I watched anime a lot in my youth and young adulthood, and found that after about 10 years of daily watching I could easily pick up a new show and understand the gist of what was going on. Complex words or exposition tripped me up, though. Nowadays I rarely watch anime but I’ve been studying Japanese daily on Duolingo for 4 years, and sometimes I’ll turn on a Japanese show as practice to try to recognize as many words as I can. It’s a totally different beast - Now I actually understand the nuances of sentence structure and have a much larger vocabulary, instead of just knowing a few key words. It’s a fun exercise.
Non-Japanese Native Speakers: How long were you watching anime before you are comfortable with watching your first episode without subtitles?
Submitted 16 hours ago by mo_lave@reddthat.com to anime@ani.social
Comments
Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 hours ago
isyasad@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
As someone who actually did learn Japanese through watching anime, it took me about 3 years. I started watching anime regularly in 2018 and when I was watching Hori-san to Miyamura-kun in 2021, the last two episodes had not been subtitled, so I watched them raw and mostly understood it.
A lot of people will say that it’s impossible to learn just via watching anime, but have not actually tried it. Yes, if you have subtitles on, it’s easy to let yourself totally ignore the Japanese. But it’s not impossible, and if you are focused, you can still learn even with subs turned on.
Later on, I started taking classes in Japanese at college and started learning a lot more. But just knowledge from watching anime was enough to pass an oral placement test and skip the first 2 semesters. If you are serious about learning Japanese, I recommend taking classes or studying it seriously online. There’s also better input resources than anime such as streamers or even conversation analysis audio for linguistics research.
But I am convinced that anime is still a very good tool because many people like anime and are already very motivated to watch it. This is a very big strength because the biggest obstacle to learning language is giving up. This, combined with Japanese’s very very simple grammar and verb conjugations actually makes it a very easy language to learn, imo.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
Probably due to immersive learning?
Integrate777@discuss.online 5 hours ago
I’ve watched anime for decades at this point, but nope. I can pick out words here and there, but it would severely limit my enjoyment of anime. Subtitles allow my brain to skip most of the hard work when it comes to learning a language, I don’t believe it will get better even if this goes on for another decade.
I also feel if I suffered through a couple of months of non-subtitled watching and put in the effort to process, understand and memorize what I’m hearing, it might eventually get better. But as long as I have access to subtitles, I don’t do any of that…