I like this piece a lot. I have tutored a lot of kids who are obsessed with anime, and I feel like if I teach them these tactics, they will be able to learn a lot more from it. I have been trying to find the best way to learn from anime, but I think you may have done it first.

One question though… what is “Ve”? The link that’s in this article leads to a “Page not found”.

Great article. I don’t think I’m at the level to start doing this but I’ll definitely keep this in mind for later.

I’ve barely started on spoken Japanese, and am amused at how many bits of phrases I’m recognizing in anime audio, even if they’re only fragmented variants of terms that I know. Suddenly bits of something as minor as “so desu ne” start being noticed.

I don’t know how much truth there is to the assertion that not a lick will be learnt from just watching anime but I can tell you that it certainly doesn’t hold true for everyone. I watched a lot of anime during a couple of years (and the only Japanese studying at all being done was learning kana towards the end as far as I can remember) and could understand a lot and hold a basic conversation when I finally went there on a youth exchange. I shocked my host family (who assumed I knew no Japanese, not having studied it and generally being timid) when during a conversation around the dinner table on the first day I said something along the lines of “彼の妹は半分日本人だから”, after not really having said much during the car ride to their home. I can’t remember the circumstance exactly but I think they were talking about another exchange student from my area who they noticed could speak some Japanese, and I guess I felt compelled to show them that I had in fact understood everything they had been talking about and knew some myself, flawed though as it may have been. :P

Which reminds me of another time when I was in Tokyo, many years later, and an old lady in a hyakkin or something greeted me, and before I had time to greet her back she started going on about how we foreigners should at least learn the language before we go there and other mildly xenophobic statements. She grumbled on while walking away so I just ignored her. She exited the store, and soon after so did we, and I saw her waiting for a red light just outside the store. This time I greeted her first, and added “ちなみに、日本語はちゃんと話せますよ”.

Thanks so much for sharing this, Viet. This is a great resource. I don’t know why I didn’t hear about this until now.

I don’t watch anime as a general rule. My younger son does and, unfortunately, it had an adverse effect on his spoken language. We noticed that his Japanese was becoming courser and mentioned it to him. He was surprised and is making an effort to learn Japanese that would be more acceptable to normal social and business settings. Since I don’t watch anime, I don’t know what level of politeness is typical there, but it seems that some caution is advised in using it as a learning tool.

While learning without subtitles is a fine strategy, I think passive learning with (English) subtitles does increase you vocabulary as you directly get the feedback of a word you might not have known before. At least, this is from my own experience. Second of all, adding Japanese subtitles is pretty limited since only few channels add Japanese subtitles for the impaired or deaf persons when it comes to anime (of course, movies will usually have Japanese subtitles included). But when an anime does have subtitles, it will actually show at the top right at the beginning of the episode, I believe in the lines of 「字幕」 or 「字幕あり」, something close to that. Might be a pointer for some.

Language-shadowing over an anime? I have my doubts about the efficiency. Depending on the series, the voice actors and actresses take on a speech pattern that is quite unusual to common Japanese in real life.

What definitely boosted my comprehension as I went on learning Japanese through anime, is the karaoke which is usually made by the fansubbers. Singing along or just reading along the romaji (or if you’re more proficient in Japanese, the kana) while having the translations down below is a great way to passively learn Japanese, in my opinion. It should be very effective, since you’ll get to hear it every single episode. As if you’re cramming for fun, almost. At least it worked out quite well for me as I started watching series after series. I guess you’d have to be a fan of J-pop though, for that matter.

Also, if you’re not believing this written story at all: I’ve been quite active in the fansubbing community (which I consider my active part in learning Japanese through anime), and I’ve got to know some people who actually are proficient at translating anime by just passively learning through, you guessed it, anime itself. But I do consider that learning Japanese through anime is only meant for people who are actually willing to maximize their proficiency without any close sources, or just to keep your mind busy with Japanese as you’re at home. Basically, you’d be putting so much time in it that Japanese is not just a language you want to try speaking, but want to master. A tool for Japanese Studies students. But perhaps I might be wrong and biased as I’m a Japanese Studies student myself.

I agree with your recommendation about dramas. Especially those that show the characters in different settings including at work, socializing with friends, and at home with the family. It’s important to become comfortable with the shifts in formality/politeness.

“I watched a lot of anime during a couple of years (and the only Japanese studying at all being done was learning kana towards the end as far as I can remember) and could understand a lot and hold a basic conversation when I finally went there on a youth exchange.”
- I can totally relate to that. I also watched a lot of anime for some years and only learned kana, but I could understand a lot of things that were said to me when I went to Japan to study in a language school. I was even able to speak better than a chinese student that took the level N1 JLPT(or maybe he was just too shy) and I could handle having conversations all day long in Japanese. Well, of course from time to time I made awful grammatical errors that made me look really silly, but I was still able to convey my point of view. My language wasn’t very formal but it was enough to help me make a lot of friends, which I think was the most important thing at the time(I was 16 years old).

I guess the topic comes down to what anime you’re actually watching. Indeed, anime that is aimed for children is often accompanied with closed captions, but the percentage of my projects having cc was fairly low. I wouldn’t call it often, but then again there are a lot of anime every season so I can’t say for sure. If I assume the kitsunekko website shows the average amount of anime subtitles available on the internet, I’d say it’s quite limited when looking at the total amount of anime around. Then again, if you don’t mind watching old anime, I guess there should be something to your liking to work with. So I guess you’re right.

True, I do agree on the fact that you’d get used to the Japanese phonetic inventory, which is known for having the alveolar tap (the R that you form by actually making some kind of D). I guess this mimicking I did was at the time of karaoke then. You’re right that the lines are not beneficial for everyday Japanese conversation, but they do use some words that are nice to keep in mind. Trying to translate these sentences is actually really fun to do, since it’s challenging but you can be poetic in your own way as well. And you can always learn from your mistakes.

While it’s a tool, it should not become the main method. That’s at least how I look at it.

“you could be training yourself to sound like a weirdo.”

Oh, I’ve already completed that training years ago.

Since you don’t watch anime, how would you know that the coarseness in his language is caused by that, and not his comfort around you, because of your close relationship, or learned from kids at school?

I’m genuinely curious, because I’ve heard of somewhat similar circumstances. (Parents who are against violent video games.) It’s something I’ve never understood.

Oh, okay. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. ^_^

While you CAN get better comprehension of standard Japanese in anime, be very careful though: some anime have characters that speak in a non-standard Japanese dialect that can cause confusion. For example, the anime series “Namiuchigiwa no Muromi-san” has characters speaking in the Hakata and Kokura dialects of northern Kyushu island, which can be a bit hard to understand even if you are fluent in standard Japanese. (Small wonder why I haven’t heard of any anime series where characters speak in the very hard to understand Tsugaru or Satsagu dialects–those are so different than standard Japanese subtitles are needed in TV drama shows whenever an on-screen character speaks in these dialects.)

I watch anime and dramas with subtitles primarily for entertainment but its a VERY nice compliment to my studies I think. Getting to hear how things are said, hearing vocab that I’ve learned and hearing the most common vocab is a great help and is a lot of fun to sort of gauge how much better I’m getting.

This is for more advanced learners but U could also find blogs where people out lines from said show. And u find those blogs by googling dialogue from the show with quotes.

I happen to be in fansubbing as well and I don’t really agree about the close captions. I’m clearly not good enough to work as a translator but I do attend meetings when we choose our shows each season and I don’t remember that there were even half of the shows with close captions (which is pretty important for some translators because it speeds up translating a lot)
For karaoke I agree that often you won’t learn anything on grammar but you can learn many words/kanji which is still useful. Because I often do the timing on the karaoke it helps me learn the pronunciations of most kanji (since you need to associate part of the romaji to each kana/kanji to avoid timing twice) so I think it’s really something that can help.

A classmate watched during six months Phineas and Ferb in Spanish without subtitles only knowing how to say “Hola” and the basic conjugations and he got better marks in the exams than the people who had actually done the subject for three years. Japanese is harder than Spanish, but I suppose that if you are really hardcore with your studies you can do it in quite a bit less than three years.

My problem isn’t so much that the most useless terms are the ones that stick, but that the most useful ones don’t. It’s worse when trying to read: for the longest while the only reading I could remember for 下 was ‘shita,’ despite the fact that it accounted for fewer than 15% of the correct usages. And the book I was reading had this character at least three times per page, so since I was retyping everything into Translate, the usually-wrong reading (being the only one I could remember) was the one that was being reinforced, so I was even less likely to remember that at least half the time it should have been ‘moto’.

Likewise, I can only remember one of the various words for ‘breakfast’ (and I don’t even know if it’s the one I should be using), and I can’t remember any of the other meal names at all. Despite hearing them constantly, I’m still not certain which ‘-gakkou’ is elementary school and which one is high school. I used to mix up ‘itadakimasu’ and ‘ittekimasu’ until I made myself start actually using them on a daily basis. And it was only last week that I finally stopped looking up ‘kimoi’ in the dictionary every time I wanted to complain about the contents of my son’s diapers. The more I think that the word is going to be useful, the less likely it is to stick in mind for some reason – whereas when I just let them flow over me, I can remember them without having to think about it. Thankfully, the ones I’ve picked up that way are USUALLY worthwhile – ‘daijoubu,’ ‘betsuni,’ ‘nandemonai,’ and especially ‘kawaii koneko’, and even ‘kaijuu’ and ‘henshin’ can have their uses – but I’ve only ever heard ‘sekai seifuku’ in the context of Kamen Rider and Zvezda Plot (and modern Kamen Rider shows don’t go in much for the world conquest anymore).

For me, it’s dramas rather than anime, but the principle is the same. The words and phrases take on much more meaning when you see how they are used in everyday life. The intonation, facial expression, body language, etc are all part of the language.

Spanish is balls easy? Hmm, maybe for people that have adapted romance languages, I doubt a man from rural China might feel the same. Don’t be so quick to say what’s easy or not based on your experiences.

Although I agree with the methods stated and have no doubts that all the things explained are more efficient (yet maybe troublesome and a bit more time consuming), I believe that saying that you can’t learn Japanese from anime (with the usual « insert your language of preference here » subtitles) is an overstatement.

I’ve been studying Japanese for a bit over 2 years, and have around 60 days of watched anime according to myanimelist, and I have had countless of times when I’ve been talking to my teacher and been able to use vocabulary that we never studied, or by the time we reach a certain subject I already have the general idea in my mind thanks to having heard it over and over while I watched anime. Even now that I’ve started reading manga in Japanese, although I need to have my denshi-jisho to look for the meaning of a lot of stuff, I’m also reading many times the kanji furigana and thinking “oh, so that’s how you write this word…” (which I had picked effortlessly watching anime).

I’m not arguing that if you were to watch anime with japanese subtitles, and took your time to really study the conversations and all, you will most likely have a faster improvement (albeit reducing a bit the fun factor of watching a series), but I think you shouldn’t underestimate the ability of the subconscious.
Just the humble opinion of a (probably) low-intermediate student :)

I think most importantly though, you are at least training yourself to sound like a Japanese weirdo. It’s still actual natural native Japanese, in some ways moreso than formulaic textbook Japanese. The weird cartoon-y things that weird Japanese cartoon characters say are at least weird Japanese things, and not weird foreign-mistake things.

Yes. I think it’s important to point out that anime CAN be useful in learning Japanese if used properly. I don’t even like anime now as I did when I was a child, but people are too quick to turn up their noses at the thought of it having some benefit to language learners.

Though, I wouldn’t hate on subtitles yo. If you hear the same Japanese word associated with the same English displayed on the screen, you’re gonna pick it up.

I wasn’t *trying* to learn, but listening drilled a lot of incredibly basic constructs (ｘはｙです), pronunciation, and vocab words. When I got to Japanese 101 in university, I wasn’t the newb saying “ko-NEEEchee-wa waTAshee WAA Sally de-SOO”. I also shadowed the Japanese a lot. Back in the day of VHS. Just good listen, pause, say. ^_^; I don’t even know why… again I wasn’t *trying* to learn… it was just a fun game that I often played with my sister. When I got older and was made to do it in school, I was pretty shocked it was an actual learning tool.

Now I’m kind of forced to watch anime daily. My boyfriend does not speak English so watching Japanese anime with Eng subs is the easiest, cheapest form of entertainment we can enjoy together. Sometimes I can look away from the screen and understand perfectly, sometimes I can’t (especially those anime with unusual ways of speaking) but vocab and basic grammar constructs are pretty consistent, so it’s still useful for me. (Oh: you need to add watching anime with your Japanese boyfriend/girlfriend is double effective because you can ask them to explain a word or concept you don’t understand using words you do understand!) Sometimes I hear words that I’ve only studied one time but never heard or read in context, so seeing them pop up in the anime helps cement them into my brain (ohhh that’s how you’d use that word…). Same goes with grammar I find difficult. So I find anime to be a pretty useful supplemental tool.

I’ve been learning Japanese for about 5 months – I use Wanikani, and go to a local language class for a couple of hours once a week. I’m also a big anime fan. And I would agree with a lot of the thrust of this article, that is: by watching anime *for pleasure*, you’re really not going to pick up that much in terms of grammar, vocabulary etc.; though for beginners I think it does help with recognising speech patterns and how emphasis is placed on certain words.

The thing that I think has most helped me with my listening comprehension is probably the character song albums that I got into off the back of anime, and Jpop in general (so long as there’s a big focus on lyrics). I find my brain picking out new words as I listen to a familiar track. What once was unintelligible sound becomes, “今すぐ” ,because I just learned that vocab from Wanikani last week.

Sometimes it goes even further than just listening comprehension. When listening to a track yesterday (http://tinyurl.com/pxduded) I came across the construction 食べられない for the first time. Because I’d just learned the difference between 見る　と　見える　I kinda thought that this might be a passive form (to be eaten). Then, I thought way way back to another song, where they said 止められない and I had read this was translated as “unstoppable”; so I had an “ah hah!” moment, and realised that 食べられない probably meant “cannot be eaten”.

IN CONCLUSION I think that your intent is paramount. If you go to any japanese-language media with an intent to learn stuff, and can be disciplined about it, it’s going to help.

Plus, it’s not like you can pick up any bad habits from anime, dattebayou.