How to Use Voracious to Learn Japanese From Anime
As previously discussed, Voracious is one of the best applications for language learners to watch anime or dramas with. I’m assuming that you already know what makes Voracious so great and are here to learn how you can use it to learn Japanese from anime.
Sourcing Materials
Since Voracious is just a player, it’s up to you to find and download the anime you want with its subtitles. This also means you have a wider selection of anime to learn from, as compared to the limited libraries of Netflix and Animelon.
Subtitles
Before you decide to watch anything, you’re going to want to check if it has Japanese subtitles available. For anime, you can find a huge collection of subtitles on Kitsunekko.net. Though this list is limited, it’s still several times more than what’s available on Netflix or Animelon. You’ll have a better chance of finding something particular that you have in mind. I was even able to find subtitles for a fairly old anime from my childhood, though they were terribly out of sync (we’ll learn how to fix that).
Video Files
Unfortunately using Voracious isn’t as simple as clicking play and instantly streaming anime. Instead, you’ll have to download the video files by searching for torrents or from illegal streaming sites such as KissAnime.
Something to keep in mind with streaming sites is that their videos often have English subtitles hardcoded into them, meaning there’s no way to turn them off. This is a problem if you’re trying to practice without English subtitles or keep them hidden until and unless required.
For torrents, you can search on conventional sites like the Piratebay or on sites that specialize in anime such as Nyaa.si and HorribleSubs. These usually don’t have hardcoded English subtitles. Instead, they’re often embedded in the video (there’s no separate subtitle file). This comes with its own challenge as we’ll see shortly.
Another thing to be aware of is that Voracious can’t open videos that are encoded in x265. This means that if your torrent has x265 in its name, it won’t load in Voracious.
Editing Subtitles
A number of operations might need to be performed on the subtitle files before you can use them.
Extracting English Subtitles
To start with, if your video has embedded English subtitles that you want to use, you’ll have to extract them from the video because Voracious can’t read them otherwise. There are a number of programs you can use to do this, including subs2srs (Tools ➡ MKV Extract Tool).
To do it in Aegisub, open the program and click File ➡ Open Subtitles and select your video. Once it’s done extracting, click File ➡ Save Subtitles As and save it in the same place as your video.
Fixing Subtitle Timings
Sometimes subtitles from Kitsunekko.net won’t be in sync with your video. If you have the English subtitle file, you can use it to sync up the Japanese one automatically using Aligner-RS.
This can be done in subs2srs as well using Tools ➡ Subs Re-Timer. Open the English one on the left with the Japanese one on the right and click two lines from each that correspond to the same dialogue. Then click Time Shift in the corner and finally save through File ➡ Save Right.
Alternatively, fixing this issue yourself manually with Aegisub isn’t very hard but can be cumbersome. However, the tedious work of finding where the video and subtitles match only has to be done once since the difference in timing is likely to be the same for all videos in a collection.
First, we’ll measure the point in time when the first dialogue is spoken. For this, open the video in Aegisub through Video ➡ Open Video. Then use the player on the right to find the general location of the first dialogue. Next, we’ll use the complicated graph thingy on the right to get close to the exact point when it's spoken.
Use the scrubber on top to get to the general point we just found. Then click on the highs in the graph (blue blobs) near that point to find which one corresponds to the dialogue. Once you’ve found it, take note of the time by hovering your mouse that point. Compare this to the start time of the dialogue in the list of lines below. Subtract the two to get the time difference that the file needs to be adjusted by.
Then click Timing ➡ Shift Times. Enter the difference that you calculated. Hover over the Forward and Backward options to figure out which one you need. Forward if the subtitle time is currently before the actual dialogue time and Backward for the opposite case. Check the options to affect the start and end times of all rows. Click OK and Save the file.
If the subtitles are from the same provider (similar filenames or downloaded together) and the videos are from the same collection, this painful exercise only needs to be performed once. For later episodes, you can go straight to the Shift Times window and load from history.
Renaming Subtitle Files
For Voracious to detect the subtitle files, they need to have the same name as the video file. Hence, rename the files accordingly. If you’re using both English and Japanese subtitles, put .jpn or .eng right before extension name. For example, death_note_1.jpn.ass and death_note_1.eng.ass for the video death_note_1.mp4. (.ass is a common subtitle format and not a crude joke)
Conclusion
A lot of this preparation to simply watch an anime can seem very tedious. To be frank, it really is. However, consider that a series consists of multiple episodes and the bulk of these tasks only need to be completed once. In terms of the amount of work you’re doing per episode, it’s not that much. In exchange for this effort, you have several more choices of what anime you can use to learn Japanese from.
