Apologies for the long wait, hope you enjoy the video! If you are interested in reading any of the research/frequency list data or using any of the mentioned resources in the video, make sure to check out the description! support on ko-fi: ko-fi.com/lazyfluency our eng/jpn podcast: www.youtube.com/@lazyfluencypodcast Also the text for the correction at 10:33: Toppan Publishing ranking on left, compared with the others. As Toppan is the second largest publisher in Japan, in effect this still represents a large enough swath of Japanese to be thought of as a representative set of general Japanese vocab. My bad :(
80% of my Japanese learning is from anime (20% youtube videos & google translate), so I'm in the camp that one can learn Japanese through Anime. Now, for the critics, I do understand where they come from, which is impolite Japanese used in anime, but I think this could be easily corrected once a person have some command over the language. For me, it turns out that rather than montone of normal conversation, abnormal variations of anime conversation is much easier to remember and fun as well.
Lol the funniest part about the critiques of anime being a poor way to learn Japanese is that majority of the motivation to even start learning in the first place comes from it. That said great vid guys
This channel is so small and thats INSANE. This is one of the most concise and well prepared informative videos on a ‘controversial’ topic I’ve ever seen. The sources, studies, and analysis are all excellent, and the fact that you take things from all angles so there are no questions left unanswered is TOP tier. I just went through 3 of your videos and this one was so good I had to leave a comment. All that’s to say, you make some quality content dude, seriously.
ikr. It's sad to see the algo not hit for this channel. im only 9 minutes into the vid and he's already given me more useful information than some vids I see with millions of views. Pretty wacked out ngl. I low key hope they are doing seo and pcc. This channel really puts in fat effort. Frankly, the take they had on cartoons vs anime, and the statistics of demographics for watching anime, would've been lovely if that was the case years ago xD. I know some other 25+ year oldies can relate as well.
I learned English through the things i like which is gameplay commentary videos. Most of the things they said is not often shown up in textbooks but i still manage to learn the language despite it being "unnatural".
'Ore' being the second most used kanji in shonen makes sense but still surprises me. Many characters don't use it at all and I imagined its use could be avoided more easily than words that use the other kanji.
How is this channel so small? You make excellent videos about what it's like to learn Japanese from an insider veteran's perspective. I'm in this journey myself and your videos help bring another perspective and approach towards the inattainable fluency level.
I assume I am bad at SEO, thumbnails, titling or something of the like, haha. But I'm trying to improve. Appreciate the kind words! Feel free to share the video 😂
I think you just ended up calling most language teachers ineffective and I for one agree. With so many ways to learn things and all the resources available it kind of calls into to question most of our education system. Lot of great resources included in this video I can feel the extra time put in well done.
Haha, in some way's I may or may not have been calling out some teachers, in other ways, researchers are the ones that are calling out teachers, haha. How weird is it to be researching a field where almost non of your research is put into practice😂
If I watched a couple hours of german shows every week for 5 years, I probably would've been fluent by now, as German has a lot of similarities to my native language (Dutch). Yet the school system demanded us to spend 95% of our time in textbooks. After 5 years of having German in middleschool and highschool, I couldn't even output at a conversational level, nor understand much at that level. Admittedly, I only learned what the school demanded from me to learn and didn't otherwise engage in the language. While studying and practicing from textbooks is useful, without any kind of immersion progress will be very slow. It's weird how the school system and independent language learning schools forget that the way that we all learned our mother tongue and perhaps our second language as well, was through incidental learning by viewing content made for natives of said language. It is also funny how school systems (at least in my country) fail to keep kids engaged in learning new languages, but then refuse to teach language in an efficient and fun way. If my previous school opted to dedicate more of their school hours to immersing in engaging content like tv shows, there wouldn't be a worry of their regional language disappearing. However, most school systems wouldn't dare to let their students have fun while learning because they view it as slacking off.
Dude I only just started watching this (came straight from your other video) but holy shit, the effort you put in to each video is immediately apparent. You 100% deserve any success that comes your way, I’m rooting for you homie.
Thanks so much! I feel like I have finally figured out what kind of videos I want to make (which I haven't made yet funny enough) which is why I think'll you'll notice a lot of variance in video style (especially across my earlier videos). Well that and I can't bear to watch some of my earlier vids as the quality isn't up to what I want it to be. But I think that means I'm improving😂
Natural talk is also sometimes just monologuing for fun with friends or sitting around and saying meme phrases. Communication can be very fun and is often outside the bounds of what is taught at school, given that these institutions focus on more business interactions etc.
I was feeling lost by learning Japanese by myself, and yeah... I guess you pushed me into just looking at it from a different angle. The funny part is that English is not my native language either and media immersion was how I learnt it, but I refused to do it that way with Japanese.
By the end of September, I'll be in Japan for my master's degree. I'm already starting studying it on my own, at least of hiragana/katakana and basic phares and words (also, in more than 20 years of anime and manga, I already learned various expressions). When I'll arrive in Japan, the first thing I'll do is going to the Book-Off near the university and praying to find the 14 volumes of Love Hina, one of my favourite manga since when I was a child. I know it as my own hands and I'll probably bring together with me my own copies of those volumes, in my native language. So, this way, I'll slowly approach to the japanese version and start learning from it to read fluently, together with various every-day expressions (Love Hina has various strange/absurd situation, but at the end of the day it is a normal slice of life in a modern Japan, so a lot of phares will be pretty standard and common).
When I first tried learning Japanese, I tried to do so because of so many then unreleased games in the west, such as Persona 5 that came out 6 months before the west got it, and Yakuza 0, which came out 2 years before. I dont care whether that is proper or not I HAD SO MUCH GODDAMN FUN! After that I sadly stopped after memorizing the JLPT5 Kanji and hiragana/katakana and some bare basic grammar. I've been inspired to pick it back up by you. My dream is to one day work in localization.
I love it. High quality and effort put into the research and editing is definitely felt. Unfortunately, this was all unnatural english so I won't be able to learn the language.
People do be like that though, lol. When I shot the latter part of the video where I mention that I am editing, I actually had to re record it multiple times because I forgot that I need to speak much louder and in a specific register so that my audio matches that of the previously recorded video, haha.
@lazyfluency Heck yeah. You did the thing! I remember student teaching when I was told basically to speak in a higher register with more inflection because that you're literally difficult to understand if not. If you want to see a drastic switch from natural to unnatural, sit in a band directors office when a student walks in the room. That and I think one of the worst things I've ever had to do was edit a podcast where everyone spoke "naturally" and without any bullet points, topics, or goals. The amount of "umm tss" I edited from this one guy is wild. So we should all learn to speak unnaturally. That's my takeaways. I am Dio Brando now.
0:13 I don't have any desire to go to Paris but I kinda want to learn French one day just so I can read Tintin in its ORIGINAL language. 🤣 Learning Japanese in order to understand Anime and Manga is NOT a stupid reason at all. Storytelling is one of the most important parts of language.
I think the best way to learn japanese is to use textbooks. And "quickly" try to read/watch things you like and try to understand some bits to reinforce learned stuff
Thankyou for your amazing video content, for me personally more comfort watching anime and japanese content or podcast. Most people dont watch other genre that more like slice of life that is show more conversation or other anime and one my favorite anime is fuwe no amu.
Thanks! Fune Wo Amu is great! I actually indirectly shoutout it out as "shows about the art of making dictionaries." It's one of my favorite shows to pitch given how boring it sounds on face value, haha.
Nice vid! I dunno, I’ve spoken to Japanese people who learned English through watching Logan Paul and stuff and it hurt at little 😅 But yeah with anything, you just need context and a little bit of guidance. My Japanese friend is learning English with “Adventure Time” and she often checks with me to ask if something is natural or often used, and a lot of the time it is. Though this is my theory, I think as your Japanese level increases, you notice a lot of the cringe and chuuni aspects of anime and this may cause some of the criticism when using anime as a tool. Like if someone told you they were gonna learn English exclusively/mainly from Reality TV I think most of us would chuckle at the thought. I personally think to get the most out of anime, you already have to be intermediate level, but that’s just me. There’s no harm in using it to get exposure or pic up you words. You many not be able to use some words of obscure kanji in conversation, but it will help you when you want to read a novel or newspaper article.
Yeah, I for sure think that as you get better at a language it is easier to get benefits from natural content, but one of the biggest pulls for anime at any level is how engaging it is (which is why anime and manga are used to learn other languages). A big reason that the research that is being done on anime is being done is because anime is by in large the largest reason that people get into learning Japanese (something like over 70% of learners). Appreciate the comment!
When I first started reading in english (outside class, that is), I was obsessed with the warrior cats series. I mean, I used to say "she-cat" to refer to female cats, but apart from that I don't think I wrote like a cat-obsessed british lady...
Well worth the wait! Great work, Joey! I never understood this claim about anime Japanese being significantly different and not a good source to learn from. There are also countless of instragram vids spreading this notion and insisting on it. When i first started learning it kinda scared me, because as a self learner it's one of my main sources of input. The more i advance, i realize it's a stupid assertion. Any reasonable person would understand phrases like [お前はもう死んでいる] are not part of the daily conversational Japanese (unless they've joined the yakuza or something), so where is this fear coming from? If you need more - albeit anecdotal - evidence (which you don't), the vocab i pick from anime sticks the fastest in my brain. I learned English almost exclusively through watching movies and tv (but also reading a lot) and the only language i failed to pickup is Spanish, which i learned for two years only through the official uni curriculum.
Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation in the Japanese learning community. Something I have noticed is that the vast majority of content in Japanese is made by well intentioned beginners or... let's just say over zealous advanced learners. One of my goals is to provide a different lens about many notions that are taken for granted about the Japanese language and culture. Hopefully I get faster at making videos though, because the videos I want to make list is getting way too long, haha. Not to mention the 5 videos I already have basically recorded which I might not even edit (mainly due to RUclips algorithm concerns, haha).
Shoutout to Dimitri from Sly Cooper for teaching me at a super early age that people can learn a language from media consumption alone (Long story short they wrote him in a way that shows he got all his English from listening to pop songs & honestly it's so cool, his way of speaking is so fun!)
I believe that you should learn using the content that you like best, whether it be anime, podcasts, or literature. Because the biggest risk in language learning is not that you will learn unnatural phrases, but that you will stop learning halfway through.
I hope that you didn't mean to say that "comedy, kids and superhero" is a partition of the cartoon medium, because many, if not most, cartoons are in more than one of those categories. Teen Titans Go would be all three, and so would The Tick and maybe even Danny Phantom. As for a cartoon that is in none of the three, you really got me. The only things I can think of are The Venture Bros, Legend of Vox Machina, Arcane, Castlevania, Final Space and Mike Tyson Mysteries, multiple of which are recent. I suppose Spawn counts as "superhero" considering who the character has inspired, ben ripped off by, met and been inspired by (multiple DC and Marvel characters). If you really stretch it, maybe you could say that the Mortal Kombat movies are "superhero movies". I have actually had the discussion before that more adult cartoons should be things other than comedy.
My claim is that the vast majority of cartoons have one of these as their primary genre. Recently there have been some cartoons that break this mold, but historically, there have basically been none, lol. It is funny because if you posit this question towards anime, it is trivially easy to list shows.
I have been watching anime for over a decade and I recently decided to actually learn Japanese because I found out about corruption in English localization circles and vandalism of English translations. Learning the language has given me a deeper appreciation for the mindset of the authors and the culture they've grown up with. I don't think "weebs" are bad or weird people, and their interest in foreign media is generally a positive thing. They are consumers and participants in an exchange of ideas, and I've heard many Japanese people say they like that overseas people are interested in their culture. The only kind of "weeb" that is a problem is the person who says "Japan should change" or "I am going to tell people this sentence means something else." Those people should not interfere and should go elsewhere.
Build your lesson plan around kanji, phrases, and grammar that you will hear in a specific Anime . (Watch the Anime with the subtitles on.) When the student watches the Anime at the end of class, they will be able to comprehend what they hear because the material in the class "set the table" for their experience . The moment the student's hear something that was in the lesson, they will practically shout, "I know what that means ," and they will know that they have learned something . It's a magic moment of learning for the student that increases their understanding, and confidence... and it uses Anime to do it . It would be great if you could color code the particles and verb endings in the subtitles . People can pick those up really quickly and spend their attention on other aspects of vocabulary and grammar instead .
Haha, thanks so much. Although I can't guarantee the topics of the videos I choose will always be to your liking, I can guarantee you that my goal is to make better and better content 👍
How can this video and this channel have such low amount of views and subs??? That's insane! The amount of work and time spent to create one such video is incomprehensible to me! The delivery of useful information, your knowledge, i absolutely love it! You have a new sub, sir, keep it up!
Appreciate the kind words! Currently in the process of finalizing a script for my next vid! From what its looking like it will be a lot of work though😂
7:40 yes! It’s a medium, an art movement, that sort of thing not a genre on its own! As an artist it bugs me to imagine people thinking **anime itself** is a genre 😭
my friend recently showed me a video a girl who turns out to be quite popular in my country. But anyways, the video was of her explaining how she's been watching anime for 10 years and has never left her hometown but can speak fluent Japanese due to anime; she also nailed the accent while talking and the background video was of her writing in Japanese. I guess that's pretty cool.
6:45 For future reference, if you use any line or scene from anime, please mention it as a caption or speak its name as source. So we can watch it later ofcourse. not just credits
do you do your own motion graphics? i've been listening to the podcast for awhile but this is the first main channel video i've seen and it's very tight
i know it's cliche but you deserve to have many more subscribers based on how well researched and polished this video is! i've been using anki and working through genki for some time now and i'm really excited to use some of the resources you linked @@lazyfluency
Thanks so much! All I can I do is try to put out the best content I can, and hope that the RUclips algorithm gods smile my way, haha. Make sure to check the description for additional details if you want to use any of the resources listed in the video!
I love these videos. Also unless you're able to just fly to and live in Japan, you kinda need to immerse yourself somehow. I listen to music, watch/listen to anime+the news +tv shows and will be reading manga with furigana soon. I'm relearning and so while I watch media in Japanese I try to write out words I'm able to make out in Japanese and then their meaning in Standard English and if relevant AAVE and may also start translating to Tutenese (a "dead" African American language,). For context I'm African American and I speak AAVE an English dialect and a tiny tiny bit of the dead language of my ancestors. I am from the north west with my closest ancestors and elders from the south primarily gor further context. Why am I saying this? Well to contribute to the space but also because i agree, the idea of natural sounding one way is odd, for any language. Regions , periods of time, cultural shifts, a lot of other things can ahift what natural sounds likr. Sure certain things may sound odd if someone learns how to speak from a dramatization of daily lifr for example but idk I've met people that learned English fir example , from TV and they speak pretty well 🤷🏿. Lol sorry for the essay but I've heard the "I won't use anime to learn" enough times to lead me to searching for a video validating my frustrations with that phrase 😂 Edit I'm not fixing the typos as of yet because I am off to the next video 😂
Textbooks are great tools but college relying on them is a scam. Nobody talks like that! It is way too formal from genki to tobira and your brain becomes mashed potatoes when you hear real Japanese through native speakers or anime because your are sooo used to hearing “masu” and “desu” it’s nearly impossible to hear the verbs being spoken in such a casual manner because your brain was being forced to practicing masu and desu for 4 years in college study. This basically just sets your listening comprehension up for failure.
Genki Third Edition updated to use Japanese that is more common which helps. But yeah, getting more than just text book input is super helpful for learning Japanese.
I don't intend on ever doing advertisements for products directly related to the video topic I am making as I think it could impact my perceived credibility. With that said, I'm an honest dude. The product was good and very relevant😂 I was aware in the moment how unoptimal this approach was though, lmao.
When used as one of many tools for learning there's nothing wrong with it. If someone only has 100% immersion from anime they might sound a bit unnatural, but throw in some RUclips here and some real conversations there and people will intuively pick up on the context of spoken the language over time. Native speakers aren't going to freak out if a learner uses a rare sentence ending they heard in an anime and small mistakes can be learned and corrected pretty easily.
The quotes from studies has me questioning what natural English is and if I know it. (As a native speaker) I keep losing focus and it turns into word soup and I have to play it back again.
Just assume it's a dialect. Learning one dialect of a language makes it easy to learn the official language. Anime will give you a ton of vocab, and I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to transition to formal/casual japanese.
You made me realize I fell for the "you can't learn japanese with anime, it's unnatural" lie despite learning English through videogames and children's movies, recommending that method to other people, lol
Do you put on a suit and tie just to record a video or do you always just wear that? Is it your work attire, or you just want to look good specifically for the video?
I think that the issue is that there are so many people out there who think their love of anime will naturally translate to meaningful language ability if they just concentrate a little and try to pick out frequently heard words. I see the "don't use anime to learn Japanese" opinion as more of a pushback, or a warning of sorts, to people who think this way. "Don't use anime" is not good advice on the surface, but what it's really saying (in my view) is that learning a language, especially one as hard as Japanese (compared to English anyway), requires actual work. Especially in the beginning before you know enough to follow along with Japanese media without relying on subtitles (note, I said "follow along with," not "perfectly understand"). No offense, but I can't tell if you actually read the papers or just the abstractions and called it a day, because those are all you seem to be quoting from in this video (please correct me if I'm wrong). But I think the papers you're quoting are not as supportive of your overall thesis as you think. I went ahead and read a few of the papers in your works cited page (thank you for including that btw!). It seems like almost if not all of the studies were focused on college students whose Japanese language knowledge going in was apparently little to none (with one exception that I saw). So, your examples of all these studies that call anime a useful language learning tool are talking about using them paired with traditional learning methods in a controlled environment, the classroom. Self-learners are also barely mentioned, if at all. They're all designed to support using anime to supplement traditional classroom learning. I'll demonstrate my point with two examples: Fukunaga's "Those Anime Students" is about using anime as supplemental tools in college classrooms. It was written based off of his conclusions after an interview or something done with 3 university students, and 1 of them didn't even continue learning Japanese after "establishing her agency in the anime community," whatever that means. As for the most successful one, according to the author, his interest in Japanese and Japan in general extends far beyond watching anime. He started studying Japanese in 7th grade to be able to play video games and later took private language lessons. In college, he studied abroad and is looking for graduate schools related to his interest in Japanese language, history, and culture. His interest and success before and going into college comes from using a variety of sources and learning methods, apparently beginning before he even became interested in anime. Bacani's "Becoming 'Those Anime Students'". The people studied were all learning through traditional classroom study in a beginner level class. They studied people whose main or only exposure to Japanese going into the class was through anime. At the beginning of the study, they self-reported what they thought their skills were at. Then they took some tests, and the researcher compared their results to people from a previous study from the year before. In that previous study, half of the students had exposure to Japanese through methods other than anime (like those you mentioned at 18:45. More on that in a second). They then cross-checked the results of their subjects' tests with said previous study. Basically, the people from Bacani's study who only had exposure to Japanese through anime apparently kinda sucked in comparison: "As participants in this study were primarily exposed to the Japanese language through viewing anime, these results suggest that anime viewers can develop both listening and speaking skills. However, in comparison to the results of [the previous study], which also assessed self-reported Japanese language abilities of informal learners, these percentages are relatively low." In summary, the study basically found that the anime-only students had a foundation to not be totally confused in the start of their beginner-level classes, but that their skills were worse than those who used other methods of informal study like "through friends (5.8% of participants), RUclips videos (24.8%), social media (8.8%), video games (5.8%), and direct contact with native speakers (3.4%)." The metric to assess their listening skills was using the JLPT N5. So this is literally the bare minimum of proficiency they're being tested on, and the anime-only participants were still lacking in comparison to people who used more than anime for informal study. Their language skills amounted to little more than "basic/ritual phrases, insults/swear words, and common catch phrases." Yare yare da ze! In conclusion, I think it's pretty easy to determine what peoples' learning outcomes will be depending on how they study. From best to worst: 1. Traditional learning methods (textbooks, classes, shoutout Tae Kim's guide for self-learners) combined with all sorts of native content for input, including watching anime if that's what you like. 2. Traditional methods combined with using non-anime content for input. 3. Traditional methods combined with using only anime for input 5. Not using any traditional methods, but every kind of content including anime 6. Same as 5, but no anime 7. Same as 5, but only anime People who combine anime with other study methods are fine. People who think they can learn Japanese from zero through only or mostly just watching anime (which I believe are much more numerous than you probably do) are delusional. People who think they can learn a language through only one source of media IN GENERAL are delusional. I guess it's technically possible, but it'll be a horribly inefficient waste of your time. It just so happens that the number of people who think they can learn Japanese from only watching anime is greater than the number of people who think they can learn it through only, I don't know, music or something.
That being said, I'm still subscribing because I love your video on texting in Japanese (which I watched before this one). I related way too hard at the "Use qwerty. Or you can try to use the flick keyboard, then give up and go back to qwerty" line😂
Appreciate the long thorough comment! Rest assured I read through all the Japanese studies in full! The only ones I wasn't able to access through a pay wall were the meta studies on language anxiety. I actually read through a lot more studies than were discussed in the video. I partially agree with some of your take aways from the study but also disagree with some others. First off, I would love it if there were some more robust studies with thousands of participants in a randomized control trial. As far as I can tell, that is not the case. Hence the studies I referenced were ones that had the most citations in the field regarding the subject. This is also why I referenced studies outside the field including the consensus and general recommendations from the language study summit. Also, learning Japanese does not equal mastering Japanese, and that was not the focus of any of the studies. If I remember correctly 70 percent of learners of Japanese have an initial interest in anime. I acknowledge that the whole notion of watching anime in a vacuum is a silly notion in the video, nor do I believe it is one that people are doing. Granted once someone is at the point where they can generally understand a given amount of Japanese, you could totally learn Japanese to an advanced level purely through anime consumption. Futhermore the reference of studies, as small as they some of them were was to show that generally speaking anime was a net positive to their learning. Anyways, the point that I saught to make in this video was for those whose main interest is anime, they shouldn't be dissuaded from using that in their learning. And I do believe that over the course of learning Japanese, an interest and consumption in anime will likely be the largest contributing factor in the improvement of many learners. As for the way you categorize the effectiveness of different strategies, I would generally disagree. Mainly in the sense that traditional strategies are not that effective at all. I guess it depends on what we are referring to as traditional. To me the most effective strategy depends on the learner. Some learners are heavily off put by textbooks, some love reading but hate speaking and vice versa. Learners also have a variety of goals. I believe the reason it may seem like I was over stating my conclusion was because there was a misunderstanding about the kind of conclusion I was trying to make.
0:34 personally I just don’t think it’s all that productive. Not just cuz there’s ways of talking that people don’t do irl but cuz it’s not the same as immersion or even comprehensive input. I think it needs to be paired with something else to really be helpful.
They are fundamentally two different apps. Unfortunately both require paying too (Hayai Learn didn't when I made this video). With that said Migaku allows you to choose a lot more different kinds of resources. But if you know how to find videos to watch Voracious is free and does the same!
I graduated from SDSU and worked as a business interpreter for a long time. I have been studying English for 60 years, but I have never watched English animes because I don't think there is any need to watch them.
Its sounds your interest in learning English might have been primarily business related. Many learners learn for many different reasons. When it comes to anime 70% of Japanese learners have anime as a reason.
I think a better angle is *beginner* shouldn’t learn Japanese from anime. It’s a great supplemental tool for sure, but only if you know the fundamentals. Like I didn’t start to learn any Japanese from anime until a couple years learning it.
Although using it as a supplemental tool and before fully jumping in is one approach, I don't think it is the only one. Especially if a learner is primarily motivated by anime. And even more so if they are learning independently.
People learn for a lot of reasons, and I don't see it as productive to judge the reasons for why people learn. Also as I mention in the video at least in one study on the subject, 70% of Japanese learners cite anime as a primary reason.
Other Japanese learners: Noooo you can't learn Japanese from anime!!!! b-b-b-but what about the 役割語!!!! The pronouns and sentence endings tho!!!! are you some sort of weeaboo or something????? Me: [looking atくノ一ツバキの胸の内] Holy shit!!! Enjoyable and comprehensible input!!! :D :D :D :D All in all, you've made a lot of good points that are basically how I already feel about the topic: it doesn't hurt to be aware of the ways that anime Japanese non est TV newsroom Japanese non est textbook Japanese non est teenage street slang Japanese, but these differences aren't anywhere near as huge or as big a deal as people make them out to be. Because if some big burly man ends up revealing himself to be a K-ON! mega-fan because he dropped the wrong 一人称代名詞 in a sentence, then that isn't really any more embarrassing than me conflating никогда with нигде in Russian. And the whole purpose of embarrassment as an emotion is to facilitate learning anyways, right? So it's great for people to have low-anxiety ways of learning a language, and it's also great for people to realize that sounding like a dingus is actually a good thing sometimes. And although even the most unnatural anime Japanese is still not too far from natural conversational Japanese - if someone does end up learning how to say some rare word or name before a more common one, then honestly people don't really need to learn every single word in its Zipfian order, anyways. Learning is learning! If you know more now than you did two weeks ago, then that's still progress in any case, right? There is one more point to be made, though, which is that listening to anime Japanese is in a lot of ways different from listening to other forms of the language. In some ways anime Japanese is easier to listen to, because the characters tend to enunciate well and speak in more comprehensible sentences, at least in the anime I watch; but in other ways, anime Japanese actually is harder, because it's impossible to lip read, and the background music and sound effects will often further muddle the words in my experience. These are all things that people should consider with any potential language learning tool in general, although the most important thing is always that you're just trying at all, right? PS: I'm glad you mentioned use of anime to learn languages other than Japanese, because this is something I've done with learning Russian, and that I've been thinking about a lot lately, with regard to the lack of audio description in English dubs of anime, and the lack of subs/dubs of anime in Norwegian, my co-native language. The more readily apparent uses of AD in anime would be for blind accessibility, but AD can also be massively useful for language learners; likewise in a language like Norwegian, anime subs/dubs are most obviously useful for children and the elderly, since English proficiency is high here - but being able to enjoy anime and manga in Norwegian would also be a source of engaging and accessible content for learning Norwegian as a second language, especially for people who already are fans of anime and manga. Many immigrants here speak neither English nor Norwegian when they first arrive, and naturally focus on learning the latter first.
Wow, your comment has a lot of awesome stuff I want to reply to (which I might do so later on, haha). My brain is kinda fried atm given that it was a grind to get this video out, haha. One thing I will say is that there were a lot more thoughts that I had on this subject and even what I did mention was a heavily condensed version of what I wanted to say, lol. Great comment!
Imagine telling a Japanese person learning English that they shouldn't watch family guy because they'll end up sounding like Peter Griffin. Absolute clown world that people think this is how it works.
Haha, thanks for the comment! It will actually be finished today! I am a day short, but I did get hit with the flu for the past week and a half which made things hard 😂
Even if anime is not your motivation for learning Japanese, which it isn't for me, I can't really fathom the argument for why you would ignore manga and anime altogether as a Japanese learner? When there exist SO MUCH of it. Unless you really dislike comics and animation. If you actually have dug into japanese culture at all or visited the country, it's obvious it's just a normal as well as incredibly diverse storytelling medium here? And possibly the most consumed media in Japan. I have no idea why you would ignore it lmao, you are just limiting yourself from probably the biggest wealth of resources, especially as a beginner/intermediate student that can't consume high level literature (even a lot of light novels are based on manga or anime)... I'm never gonna use genki though.
I personally learned english first from FANFICTION and from internet social media and fandom forums as a teenager. Later I read, listened and watched all sorts of stuff, including more complex literature and science books. I sure have a lot of meme-level english in my vocab, but have more than enough context to know when I'm inclined to speak in those terms.
OMG JPDB SHOUTOUT Your video is now very good, big respect. I love that site, highly recommend for its integration with the heisig RTK method of kanji, it is a wonderful all in one Cheers
All Japanese children who watch anime learn Japanese from anime. All media that people consume helps them learn about the language. Anime just like any other media, is created by native speakers for native speakers and the language present in anime is incredibly varied and much of it reflects very commonly spoken Japanese.
@@sakuraikeizo Anime is really fun. I wish I had started watching it when I was a kid but I thought it was just cringe. I got into it in my late teens because I was reading Webtoons in English and now in my early 20s, I still enjoy it. That’s mainly the reason why I want to learn Japanese because I’m tired of watching in dub and subs 😅
Apologies for the long wait, hope you enjoy the video! If you are interested in reading any of the research/frequency list data or using any of the mentioned resources in the video, make sure to check out the description!
support on ko-fi: ko-fi.com/lazyfluency
our eng/jpn podcast: www.youtube.com/@lazyfluencypodcast
Also the text for the correction at 10:33: Toppan Publishing ranking on left, compared with the others. As Toppan is the second largest publisher in Japan, in effect this still represents a large enough swath of Japanese to be thought of as a representative set of general Japanese vocab. My bad :(
What? You want to learn English with Star Wars? That's ludicrous! The characters speak in stilted, unnatural English.
The best way to learn Japanese is the way that makes u come back to continue learning tomorrow
Exactly. I love gaming. So recently I've taken Ni no Kuni and the Persona 4 games up and want to finish them in Japanese.
Nice
80% of my Japanese learning is from anime (20% youtube videos & google translate), so I'm in the camp that one can learn Japanese through Anime.
Now, for the critics, I do understand where they come from, which is impolite Japanese used in anime, but I think this could be easily corrected once a person have some command over the language.
For me, it turns out that rather than montone of normal conversation, abnormal variations of anime conversation is much easier to remember and fun as well.
Lol the funniest part about the critiques of anime being a poor way to learn Japanese is that majority of the motivation to even start learning in the first place comes from it. That said great vid guys
For real, haha
Anime has really clear and easy to hear pronunciations. That's very nice for beginners.
This channel is so small and thats INSANE. This is one of the most concise and well prepared informative videos on a ‘controversial’ topic I’ve ever seen. The sources, studies, and analysis are all excellent, and the fact that you take things from all angles so there are no questions left unanswered is TOP tier. I just went through 3 of your videos and this one was so good I had to leave a comment. All that’s to say, you make some quality content dude, seriously.
Really appreciate the kind comment!
Many great channels start with small creators who decide to make content as if they were a large channel. Most of the best channels are small.
ikr. It's sad to see the algo not hit for this channel. im only 9 minutes into the vid and he's already given me more useful information than some vids I see with millions of views. Pretty wacked out ngl. I low key hope they are doing seo and pcc. This channel really puts in fat effort. Frankly, the take they had on cartoons vs anime, and the statistics of demographics for watching anime, would've been lovely if that was the case years ago xD. I know some other 25+ year oldies can relate as well.
As an English native speaker, I've learned a surprisingly large amount of English from watching cartoons.
I learned English through the things i like which is gameplay commentary videos.
Most of the things they said is not often shown up in textbooks but i still manage to learn the language despite it being "unnatural".
'Ore' being the second most used kanji in shonen makes sense but still surprises me. Many characters don't use it at all and I imagined its use could be avoided more easily than words that use the other kanji.
The full list of all the rankings is in the description! There are definitely a lot of "Oh, I didn't expect that" moments, haha.
ichigo alone brought that up by probably 10x 😭😭
Yeah, but when a character does use, it use it A LOT.
How is this channel so small? You make excellent videos about what it's like to learn Japanese from an insider veteran's perspective. I'm in this journey myself and your videos help bring another perspective and approach towards the inattainable fluency level.
I assume I am bad at SEO, thumbnails, titling or something of the like, haha. But I'm trying to improve. Appreciate the kind words! Feel free to share the video 😂
I think you just ended up calling most language teachers ineffective and I for one agree. With so many ways to learn things and all the resources available it kind of calls into to question most of our education system. Lot of great resources included in this video I can feel the extra time put in well done.
Haha, in some way's I may or may not have been calling out some teachers, in other ways, researchers are the ones that are calling out teachers, haha. How weird is it to be researching a field where almost non of your research is put into practice😂
If I watched a couple hours of german shows every week for 5 years, I probably would've been fluent by now, as German has a lot of similarities to my native language (Dutch). Yet the school system demanded us to spend 95% of our time in textbooks. After 5 years of having German in middleschool and highschool, I couldn't even output at a conversational level, nor understand much at that level. Admittedly, I only learned what the school demanded from me to learn and didn't otherwise engage in the language.
While studying and practicing from textbooks is useful, without any kind of immersion progress will be very slow. It's weird how the school system and independent language learning schools forget that the way that we all learned our mother tongue and perhaps our second language as well, was through incidental learning by viewing content made for natives of said language. It is also funny how school systems (at least in my country) fail to keep kids engaged in learning new languages, but then refuse to teach language in an efficient and fun way. If my previous school opted to dedicate more of their school hours to immersing in engaging content like tv shows, there wouldn't be a worry of their regional language disappearing. However, most school systems wouldn't dare to let their students have fun while learning because they view it as slacking off.
Dude I only just started watching this (came straight from your other video) but holy shit, the effort you put in to each video is immediately apparent. You 100% deserve any success that comes your way, I’m rooting for you homie.
Thanks so much! I feel like I have finally figured out what kind of videos I want to make (which I haven't made yet funny enough) which is why I think'll you'll notice a lot of variance in video style (especially across my earlier videos). Well that and I can't bear to watch some of my earlier vids as the quality isn't up to what I want it to be. But I think that means I'm improving😂
I've been using anime to learn Japanese and I haven't had a problem speaking to Native Japanese speakers. I've been learning for 2 years now.
lets go!
Natural talk is also sometimes just monologuing for fun with friends or sitting around and saying meme phrases. Communication can be very fun and is often outside the bounds of what is taught at school, given that these institutions focus on more business interactions etc.
100%
It's a shame ,that such a good video, gets such few views, man
keep it up!
I was feeling lost by learning Japanese by myself, and yeah... I guess you pushed me into just looking at it from a different angle. The funny part is that English is not my native language either and media immersion was how I learnt it, but I refused to do it that way with Japanese.
Really glad to hear that!
i found your channel on a whim, and i am so glad
IT'S FINALLY HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Awesome video. Very cool to see all of the data put into video form!
By the end of September, I'll be in Japan for my master's degree. I'm already starting studying it on my own, at least of hiragana/katakana and basic phares and words (also, in more than 20 years of anime and manga, I already learned various expressions). When I'll arrive in Japan, the first thing I'll do is going to the Book-Off near the university and praying to find the 14 volumes of Love Hina, one of my favourite manga since when I was a child. I know it as my own hands and I'll probably bring together with me my own copies of those volumes, in my native language. So, this way, I'll slowly approach to the japanese version and start learning from it to read fluently, together with various every-day expressions (Love Hina has various strange/absurd situation, but at the end of the day it is a normal slice of life in a modern Japan, so a lot of phares will be pretty standard and common).
That sounds awesome! Best of luck!
When I first tried learning Japanese, I tried to do so because of so many then unreleased games in the west, such as Persona 5 that came out 6 months before the west got it, and Yakuza 0, which came out 2 years before. I dont care whether that is proper or not I HAD SO MUCH GODDAMN FUN!
After that I sadly stopped after memorizing the JLPT5 Kanji and hiragana/katakana and some bare basic grammar. I've been inspired to pick it back up by you.
My dream is to one day work in localization.
Best of luck! Japanese can be difficult but as you mentioned it can be so much fun!
I love it. High quality and effort put into the research and editing is definitely felt.
Unfortunately, this was all unnatural english so I won't be able to learn the language.
People do be like that though, lol. When I shot the latter part of the video where I mention that I am editing, I actually had to re record it multiple times because I forgot that I need to speak much louder and in a specific register so that my audio matches that of the previously recorded video, haha.
@lazyfluency Heck yeah. You did the thing!
I remember student teaching when I was told basically to speak in a higher register with more inflection because that you're literally difficult to understand if not. If you want to see a drastic switch from natural to unnatural, sit in a band directors office when a student walks in the room.
That and I think one of the worst things I've ever had to do was edit a podcast where everyone spoke "naturally" and without any bullet points, topics, or goals. The amount of "umm tss" I edited from this one guy is wild.
So we should all learn to speak unnaturally. That's my takeaways. I am Dio Brando now.
0:13 I don't have any desire to go to Paris but I kinda want to learn French one day just so I can read Tintin in its ORIGINAL language. 🤣
Learning Japanese in order to understand Anime and Manga is NOT a stupid reason at all. Storytelling is one of the most important parts of language.
The compilation of websites and apps might have been just what I needed to get back into learning Japanese, thank you so much!!
1000 Subs おめでとうございます
So glad I ran across your channel. Your content is amazing and motivates me!
I think the best way to learn japanese is to use textbooks.
And "quickly" try to read/watch things you like and try to understand some bits to reinforce learned stuff
Your channel is going to blow up.
Thankyou for your amazing video content, for me personally more comfort watching anime and japanese content or podcast. Most people dont watch other genre that more like slice of life that is show more conversation or other anime and one my favorite anime is fuwe no amu.
Thanks! Fune Wo Amu is great! I actually indirectly shoutout it out as "shows about the art of making dictionaries." It's one of my favorite shows to pitch given how boring it sounds on face value, haha.
Nice vid! I dunno, I’ve spoken to Japanese people who learned English through watching Logan Paul and stuff and it hurt at little 😅
But yeah with anything, you just need context and a little bit of guidance. My Japanese friend is learning English with “Adventure Time” and she often checks with me to ask if something is natural or often used, and a lot of the time it is.
Though this is my theory, I think as your Japanese level increases, you notice a lot of the cringe and chuuni aspects of anime and this may cause some of the criticism when using anime as a tool. Like if someone told you they were gonna learn English exclusively/mainly from Reality TV I think most of us would chuckle at the thought. I personally think to get the most out of anime, you already have to be intermediate level, but that’s just me. There’s no harm in using it to get exposure or pic up you words. You many not be able to use some words of obscure kanji in conversation, but it will help you when you want to read a novel or newspaper article.
Yeah, I for sure think that as you get better at a language it is easier to get benefits from natural content, but one of the biggest pulls for anime at any level is how engaging it is (which is why anime and manga are used to learn other languages). A big reason that the research that is being done on anime is being done is because anime is by in large the largest reason that people get into learning Japanese (something like over 70% of learners). Appreciate the comment!
These cuts are so good, man.
The data analysis was great! Earned a sub with that level of investigation to this question.
When I first started reading in english (outside class, that is), I was obsessed with the warrior cats series. I mean, I used to say "she-cat" to refer to female cats, but apart from that I don't think I wrote like a cat-obsessed british lady...
Thank you for this video and the level of research that you put into this! ✨
The amount of research you've done for this video is amazing! Lots of interesting resources to check out as well. Thank you!
Well worth the wait! Great work, Joey!
I never understood this claim about anime Japanese being significantly different and not a good source to learn from. There are also countless of instragram vids spreading this notion and insisting on it. When i first started learning it kinda scared me, because as a self learner it's one of my main sources of input.
The more i advance, i realize it's a stupid assertion. Any reasonable person would understand phrases like [お前はもう死んでいる] are not part of the daily conversational Japanese (unless they've joined the yakuza or something), so where is this fear coming from?
If you need more - albeit anecdotal - evidence (which you don't), the vocab i pick from anime sticks the fastest in my brain. I learned English almost exclusively through watching movies and tv (but also reading a lot) and the only language i failed to pickup is Spanish, which i learned for two years only through the official uni curriculum.
Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation in the Japanese learning community. Something I have noticed is that the vast majority of content in Japanese is made by well intentioned beginners or... let's just say over zealous advanced learners. One of my goals is to provide a different lens about many notions that are taken for granted about the Japanese language and culture. Hopefully I get faster at making videos though, because the videos I want to make list is getting way too long, haha. Not to mention the 5 videos I already have basically recorded which I might not even edit (mainly due to RUclips algorithm concerns, haha).
@@lazyfluency you really *do* get up very early! Haha
Yes, haha.
Shoutout to Dimitri from Sly Cooper for teaching me at a super early age that people can learn a language from media consumption alone (Long story short they wrote him in a way that shows he got all his English from listening to pop songs & honestly it's so cool, his way of speaking is so fun!)
Sly cooper is epic
I believe that you should learn using the content that you like best, whether it be anime, podcasts, or literature. Because the biggest risk in language learning is not that you will learn unnatural phrases, but that you will stop learning halfway through.
I love your channel! It's amazing the effort that you put in every video, keep up the hard work! :D
Thanks so much, this video took a whole lot of time to make, so I appreciate that people appreciate that 😀
@@lazyfluency Are you planning on doing a video about your journey with japanese language? I think that kind of content is very interesting :D
Maybe in the future!
I hope that you didn't mean to say that "comedy, kids and superhero" is a partition of the cartoon medium, because many, if not most, cartoons are in more than one of those categories. Teen Titans Go would be all three, and so would The Tick and maybe even Danny Phantom. As for a cartoon that is in none of the three, you really got me. The only things I can think of are The Venture Bros, Legend of Vox Machina, Arcane, Castlevania, Final Space and Mike Tyson Mysteries, multiple of which are recent. I suppose Spawn counts as "superhero" considering who the character has inspired, ben ripped off by, met and been inspired by (multiple DC and Marvel characters). If you really stretch it, maybe you could say that the Mortal Kombat movies are "superhero movies". I have actually had the discussion before that more adult cartoons should be things other than comedy.
My claim is that the vast majority of cartoons have one of these as their primary genre. Recently there have been some cartoons that break this mold, but historically, there have basically been none, lol. It is funny because if you posit this question towards anime, it is trivially easy to list shows.
I have been watching anime for over a decade and I recently decided to actually learn Japanese because I found out about corruption in English localization circles and vandalism of English translations. Learning the language has given me a deeper appreciation for the mindset of the authors and the culture they've grown up with.
I don't think "weebs" are bad or weird people, and their interest in foreign media is generally a positive thing. They are consumers and participants in an exchange of ideas, and I've heard many Japanese people say they like that overseas people are interested in their culture.
The only kind of "weeb" that is a problem is the person who says "Japan should change" or "I am going to tell people this sentence means something else." Those people should not interfere and should go elsewhere.
Build your lesson plan around kanji, phrases, and grammar that you will hear in a specific Anime . (Watch the Anime with the subtitles on.)
When the student watches the Anime at the end of class, they will be able to comprehend what they hear because the material in the class "set the table" for their experience .
The moment the student's hear something that was in the lesson, they will practically shout, "I know what that means ," and they will know that they have learned something .
It's a magic moment of learning for the student that increases their understanding, and confidence... and it uses Anime to do it .
It would be great if you could color code the particles and verb endings in the subtitles .
People can pick those up really quickly and spend their attention on other aspects of vocabulary and grammar instead .
Ah! Thank God I subbed to this channel for quality content like this
Haha, thanks so much. Although I can't guarantee the topics of the videos I choose will always be to your liking, I can guarantee you that my goal is to make better and better content 👍
I didn't expect a literature review on this matter, well done
How can this video and this channel have such low amount of views and subs??? That's insane! The amount of work and time spent to create one such video is incomprehensible to me! The delivery of useful information, your knowledge, i absolutely love it!
You have a new sub, sir, keep it up!
It is what it is, haha. I'm currently working on my biggest project yet!
Just found your channel yesterday, you make really good content, looking forward to watching more. Keep up the good work!
Appreciate the kind words! Currently in the process of finalizing a script for my next vid! From what its looking like it will be a lot of work though😂
Great video, helped explain a lot!! 6:27 I was listening to a song with those lyrics recently.
25:39 wow the sound design in this video dude, lmao. this tonal shift was so real
7:40 yes! It’s a medium, an art movement, that sort of thing not a genre on its own! As an artist it bugs me to imagine people thinking **anime itself** is a genre 😭
3:32 LMAO THE WAY HE SAID IT N THE WAY SHE WAS SO SAD
i can tell you work hard on your videos, it really shows! keep up the good work man, you get my like and sub
thanks so much!
my friend recently showed me a video a girl who turns out to be quite popular in my country. But anyways, the video was of her explaining how she's been watching anime for 10 years and has never left her hometown but can speak fluent Japanese due to anime; she also nailed the accent while talking and the background video was of her writing in Japanese.
I guess that's pretty cool.
"you cannot learn japanese from anime, it would be like learning english from watching spongebob, I mean how far you think you gonna get" lol
Is this a quote from someone? 😂
This deserves all the views in the world
Appreciate the kind words!
I was ready to give out, if HxH didn't appear on that list 😤
At last. I finally know what fleek means
6:45 For future reference, if you use any line or scene from anime, please mention it as a caption or speak its name as source. So we can watch it later ofcourse. not just credits
6:31 I heard of this Rakugo recently and I love it it’s hilarious
I recommend checking out 昭和元禄落語心中! Great show about Rakugo!
Well. I'm subbing. This is quality
❤super helpful! thank you!!!
do you do your own motion graphics? i've been listening to the podcast for awhile but this is the first main channel video i've seen and it's very tight
I do everything by myself 😂
With the exception of Ayami of course for some shots!
i know it's cliche but you deserve to have many more subscribers based on how well researched and polished this video is! i've been using anki and working through genki for some time now and i'm really excited to use some of the resources you linked @@lazyfluency
Thanks so much! All I can I do is try to put out the best content I can, and hope that the RUclips algorithm gods smile my way, haha. Make sure to check the description for additional details if you want to use any of the resources listed in the video!
I love these videos. Also unless you're able to just fly to and live in Japan, you kinda need to immerse yourself somehow.
I listen to music, watch/listen to anime+the news +tv shows and will be reading manga with furigana soon.
I'm relearning and so while I watch media in Japanese I try to write out words I'm able to make out in Japanese and then their meaning in Standard English and if relevant AAVE and may also start translating to Tutenese (a "dead" African American language,). For context I'm African American and I speak AAVE an English dialect and a tiny tiny bit of the dead language of my ancestors. I am from the north west with my closest ancestors and elders from the south primarily gor further context.
Why am I saying this? Well to contribute to the space but also because i agree, the idea of natural sounding one way is odd, for any language. Regions , periods of time, cultural shifts, a lot of other things can ahift what natural sounds likr. Sure certain things may sound odd if someone learns how to speak from a dramatization of daily lifr for example but idk I've met people that learned English fir example , from TV and they speak pretty well 🤷🏿.
Lol sorry for the essay but I've heard the "I won't use anime to learn" enough times to lead me to searching for a video validating my frustrations with that phrase 😂
Edit I'm not fixing the typos as of yet because I am off to the next video 😂
I appreciate the "essay", haha. I definitely feel there is too much of a fixation on being natural in language learning and doubly so in Japanese
Wow! Who would have thought that watching content in Japanese can help you learn Japanese 😮😮😮
You would be surprised how many people seem to think this isn't possible, lol.
Textbooks are great tools but college relying on them is a scam. Nobody talks like that! It is way too formal from genki to tobira and your brain becomes mashed potatoes when you hear real Japanese through native speakers or anime because your are sooo used to hearing “masu” and “desu” it’s nearly impossible to hear the verbs being spoken in such a casual manner because your brain was being forced to practicing masu and desu for 4 years in college study. This basically just sets your listening comprehension up for failure.
Genki Third Edition updated to use Japanese that is more common which helps. But yeah, getting more than just text book input is super helpful for learning Japanese.
LF turning down a sponsorship then advertising it anyway because the service was good, certainly is a marketing strategy.
I don't intend on ever doing advertisements for products directly related to the video topic I am making as I think it could impact my perceived credibility. With that said, I'm an honest dude. The product was good and very relevant😂
I was aware in the moment how unoptimal this approach was though, lmao.
I use Doramas, not anime, just cuz I can understand it better from facial expressions, mouth movement, body language.
When used as one of many tools for learning there's nothing wrong with it. If someone only has 100% immersion from anime they might sound a bit unnatural, but throw in some RUclips here and some real conversations there and people will intuively pick up on the context of spoken the language over time. Native speakers aren't going to freak out if a learner uses a rare sentence ending they heard in an anime and small mistakes can be learned and corrected pretty easily.
Yup!
Deserves more views❤
Words of wisdom, spoken right from the language god shrine. 🙏
The quotes from studies has me questioning what natural English is and if I know it. (As a native speaker)
I keep losing focus and it turns into word soup and I have to play it back again.
There are a lot of quotes for sure, haha
so far, 80% of the Japanese language I've learned are from JAV.
All Japanese is good Japanese, haha
Just assume it's a dialect. Learning one dialect of a language makes it easy to learn the official language. Anime will give you a ton of vocab, and I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to transition to formal/casual japanese.
Amazing video.
cool montage, can't believe that it has only 2.4k views lol
But is the dialogue in Pikmin natural?
asking the real questions, haha
What Kanji Dictionary would YOU recommend, Please :D (for beginners)
As in an app on your phone? If so, as mentioned in the end of the vid, Shirabe Jisho for Iphone and Akebi for Android!
Thank you for this video. Now, back to watching hunter x hunter and Gundam
You made me realize I fell for the "you can't learn japanese with anime, it's unnatural" lie despite learning English through videogames and children's movies, recommending that method to other people, lol
you're a hidden gem
the paper slap got me 😭😆
Do you put on a suit and tie just to record a video or do you always just wear that? Is it your work attire, or you just want to look good specifically for the video?
None of the above! I like wearing suits, and I thought associating them with my brand would give me an excuse to wear them!
I think that the issue is that there are so many people out there who think their love of anime will naturally translate to meaningful language ability if they just concentrate a little and try to pick out frequently heard words. I see the "don't use anime to learn Japanese" opinion as more of a pushback, or a warning of sorts, to people who think this way. "Don't use anime" is not good advice on the surface, but what it's really saying (in my view) is that learning a language, especially one as hard as Japanese (compared to English anyway), requires actual work. Especially in the beginning before you know enough to follow along with Japanese media without relying on subtitles (note, I said "follow along with," not "perfectly understand").
No offense, but I can't tell if you actually read the papers or just the abstractions and called it a day, because those are all you seem to be quoting from in this video (please correct me if I'm wrong). But I think the papers you're quoting are not as supportive of your overall thesis as you think. I went ahead and read a few of the papers in your works cited page (thank you for including that btw!). It seems like almost if not all of the studies were focused on college students whose Japanese language knowledge going in was apparently little to none (with one exception that I saw). So, your examples of all these studies that call anime a useful language learning tool are talking about using them paired with traditional learning methods in a controlled environment, the classroom. Self-learners are also barely mentioned, if at all. They're all designed to support using anime to supplement traditional classroom learning. I'll demonstrate my point with two examples:
Fukunaga's "Those Anime Students" is about using anime as supplemental tools in college classrooms. It was written based off of his conclusions after an interview or something done with 3 university students, and 1 of them didn't even continue learning Japanese after "establishing her agency in the anime community," whatever that means. As for the most successful one, according to the author, his interest in Japanese and Japan in general extends far beyond watching anime. He started studying Japanese in 7th grade to be able to play video games and later took private language lessons. In college, he studied abroad and is looking for graduate schools related to his interest in Japanese language, history, and culture. His interest and success before and going into college comes from using a variety of sources and learning methods, apparently beginning before he even became interested in anime.
Bacani's "Becoming 'Those Anime Students'". The people studied were all learning through traditional classroom study in a beginner level class. They studied people whose main or only exposure to Japanese going into the class was through anime. At the beginning of the study, they self-reported what they thought their skills were at. Then they took some tests, and the researcher compared their results to people from a previous study from the year before. In that previous study, half of the students had exposure to Japanese through methods other than anime (like those you mentioned at 18:45. More on that in a second). They then cross-checked the results of their subjects' tests with said previous study. Basically, the people from Bacani's study who only had exposure to Japanese through anime apparently kinda sucked in comparison: "As participants in this study were primarily exposed to the Japanese language through viewing anime, these results suggest that anime viewers can develop both listening and speaking skills. However, in comparison to the results of [the previous study], which also assessed self-reported Japanese language abilities of informal learners, these percentages are relatively low." In summary, the study basically found that the anime-only students had a foundation to not be totally confused in the start of their beginner-level classes, but that their skills were worse than those who used other methods of informal study like "through friends (5.8% of participants), RUclips videos (24.8%), social media (8.8%), video games (5.8%), and direct contact with native speakers (3.4%)." The metric to assess their listening skills was using the JLPT N5. So this is literally the bare minimum of proficiency they're being tested on, and the anime-only participants were still lacking in comparison to people who used more than anime for informal study. Their language skills amounted to little more than "basic/ritual phrases, insults/swear words, and common catch phrases." Yare yare da ze!
In conclusion, I think it's pretty easy to determine what peoples' learning outcomes will be depending on how they study. From best to worst:
1. Traditional learning methods (textbooks, classes, shoutout Tae Kim's guide for self-learners) combined with all sorts of native content for input, including watching anime if that's what you like.
2. Traditional methods combined with using non-anime content for input.
3. Traditional methods combined with using only anime for input
5. Not using any traditional methods, but every kind of content including anime
6. Same as 5, but no anime
7. Same as 5, but only anime
People who combine anime with other study methods are fine. People who think they can learn Japanese from zero through only or mostly just watching anime (which I believe are much more numerous than you probably do) are delusional. People who think they can learn a language through only one source of media IN GENERAL are delusional. I guess it's technically possible, but it'll be a horribly inefficient waste of your time. It just so happens that the number of people who think they can learn Japanese from only watching anime is greater than the number of people who think they can learn it through only, I don't know, music or something.
That being said, I'm still subscribing because I love your video on texting in Japanese (which I watched before this one). I related way too hard at the "Use qwerty. Or you can try to use the flick keyboard, then give up and go back to qwerty" line😂
Appreciate the long thorough comment! Rest assured I read through all the Japanese studies in full! The only ones I wasn't able to access through a pay wall were the meta studies on language anxiety. I actually read through a lot more studies than were discussed in the video. I partially agree with some of your take aways from the study but also disagree with some others. First off, I would love it if there were some more robust studies with thousands of participants in a randomized control trial. As far as I can tell, that is not the case. Hence the studies I referenced were ones that had the most citations in the field regarding the subject. This is also why I referenced studies outside the field including the consensus and general recommendations from the language study summit. Also, learning Japanese does not equal mastering Japanese, and that was not the focus of any of the studies. If I remember correctly 70 percent of learners of Japanese have an initial interest in anime. I acknowledge that the whole notion of watching anime in a vacuum is a silly notion in the video, nor do I believe it is one that people are doing. Granted once someone is at the point where they can generally understand a given amount of Japanese, you could totally learn Japanese to an advanced level purely through anime consumption. Futhermore the reference of studies, as small as they some of them were was to show that generally speaking anime was a net positive to their learning. Anyways, the point that I saught to make in this video was for those whose main interest is anime, they shouldn't be dissuaded from using that in their learning. And I do believe that over the course of learning Japanese, an interest and consumption in anime will likely be the largest contributing factor in the improvement of many learners. As for the way you categorize the effectiveness of different strategies, I would generally disagree. Mainly in the sense that traditional strategies are not that effective at all. I guess it depends on what we are referring to as traditional. To me the most effective strategy depends on the learner. Some learners are heavily off put by textbooks, some love reading but hate speaking and vice versa. Learners also have a variety of goals. I believe the reason it may seem like I was over stating my conclusion was because there was a misunderstanding about the kind of conclusion I was trying to make.
If you liked that vid, I recommend checking out my Kanji Iceberg vid!
This video is too good for the amount of attraction RUclips is giving.
RUclips is strange, but I'm glad that the people who do watch the video seem to enjoy it!
Surprise adam ragusea reference lol
0:34 personally I just don’t think it’s all that productive. Not just cuz there’s ways of talking that people don’t do irl but cuz it’s not the same as immersion or even comprehensive input. I think it needs to be paired with something else to really be helpful.
Any chance this is the wrong timestamp? Not sure what you are referring to?
which one is better, Migaku or Hayailearn?
They are fundamentally two different apps. Unfortunately both require paying too (Hayai Learn didn't when I made this video). With that said Migaku allows you to choose a lot more different kinds of resources. But if you know how to find videos to watch Voracious is free and does the same!
@@lazyfluency thanks for the recommendation, i'll check it out.
I graduated from SDSU and worked as a business interpreter for a long time. I have been studying English for 60 years,
but I have never watched English animes because I don't think there is any need to watch them.
Its sounds your interest in learning English might have been primarily business related. Many learners learn for many different reasons. When it comes to anime 70% of Japanese learners have anime as a reason.
@@lazyfluency I didn't learn English by studying abroad. I just used it for business because I was good at English.
I think a better angle is *beginner* shouldn’t learn Japanese from anime. It’s a great supplemental tool for sure, but only if you know the fundamentals. Like I didn’t start to learn any Japanese from anime until a couple years learning it.
Although using it as a supplemental tool and before fully jumping in is one approach, I don't think it is the only one. Especially if a learner is primarily motivated by anime. And even more so if they are learning independently.
@@lazyfluency learning Japanese for the sake watching anime is cringe
People learn for a lot of reasons, and I don't see it as productive to judge the reasons for why people learn. Also as I mention in the video at least in one study on the subject, 70% of Japanese learners cite anime as a primary reason.
@@lazyfluency in the words of Kendrick Lamar, “some sh*t just cringeworthy, it ain’t even gotta be deep I guess”
Other Japanese learners: Noooo you can't learn Japanese from anime!!!! b-b-b-but what about the 役割語!!!! The pronouns and sentence endings tho!!!! are you some sort of weeaboo or something?????
Me: [looking atくノ一ツバキの胸の内] Holy shit!!! Enjoyable and comprehensible input!!! :D :D :D :D
All in all, you've made a lot of good points that are basically how I already feel about the topic: it doesn't hurt to be aware of the ways that anime Japanese non est TV newsroom Japanese non est textbook Japanese non est teenage street slang Japanese, but these differences aren't anywhere near as huge or as big a deal as people make them out to be. Because if some big burly man ends up revealing himself to be a K-ON! mega-fan because he dropped the wrong 一人称代名詞 in a sentence, then that isn't really any more embarrassing than me conflating никогда with нигде in Russian. And the whole purpose of embarrassment as an emotion is to facilitate learning anyways, right? So it's great for people to have low-anxiety ways of learning a language, and it's also great for people to realize that sounding like a dingus is actually a good thing sometimes.
And although even the most unnatural anime Japanese is still not too far from natural conversational Japanese - if someone does end up learning how to say some rare word or name before a more common one, then honestly people don't really need to learn every single word in its Zipfian order, anyways. Learning is learning! If you know more now than you did two weeks ago, then that's still progress in any case, right?
There is one more point to be made, though, which is that listening to anime Japanese is in a lot of ways different from listening to other forms of the language. In some ways anime Japanese is easier to listen to, because the characters tend to enunciate well and speak in more comprehensible sentences, at least in the anime I watch; but in other ways, anime Japanese actually is harder, because it's impossible to lip read, and the background music and sound effects will often further muddle the words in my experience. These are all things that people should consider with any potential language learning tool in general, although the most important thing is always that you're just trying at all, right?
PS: I'm glad you mentioned use of anime to learn languages other than Japanese, because this is something I've done with learning Russian, and that I've been thinking about a lot lately, with regard to the lack of audio description in English dubs of anime, and the lack of subs/dubs of anime in Norwegian, my co-native language. The more readily apparent uses of AD in anime would be for blind accessibility, but AD can also be massively useful for language learners; likewise in a language like Norwegian, anime subs/dubs are most obviously useful for children and the elderly, since English proficiency is high here - but being able to enjoy anime and manga in Norwegian would also be a source of engaging and accessible content for learning Norwegian as a second language, especially for people who already are fans of anime and manga. Many immigrants here speak neither English nor Norwegian when they first arrive, and naturally focus on learning the latter first.
Wow, your comment has a lot of awesome stuff I want to reply to (which I might do so later on, haha). My brain is kinda fried atm given that it was a grind to get this video out, haha. One thing I will say is that there were a lot more thoughts that I had on this subject and even what I did mention was a heavily condensed version of what I wanted to say, lol. Great comment!
Imagine telling a Japanese person learning English that they shouldn't watch family guy because they'll end up sounding like Peter Griffin. Absolute clown world that people think this is how it works.
for real😂
Hey joey where the hell is the new video??
Haha, thanks for the comment! It will actually be finished today! I am a day short, but I did get hit with the flu for the past week and a half which made things hard 😂
At the end of the day, anime is still Japanese
where did you find this wrong version of rero-rero meme? is this english dub?
I can't remember 🥲
3:25 4:55 What is the source of this video?
ruclips.net/video/dleYTXsRKA0/видео.htmlsi=vS5XZ-RwfHvwk924
@@lazyfluencyThanks!
私はこの10年はネイティを真似、フィードバック修正するディープラーニングで英語を学んでいます。普通の動画や映画を使っています。
その理由は英語も日本語も長い長い歴史の中で、ネイティブが最も効果的で楽しい言語学習を知っているからです。
私は英語60年間学んでいますが、10年前にやっとネイティブを真似る方法が効果的だと気付きました。
最新の全てのAIも人間を真似て統計的なデータ駆動学習をしています。
言語学者はAIと違って意識と意志を持つ生き物です。こういうやり方は効率的だからと言って人間はやりたいとは限りません。やりたいとは思っていても継続的に続けられるのは非常に難しいです。最も大事なのは言語に触れる機会を増やすことだと思います。言語に触れることはつらいやつまらないと思うようになる人は言語に触れ続けるとは思いません。ですから、言語を楽しんでいるかどうかというポイントは最も大事な気がします。
@@lazyfluency 言語を学ぶ人は意識と意志を持っております。そして学習の楽しさを生かして学習を継続をしています。
その学習の楽しさとは自分の英語スキルが上達することです。上達すると脳の報酬系からドーパミンが放出され
学習意欲を高め、記憶の定着も促進しています。
子供はそのスキルが上手になるのが嬉しくて言語を学習しています、言語で楽しいことを学んでいるからつづけるのではありません。
脳は言語に触れる回数ではなく、フィードバックで何度も修正をして手続き記憶で長期記憶に保存する事で学習をしています。
@@lazyfluency 言語を使ってアニメや動画が楽しめるのは言語が上手に使えるからです。
楽しめる段階になるためには、大変な時間がかかり、内容が理解できないからその間はほとんど時間の無駄となります。
言語は上達が楽しいから学ぶものです。言語の自然な表現を覚えるのが楽しいのは内容が楽しいからではありません。
言語学者は全員同じ目標がありません。それぞれ自分の目標があって同様に楽しみも違います。母語話者だと何もしてなくても自然に言語を学べますので私がしている話は第2言語を独学している人に限っています。子供は第2言語が使われていないところに住んでいるとスキルの上達という楽しみだけで第2言語を上級レベルまで学ぶとは思いません。その一方ではただただ英語の番組やユーチューブに大変興味を持っていていつの間に英語だんだん使えるようになった人に割と会ったことがあります。
最初から難しいものを見ようとするのは確かに難しいです。ですから最初からレベルに合った面白いものを見ればいいです！この動画の最後のところで話しますが初心者でもアニメから学べる資料があります。上達も楽しいとも思いますが全部ではありません。
Is this guy WhatI'veLearned?
Who is that??🧐
@@lazyfluency You sound like this guy:
ruclips.net/video/J_EQDtpYSNM/видео.html
日本語をアニメで学べるのは結果としては、日本語を真似て学習しているからです。それなら最初から使えそうな自然な日本語を母語で意味を理解して真似る方が
何十倍も効果的な学習になります。アニメは楽しむ事が目的で作られており、言語学習のために作られてはいないのです。
意見と視点は根本的に異なりすぎていて同意することはないと思うんですが、長い話に付き合ってくださってありがとうございます。楽しかったです！
@@lazyfluency 私の視点を述べているのではありません。人間の脳が科学的にどう言語を学習しているかを論じています。
お互いに同意する必用はありません。科学的な知識から何が正しいかと言うだけの事です。
アニメがどうして効果的かは何の説明もありません。アニメを見て日本語が上手なったのであれば、間違いなく真似て学習したからです。
それならアニメに限定しないで、いろいろな自然な表現を母語で理解して、真似るてフィードバックせ修正する方がずっと効果的な学習になります。
Even if anime is not your motivation for learning Japanese, which it isn't for me, I can't really fathom the argument for why you would ignore manga and anime altogether as a Japanese learner? When there exist SO MUCH of it. Unless you really dislike comics and animation. If you actually have dug into japanese culture at all or visited the country, it's obvious it's just a normal as well as incredibly diverse storytelling medium here? And possibly the most consumed media in Japan. I have no idea why you would ignore it lmao, you are just limiting yourself from probably the biggest wealth of resources, especially as a beginner/intermediate student that can't consume high level literature (even a lot of light novels are based on manga or anime)... I'm never gonna use genki though.
I personally learned english first from FANFICTION and from internet social media and fandom forums as a teenager. Later I read, listened and watched all sorts of stuff, including more complex literature and science books. I sure have a lot of meme-level english in my vocab, but have more than enough context to know when I'm inclined to speak in those terms.
100 percent! Its the stigma!
Nice tie bro
The video is okay 😉
OMG JPDB SHOUTOUT
Your video is now very good, big respect. I love that site, highly recommend for its integration with the heisig RTK method of kanji, it is a wonderful all in one
Cheers
I am a man of many ties😂
Japanese children also watch animes, but none of them learn Japanese with anime. They all learn natural Japanese by imitating adults around them.
All Japanese children who watch anime learn Japanese from anime. All media that people consume helps them learn about the language. Anime just like any other media, is created by native speakers for native speakers and the language present in anime is incredibly varied and much of it reflects very commonly spoken Japanese.
@@lazyfluency I have four children and I don't let them watch much anime.
I don't think adults find anime very enjoyable.
@@sakuraikeizo Anime is really fun. I wish I had started watching it when I was a kid but I thought it was just cringe. I got into it in my late teens because I was reading Webtoons in English and now in my early 20s, I still enjoy it. That’s mainly the reason why I want to learn Japanese because I’m tired of watching in dub and subs 😅