Hi all,
Okay so I would consider myself intermediate (at least comprehension wise) in Japanese.
However, what I struggle with the most is intensively immersing in Japanese through reading and watching shows. It just makes something that should be relaxing a bother sometimes.
I also end up feeling bad when reading a manga in English, or a novel.
Am I the only one ?
7 comments
I don’t feel bad, but sometimes I’m like *this is so easy hahahaha*
Anime was my hobby before I started learning Japanese, so I’ve decided that it’s silly to give up anime just because I’m learning Japanese. For me that means I still watch with English subtitles when I’m watching something for the first time, since I’m not good enough yet to enjoy it otherwise. That makes it more entertainment than actual language study but that’s fine, I do plenty of other language learning each day and I’m having fun with the language.
I might be weird here. But: I did not like English (or German) language Manga or Anime. How shall I say .. I still enjoy English- or German-language content. But I just can not deal with original Japanese content that is not in Japanese and this just got more pronounced since I went into the translation industry.
To me, no matter how hard you try, you still loose out on too much in a translation. So much that sometimes whole scenes get altered because in the west we just don’t have the same concepts.
When I first started learning Japanese and ran into content that was too hard for me, I would simply go and read or watch something else, because it seemed kind of strange to read something in English just because I can’t understand the Japanese *now*, since I will be able to understand it *some day* and the content itself isn’t going anywhere. It worked out, that turned out to be exactly the case.
That said, if you want to discuss something with your friends or participate in a discussion of an ongoing manga or game, I don’t think it’s “bad” to switch to English, if the translation is good enough. And besides, you can always re-read the work in Japanese later.
However, I think it’s important not to fall into the trap of just always falling back on English just because things feel “slow”. The early stages of immersion are the hardest, but it does get easier if you keep at it. The difficulty curve with native content will always be a bit of a rollercoaster. It’s totally normal to feel really slow at the beginning, then feel like you’re starting to get the hang of it, only to drop back down as soon as you pick up something by a different author with a different style and vocabulary.
But you just gotta remember why you’re learning Japanese in the first place, and appreciate the small victories, whether it’s reading a chapter of a new novel or manga to completion, noticing something in what you’re reading that would likely have been lost in translation, etc.
Something of a “hack” that helped me early on is actually reading or watching something you’ve already watched a while ago, like an anime you’ve watched when you first got into the medium, for example. You won’t feel as bad about skipping bits that are too hard because you already know the gist of the story, while being able to appreciate it from a new perspective.
You can watch an episode with English subs and then rewatch it in Japanese. Or use Japanese content for a set amount of time, tap out, and switch to English. One day, you won’t need to, but until then it’s not a hard rule. You don’t have to get kanken 1 in 4 months, you can go at your own pace and do what you want as/how you want it. It’s not important that you avoid English, only that you immerse in Japanese
There’s nothing wrong with reading things in English. Not everything needs to be “productive” or “study” time. Learning Japanese doesn’t need to be the focal point of your life. It’s ok to read things in English for fun
I think it’s totally fine to read/watch/enjoy Japanese contents in English language. Reading something in a foreign language is really hard and it’s difficult to enjoy it since you need to focus on reading and understanding. It’s also really tough to understand jokes, memes, connotations, trends in a foreign language, which you are not familiar with.
N1(and almost perfect score) isn’t still enough to read and manga as much and fast as native speakers of Japanese do.
Especially, anime and manga usually have many otaku memes and slangs. They are sometimes much harder than academic textbooks to understand. Vice versa, watching South Park or Dead Pool in English is extremely hard for non native speakers of English too.