What was your study plan/routine for learning Japanese for the sole purpose of watching unsubbed anime? Be as specific as possible please. Examples would be like hours per day, textbooks, videos, websites, etc. Also, how long did it take you to learn enough to be able to watch anime unsubbed? I know fluency will not be quick but I would like to get to a point where I can hear new words and use the sentence context to make sense of words I do not know. I do that with English words I hear for the first time.
3 comments
My plan was to do anki and learn grammar and watch anime until I understood it. After about 6 months a lot of it was pretty comprehensible, and after a year a lot of it was automatic.
I also did lots of anki, probably more than you’d be willing to do.
I did various amounts of various different decks in Anki before I’d even found the comprehensible input hypothesis, I was somewhere around 3-3.5k words when I found out about it after giving up several times cause I literally ONLY did Anki. I looked through tae kim’s guide and just started watching anime with Japanese subtitles and looking up every word I didn’t know. After like 150~ hours of doing that over the course of two months I started mining words below a certain threshold of frequency, did anywhere from 30-90 words a day(mostly around 40-50), and after around 3.5 months of doing that my computer broke so I watched some anime raw cause I thought it’d be better than nothing and was pleasantly surprised to be able to at least understand what’s happening and a lot of what people were saying outside of exposition dumps and stuff like that.
That’s the way I did it but I exclusively recommend using [JPDB.io](https://JPDB.io) and learning words in order of local frequency episode by episode of a show you really want to watch now, this way you get into native material you care about much faster and with as little pain as possible. Maybe follow tokini andy or something else while doing your vocab in the beginning instead of just having Tae Kim’s on hand possibly. Eventually you’ll get to the point doing this that it’ll make more sense to go by local frequency of the entire show so that you won’t have much downtime between episodes or between starting a new show
I don’t know how many hours a day I was doing all together per day, I only recorded my time using the language, but it was 2.5~ hours a day for the first two months, 1 hour a day for the next like 4 months, then 2-4 hours a day for the most part ever since. Currently going through all of One Piece without subtitles of any kind, only 700~ episodes to go….
I mean, a bunch of anki….but its not just a listening and anki thing…..because a lot of words can have different meanings based on context, initially being able to read it helped too so I could watch jsubbed…anime is so varied depending on the genre you like to watch there can be soo many nouns and things that only exist in that anime…and those kinds of words can sometimes be hard to pick out.
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My recommendation: Study as if your goal was not to watch raw anime, but also understand the ins and outs of the language itself…because every skill (listening, reading, maybe not so much speaking) complements each other…all you may need for anime most of the time is listening….but you can’t get to a good listening level without a good grasp on vocab and grammar….and vocab and grammar is easier to get a better grasp from reading…and you cant really do much reading without kanji, etc….idk, just throwin in my 2 cents…
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if you’re still interested in what I really did then…..
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– learned kana
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– got anki, but without any pre-built decks
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– used iKanji (ios app) to learn kanji
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– used nihngo sou matome book series to learn grammar (from N3 level and on, only bought the grammar book)
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– changed everything (and I mean everything) in my life to japanese; wanted to play a game, had to be in japanese, my phone, tablet, computer (which I use to work on a daily basis)…all in japanese, my gaming consoles too..even my apple TV…sadly my smart thermostat does not support the language…oh well :)….
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– I stopped watching anime for a couple of years….I knew I wasnt at the level where I could listen….and everything I did in my life had to be in Japanese….so anime would not cut it at this point since it would have to be with english subs…..but I understand if not everyone can make that immense sacrifice lol
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– played games….at first, games that were only text based, and that had a story, but I didnt to really need to know the story to play the game…not very intricate in the ways of storytelling…..every unknown word was added to anki (~50 new cards daily) and I would review about 500 cards daily
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– after playing about 5 games, from start to finish (1 metroidvania, 4 jrpgs; all text based), i started visual novels…..they arent really my cup of tea so after 2.5 VNs I moved on to light novels…..tbh I had never read a LN in my life before this point…..but to my surprise I really liked them…read like 4 or 5 LNs, then went back to gaming….at this point I started focusing more on listening, with games like Halo Infinite, Tales of Arise, Ghostwire Tokyo, etc…all while starting to watch jsubbed anime (also watched the occational JDrama….which to my surprise I ended up liking more than I thought I would…never had seen a JDrama before this point in my life)
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results:
just recently (as of January 2023), started watching completely raw anime and so far from what I’ve seen I seem to understand more than 60%…albeit while rewinding a lot to ensure I got the gist…but still…just recently finished (or should I say “got caught up”) with my hero academia (hadnt seen the last season) and boruto (was behind like 50 episodes…but I did skip about 10 filler cuz it was getting boring)… I rewatched death note for like the 5th time…just because lol got caught up with jujutsu kaisen and kimetsu no yaiba… just started watching the sequel to inuyasha (ik, people dont seem to like it much…..but it hits in the nostalgia a bit so I cant pass on it), etc…all this stuff I’ve seen since the beginning of the year….and I dont remember an episode where I did not at least get the overall picture…
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my goal originally was not to watch anime raw….which is why I could go almost 2 years without watching anime at all…I just geniunly love the language…..but I have to say being able to understand raw anime is pretty good side effect of knowing the language 🙂