Hello Japanese learners! At what JLPT level do I need to reach before being able to watch anime without subtitles

11 comments

1. [deleted]

2. Kinda depends on the anime, but if your favorite anime are not just slice-of-life stories, achieving your goal is actually a decent bit harder than N1.

   However, since your goal is focused on anime, it also makes sense to focus your study on anime instead of the JLPT. Once you have an actual grammatical foundation (by which I mean having worked through a beginner textbook or something similar, Duolingo doesn’t count), you should start watching anime with Japanese subtitles as one of your primary study methods. That way, you’ll get used to listening to anime dialog spoken at natural speeds while also being able to identify and look up unknown words.

3. Depends what level. You can probably watch kids anime at around n3 (probably have to look up some words). And for some other anime you need to have knowledge above n1. If you like all genres you’ll probably want to be above n1 level.

   I don’t know that much about jlpt, but I do know it doesn’t go from 0% to 100%, there are a lot of stuff not covered in it you need to know to watch some anime.

4. I would recommend focusing on your listening skills. Check out the app: Drops.
   As well as LingoDeer and the website YouTube where you can search for Japanese lessons for free. I also recommend the app Memrise. I also recommend the app Duolingo. I also recommend the app HeyJapan.

5. I watch anime without subtitles. It’s oddly wired into my brain enough that I was watching Vox Machina the other day and had the automatic thought while eating that I should *switch to the Japanese language track* so I wouldn’t have to look at the screen the whole time.

   Vox Machina is a native English show.

   If your goal is to watch without making a mess out of your food, this may not be the language for you. You’ll need a deep and durable motivation to study your way through the complexities over the course of years.

   It’s also critical to delve into speech and writing (you’ve started that). Passively absorbing the language to comprehend audio only gets people so far.

   Neither Duolingo nor the JLPT really have anything to do with this. You would not aim to pass a certain level of the JLPT in order to comprehend anime. This proficiency test is designed to demonstrate to potential employers, universities, research and language programs that you have achieved a certain benchmark. You can use it as a measuring stick but it’s not particularly useful for studying anime.

   As for Duolingo, it’s a fun puzzle game. That’s really it. It will give you some general ideas about Japanese but Duolingo is basically useless for teaching grammar and honorifics.

   The good news is that with a broad brush, anime is much easier to understand than naturalistic speech because people don’t talk like that in real life, or in other forms of media. It sounds slow, exaggerated and extremely dramatic.

   At the same time, people also speak to each other in strange ways, from tacking on animal sounds to using ancient archaic forms to sounding brutally blunt, overly tough, overly soft and so on. These nuances take a comprehensive understanding of speech patterns to contextualize the deviations.

   If all of the above doesn’t scare you off I’m happy to give some tips! I started learning Japanese in high school when I couldn’t access classes and so I used Japanese entertainment shows, anime, jpop and jrock to augment other methods of learning.

   Also I’m here from the future to tell you that you can spend years of your life dedicated to learning Japanese, study and work in Japan, and still watch a show like The Case Study of Vanitas and go WTF. You’ll never run out of opportunities to pick up a whole new set of vocabulary 🙂

6. At about an N3 level, you’ll be relatively comfortable watching anime with subtitles. There will be a lot of words you don’t know, but you will understand the vast majority of what’s going on in simple plots. When I watched the live action version of 耳をすませば in theaters before I was “officially” N3, I understood roughly 90%. When I watched the new テンスラ movie though, I barely was able to follow it at all. Really depends on what you’re watching.

   If your goal of learning Japanese is to watch anime in Japanese though, it’s probably better to ignore JLPT focused learning and either just go straight into watching anime and mining words or using one of the frequency vocab books out there. When I watched the new airing of Demon slayer in theaters, I understood maybe 95%, in large part because I started mining words from the show a couple months before the premier.

7. To watch ANY anime, not limited to just kids or slice of life, id say above n1. Animes with specific theme and setting will have jargons and senmon gengo that arent really used everyday

8. FWIW, you can learn words specific to a given anime with this site:
   [https://jpdb.io/anime-difficulty-list](https://jpdb.io/anime-difficulty-list)

9. Lol this is prob going to be downvoted to hell but when I started reading this post i immediately thought it was a troll/joke yet veryone answers so seriously 😅

   “I want to learn Japanese because food drops and it gets messy”

   “ill reach that jlpt level and understand anime with a 95%comprehension rate without subs and never study again”

   “hitagana on duo lingo” (might as well be LuoDingo lol)

   Idk…it seems like OP knew what he was talking about but intentionally wrote this to f around..yet if everyone replies so seriously….i feel like im just overthinking it lol🧐

10. post N1 for all/any

    some will be easier than that though

11. Way above N1, so true fluency