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.

I know that TiVos are mostly replaced these days, now that Comcast and Dish provide their own digital recorders, but if there’s one thing TiVo was great at, or is (is past tense appropriate), it’s fast forwarding and rewinding. There were a serious of soothing beeps and boops that let you know how fast you were going, and when you hit play while fast forwarding or rewinding it would always back up just the right amount.

But my favorite part was this little button here. It would just backup the tape 2 to 3 seconds and then start playing again, which is an unbelievably convenient feature.

You may be wondering why this is important, and what this has to do about Japanese. Well, today I was watching my new favorite anime, Eyeshield 21 , and copying down some sentences from it to use on my SRS. I was watching on Crunchyroll , so I couldn’t exactly use a remote, and I spent hours (minutes) clicking to move the tape back to the phrase I was copying.

What I’m trying to say is a was really wishing for a TiVo, and more specifically, a TiVo remote.

So do any of you have TiVos? Do you use it to copy down stuff from Japanese shows? If not, you’re a sad, sad pile of wasteful, wasteful waste.

Yesterday I posted a review of crunchyroll.com , a site where you can watch hundreds of Japanese TV shows and movies for free. However, to take full advantage of a resource like this, you need to know the best way to glean knowledge from subtitled media. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your viewing experience:

Read & Listen:

Anyone can read subtitles, but you don’t see everyone that’s seen Spirited Away at the UN doing translation. You really need to actively listen to the Japanese as well. When you first read the subtitle, quickly scan it for words that you know how to say in Japanese then listen for them. Try to pick up the rest of the sentence in context. It’s hard to pick up these two streams of information at once, but you’ll get better at it. There’s also no shame in pausing or rewinding.

Pay Attention to Context:

The most important function of subtitled TV/Movies is, in my opinion, to teach you context. When you hear a word or phrase pay attention to who’s saying it, what the situation is, and who they’re saying it to. Is it a man or a woman? Young or old? At work or at home? Are they talking to someone with higher social rank like a boss, lower like an employee, or equal like a friend? Are they a gangster? A sushi-chef? A samurai? All of these are the kind of questions you should ask. Japanese is a very niched language, with many groups having their own special vocabulary that only they can use (women, gangsters…). Additionally, social context pays a very important roll in what you say; you use keigo (honorifics) when talking to people with higher social rank than you, and slang with your friends. Just keep context in mind when you incorporate something from a TV show or a movie into your vocabulary, samurai slang does nothing for you. If your unsure about meaning or when to say something, ask a Japanese friend or teacher. If you don’t have any Japanese friends, that’s a problem. I’ll write an article about making Japanese friends later on.

Watch Out for Small Phrases:

It’s a simple fact that short phrases of about 4 words or fewer are easier to translate than longer sentences. When you see a subtitle that’s under 5 words long, it should be pretty easier to hear the corresponding Japanese, and odds are it will be a pretty direct translation. I’ve subtitled a Japanese film before, and one thing I noticed is that the longer the subtitle it is, the more likely it is to be summary. There is a very limited area of the screen you can use for subtitling, so a direct translation doesn’t always fit. In those cases, you summarize to the best of your ability, sometimes glossing over the nuances of Japanese. Because of this tendency, stuff you learn from shorter subtitles is more likely to be accurate.

Rinse, Wash, and Repeat:

Find a certain episode, movie, or series that you really enjoyed and learned a lot from when you saw it the first time. Then watch it again with subtitles, but try to just listen and only look when you don’t know what’s going on. Then watch it a third time without subtitles, or without looking at them at all. I know this is a lot, so make extra sure you choose something you won’t get bored of.

Let me know how it goes!

It’s hard for me to do this, but I’m willing to let you in on the best kept secret for learning Japanese on the web. To work on your listening, you can’t get much better than watching subtitled Japanese TV shows, and crunchyroll.com is the place to do that. Crunchyroll offers hundreds of East Asian dramas and anime, fully subbed, for you to peruse free of charge. Make sure you don’t just read the subtitles, listen to the Japanese first and then look to check. Anyways, on to the review:

Ease of Use: 7.5

The site sorts its shows into anime and drama, and has an alphabetic index for each category, but you can’t search and you can’t sort by Japanese/Chinese/Korean and you can’t separate movies from TV shows, but these things aren’t too much of a problem, just make sure you don’t learn Korean by accident.

Authenticity: 7

The authenticity is, of course, dependent on the show/movie you choose to watch. In some cases it will teach you a lot of relevant colloquialisms and slang that are hard to find other places, but it can also mess up your Japanese. Just remember that what’s right for a gal in Shibuya is not necessarily right for you, and talking like Naruto NEVER makes you sound cool.

Quantity of Knowledge: 10

I dare you to try to watch all the shows and movies on this site, oh wait, no I don’t, that’d be a good way to get convicted of 3rd degree murder. What I mean is that there are more subtitled Japanese shows and movies on this site than you can possibly watch. There’s also some sweet game related videos too, which are cool even without teaching you Japanese.

Price: 10

The best thing is that all of this is for free. You can even watch the videos in hi-def. You used to have to pay for it, but the guys over at crunchyroll decided to make it free. You can still become a member and be first party to their beta features (not really worth it), but I would recommend signing up if you have the extra money. These guys deserve it.

Fun: 10

What’s more fun than watching TV? Oh yeah, watching Japanese TV. Nothing will make you want to practice your Japanese more than being caught up in a great drama or anime. For drama reviews check out my homey Kumo at kumojapandrama.blogspot.com

Overall: 9.2

This site is great as long as you know how to watch drama or anime as a student of Japanese rather than a regular Gaijin. I would put this higher if you had the ability to single out the Japanese stuff on the site, but as I said earlier, its only I minor problem. Enjoy!