Best anime to mine Japanese from?

8 comments

1. I would use [Learn Natively](https://www.learnnatively.com) and go off of their ratings. But pick stuff you know you like or will probably like. It’s okay to abandon stuff if it isn’t working for you.

2. I would recommend you just watch what you want, don’t worry about it being a particular level because if you enjoy it, you’ll stick to it way more. That being said on your points 1) Exposing yourself to a variety of speaking styles helps with being flexible about encountering permutations in the language 2) This won’t happen if you learn about the culture even a little.

3. I also had the same concern. I ended up mining Japanese from 4 different sources:

   1. Anime (slice of life, since they’re more natural Japanese)
   2. Street interviews
   3. Manga (slice of life too)
   4. J-drama (typical real-life dramas)

   So far, amongst these, street interviews are the easiest to understand, and thankfully, the most natural. I started mining right after finishing Tango N5, N4, and Genki I and II.

4. Back in the day, the biggest contributor to my Anki deck was Mujin Wakusei Survive – it’s fairly simple, but it has a lot of interesting words show up because they’re doing varied stuff like working out how to light fires, building houses, hunting, get electonics working, etc.

5. keep it cool, guys!!! pretty easy to follow along.

6. > don’t learn Japanese that’s hyper specific to a particular dialect

   Tbh this should be the least of your concerns…if you like anime and want to learn from anime, then just watch whatever you like…though at N4 I wouldn’t recommend attack on titan or Jujutsu kaisen as those are definitely past N1 level…I would just suggest starting a show and seeing where it takes you, not expecting to understand 100% of it…it is always ok to drop shows you feel are way too hard but if you just try to limit it to a certain list you might just be confining yourself for no reason

   > don’t sound like a goober that speaks over dramatic “anime Japanese”

   This seems to be a horribly misguided concept among the learning community…Japanese is Japanese everywhere. If you can get to the point where you understand Japanese in anime, you will have no issues understanding “real Japanese”…some anime sometimes do say exaggerated things or use expressions that sometimes may cause someone to look at you weird or even anime where the wrong formality may be used based on relationship but that is the minority…if you can understand conversations between anime characters almost without issues (and I mean, actual conversations), it is easy to “adjust” to what “normal” Japanese would sound like

7. psycho pass

8. At N5-N4 level it’s much easier to rewatch something you’ve already liked and mine the vocab from it, and then move on to something in the same genre. For example, I’ve already watched Fruits Basket and mined the vocab, then went onto watching Horimiya for the first time and the transition felt great. But beware that there will be a lot of grammar you still haven’t come across, on top of slang and abbreviations that are difficult to parse if you don’t know the grammar behind it. Continue your grammar study on the side and you will understand those fairly soon as well.