I passed the N4 recently and the listening part was my worst part. So I have decided to get back into anime. I want something that I can really enjoy. I was told by a Japanese girl that Fairy Tail is N4 level but there was a lot I didn’t understand.
Any other suggestions? Fairy Tail still a solid choice for my level? Should I use English or Japanese subtitles?
Any help will be appreciated! Thank you!
6 comments
Anything on hanime should be perfect! 👍👍
Fairy Tale may be N4 overall, but fantasy anime usually has a lot of fantasy *words* in them. Sci-fi like Steins;Gate have similar issues — weird technovocab you’d never know.
Here are some I had good results with along with around how much I believe I understood (estimating off the fly):
* Karakai Jouzu na Takagi-san (90%)
* Soredemo Ayumu (85%)
* Girls’ Last Tour (80%)
* Houkago Teibou Nisshi (70%)
* New Game! (60%)
* Naruto (50%)
This doesn’t mean I understood 80% of the words in Girl’s Last Tour — it means I understood 80% of what was being said. Even if I didn’t understand a word in a sentence, I may have still understood the sentence, for example.
No anime will be really N4 level, even basic slice of life will have a lot of informational words you will not understand into N3. You will get about 80% understanding, but that’s a lot of ambiguity. If you are an AJATT type learner you might as well start, but I like to read so I just SRS grind (the other extreme) – Hidamari Sketch, Lucky Star, Himouto Umaru-chan or romances are all relatively easy compared to things like Stein’s Gate or Code Geass. I knew chunks at about the N3 level, but I know 90%+ now so it will get easier, but it is highly vocab dependent. More words known = more comprehension.
If you want to practice listening specifically, then use zero subtitles. It’s okay not to understand everything, just pay attention to the context and catch as much as you can. You might want to use jpdb to find easier anime.
Check out “day 2” of the [30 day](https://learnjapanese.moe/routine/) TheMoeWay guide, which has a list of easy anime recommendations for beginners. Also, JPDB has [anime sorted by difficulty](https://jpdb.io/anime-difficulty-list).
Keep in mind though that all of them are made for native speakers and N4 will only get you so far.
Detective Conan, exactly what I watched when arround that level.