If I recall correctly Death Note has A LOT of references to Buddhist traditions that most japanese people would easily catch on to, but foreigners couldn’t get them just by watching the translated work because it gets lost in translation. It makes me wonder how much I’ve missed, and if I would enjoy my favorite anime more if I just were fluent enough in the language.
Could you think of any kind of joke/point/foreshadowing you didn’t “get” before you were learning japanese? Has it changed your interpretation of the work? Does it happen often? Thanks 🙂
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I recently learned the word 生還, or “returning alive”, which is also the word for reaching home plate in baseball. And my mind immediately went to the first episode of Clannad Afterstory, when >!it emphasized Tomoya bringing Nagisa home. Knowing that the word is “returning alive”, it feels like some pretty intentional foreshadowing for her death later in the series.!<
I have a favourite movie that I realised had pretty bad subtitles after I learned enough to understand the speech myself. Stuff like misinterpreting a name as nouns, totally misunderstanding lines or completely missing references to other parts of the movie. A few scenes made a lot more sense once I understood the Japanese lol
There’s a move in Pokemon called translated as “Curse” in the English version which has peculiar effect. When a ghost pokemon uses it, it looses a chunk of its HP to inflict a curse on the opponent, but when a non-ghost type uses it, it instead lowers your speed and boosts your offensive and defensive stats.
I never understood why that was before learning Japanese, where the move’s name is のろい, which could be either 呪い (curse) or 鈍い (sluggish).
I think people would be surprised how many names of characters in anime are puns or just straight up names of things- particularly Naruto and one piece era. Even more advanced, often times a ‘normal’ sounding name will be written with nonstandard characters that have something to do with the nature of the character. This happens in all media, not just anime.
To use or not to use keigo, when to switch from one to another — it tells something in more than half of any drama.
In anime Non Non Biyori a little girl Renge wants to play a new version of tag, which is acting like a demon. It makes sense, because onigokko has this double meaning.
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In Date A Live all girls have a hidden number in their names.
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In some comedy anime people names are very obvious puns. Like in Komi-san.
There are quite a few thoughts and concepts that are much more normal and common to express in Japanese, and because of that they can be expressed much faster. This changes the pacing and texture of conversations and is pretty much impossible to translate well.
The obvious examples that you’ll get in textbooks are あいさつ like ただいま and おつかれさま so on, but there’s an entire vocabulary of casual reactions to social situations. Like ばくしょう is basically “lmao” so I can translate it, but there is no similarly short translation for ぎゃくぎれ – (you’re in the wrong, so why are *you* getting snippy?).
> It makes me wonder how much I’ve missed, and if I would enjoy my favorite anime
If the translators are good, honestly, not much. It’ll depend on genre – I’d say that comedy can significantly more enjoyable – but either way the main point of storytelling is that you have characters and situations that a human audience can relate to. If your main genres are fantasy or sci-fi, this isn’t a particularly good reason to learn Japanese.
Small moments, yes, those can be impossible to translate. It happens very often. But the overall story, the personalities of characters, most conversations, no, translation doesn’t change them significantly. And as you become pretty okay at Japanese, it doesn’t feel *exotic* as foreign language any more. It’s just how people talk.
If you read, and especially if you read novels, the difference is more noticeable. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read うちの師匠はしっぽがない in translation. It’s still pretty hard for me, but the dialects and the tapestry of words and the puns and cultural references do feel so specific that I’d rather have an imperfect experience in Japanese than an imperfect one in English.
The difference is that I have the power to improve my Japanese.
Complex sentences that play with grammar in satisfying ways – those are possible in Japanese and in English. But the collection of satisfying sentences often doesn’t overlap. This affects music a lot – I can’t imagine lyricists like PinocchioP or TOPHAMHAT-KYO ever being translated in a way that feels correct.
Sorry that this has been kind of a winding answer, but now that I think about it:
– yes learning Japanese will expand your mind so that you can experience things that you aren’t able to experience now
– but the real mind-expanding content isn’t anime, it’s creators and media that you haven’t even heard of yet