Probably a very stupid question. If you were trying to learn Japanese in order to read manga (or watch anime) in the original, would your learning strategy differ significantly from “just” learning “regular” Japanese?
Would it be something like the guy who learned Spanish only by watching telenovelas (and thus speaks in a lot of soap-opera like cliches)? Or the guy who learned English only from 1950s radio serials? (“Leaping galaxies! How will we defeat that dastardly demon of deviltry?”)
3 comments
Nah, Japanese is Japanese. The grammar and such don’t change just because the characters are kinda cartoony. 😀
I would compare it more to someone learning English using only western cartoons, they might say something strange or over dramatic every so often, but it’s not like they wouldn’t be understood easily by English speakers. Same with telenovelas, he would be understood but it’s not like every sentence he mutters would be like “Can you, my sisters ex lover who came from the dead and is here to kill me, grab the milk?” Or something silly.
tl;dr “Anime Japanese” and “Real Japanese” are both Japanese. As long as you aren’t calling random strangers てめ or きさま you’ll be fine.
Onomatopoeia words pop up in manga quite often. Study regularly and when you get to that vocabulary, memorize it!
The troubling underlying subtext to posts where people ask about learning “just to do x, I don’t want to do y” is that they’re essentially saying “I want to half-ass my way through this with as little effort as humanly possible”…..which doesn’t bode well for the likelihood they’ll put in the work required or even stick with the project very long once they realize there’s a whole hell of a lot of dull drudge work that has to be done along the way.