What JLPT level is recommended before reading or watching Doraemon?

9 comments

1. Probably around N2, if you follow the breakdown of what the levels are supposed to put you at, though you would likely still have to look things up.

   http://www.jlpt.jp/e/about/levelsummary.html

   That being said, it’s better to start consuming native materials sooner rather than later. You don’t need to be able to grasp everything to get some benefit from it.

2. Immersing in native material is a great way to improve and solidify your japanese. It is what takes your learned knowledge of the language (anki, textbooks) and turns it into acquired knowledge (actually understanding the language). I started trying to read manga about halfway through N5 material. Of course it was extremely difficult at that time and I mostly only understood words here and there and a few sentences when I was lucky, but the point was I enjoyed it.

   Doraemon is a show and manga aimed at kids so it’s a great place to start especially if you have an interest in it! I’ll link a great website below that has lots of manga you can read for free that works with the chrome dictionary addon Yomichan and Migaku, that way you can easily look things up as you go. There is also a link for reading material rated by level. You should definitely start immersing sooner rather than later, if not halfway through Genki 1 then definitely by the end of it!

   https://learnnatively.com/

   https://bilingualmanga.net/

3. [Natively](https://learnnatively.com/resources/search/?type=manga) is a useful site that assigns difficulty to books by user rankings. The Doraemon manga scores a 21, which puts it around a low N3 on their scale. Though you could probably start even earlier (like early N4) and learn a lot if you’re willing to take it slow and use a dictionary.

   For the anime you could probably start right away. Watch it with English subtitles first and then rewatch it without subtitles. If you know what’s going on (because you’ve seen it already), then you can still enjoy it even if you aren’t catching all the words, and you’ll learn a lot.

4. If you could watch the movies with Japanese subtitles, pause whenever you need to look something up, I think it’d make a decent resource. I’ll never stop pushing for people to just read regular literature though. Yoshimoto Banana’s Tsugumi, Kazumi Yumoto’s Natsu no Niwa and Keigo Higashino’s Tegami should all be approachable works.

5. The more you dig into the language, the more it will open up to you.

   If you work with Genki, try to work into Genki 2, try to set up some tools / apps that might help you with words (dictionary) and kanji (at best something where you can draw unknown kanji) or browser extension that can read subtitles .. well, pretty much just try to set yourself up in a way that once you start with any specific form of native content, you are prepared to check for whatever you want to check – be it vocab, Kanji, grammar points, whatever.

   Just keep in mind: enjoy the journey. You can start watching right now and come back with more knowledge a later time to watch it again. Whenever you want to tackle challenging content, there is absolutely no need to understand or plot everything, learning a few new words a long the line can be enough. And especially rewatching or re-reading can be really beneficial for your learning process.

   Just remember: The more efficient you did set yourself up for specific content, the more time will be spend enjoying said content.

6. Jpdb puts the Doraemon movies at 2/10 or 3/10 difficulty.

7. It might be more productive to just get a volume and see how approachable it is for you. Native materials aren’t exactly graded readers.

8. Bro, just immerse in it. Forget which jlpt level you need to be. That doesn’t matter because you can’t really measure anime by their “jlpt level.” Besides, Doraemon should be on the easier side, so just get some subtitles, check out the links that the others in this thread have given you so that you can read the manga and just get into native content.

9. You can always get something out of any material even if it’s just picking up on the odd word. Whether it will be enjoyable to watch without understanding it or constantly pausing/rewinding/using a dictionary is another matter.