In this sub, you can read a lot about watching anime to learn Japanese – and rightly so btw – but you cannot really find a lot about j-drama and live action compared to that.
And don’t get me wrong, anime is awesome to learn Japanese, altough it can be quite unnatural at times. Now, I don’t want to rediscuss the naturalness of speech in anime/j-drama and live action, but it’s safe to say that a lot of content is somehow stylized, especially to portray characters in a certain way or style. Anime is not free of stylization, drama is not free of stylization, that’s just how it is.
Stylization is generally not a bad thing, and not one that is only typical for the Japanese language – media, doesn’t matter in which language, is certainly stylized in some way or another. Japanese is not a linguistic anomaly, altough some people falsely make it out to be “special”.
The dialogue in j-drama and live action however is most often closer to real-life interactions than in anime, which in my opinion is a big plus. It also portrays Japanese culture and way of life better than the average anime. J-drama and live action are almost exclusively produced for the Japanese market. Most often these shows are on the easier side in terms of difficulty – especially compared to novels and most often even anime. The average j-drama is 10-12 episodes long, each episode is 45 minutes. If you look on [jpdb](https://jpdb.io) you can see that a lot of j-drama only consist of around 3,000-4,000 individual words, which makes it accessible not only for advanced learners, but also beginners that already have a solid foundation.
As I said earlier, drama and live action are by far not free from stylization, but that’s not a problem as long as you’re aware of it – it’s probably even quite useful to be exposed to several different styles of speaking. This is especially important when shadowing drama/live action.
Shadowing drama and live action is great to improve your accent and learn to speak more fluently. You obviously want to shadow scenes/characters that are not as heavily stylized, because that could make your own speech weird. As long as you vary your input sources and use some common sense you’re good to go.
The problem with drama is its availability – drama is really hard to find raw/with jp subtitles. There are some drama/live action shows on Netflix/Amazon prime if you use a VPN, and you can also find some online if you are ok with pirating content.
In conclusion: Watch some more drama and live action! As long as you use a variety of written and spoken content to learn Japanese, you’re doing it right. All media has something to teach you!
Or, as a brilliant comment I saved some time ago states:
“Don’t watch anime or you’ll end up sounding awkward and cartoonish. Also don’t listen to music, as lyrics generally take poetic license and people don’t speak like that in real life. Also, don’t watch movies or dramas, as they’re scripted and you’ll end up sounding exaggerated and fake. Don’t listen to women speaking or you’ll end up sounding feminine. Don’t listen to children or you’ll end up sounding childish. Don’t listen to old people. Don’t listen to youths or you’ll sound rude and abrasive. In fact, just don’t listen to Japanese at all – that’s the best way to learn Japanese! Otherwise you’ll pick up bad habits and make an ass of yourself.”
8 comments
So a disclaimer: I’ve been living in Japan for over three years now (AKA daily immersion) and am actively studying and improving my level- or in other words, i am actually putting in the effort.
Japan has what’s known as “Asa-dora”, or 15 minute long episodes of a drama in the morning. I caught one of the climaxes to the show on TV the other day, and beyond just the visual context of it, I caught most of what was spoken, too. So, I absolutely agree that j-dramas are better for daily-use Japanese.
However, there are two problems, and I believe they feed each other. The first is, as you said, general lack of available subs for most j-dramas. So, not so many foreigners are watching these dramas, meaning there’s not a big demand for them.
The second problem, and what I think causes the first really, is that the vast majority (but not all!) of Japanese learners… are the weebs. In other words, “I want to know Japanese so I can watch my anime in the native language, and anime’s the only thing I care about! Boo to dramas or anything else, I only want anime!” So if the ones who want the subtitles and are trying to learn the language only care about anime… yeah, dramas are an untapped goldmine, if you ask me.
I like murder mystery movies and shows. Absolutely nobody on this sub ever talks about any anime that appeals to me (I actually tried to get in to the more popular ones, but I hate them). Only exception I’ve found is 白くまカヘ。That show is just hilarious.
Yes, watching mostly murder mystery content definitely skews the language I learn. I do not need to know so many ways to talk about killers and death and corpses and lying. I do not need to know this much police or court procedure language. But it entertains me, and I don’t really use it to “learn” it’s more just… “infotainment”.
You don’t watch BBC nature documentaries to become a zoologist. But I bet a lot of zoologists, new and experienced, enjoy watching BBC nature documentaries. I see it like that.
I loved watching Terrace House for real spoken Japanese, but I admit I don’t know much of what’s on offer (I loved Old Enough too). Any recommendations you can give for suitable j-dramas or reality tv?
I use TVer.jp to watch Japanese drama. It’s free and legal in Japan (you probably need a VPN to use it). It has Japanese subtitles only. I would love something like AniMelon but it’s not going to happen, lol.
As someone who’d probably be called a weeb in this sub, there’s just a lot that you can accept in anime simply due to the media of animation itself — it makes you more readily accept some exaggerations in characterization, tone of voice and comedy usage.
It’s harder to suspend my disbelief for live-action dorama, as the acting tends to be so, *so* different from what I’m used to in western TV shows that it feels a little like I’m watching a soap opera from my own country (they don’t have great acting either, and my country is actually *known* for making quality soap operas), with much more dated comedy to boot; not to mention, such a huge amount of them is just the regular straight romance fluff that I just can’t handle anymore. It just tends to not be a good time, even though the Japanese used is clearly a lot closer to reality, and if I don’t have fun with the show while I’m watching it I’d rather just watch youtube or listen to a podcast. Due to these reasons, I actually tend to gravitate towards Japanese movies more (like anything by Kore-eda or the more recent Drive My Car) , which tend to have more naturalistic acting and interesting plots — but of course, they only last under three hours and aren’t always filled with dialogue — or even just go for Terrace House, which is silly reality TV but at least it’s just regular people interacting normally.
If anyone has recommendations for dorama that isn’t as filled with overacting and with interesting plot, I’d be interested.
Unfortunately it’s much harder to find j-dramas online than it is to find anime.
As someone who watches a lot of Jdramas, I feel that the relative underground-ness of it can be a boon to someone learning Japanese.
1) There are some shows which never get English subs (whether fansubs or picked up by international streaming sites). Therefore it is a real advantage to have Japanese knowledge vs anime which in general has more availability in subbed form.
2) There is relatively little discussion of many of the currently airing shows in English language social media, but with knowledge of the Japanese language, a learner can watch shows in the same week as they are released in Japan and read people’s opinions / snarky commentary on Japanese message boards or Twitter (this is not always as great as it sounds, but I have no regrets).
Because of the above, my listening and reading skills have improved quite a bit since I started watching dramas alongside traditional study methods. I’ve also had quite a bit of fun.
**The how of it:**
TVer is a good resource, where recently aired episodes are put up for a week. Many of the prime time shows can be streamed there with JP subs. Near the end of the drama seasons (March, June, September, December – so around now), they put up full seasons of older dramas for a couple of weeks, most of these without subs. If you need JP subs with your shows, check there again in July when the new shows start.
Some shows are on international streaming services like Netflix, Disney Plus etc., and may or may not have a JP subtitle track.
Otherwise there is piracy e.g. direct download and torrent sites to get raw episodes. Some of the downloads already have JP subs, and for those that don’t, there’s jpsubbers dot xyz for many of the terrestrial dramas aired recently (includes ad breaks but easy to retime with a subtitle editing app).
Do feel free to also hop over to /r/JDorama to ask for recommendations and see what others are watching.
There are community-made sentence decks for ~80 J-dramas and ~100 J-movies in [the catalogue](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ukDIWSkh_xvpppPbgs1nUR2kaEwFaWlsJgZUlb9LuTs/edit#gid=822742203), starting at row 1444. I would assume the subtitles are indeed hard to find, because that’s nothing compared to the anime decks.