Maybe materials that are at your level are too boring, and materials that are interesting are too difficult. Maybe you tried the whole “watch even though you can’t understand” thing, and you realized you learn way too slowly that way. So you are going to have to use English as leverage.

There are two main strategies — look up words you don’t know in a J-E dictionary, or use subtitles / translations. Which strategy has you spending more time with Japanese, and less time with English? Probably the best thing is to try both and actually measure it. But it’s worth considering some ideas that might surprise you.

Suppose you have to read 10 English words in a dictionary to understand what a given Japanese word means. That means if you have to look up every word in a sentence, your study session is around 91% English. I don’t know about you, but that is a lot higher than I thought it would be before I started thinking about this. Translations, on the other hand, are going to have a similar number of words as the original. So if you use a translation, and have to look at it for every sentence, you are at around 50% English.

Now maybe my numbers are wrong. Maybe you only need to read 5 English words in your dictionary when you look something up, and you only have to look up every 4th word. So you read 3 Japanese words that you know, and then run across one that you don’t know and can’t guess. What about that? Well, your study sessions are 55% English, which is still higher than it would be if you had a translation.

What would it take to get to 80% Japanese? Well you could do that with a translation, if you only looked at the translation for 1 out of every 4 sentences. That could work for things like comics, where there are short blocks of text and it’s easy to find the corresponding translation. If you go the dictionary route and have to read 5 English words when you look something up, then you would need to get to the point where you only have to look up 1 in 20 words, or 95% vocabulary coverage of the material. Again, I don’t know about you, but that really surprises me. That’s so high that I think by then you could probably use a J-J dictionary and go right to 100% Japanese.

There are of course other issues to consider, and word counts don’t measure everything about language learning. But if you are doing the dictionary thing now, and your only reason is that you think you are getting more Japanese that way, you might want to reconsider whether that is really true. In a final note, consider how much English is involved in kanji mnemonics. A 15 word story for a single kanji? Even if you count a single kanji as a whole word, that part of your study session is around 93% English.