I take japanese classes, they teach me the proper way to speak, but the best way is to have a japnese friend so they can teach you everyday conversation. There is a BIG DIFFERENCE anime and the casual conversation between the japanese people.

Totally true. However, I think anime should be credited with interesting people in the language in the first place. I just recently started (trying) to learn japanese through online sources (there are no japanese courses at my college) and found that I learned so much more about sentence structure, etc, etc than I did in years of watching anime. For those of you not fortunate to have a japanese friend/class/textbook, it’s an acceptable substitute for beginners. And it really wasn’t that hard at all because I was already a little familiar with the language through anime. A great jap self-tutorial site is http://www.studyjapanese.org. Of course, you don’t have to learn japanese like your going to read literature. I myself am just learning romanji so I can use it in conversation.

Another thing that I found really useful for leaning japanese is song lyrics! You can become pretty familar with vocab through it and it’s an excellent resource for examining sentence structure. Good luck in your nihongo endeavors!!

Thank you! Over the short time I’ve been here, I’ve met a ton of fresh off the plane gaijin who claim they’re learning Japanese from their favorite anime. They look bewildered when people give them dirty looks for whipping out an “ore” to a stranger or their boss. The best case was a guy who affected a really deep voice whenever he tried to speak. “But that’s how all the native speakers in my shows sound!” Ugh.

Ehhhh…. Anime isn’t a great place to learn Japanese, I am Japanese, I have taught it to many people. I have tried this way on more then one person, the comprehension isn’t all that great. Sure they are seeing the characters but are they really understanding it? Many ways have been thought to work but, I don’t really recomened this; simply because it is the longest way to learn Japanese. If you start out learning this from a kid this can work but I don’t recomened it to people, because it takes TIME away fast.

First of all congratulation for your website, I’ve just found it.
I agree that It is imposible learning japanese only watching anime. I’ve been watching it a looooooooot of years and I only learn the simple phrase “watashi wa blabla desu” and some vocabuary but that all you can learn from it… or maybe I could learn japanese with anime but I would had to waiste all my life (or more) u.u So I started studing japanese in a school, and in 6 months I’ve learnt mooooooore than all the years I’ve been watching anime. And also, I learn that a lot of things I though I know, were wrong.

Well, that’s it XD Sorry for all the mistakes I’ve done. English is not my language -.-U

Fantastic vid! I speak decent conversational Japanese after living in Japan for 4 years, drowning myself in dramas & anime, giggling over late night variety shows, and reading manga…Just a minor thing: I also busted my tail with textbooks, flashcards, etc. ad nauseum for at least 6 hours a day, and practiced my awful Japanese on anyone with a pulse. It drives me nuts when my friend, of the slimy-fish-body variety you mentioned in the vid, thinks he’s “almost” as good at Japanese as me because he watches anime nonstop. I’ve tried to explain to him that he sounds like a ghetto mickey mouse, but he doesn’t quite get it. I’m an elementary school teacher, and our school begged me to give a seminar the last week of school because so many kids love anime. Quote: “Just show them anime, they’ll pick alot up.” — Principal. The goal is for them to have fun and enjoy the class, so I’m going to teach them some phrases from naruto (their latest obsession) — mixed in with the REAL way to say it, and some other useful phrases. I’m toying with the idea of showing part of your vid though, because basically every 3rd through 5th grade boy in our school has come into my room sometime this year saying “I learned Japanese from anime!” and saying something like “fuzakennayo” or “nanjakoreya.” Its also difficult explaining to a nine year old that he should not address me, his teacher, with “teme” even though Naruto uses it a whole lot. Thanks for the fun!

You mean It isn’t handy to be able to say” Fire style:Blazing Fireball Technique!” in conversation?!
All that hard work gone to waste.
I watch anime so I can learn how to say the character’s names properly.
As opposed to saying,”HokiJe”, “Karkarshii” And Ameedamaaaaaaru”
It’s common sense that you can’t learn Japanese from anime without sounding like a psychotic magician.

I’m gonna become the pirate king ftw!
I agree you can’t use anime as your main source of learning. But definetely you can learn some words or some expression, of course you must take a look whether this anime-learning word and expressions are properly acceptable or not. I started taking Japanese lessons two weeks ago, before then I got some words from Bleach and Naruto, but I wouldn’t use them in a real conversation, I used them mostly as ‘fun fact’ with a friend of mine who also watches anime, never on a serious basis.

Tofugu should make an article about Namasensai from youtube!
From Brazil, Igor.

ps: psychotic magician… =P

YOU ARE SO RIGHT!!!
i am only 12 years old but i speak perfect japanese (now). all the kids at my school were all “i am going to learn japanese!” and what i said “how are you going to do this”
they said “i am going to watch Japanese anime”. and then i gave them a look like what the FReak is wrong with you? and i said “go to the store and buy some books and take lessons.

while i like some anime i never thought it possible to learn japanese from it at all.

I would argue that American cartoons have always been pretty good with all English except pronounciation, so I think that point is moot (at least when inversed to our perspective); I wouldn’t really mind talking to a foreigner who spoke like Patrick Star, since getting your point across is better than nothing.

I think my two main points would be:

1. I believe you can learn a great deal of Japanese from anime, however any amount of real, cerebral effort X you spend learning Japanese through anime will teach you less Japanese than any effort X spent in traditional study, and thusly is it a waste of time.

2. Personally, I don’t even care to know Japanese *except* in the context of anime. In this case, spending any time learning things that *don’t* refer to pirate kings seems like a wasted effort (LOL).

So yeah, the idea that there is institutional education for a topic, and you can just learn it by watching television, is pretty silly in any context, but one can also argue that any experience in the universe has some minute learning value somewhere.

YOU’RE TOTALLY RIGHT!!
i have a buch of friends who think that they can learn perfect Japanese just by watching anime..and that’s just sooo SILLY!!..personally,i am learning Japanese using books, CDs and a bit of lessons on net..so that( it’s not the only reason) i can understand what are the characters speaking about..lol..but never used anime as some kind of Jap dictionnary which i refer to or something..XD

why discourage people? i mean yes, it’s a difficult language to learn but not impossible by any means. If someone (specially young people who learn things way faster than adults/late teenagers) thinks “hey i love anime and manga, i should learn japanese so i don’t have to wait for people to sub the episodes/volumes for me” i hope they at least try it. I’m aware that an incridibly high percentage will fail dramatically, but between the time they start caring and the time they realize japanese is simply just not for them, they’ll have grown wiser. My advise, if you like something don’t feel bad about doing everything in your hand to learn about it or improve your experience about it, it will never come and haunt you and you will have a little bit of knowledge which is never bad

where you learn japanese? are there some kind of school?

I wish this could be required viewing before any beginning Japanese class. If I have to hear one more girl refer to herself as “ore” because she just loves Bleach THAT MUCH well… I-I… I just don't know. ;_;

But, yeah, anime tends to emphasize certain speech patterns to an absurd extent. Not something I'd want to be caught doing in front of someone that actually spoke Japanese.

I used to watch a decent amount of anime back in the day, and for some reason, I had a good memory to memorize lines in Japanese… so learning some phrases weren't hard. But you don't learn the foundation/basics, which is the problem.
I never took a Japanese class (a skipped to level 2 in Korean though), but I can understand Koichi's Japanese youtube videos. [not pure 100%, but like 90%, usually]
What I did to learn was having a best friend who was Japanese, good online grammar guides (Tae Kim), have a good Japanese dictionary, and of course, listening to Koichi. ;)
And all of my Nintendo DS games are Japanese. [I recommend the Pokemon ones for beginner Japanese learners, because there's no Kanji, and it's at childrens reading level]. Also, a lot of the Japanese games come voiced, and w/ tons of Kanji in the reading. So that's one of my ways of getting my Kanji down (listening to the voice-actors).
So J-video games, and a good dictionary are my thing, though.

You forgot to say: “I will never forgive you” and “Gomu Gomu”

Thats like saying a baby can't learn English just by talking in front of it for a few years. The brain is capable of this. It just takes a lot more time to learn this way. 5 minutes a day wont work. 30 minutes a day for 10 years will get you somewhere though, given you haven't realized that you have no good reason to learn Japanese by then. Of course you will never learn to read and write by Anime. At least if you watch Anime for 10 years and realize you didn't need to know Japanese, you still had fun. If you spent years memorizing 20,000 characters and then realize you don't need it, it is a bit of a bummer.

you say you learned (l-e-a-r-n-e-d, not LEARNT) how to say those in Japanese through watching Anime….and yet, you can't even spell it /: How do we know if you're even able to pronounce it.

Yes, you are able to learn some phrases, but the whole point of the video is not to allow anime to be the sole source for your Japanese instruction if you're someone who actually wants to learn it…

And you pretty much just proved that….

(And no, i'm not trying to start an argument here, this just really bugged me)

No hard feelings! :)

bloody anime geeks. dattebayo this and that. who the fuck says dattebayo in normal japanese conversation? nobody i've never heard it. maybe some otaku but nobody else. its mada jyozu jya arimasen by the way. besides the subs are never literal so you will end up saying things wrong because they are translated wrong. 死ね、オタク！

Okay, so watching anime by itself with subtitles all day will get you no where. No one's debating that. And *certainly* no one is debating the “5 minutes a day” part. But watching ridiculously huge amounts of anime without subtitles for months on end?

Yes, I can say it does work. I even ripped the sound off of my favorite anime and carried it with me on my ipod and listened to it in my free time. IT DOES WORK. I am able to parse out words in almost any Japanese that I hear. Before I started studying on the side, I had already gained an intuitive understanding of many different structures, phrases, and words.

I'm not saying watching Anime should be your only method of learning. But it's a powerful, powerful tool, no matter what the fool in this video says. Because of all that listening and watching, It's easier for me to learn and remember different phrases and structures because I've heard them loads of times before.

Though I would recommend being smart about which anime you pick; Naruto (eww) and Bleach (yay) will both probably get you no where. Look for useful dialogue. I must admit, I find J-Dramas very useful. As Khatzumoto of AllJapaneseAllTheTime fame says, “10 % of it is special, perhaps unuseful, specialized vocabulary. But the 90% is plain vanilla, every day Japanese.”

it always bugged me a bit when I heard random KUHWAII DESOO from some person in anime club. :T It makes me feel a bit embarrassed to sit around with my friends in anime club at school. Honestly, I'm not interested in anime at all but I think it makes a pretty good supplement for just listening to patterns and such.

However I'm a sucker for otome games ( shoot me if you want :P ) and I find that reading along with the voice actor really helps me distinguish words better, no matter howwwww weird they may talk, haha. C: I think that watching japanese cartoons, playing japanese games, and watching j-dramas is a nice break and supplement from studying hard from the textbooks.

I am a little iffy about anime though because I always sortakinda associate it with some of the strange anime club kids at my school that run around screaming random japanese phrases.

There is nothing wrong with learning Japanese from anime even if you're just a beginner, and especially if your reason for learning Japanese is to understand new anime that you haven't watched yet. Let's face it, English used in American cartoons is the same English used in the store when buying food and the same English used while talking to friends. American kids learn English while watching cartoons over and over again. They are exposed to their parents and the rest of the society, but they do spend a large portion of their time just watching cartoons. If you learned English just by watching cartoons, you would surely sound funny, but at least you would be understood, and able to understand, which is the main purpose of the language anyway. Same goes for any other language. Once Japanese found in anime is mastered, it is a lot easier to move to listening to news or talking to people. Grammar is the same. 90% of vocabulary is the same too.

Advice: if anime is what you are into and it makes you get exposed to more Japanese, watch it! Nothing wrong with it. Once you are ready and interested, you will move on to watching movies/reading books/articles about politics, ethical issues, or medicine. If you are happy with Japanese you learned from anime and think that's enough for you, stop there and enjoy your knowledge.

i think it's entirely possible to learn a lot of Japanese from watching anime, but it takes time. i developed my own system for it. try it out if you want: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/181288… i agree though that simply watching won't accomplish much other than teaching the occasional random vocabulary.

no you cant you idot you suck [no offence]