Forum - View topicHas anyone ever learned Japanese from anime?
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HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
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I am studying Japanese but its going pretty slow. I like anime but I usually end up watching the dub if there is one (and it isn't bad).
Has anyone here ever made progress in learning the language from listening to the original track? If you do is it with the subtitle on or off? |
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hissatsu01
 Posts: 963 Location: NYC |
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To be blunt, it's a waste of time. Yes, you can practice comprehension by listening to anime, and you might even learn some new vocabulary, but as a learning tool it's pretty awful. Not to mention whatever you might learn would probably be pretty crude/rude Japanese. Think of learning English by watching Jersey Shore. There's really no replacement for actual study. Well, aside from immersion, but that's not very practical for most outside of Japan. |
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egoist
 Posts: 7762 |
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The thing about listening to subs is that you're listening to a professional voice actor, with a really smooth Japanese. Once you come across a Japanese speaking his language, you'll realize how inutile it is to use anime as a means to understand spoken Japanese. There was a thread about this a few months ago, another twofrom a few years ago. Perhaps you can find one of them of help.
Last edited by egoist on Sun Feb 07, 2010 9:15 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Thunderbird-
 Posts: 60 |
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I've learned a few word since I started watching English sub only. Especially when a character says something over and over. Though you have to be careful because sometimes the subs aren't exact, like on crunchyroll's Reborn! sub when Gokudera calls Tsuna Judaime (I think it's spelled that way) they translate it as boss but the fansub translated it as 10th, I also know that Ju means 10 so 10th might be more accurate but I'm not entirely sure.
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HaruhiToy
Posts: 4118 |
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I'm glad you posted. My business does a lot of work with Japanese customers, but when we or they visit or on conference calls they mostly prefer to speak English. I don't get much face time with those that don't speak English well, and even they prefer to practice their English with me. So I get little chance to "immerse" there. I thought maybe anime might be good exposure, but from the replies I got here it sounds like a pretty shallow well. But what about manga? Currently I don't read any. I remember as a kid partly learning to read from DC Comics. I remember I time I could look at the pictures but not make out many of the words. I wonder if that would be worth the investment. Rosetta stone (version 3) is what is working best for me but it doesn't stand alone. You just can't make progress without separate textbooks because Japanese is different enough from English that the immersion method Rosetta stone uses is just too hard to pick up from scratch. Also, it helps to know Hirigana and most of the Katakana. On a loosely related note, most of the Japanese businessmen understand my interest in anime even less than most Americans do. |
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zgripţuroicǎ
 Posts: 140 Location: Newburgh, NY |
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I've only known one person who has to any extent, and that was a kid who would go on 48-hour binges of various series, doing absolutely nothing else. As best I know, he learned in conjunction with other self-teaching tools. How long have you been taking classes? Realistically, with a language as complex as Japanese, it's going to go slow. If you really want to learn it, you're going to have to dedicate years (to be optimistic, if you started by full immersion in Japan and classes, maybe five years or more, realistically, probably more) of time if you plan on approaching native fluency.
It probably won't really be too helpful you know enough verbs and vocab thoroughly enough to recognize the various permutations they undergo. As someone else said, there's also regional variance in Japanese as it's spoken. If you go to Japan, they'll be different accents and manners of speaking you may not have known about. You're also going to deal with a lot of stuff that likely doesn't make any sense in Japanese (think sci-fi babble they make up for shows, as an example) that will just get you a strange look. Also think about the various levels of politeness built into the language. You wouldn't want to learn something that's considered very casual and then suddenly bust it out on your conservative Japanese boss at work. It won't really hurt you, but you should be careful about using vocab you pick up from it. And if you can't watch a show with the subs off and understand enough of it to know what happened, or to enjoy it, I'd say watch Japanese dub with subs until you find yourself no longer relying on them. Of course, you're going to need to learn kanji from somewhere, and I can't really say I'd advise picking it up from manga. |
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JacobC
ANN Contributor
 Posts: 3728 Location: SoCal |
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Well...you know if there's one thing I think anime can help with in terms of learning the language it's not really learning it in terms of grammatical structure or vocabulary, it's getting the sound right. If you're planning on speaking it rather than writing it, listening to anime can help you pick up on pronunciation, masculine/feminine speech styles, phrasing of questions, requests, very affirmative statements, all those things. So it can help in that regard if you're already studying. Pronunciation is extremely important, you know. Our constant jibs at the "engurishu" we hear should be proof enough of that. Add to that Japanese is a tonal language and ours isn't...at least...I think that's the term for it. Basically, all I mean is that English is rhythmic. We speak in beats, like waves on the ocean or blows to a punching bag. Exaggerate this and it becomes iambic pentameter, an almost strictly English poetic device. Japanese is not rhythmic in the same sense, it is spoken largely in "monotone" with shifts in pitch rather than syllabic stress, like a river or something bobbing up and down in the wind. Exaggerate this and it becomes song, I guess, or maybe the tones of a stringed instrument or something...the best metaphor is like a tuning fork, but that's not very human voicelike. (I am bad at this explaining thing. X_X) The speech styles are completely different, pretty much. Unless you want to sound like you're drunk or really harsh and angry, you have to phase into the tonal speech pattern when you talk. You raise and lower the pitch of your voice depending on how you want to phrase something, but you don't punch words back and forth. (Whole phrases, maybe! Um, well, if you're angry!) As for me, I picked up a couple hundred words or phrases from watching anime, but didn't know anything about the grammar, and therefore, couldn't form a coherent sentence in Japanese unless it was one of those phrases. Now I know the grammar, just by studying independently on and off and...I...still can't really...form a sentence, but my point is I don't think you can get any feel of sentence structure from watching a lot of anime. Might pick up some cool words though. My favorite is still the simple "Are you sure, really?" phrase: HONTO DESU KA?! 
I don't know, it's fun to say. ...That and I will always remember being asked by the Japanese exchange student friends I had in high school to "say something in Japanese" for them once they found out I knew some. I exclaimed this in my best accent and they couldn't stop laughing for about an hour.  It wasn't that it was bad, or at least they said my pronunciation was excellent I think it's just that WTF factor you get when a foreigner shouts something random in your language. Anyway, it was funny.
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Shadowrun20XX
 Posts: 1936 Location: Vegas |
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How long did it take you to speak, read or even write in English.
Don't expect any of this to come to you instantly. I've been watching anime for about thirty years, and it's taken me about twenty before I could comfortably watch raws. That's from watching alone. Not the games I own, or the comics/manga I've gone through. To learn through anime, you'd have to really want it. I'd say it's possible in 3 to 5 years, If you were to watch it daily. It really does pay off when you do. There is still so much that never makes it here. A ton of great titles that will never see the light of day here. R1 or fansubbed. Dubbing is good and fine, but you will never progress that way. That Rosetta stone program is a great tool, but it's one of those ones, where you have to really drop what you are doing, and concentrate to get something good out of it. |
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Sophisticat
 Posts: 165 |
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You can certainly learn to speak from anime. Just be aware you'll be speaking like an anime character.
In any case, Japanese pronunciation is fairly simple, so just watching anime should be fine to get going, but keep in mind that reading materials with audio CD's are still better, however boring they might be. You can keep up your interest with anime, at least. The kana/kanji might appear daunting, but they're pretty easy to memorize once you get used to it. The kana shouldn't take more than a day or two to get down, and some 500 basic kanji will set you back two-three weeks at most. That is, if you're interested in reading the language as well. The trick is just being organized, keeping up the pace, and at least getting in two to three sessions per week. If you're well acquainted with how you learn, it should be a relatively painless process. |
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Skylark
 Posts: 827 Location: ORE NO TSHIRT |
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I picked up a fair bit of japanese by watching subbed episodes and then raw episodes directly after it and remembering what the translated lines were, and using context and situation to work out vocab I didn't know.
Then I got onto this great site describing Japanese grammar in detail where I not only learned that anime is a dreadful resource unless you want to come across as insolent, but I started picking up kanji and the written language as well. If you want to use a source of japanese entertainment media as a learning too (because it does alleviate the boredom a hell of a lot over say learning kanji via rote), your best option is to use the online JDIC kanji lookup tables via radicals and try to read through a visual novel, preferably one with full speech so you can hear how it sounds and which reading each kanji uses. This, I reckon, is the best and most fun way to pick up the written and spoken language (with japanese I firmly believe you need to know both, because there are so many expressions with multiple meanings and without understanding kanji and their readings you can't really get a firm grip on the japanese vocabulary), whilst also being more "correct" than anime (of course, depending on which title you choose to play through). Manga is often as bad as anime, and is mostly made up of dialogue so it isn't as good a medium I think. Either visual novels for the speech aspect, or light novels are best. I've learnt most of the Japanese I know from visual novels, and I'm fairly confident that I could get by in Japan (although my ability to read and understand are good, I've never had a conversation partner or done much writing so communicating to others and formulating sentences might be harder for me than I think). Btw this would be the 4th thread on this topic I've seen since I came to the forums haha. |
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Kruszer
 Posts: 7994 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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Learning another language is too much darn work in my experience, especially since most people, and this isn't a shot at anyone here just to clarify, can't get their native language completely right. However, the average person can definitely learn common words from watching media like nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and verbs if they pay enough attention to what's being said while they read the subtitles and and have an accurate translation. This is a common function of a lot people's brains, to connect words with people, places and things, and runs almost unconsciously sometimes if you're an auditory learner type. Still, speaking it and reading and writing it are two completely different things. I find that it's difficult to grasp the language's syntax or grammar just by listening to it. If you want to master it you need some kind of supplementary material.
Personally, I'm fluent in English as it's my native language but I know a lot of Spanish after two years of it in high school but I highly doubt I could do anything more than ask simple questions, order food, or pointing at objects and saying what they are. Japanese would be the language I know the 3rd most about as I could list maybe 50-100 words. Then I also know a few random words of German, French, Italian, and Russian. |
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Mistmanov
 Posts: 27 Location: Belgium |
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I learned the vast majority of my english from dutch-subtitled television, and later on from english games/forums. While we did get english in school, all of it was on a lower level than that which I already knew. I guess it's the same for many of the non-native english speakers that can be found on the internet.
(ofcourse, english has a lot in common with the other european languages, so for many people on the internet learning english is easier than learning Japanese) That said: the average person is probably capable of learning a new language solely by listening to it. It will take a lot of time, and you will probably end up with a flawed understanding of the language (as others have said - talking like a character from your favorite cartoon might not be ideal when having a serious conversation), but it's better than nothing. If persons S and D both spend 3 hours per week studying Japanese, only S also watched 4 hours of subbed anime and D watched 4 hours of dubbed anime, S is going to learn Japanese faster. |
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TatsuGero23
 Posts: 1277 Location: Sniper Island, USA (It's in your heart!) |
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I have always equated learning a foreign language from a non-study or learning source as the equalevent of you learning how to talk from ages 1 - 5. And really, dispute what others say, its not a bad method IF its your only method. Technically it's hard for me to formally learn my native tongue unless I take a class at a private college so I can only build from exposure and practice with my interaction with my community. But if there's a formal source or if you wish to apply your knowledge professionally then your gonna need to do some studying.
You may or may not learn enough, from watching alot of anime, to be correhent or undetectable that you did not formally learn the language, but you'll have an understanding at the least and like JesuOtaku points out, you'll probably have a better sense of tones and proper pronouncations compared to a book only learner. But nothing really beats the core knowledge you get from proper studying. Some teachers and classes may be better at getting you prepared to actually hold a conversation, but all of them will at least teach the core stuff and needed stuff. |
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kiddtic
 Posts: 309 Location: Kitwe, Zambia |
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to be honest the only tjing I pick up from anime in terms of language is Words, its pretty hard to learn the grammer from just listening and reading subs. theres a lot more to it.
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Paploo
Posts: 1875 |
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Having studied japanese in a classroom environment, you're probably not doing yourself a favour just learning it from anime. Asides from the tendency to have anime characters speak in odd dialects [it'd be like learning english from HannaBarbera characters. No one ends every sentence with Jinkies.], your writing skills would be incredibly poor.
Kanji, Hirigana and Katakana have very strict, specific writing styles, and it's important to get the curves and points right- our japanese prof would take points off if you didn't draw/write it correctly. Penmanship is very important. And as others have mentioned, grammer is important as well.... anime is often conversational dialogue, so you might miss out on some of the grammatical structure, as well as stuff like verb conjugation, in addition to not understanding how to properly pronounce letters, Classes also provide the chance to practice conversations, and interact with native speakers. Learning by yourself can get you started, but to be competent, interaction is a key part of learning any language. Watching anime can probably help a little, but it's not a focus point. All that said, I found afterwards flipping through japanese books helped me refresh a little- reading manga in japanese can take awhile, but it does help you remember all those letters if you don't have a chance to practice much. |
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