good stuff until you really find a Japanese input method that fits your style.

I remember the first time I changed my phone's language to Japanese, I got this screen saying that it was “Setting Language:"

Looking at that, I kind of panicked, because I didn't know the word or kanji for 設定 / settei, “to set" (設定中 / setteichuu for “[now] setting"), and I realized that it was going to be a very painful transition.

It gets even more exciting when you use Google Maps or something and all of the place names are written in Japanese. That took some serious getting used to. Nowadays, though, I don't even think about it. My phone has been in Japanese for years now, so it hasn't been a problem for a very long time.

This basically equates to bookmarking a whole bunch of Japanese sites, and then installing a browser plugin like Rikaisama, which we talked about back in Phase #1.

But how do I find cool sites in Japanese?!

Why, I thought you'd never ask. For example, if we go to this page on Alexa, we can see the sites that get the most traffic in Japan. Removing shopping sites, porn sites and stuff that doesn't help much for this (Google and Facebook, for example), we get some pretty sweet ideas:

• Yahoo.co.jp: Japanese version of popular portal site.
• Fc2.com: This is another popular blogging site in Japan.
• Nicovideo.jp: This video site is kind of like YouTube, I guess. Only everything's in Japanese. You have to create an account in order to view videos, but it seems to be totally free. I've only spent a few minutes looking at.
• Livedoor.com: News, blogs, weather, email… and all in Japanese!
• Ameblo.jp: We already talked about this one quite a bit.
• Dmm.com: Lots and lots of articles and whatnot. (Be careful, because dmm.co.jp is a porn site…)
• Matome.Naver.jp: This site compiles lists and articles. You'll come across it a lot once you start using Japanese search engines.
• Pixiv.net: If you like anime and manga, you'll probably love this site. People post drawings. If you want to practice some Japanese, why not comment? Get involved.

Obviously this list doesn't even scratch the surface of just how much is out there, but it might be a good place to start.

Personally, I like to have my browser's homepage be a blank tab… or perhaps just Google. But my next choice would probably be a site that's in Japanese. Anything other than my email or a social networking site, as setting those as my homepage is almost certain to cost me countless hours of time wasted, time I could have spent doing something more productive. So maybe if you find a site that you love in Japanese, you could put it as your homepage. Or you could try this…

Did you know that Wikipedia has a built-in link for random articles? Some people use this random-article link as their homepage, because they want to learn lots of interesting stuff. Sounds to me like a huge distraction that we should avoid at all costs.

But what if that distraction was in Japanese? If you use this shortened link, it will take you to a random Japanese Wikipedia article: http://goo.gl/t1oLin

So if you set that as your browser's homepage link, then every time you opened your web browser, you'd be faced with yet another terrifying block of Japanese text. Yay!

Before you go thinking that that's masochistic and crazy, remember that you don't have to read the entire article. Realistically, you probably won't even look at it over 90% of the time. However, on days that you do read it, just try to read the first sentence. That's usually all you need in order to understand what an article's about anyways. And with awesome tools like the web browser plugins I talked about in Phase #1, you don't even really need to do anything other than hover your mouse over each word. For example, let's follow that link to a random page:

Hmm… I wonder what this is about. Using my masterful powers of perception, I'm going to go ahead and guess that it's about U.S. Route 82:

If this was a day in which I felt extra motivated to learn some new Japanese, then maybe I'd check out the first sentence of that article. This might get me looking at some new words and sentences, which gets me looking at some other new words and sentences, which gets me studying Japanese for an hour and forgetting what I was opening up my web browser for in the first place. Nice!

Or, you know, if I'm too busy doing some other stuff, then I'd just ignore it and move on.

Let's face it: Everyone is spending much more time on Facebook than they'd like to admit. Sometimes you're just sitting there, nothing to do, and by habit you end up opening your news feed.

Since you're wasting time on your news feed, you might as well waste time on your news feed in Japanese. First, we can change our Facebook language to Japanese by going to the settings:

This is important, because Facebook will show us more Japanese content. For example, if I type アニメ (anime) into the Facebook search bar while my Facebook is still set to English, then the results I get are all in English (first pic), but if I type アニメ (anime) after changing my Facebook account's language setting to Japanese, then the results are all in Japanese (second pic):

An even better idea would be to search Groups:

This will lead me to a bunch of groups of people who like anime, and if I look at individual groups, I can see a lot of people posting and interacting in Japanese:

It doesn't have to be something like anime, either. Maybe I like drinking, in which case I could type ビール / biiru / “beer," and it will bring up groups of other people who like beer, too… along with some people who are actually searching for drinking buddies! (Be careful, everyone, yeah?)

If I join like 50 groups and follow like 100 different pages that always post content in Japanese for Japanese speakers, with Japanese people commenting on them, then I will be much more likely to run into Japanese every time I try to waste time by logging into Facebook… right?

Have fun in your search for fun stuff!

Twitter was popular in Japan long before Facebook was. As a result, there is a healthy community of Japanese Twitter users tweeting all day, every day.

One option is to try searching for the names of your favorite characters from TV shows. For example, if I type ㇱかマル / Shikamaru, which is the name of a popular character from the manga/anime Naruto, then I get these results:

That “bot" at the top posts a number of quotes that the character would be likely to say (or did actually say… I'm not sure):

Anyways, if you're already using Twitter, then start following some users that post in Japanese. Get you some language-learning!

I've tried to use YouTube for finding useful, productive Japanese content before… and it was a total failure. The same thing happened for Spanish, too. I think that the main problem boils down to YouTube's search function, which expects me to know which video I'm looking for.

One very simple solution to this would be to sign up for an account on the FluentU Japanese site, as they already go and find the videos for you, then add interactive subtitles to them. If you're like me, however, you only watch videos sporadically, so it doesn't really make sense to sign up for a paid service.

Instead, I've tasked Rei, my live-in guide to the world of Japanese, with finding fun and interesting Japanese YouTube channels for us. Here's what she's found so far:

ActZero: 日本人(にほんじん)のチャンネル(ちゃんねる)登録者数(とうろくしゃすう)が多(おお)いYouTuberトップテン(とっぷてん)をまとめてみた

For all you Japanese nerds like me, that basically says “Collection of the Top 10 Japanese YouTuber Channels with the Most Subscribers."

Native speakers sure are good at finding good content in their own language, aren't they? If you know of any other interesting YouTube channels, please email me, and I'll add them to the guide.

By the way, it also helps to change your YouTube account's language setting to Japanese:

You can find these settings at the bottom of the page when you click on your profile settings. (Actually, I think they're always at the bottom of every page.) Setting your YouTube to Japanese, means that you will be able to watch videos with Japanese subtitles, when available.

For example, if I go look at the channel of teraminato, a Japanese guy who talks about Japanese snacks and whatnot, I can click the subtitles option (my mouse is hovering over it in the image below) on one of his videos to see the Japanese on the screen. Nice!

(That onigiri on the right is Tuna Mayo, by the way, the kind with the dry, crunchy nori on the outside, which my childlike palate craves pretty much every day.)

Also, finding one Japanese-language channel is the key to finding many channels. Continuing with the previous example, if I go to teraminato's channel, for instance, I can also check out all of his “Recommended Channels" and the “Related Channels" that pop up on the side of the screen. Then I can go to each of those channels and do the same thing, until I have a plethora of channel options:

And then every time you watch one of the videos on one of those channels, you can also browse the related videos that pop up on the right side of the screen:

I could probably spend a whole day poring through those channels, just trying to figure out which videos are good and which ones suck. At least it would be a whole day spent trying to understand Japanese, though! Also, after that whole day of “wasted time," YouTube would probably start recommending Japanese videos for me all of the time, and thus I will have successfully immersed my YouTube account in Japanese.

One last, super incredible thing: It is totally possible to download a YouTube video and it's subtitles into your Anki flashcard deck. I talk about how to do this in the section on studying Japanese through anime, later in this guide.

In other phases of this book, I talked about using language exchanges. If you sign up for one of the sites that have language exchanges, then send the same exact private message to dozens of different users, I guarantee you that you will start getting replies in Japanese.

Write your intro message in both English and Japanese. Your language exchange partner will appreciate this, because it shows that (1) they don't have to worry about sucking at English, and (2) you're not a selfish language-learner who's going to refuse to teach them any Japanese at all whatsoever. Talk about your interests, hopes, and dreams, whatever. And maybe include a note about how you'd like to do language exchange (by email, Skype, etc.). Include a Line username if you have one. (If you don't have Line, by the way, you should get it, because everyone in Japan is using it.)

Once you have a message that seems to strike a chord with people, post it on Lang-8.com and get it corrected. As a result, you'll have an accurate, persuasive intro message for language exchange that you can keep using with a hundred different people. Low-level English speakers are also likely to write lots of Japanese if you appear to be good at Japanese. As soon as a Japanese person suspects that their speaking partner's Japanese is better than their English, quite often they will switch to using Japanese entirely… maybe because they're embarrassed or something.

Long story short, if you messaged new people consistently over a solid period of time, then you'd probably be getting new emails and messages every single day in Japanese from new friends all over the globe. Before you know it, Japanese will have lodged itself securely in yet another facet of your life—and you won't be able to escape. You'll want to keep in touch with all of those friends, after all, right?