My story of learning with anime and light novels

Hi everyone, I want to share my “story” of learning Japanese using anime (and later light novels) and give you my suggestions to have the same results. Just to give you a little bit of context, I started learning Japanese slighlty more than an year and a half ago, and now I can read light novels.

I started studying Japanese like everyone else with textbooks and trying to memorize stuff in the hope that one day I would be able to understand anime and light novels. This went on for around 2 months, but although I was being consistent for 1-2 hours per day I saw little to no results. I knew just the basics and few Kanji, but I wasn’t able to understand even the content that seemed easy.

At that point i took a break and started searching for a different way to learn Japanese: I found out about the scientific research on language learning by Stephen Krashen. Basically, he tells us that we learn a language when we understand messages, but this means understanding what is being said (even vaguely) rather than how it is being said (details and nuances). If you want to know more about it, you can watch this presentation by him on youtube: “We all acquire language the same way”.

Long story short, after the break I started using only comprehensible input, it has been an year and a half since then and now I can read light novels. I have a decent reading pace of 30-35 pages per hour (I’m kind of a slow reader even in my native language, at most I read 50 pages per hour) with 90-95% of comprehension. Also, I’ve stopped using Anki or any other SRS after a few months because I’ve noticed it was just slowing me down. For this reason I don’t know exactly how many Kanji and words i can recognize, but my guess is at least 2600 Kanji and 12000 words ( it may be more than that but i haven’t tested myself). The only thing I do apart from readind/listening/watching is creating mneumonics for the new Kanji I encounter. I’ve achieved this dedicating 1-2 hours per day on average.

If this sounds good to you, here are my recommendation to replicate my same results, you can start today as long as you how the basic sentence structures and a few hundred Kanji.

\-**Choose an anime with simple messages like slice of life or sports**. No psychological/philosofical shows, you want the characters to talk about what they are going to eat for dinner, not how to rule a kingdom (as you improve you can choose more complex shows).

\-**Choose an anime you’ve already watched** or, as an alternative, read the summaries of the episodes online. You’ll understand much more messages even if you don’t know the language, just because you already know what the characters are saying (with time you’ll be able to approach shows you don’t know).

\- **Read the script before watching the episode.** At the beginning is essential to give yourself as much time as possible to parse the sentence and understand the message, and reading is the only way to do it (for instance, you can easily look up words in the dictionary). A simple show has usually less than 1000 unique Kanji, so you don’t even need to know many Kanji.

\- **Watch with Japanese subtitles.** Especially after reading the script (the subtitles) this is going to massively boost your comprehension during the watch.

So, read the script, watch the episode, repeat for every episode. I also rewatched some episodes, but without re-reading the script, just for enjoyment.

Of course, don’t expect to understand everything at the beginning. The reason why you’re studing in the first place is that you can’t actually understand Japanese. But by following the steps I outlined you’ll get a partial understanding regardless of your level and you’ll improve quickly.

As for the parts you don’t understand, here’s how to deal with them.

\- **Ignore the noise.** I just skipped some sentences I dind’t undestand because they were not relevant to the story and I didn’t care. I was constantly improving even with a partially understandable input. In my opinion the optimal percentage of input understood is around 70-80% (at least when you read), but you’ll get there pretty quickly even if you start from below.

**- Quick search.** I think sometimes it’s worth doing some extra effort to understand more, but by that I don’t mean studying or doing SRS.

Example: you find a verb ending in ば for the first time. If you search “verb ending in ば” on google it takes you a few seconds to know that it’s a way to make an “if statement”. At that point, instead of reading an entire chapter about it, creating flashcards, using it in speech or exercises, ecc. you just go back to reading. Don’t worry about not knowing the details or forgetting about it, it’ll eventually stick if you continue reading. In some cases it may take some time to find the information you were searching for, but it’s not even comparable to the time you’d spend on textbooks and SRS. I was focusing on 10-20 sentences per episode doing this and I think it’s pretty reasonable. Don’t do it with every sentence otherwise you’ll fall into the trap of trying to understand everything and you’ll be much less efficient.

Anyway, after reading around 120 episodes scripts and watching 150 episodes in total (30 were rewatches), I started reading light novels, because at that point I’d already reached some kind of reading fluency. Since then I’ve read more than 20 light novels and although I’m far from reading like a native I really enjoy reading in Japanese. Honestly, even when my comprehension was worse, it didn’t feel like a chore. Unlike Textbooks and SRS, reading and watching is pretty enjoyable as long as you ignore the noise. Honestly, i think this attitude comes naturally when you’re genuinely insterested in the content, because you’re too excited about the parts you understand to even notice that something is missing. Depending on how difficult is your favourite anime, you may not be able jump right away into it, but after a few months to get the hang of the routine you’ll probably be able to use whatever anime you want.

For the readers, I recommend reading at least 100 anime scripts before moving to light novels, and even then be aware that your comprehension will drop significantly at the beginning. Also, you can use something like “Furiganalyse” to add furigana because words are not pronounced by voice actors anymore.

Hopefully this inspires someone to learn the language with comprehensible input instead of traditional methods. Thanks for reading this very long post!