You’re supposed to force yourself to engage with the language or suffer not understanding what’s going on. Reading the subs while the natives babble away in the background helps not one bit.
I watched subbed anime my entire teenagerhood and picked up maybe two dozen words and phrases by the end.
I’m taking n1 this december after two and a half year of learning (passed n2 this year) and i’m still nowhere near comfortable watching anime without subs. However, with japanese sub i’m really comfortable with it. My listening skill is bad compared to my reading though, so that might factor in my experience.
The things that I can watch with not too much hassle are Vtubers, Youtube videos, radio talk shows, vlogs, and slice of life anime.
I think it took 2ish months before I jumped in? And I didn’t understand it well, but there certainly wasn’t any use in using English subs for learning at that point. If you wait until you’re confident and comfortable, it’s just not ever going to happen.
I never did English subs for anything once I started learning Japanese…..but at the same time I built my vocab first before I attempted to do listening…took about a year….of course, this means I also stopped watching any anime until I started listening….sort of a motivating factor 🙂
Some people do prefer to start listening from day one, I just chose reading first as it’s an easier entry point (at least for me it was)
Tuesday
Never happened to me, even after passing N1
Like many things in life, at some point you just have to say, “Screw it, I’m doing it”
The major thing to realize is, you’re never going to be ready for the changeover. Technically speaking, because it’s made for Japanese audiences, most of it will at least have some bits that are beyond N1. If you’re looking for a ballpark range, you probably want to be close to N3, heading towards N2… and that will get you stuff for kids. For anything made for older audiences… yeah, you’re going to want to be rather advanced in Japanese, and you absolutely will STILL miss stuff.
Ever since I was a small child really. I remember being like 6 or 7 years old and watching Japanese shows on TV with no English subtitles. Though that’s probably because I live in Brazil and my native language is Portuguese so nothing on TV had English subtitles because why would it.
You will never reach the point of being comfortable with Japanese if you never stop watching things in English or with English subs, that said, it doesn’t mean you need to literally watch stuff fully in Japanese from day 1 (but you can).
I think English subs is really only good to get used to the sound, so if you already can distinguish Japanese from other languages clearly, the subs are not helping you anymore in my opinion.
So to answer your quesiton from my point of view, I stoped watching stuff in English or with English subs after having the bare basics down and not because I was confident enough but to **GET** confident enough eventually, and surely enough there is now a lot of very accessible content for me (and also a lot of stuff that is still hard). What do I mean by bare basics? Around 1k to 2k words vocab and N5+N4 grammar, though one could start earlier but then you have to choose your content more wiesely, and also tolerate more ambiguity.
9 comments
Day 1.
You’re supposed to force yourself to engage with the language or suffer not understanding what’s going on. Reading the subs while the natives babble away in the background helps not one bit.
I watched subbed anime my entire teenagerhood and picked up maybe two dozen words and phrases by the end.
I’m taking n1 this december after two and a half year of learning (passed n2 this year) and i’m still nowhere near comfortable watching anime without subs. However, with japanese sub i’m really comfortable with it. My listening skill is bad compared to my reading though, so that might factor in my experience.
The things that I can watch with not too much hassle are Vtubers, Youtube videos, radio talk shows, vlogs, and slice of life anime.
I think it took 2ish months before I jumped in? And I didn’t understand it well, but there certainly wasn’t any use in using English subs for learning at that point. If you wait until you’re confident and comfortable, it’s just not ever going to happen.
I never did English subs for anything once I started learning Japanese…..but at the same time I built my vocab first before I attempted to do listening…took about a year….of course, this means I also stopped watching any anime until I started listening….sort of a motivating factor 🙂
Some people do prefer to start listening from day one, I just chose reading first as it’s an easier entry point (at least for me it was)
Tuesday
Never happened to me, even after passing N1
Like many things in life, at some point you just have to say, “Screw it, I’m doing it”
The major thing to realize is, you’re never going to be ready for the changeover. Technically speaking, because it’s made for Japanese audiences, most of it will at least have some bits that are beyond N1. If you’re looking for a ballpark range, you probably want to be close to N3, heading towards N2… and that will get you stuff for kids. For anything made for older audiences… yeah, you’re going to want to be rather advanced in Japanese, and you absolutely will STILL miss stuff.
Ever since I was a small child really. I remember being like 6 or 7 years old and watching Japanese shows on TV with no English subtitles. Though that’s probably because I live in Brazil and my native language is Portuguese so nothing on TV had English subtitles because why would it.
You will never reach the point of being comfortable with Japanese if you never stop watching things in English or with English subs, that said, it doesn’t mean you need to literally watch stuff fully in Japanese from day 1 (but you can).
I think English subs is really only good to get used to the sound, so if you already can distinguish Japanese from other languages clearly, the subs are not helping you anymore in my opinion.
So to answer your quesiton from my point of view, I stoped watching stuff in English or with English subs after having the bare basics down and not because I was confident enough but to **GET** confident enough eventually, and surely enough there is now a lot of very accessible content for me (and also a lot of stuff that is still hard). What do I mean by bare basics? Around 1k to 2k words vocab and N5+N4 grammar, though one could start earlier but then you have to choose your content more wiesely, and also tolerate more ambiguity.