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Old 2011-10-03, 23:14   Link #17
Nochgo
iceman
*Scanlator
 
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: CO, USA
As many people have pointed out, using Anime as a supplement is a very viable method to learn Japanese. This is my personal story:

I started to watch non-dubbed anime around sophomore year of high school, and watched them feverishly until the end of high school (well, I still do..) When I entered college and started my beginner's Japanese class, I still practically had no prior knowledge of Japanese. The mass anime watching had not helped at all. But, by the time I was in second year Japanese class, I started to catch some words, phrases, grammar points, etc in anime. And by the time I was in third year Japanese class, I was miles ahead of my classmates in terms of my knowledge of vocabulary, fluidity of my sentences, listening ability, etc. This was the point when I was able to understand ~70% of anime Japanese. Again, let me emphasize that I watched alot of anime throughout all this, and I had also listened to a lot of Japanese music since I started college.

So, to sum it up, have a basic knowledge of Japanese first, and then, anime is a great resource to help you learn Japanese.

One thing I want to mention though, is that this method will not help you learn kanji (chinese characters), the most difficult aspect of Japanese in my opinion. Currently I can easily read a raw manga that have furigana (the readings for kanji) because I know the spoken word, but I have a hard time reading light novels as they don't have furigana for most of the kanji's, and thus I can't read them. Now, this is where visual novels come in, but I'll leave it at that., Also, the fact that I already knew Korean beforehand helped me tons in learning Japanese, so I'm not sure exactly how much anime will help for others. I know it really helped for me, though.
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