In videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhEnMieHtec Cure Dolly advocates for learning Japanese seemingly through watching anime with Japanese subtitles and then looking up every single word, and putting most of them into an Anki deck.
But… EVERY. SINGLE. WORD? Really? She also suggests having a foundational understanding to begin with, but only of a few hundred words, which is nothing. I was thinking of finishing a Core deck first, but she says this is unnecessary.
Is this really wise? Did this work for you? It would take me hours to go through a single 20 minute anime episode like this, looking up every word. I’m sure it’d get easier eventually, but right now it’d be torturous, and probably would be for many months.
16 comments
Honestly, it mostly seems like a “fun” (subjective) method, but one that requires way more hours than just frontloading more knowledge first. I’d only suggest this to people who have several hours a day to blow.
I do this kinda. I don’t do it for *every* single word, only ones that are new to me. With animelon and tenten, it’s not too time consuming imo.
May as well try it out, then if you hated it no need to do it again any time soon.
[I asked a similar question](https://www.reddit.com/r/ajatt/comments/zymrz7/should_i_still_mine_vocabulary_that_i_think_isnt/) on the r/AJATT subreddit
I liked this answer
>Only pick sentences that are interesting to you at that moment. Only pick sentences that contain something you REALLY, ACTIVELY want to learn immediately. Not something you think you “should” learn. Not something that you think you “have to” learn. But something you really really really want to learn RIGHT NOW. RIGHT HERE. Those are the sentences you should pick to enter into your SRS.
And I have a couple of frequency dictionaries alongside yomichan, I’ve been doing that for a while
I also think knowing several hundreds of words in advance is really helpful
But that’s just my personal opinion
Regarding anime specifically, I’d say it’s a fairly bad way to learn (for beginners) simply because you can’t choose the pace, and constantly pausing gets tiresome fast.
Now, if you read and look up every single word, adding everything to your Anki deck, that’s an entirely different discussion. You can take it slow and learn what you personally want to learn. Bonus points if you sort words by frequency and learn the most frequent ones.
The last question is whether core decks help and how much. I think doing a something small deck such as core 2k is fine. It’s not a big time investment and should contain mostly essential words. However, going beyond is useless for two reasons. First, because larger decks like core 10k are built using terrible frequency lists (e.g. newspapers). Second, because you’ll still have basically zero experience with grammar and sentence structures. Getting used to the language in general is a crucial part of language learning and shouldn’t be delayed.
I did this after finishing genki 2, which supposedly covers around 1.5k vocab together with genki 1 but I’d say I remembered very little. Put on the first episode of Fullmetal alchemist brotherhood and started my first Anki deck via looking up every word I didn’t recognise in the show.
The first episode alone took me around 2-3 hours to finish, and I ended up with 140 new cards. I interspersed it with lots of other media where I followed the same method, and a year and a half later by the time I finished the series I was making around 4-8 new cards per ep.
I think you definitely want some foundational knowledge before starting this method, but more so in the grammar than vocabulary department. If you haven’t done any formal study at all doing a core deck first is probably preferable, otherwise I think all it does is delay you creating your own custom deck which is a much more effective study tool, in my opinion.
well if you’re watching on animelon you can click on the subs to see the meaning of the words you dont know so its not that annoying, ive just started doing it and im almost done with the tango n5 and n4 decks, which is more than a few hundred words maybe but nothing crazy
im not minding much pausing and all, i find it more useful than playing games which is what i started with, since everything is voiced and the animation helps way more with the context
i would advocate for learning a few hundred words and watching those grammar videos and then try to read some easy manga, and then jump to watching subbed anime
You don’t have to look up every word. Do what works for you. Always acquire vocabulary through pre-made decks or mining, you should probably start with the former and slowly convert to the latter, even eventually make cards entirely in Japanese. Also on top of repping new and old Vocab you should be constantly immersing. Trudge through when it gets tough and you’ll see the difference
If you want to learn with that approach (which yes is very time intensive) I recommend you check out the guide (and then the discord community) on [https://learnjapanese.moe](https://learnjapanese.moe). They have a lot more details on what to do exactly.
i did this at the start but what i used to do was have two different mental modes for watching anime, study and not study. for study i would use subtitles and learn all the words and for not study i would have no subtitles and just chill out and watch it
I did the core 2k deck before I started watching anime. It *STILL* took hours/days for a single episode after. A lot of words I “learned” through the core deck, I didn’t understand how they were being used in the anime. Also, words I mined from the anime were way easier to learn than the core words were. For me, getting words from the wild gives a better understanding with less work.
If I could do it again I’d only do a few hundred cards before anime.
Sure, it’s not that fun to spend hours on a single anime episode, but it’s not that fun spending hours doing core flashcards either is it? The start just sucks.
Imo, songs are probably a better target for early immersion than anime. Much smaller word count, slower pace, and much easier to look up & memorize something that’s 4 minutes vs 20. Pick a favorite song and make a deck out of it. Put a playlist together and leave it on repeat all day. Read/sing with the lyrics as much as you can, etc.
If you’re gonna do it with anime, use [subs2srs](https://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/) to generate a deck (or find a premade deck on jpdb.io) for an episode or show you really like. Subs2srs gives you the audio & images/videos, so it’s optimal if you’re an Anki person. Definitely pick a show you know and enjoy, so you won’t feel so lost when you can’t understand chunks of it. Do it one episode at a time (smaller word count, and you’ll internalize more patterns from the focused repetition). Note that a key part of her approach is listening to the audio from the episode constantly.
It will be a lot… But so will going through a core 2k deck or learning 1,000-2000 kanji. In a sense you’re just trading one ordered word set for another. The potential advantage is that you’re doing it in an integrated way. A perspective: You’re using the anime/episode as a tool to learn Japanese, rather than learning Japanese abstractly, to be able to watch anime episodes. In the end, you’ll still eventually be able to watch the episodes. And, no reason you can’t also work on the 2k word deck. There will probably be a lot of overlap, as time goes on.
You’re right in thinking that a few hundred words is very tiny. But also some anime episodes only have a few hundred words, ex: Flying Witch ep 1 has 494 unique words, ep 4 has 353). You can check on jpdb.io (you need to be a $5/month Patreon supporter for the individual episode decks). As for watching with subtitles, your reading speed just won’t be fast enough for a while, but that gets better the more you do it.
Hope some of that helps.
You can’t do every single word in every single episode. Over in Refold land we advocate a balance between intensive immersion (like CD is talking about but much less extreme) and “free-flow” immersion – just enjoy the content as best as you can.
If you do try to collect every single word you’ll get to 50% coverage pretty quickly. So if you don’t have access to a starter deck, you technically don’t need one. You can make your own over the course of a few months with a dictionary, frequency list, and suitable content. Or – and this is old-school AJATT tech – use a textbook as your source material because they use restricted vocabulary.
Note: a starter deck will take several months anyway at Refold pace. It’s one of the things that other immersion approaches criticize us for. Ten new per day times 100 days = 1000 cards. 15-16 weeks since you’ll probably miss some days.
Others will encourage you to blitz faster, like 40 days, or to go faster *and* aim for about 2k starter cards. And honestly, I think that’s good too. The optimum starting strategy isn’t a sharp peak, it’s a broad area of strategies. Refold encourages you to get plenty of input and not burn yourself out in Anki.
—
The truth is that everything before you understand your first (probably fictional) conversation *sucks.* You don’t know that the method will work for you, and you have to crawl around in the dark for a few months before you get there.
I think comprehensible teaching content may be really good for giving yourself a spark of hope during this time. It doesn’t completely solve the confidence problem (you know that it’s not for natives) but it does give you good feelings quickly.
I survived without it and did a *lot* of starter sentences and then not enough mining and then quit – that was my AJATT experience. I’m doing a lot better with Refold, and I was able to start with sentence mining, so I haven’t used any of the new starter decks.
Ain’t nobody got time for that?!? I’m sure in theory it works great, in the real world I think you will be burnt out after 2-3 episodes and not learn much
Honestly, I tried playing Pokémon and trying to understand every sentence 100%, but it took me like 20 minutes to get even one sentence and it was just exhausting and gave me a headache.
So I decided that I would only focus on catching Pokémon and then look up the unknown words in their Pokédex Entries to try and understand those. Still a bunch of work, but interspersed with a lot of gameplay and much more manageable. For the rest of the game, I only learned enough to be able to play through it.
Or I may quickly look up some words but then only note those down that appear time and time again in a game and that I might have difficulty remembering. Or I just go through a game, look up some unknown words, and then use the Note space in my dictionary app to write down the sentence from the game as an example of use if I’m having a hard time grasping the concept of the word.
Personally, I think it’s most important for language learning that you enjoy doing it. Doesn’t mean that it’s going to be fun or easy all the time, but that it’s a challenge appropriate for your level. And having something that keeps you coming back is helpful too. For me, I just love the language, I like looking at the script, it feels awesome to be able to write it, and I’m looking forward to being able to express myself better with every new bit of information I learn about this language.
Though I do like Cure Dolly&s content when it comes to explanations on how the language and grammar works because it has helped me immensely in gaining a deeper understanding of some of the concepts in the Japanese language and I’m currently working on writing down my notes in a small notebook for quick reference while I’m immersing myself in games/books/anime/etc.
I wouldn’t trust CureDolly’s language learning advice. She isn’t (or wasn’t) particularly proficient at Japanese and looking up every single word seems like an exercise in frustration.
I wouldn’t recommend anki at the starting of this, you’ll become too reliant on it, and when you look something up it will go in one ear and out the other. You can read instead and start off easy passages only and look words up when you feel you REALLY need to as to not slow yourself down too much. Only make an anki card once you’ve seen a word 2-3 times and can’t remember either the meaning or definition.