I wanted to learn Japanese for entertainment, reading manga, watching anime, watching some YouTube in japanese, reading reddit posts in japanese, but it looks like I won’t be able to do nothing like that.
Everything here is MY experience, your’s might be different and i hope it is and that you would make all the things listed on this post more bight and hopeful, in fact, that’s my focus here, to see if I can get some help of the community.
It’s not easy to find anime and manga raws on the internet, specially if you want the newest stuff. It’s a problem for a guy that learned English watching anime and reading manga, it would be even after I got fluent since I would need to get used to the english sub gliding on the video since I would need to use the same english resource that I use now to watch anime after I got fluent, and it would be funny to need to read english translated manga because of the lack of raws. Another problem is that If I got fluent I would need to throw away the anime side of my learning strategy when learning another language after japanese, try to learn another language with a show in your native language, but with subtitles for the target language, it’s just strange!
Japanese internet is big, it’s just not my thing. 5chan, the closest thing to reddit that I could find, is apparently mostly news and “suspicious” ads. Japanese YouTube looks pretty rough, is mostly variety content, and I prefer the essay kind of content, that looks scarce in japanese. ゆっくり style videos aren’t my thing, I can’t get used to the robot voices, and Vtubers are more about lives and live cuts, so I end up watching very few japanese youtubers, and I watch YouTube a lot in english and my native language, for comparison.
I’m starting to see a darker and darker future for my japanese. I’m in a pinch right now, so I’ll repeat myself here and say that everything here is my experience, and that I want the help of the people reading this to give me a hand in finding motivation to keep going, or even advice to make me stop.
Well, should I stop with japanese?
7 comments
What’s your Japanese study like? You expect to learn Japanese through media without having a solid foundation of basics like learning Hiragana, Katakana, basic grammar and Kanji?
Japanese Amazon is available. They **can** ask questions about your non-Japanese payment method though.
Crunchy roll and Netflix is a solid choice tbh but the double edge sword is that it’s better to study from content that you enjoy
Are you studying in any other way? vocab cards, doulingo, one of the language book series, a Japanese course at the community college…? anything other than anime?
Because I don’t think you would get far with that anyway and for anime and other media you SHOULD watch slice of life and stuff like that because general anime Japanese (like in popular fantasy and action anime) and real life Japanese are 2 extremely different things. You also probably wouldn’t understand grammatical phrases etc and you won’t learn the meaning and multiple pronunciations of Kanji. You need other sources than just media otherwise stuff you don’t understand will just fly over your head and you don’t learn anything but only scroll by. You should also seek a method of using Japanese by yourself like talking and writing your own sentences. maybe with a tandem partner or an app like hello talk.
I don’t think you should stop learning just because of a lack of links to anime but you should 100% seek other ways of learning, too. Going full immersion in the beginning won’t get you anywhere.
sounds like you have a lot to learn about navigating the internet.
This is like the 3rd post this week about it not being easy to find native Japanese resources like manga and anime. Are we even on the same internet? Did you even try?
I give you permission to give up