How to Learn Japanese From Anime
The great thing about anime is that there are so many high-quality shows that are worth watching for their own sake. With other languages, people often watch dramas only to help them learn the language (except Spanish, Netflix is lit). However, with Japanese it’s often the opposite: people want to learn the language because they already love anime.
Anime is often the gateway drug that leads to learning Japanese. Aside from conventional shounen works like Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, I myself started watching anime with Death Note and Psycho-Pass. While they didn’t immediately spur me to learn Japanese, the bug’s bite would be felt years later. (One of my original milestones was to be able to understand Death Note without subtitles).
If you’re learning Japanese, chances are you already watch and enjoy anime. I’m here to tell you how to take advantage of that. By making the time spent watching more fruitful and productive, you’ll be furthering your progress in Japanese at the same time. While simply watching anime with English subtitles (as is typically done) is better than watching something from Hollywood, there are a number of steps you can take to learn Japanese from anime more effectively.
The Importance of Subtitles
No, I don’t mean English subtitles. The first and foremost thing you’ll need to make anime a worthwhile study tool are Japanese subtitles. Subtitles help you to connect what you hear to the written language. This is especially important for Japanese since its written in kanji. What you learn from listening can’t be easily turned into reading skills and vice versa. Just by adding subtitles, you’ll be able to train both simultaneously.
Yomichan
Having subtitles makes it much easier to look up things you don’t know. With Yomichan installed in your browser, you just need to hover over a word to immediately view its definition. Convenience at its finest.
Not only that, but you can also save words you think are worth learning as flashcards to Anki in one click. I go into more detail about the flashcard customization options available here, but to summarize: you can save a word with its surrounding sentence, a screenshot of the video and an audio clip of the word spoken by a native. This makes it a great feature to use when watching Japanese content because you can save a word with its entire context.
Where to Watch From
As stated before, the primary consideration is the availability of subtitles. That rules out sites like Kissanime and Crunchyroll right away since they only target foreign viewers. The two primary options for watching anime online are Netflix and Animelon.
Netflix
Netflix needs no introduction. The main reason you might want to consider streaming on Netflix is that it lets watch anime at the highest quality with the least effort, while still fulfilling the subtitle condition. It’s as simple as clicking play and changing the subtitles to Japanese.
However, this simplicity is also its inflexibility. In reality, only a minority of animes have Japanese subtitles available. It’s mostly limited to Netflix produced shows such as Violet Evergarden, from what I can tell.
Helpful Extensions
To get the most out of Netflix, you’ll have to watch it in a browser with the following extensions. Unfortunately, I don’t have a subscription currently so I couldn’t test them myself, but they seem to be helpful in some important ways.
This extension makes it possible to select the subtitle text. It enables you to use Yomichan.
NflxMultiSubs and Language Learning with Netflix: These two extensions enable viewing subtitles in 2 languages together. The latter has additional features such as being able to hear one dialogue at a time and slow down its speed. It has an inbuilt dictionary and can be set to show furigana or romaji as well.
There are also some other extensions that make it possible to add your own subtitle files, but once you’re willing to go through that much hassle, you may as well use the options I introduce later because they’re more flexible.
Animelon
For the majority of readers, Animelon will be the best option. It’s just easy to use as Netflix but has a far wider library of anime titles with subtitles available. You can use the arrow keys to jump from dialogue to dialogue.
Subtitle options aren’t just limited to English and Japanese. You can also choose to display hiragana subtitles to supplement the standard Japanese one full of kanji. There are even romaji subtitles but it’s best to avoid them since learning hiragana isn’t hard and can be done in a day.
There are extra features such as an inbuilt dictionary, saving words to your account and being quizzed on them later.
However, the glaring problem with Animelon is how unreliable it is. There have been several occasions where videos have refused to load and I was stuck on a perpetual loading screen. While I’ve used it several times in the past before, it doesn’t seem to be working at all currently. Given how useful the site can be, it's worth checking back every now and then to see if it's been fixed.
Other than that, the videos are limited in quality to 720p which looks decent enough for learning purposes but isn’t as enjoyable to watch. The UI of the site, on the whole, is a bit dated. The subtitle fonts used appear a bit low-resolution.
Voracious
This video player is designed particularly for language learners, especially learners of Japanese.
As you’d expect, it lets you display 2 subtitle tracks at once. For Japanese subtitles, you can choose to add furigana automatically. It’s easier to read than having the hiragana and kanji subtitles be different lines, like in Animelon. Instead, the furigana is right above the word and can be toggled on or off with one key-press. The arrow keys are used to jump between dialogues, replay it, and unhide subtitles.
Since the player works with any video, you can watch whatever you want if you find the Japanese subtitles for it. Thus, there’s a far wider selection of anime you can choose to learn from.
Integrated Dictionary
There’s an integrated Japanese dictionary similar to Yomichan. It lets you look up the meanings of words by hovering over them. However, it’s not as robust as Yomichan. Multiple definitions are shown when applicable but their corresponding readings are not. Secondly, you can’t look up a kanji’s meaning and stroke order like in Yomichan. Both these issues are easily solved by clicking a link in the popup which opens the word’s page on Jisho.org in your browser.
Anki Integration
An even greater difference is with respect to how Anki integration is handled. Voracious is designed to save entire sentences as flashcards. With one click, you can create a flashcard of the dialogue with the line in Japanese. It extracts the audio of the sentence along with a still frame from the video. You’ll have to add the English line by copying it yourself. You can then review these flashcards to learn entire sentences at once with their natural pronunciation and context. Of course, you’ll need to know the basics of Anki to take advantage of this feature.
Creating vocabulary flashcards isn’t as seamless as Yomichan. You’ll need to copy the word with its definition yourself and forgo the sample audio of just the word itself.
Viewing Modes
There are special viewing modes to train listening and reading skills. For listening, the subtitles are kept hidden until you need them. Then you can reveal them with a single keypress and with another press continue watching.
For reading practice, the subtitle is shown first and then you can play the video to see if you read it right. In my opinion, this mode isn’t as useful for practising Japanese as it is for languages like French which have challenging pronunciation. The main challenge in reading Japanese is remembering the readings of words. Towards that end, I find it more helpful to practice and revise words with their readings individually, through their own flashcards.
Unease of Use
Voracious is fantastic once you’re watching something but the preparation required to get things running is cumbersome, even if simple. In fact, I was about to write about how to get started with using it but it became so long that I realised it’d be better as a standalone guide.
To put it briefly, the main issues are finding subtitle files, downloading video files and manipulating the subtitle files to make them work properly. Though it sounds complicated, in reality, it's just cumbersome. That said, it’s entirely worth the effort once things are running. To learn how to do each of these tasks, see my guide on how to use Voracious.
subs2srs
Rather than for watching anime itself, subs2srs is more of a finishing move. If you find yourself not understanding the majority of sentences, it might be worthwhile to make flashcards out of all of them by adding them to Anki. subs2srs does this automatically. Similar to Voracious, it creates flashcards for sentences with the subtitles, snapshot and audio. The difference is that the English line is automatically added as well.
As powerful as it is, it’s a pretty complicated tool to use with an un-userfriendly setup. The tutorial does a pretty decent job of explaining all the basics but you’ll need to be quite familiar with Anki first. I’ll soon come out with a list of tips that I felt that the tutorial is missing or doesn’t make obvious.
Conclusion
While the focus has been on anime, many of these tools and techniques can be effectively used for learning Japanese from dramas as well, especially Voracious and subs2srs.
A big focus of this guide has been on the importance of Japanese subtitles in enabling you to practice reading and listening at the same time. However, it must be noted that at some point, you’ll become better at one than the other. In that case, you should change up how you study accordingly. I personally found my listening skills to be lacking so now I practice using Voracious by keeping the subtitle hidden until I don’t understand something. Then depending on the obscurity of the vocabulary used, I decide whether to add the sentence to Anki or not. In other words, my focus is on understanding sentence structure and pronunciation, not picking up new vocabulary (I do that through reading).
Though Voracious and subs2srs are very powerful tools that are worth learning how to use, many will prefer the simplicity of Netflix or Animelon. In either case, what’s more important is how much time you spend studying. An inefficient tool used well accomplishes more than an efficient one not used at all. If the work required to use the more advanced tools puts you off, then don’t use them. Keeping the bar low enough that you take the initiative to practice and learn is vital.
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How to Use Voracious to Learn Japanese From Anime
