Alex's Stages of Learning Japanese While Watching Anime

I'm not fluent, far from it, but I have progressed through many stages. And it occurs to me, those stages are somewhat amusing and worth listing, so here is my list:

1. "Hey, how do you turn on the sub-titles"
2. You can pick out with 100% accuracy totally trivial words and words which Japanese people never actually use.
3. "Hey, how do you turn on the sub-titles"
4. You can totally pick up on basic 1 word sentences.
1. You subsequently find yourself shocked by how many 1 word sentences there are Japanese, and how many of those you still don't understand.
5. Turn sub-titles back on.
6. If the anime has cutesy characters and is probably aimed at kindergartners... you can pick out enough words to guess roughly what they are talking about... some of the time.
7. You can actually pick out some common sentences and usually have at least some idea what's going on often enough to impress even yourself.
8. But... you still get depressed about how much you can't understand... and turn the sub-titles back on.
9. OOOO you can now understand a whole lot of what is going on.
10. You realize that #9 only applies to very specific genres and still probably fairly low level understanding. Fall into deep depression, turn on sub-titles.
11. You can understand a LOT of the words most of the time, but somehow have less of a clue about what is going on than you did a week ago.
12. ... don't know, not there yet.
13. Profit!

#2 is funny, it is where my wife is at. She can pick up words like おいしい、可愛い、こんにちは which are kind of pointlessly trivial, but also words that often get translated as swear words or words with crazy amounts of emphasis which are generally only used by gangs and thugs or really aren't said at all. I am amazed at myself by how many totally useless Japanese words I know. And it seems like every day I come across another article or video where someone says "oh, we never actually say that, it is too [rude/silly]".

#11 is also funny, if a little demoralizing. When I was bad, but getting better at Japanese, it was super common to pick up on one or two words and piece the meaning from the context on the screen. And I could get into the right ballpark about what was going on. As I learned more though, I stopped trying to pick out just one word and instead tried to actually understand what was being said rather than using the context from the show to help... and despite knowing massively more words, the complexity of the grammar often left me TOTALLY wrong.