Learn Japanese Today

So I’ve been talking a lot lately about this anime I’m watching, Eyeshield 21. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the big draw it has for me is that it’s about American football, something I know a lot about, and so I can just focus on the Japanese. Giant robot shows are all well and good, but you should save them until your nearly fluent. Watch shows with mostly everyday language.

Also, I want to add that this isn’t a regular old anime review. I’m not going to go into character development or art quality or anything like that. This review is for showing you how this anime compares to others for learning Japanese. But, it is REALLY good. The characters are interesting, and I just want to hug Kurita (the big fat lineman that looks like he was drawn by a first-grader) every time he’s on the screen.

Ease of Use: 8

There are a lot of characters that speak in fast, rough male Japanese, which can be hard to interpret, but you have to get used to it sometime. However, the main character and the female characters are usually pretty easy to understand, so you can get sentences for your SRS there. The player on Crunchyroll isn’t ideal for repeating dialogue multiple times, but it doesn’t entirely suck either. I’ll admit at this point, I don’t have a huge amount of experience of mining subtitles from other anime on other players, so I don’t really know. It’s pretty easy to use, could be easier.

Oh. And the subtitle are fantastic.

Authenticity: 6

Again, lots of rough males. This is a way some people talk in Japanese (saying things like ore-sama and temee), but not nearly to the extent shown in this show. The show also has a high tendency towards gimmicky characters, such as an entire team based off ancient Egypt with the pharaoh as the quarterback, and these contrived situations usually lead to contrived dialogue and terrible puns, so watch out for those. Also, a lot of these gimmicky characters tend to speak in weird ways that people don’t usually talk. For example, the aforementioned pharaoh always uses yo instead of ore or some other version of I. Yo means “mine” according to the subtitle, but I haven’t been able to find it in a dictionary. Just watch out for that sort of thing.

Quantity of Knowledge: 7

Well, I’m not sure how to judge this. There are over 140 episodes. Then again, a lot of football related words are in katakana, so I’m inclined not to count them as highly. But generally, there is a pretty high concentration of dialogue in episodes.

Price: 10

Free via CrunchyRoll .

Fun: 10

I’ve been having a ball with this one. I hope you do too.

Overall:8.1

I’m sure there are better shows for learning, but this one is really engaging and not too difficult to pick up stuff from. Also, it’s exceedingly well subtitled, and that’s always good. I really like it, i hope you do too.

So I’ve been watching a lot of Eyeshield 21 lately, an anime about American football, and I’ve been using it to find new sentences to put in my SRS to study. I struggled with the process at first, but now I have a pretty good system for getting them down, and I’d like to share that with you.

First of all though, why use anime? Why not sample sentences from textbooks or dictionaries where they’re already translated?

Well, and I’m sorry for getting all neuroscience-y on you, but listening and translating builds neural pathways, while copying from another source does not. By the time you’re studying a sentence from an anime in your SRS, you already have a neural pathway for how it sounds and what the individual pieces mean. This provides a stronger background for the next time you hear the word, whereas with a sentence from a textbook, you’ve still yet to hear it in context and that neural pathway has yet to be established. It is still worth it to learn sentences from textbooks, in fact you can input sentences much faster, but taking in sentences from a contextual, audio source is the fastest way to incorporate them into your memory.

Now AJATT likes to recommend watching shows without subtitles, but I’m inclined to disagree, at least for the purpose of mining sentences. The key is to use the subtitle as a guide, not a translation. I’m a subtitler myself, and rather than a literal translation, the subtitle is usually an English phrase that means roughly the same thing, and fits in context. Idioms and colloquialisms are usually converted to English counterparts in the subtitle, which can be very useful for contextualizing Japanese phrases. As my high school Japanese Sensei used to say, “In America, you have ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease.’ In Japan, we have ‘the crying bird gets shot.’

Basically what I’m saying is that you should listen, and keep listening until the words you hear come out to make a sentence that means roughly the same thing as the subtitle. You do this by listening for a word, spelling it out in hiragana, and then looking it up in a dictionary. If the meaning fits as part of the subtitle, move on. Then you plug the subtitle into your SRS. This forces you to remember the whole context, the listening, and the meaning of the individual parts to remember the sentence correctly.

More on listening though, sometimes figuring out what people are saying is hard. So first of all, choose a show you know something about, so the words aren’t that strange. I chose Eyeshield 21 because, being an American, I know lots about football, so the content itself is rarely confusing and I can focus on the language. If most of the sentences are about Proton Mass Accelerators and such, you may have a hard time translating with most dictionaries.

You should also try to get a sense of what characters you can understand and which ones speak either quickly, weirdly, or with heavy dialect. I’ve found that female characters are usually the easiest to understand, but that doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to them. Try figuring out what a bike gang member is saying sometime, it’s very much fun.

I’ve only been doing this for a couple of days and I’m already seeing huge improvements, so I hope you can say the same.