Learning More Japanese through Anime

By Dan Hope

Anime has always been identified with Japan, and rightly so. The genre was created and pioneered by Osamu Tezuka and other Japanese animators, and it continues to enjoy popularity throughout Japan. However, anime has become popular around the world and a common form of animation in all cultures. And anime can become an effective, and entertaining way to improve the way you learn Japanese.

Learning Japanese through anime can be tricky business, though. It’s probably not a good idea to start with anything based in science fiction or fantasy because the vocabulary they use might not be common words for everyday conversation. If you can find anime about more ordinary subjects it will be easy to identify words you know and expand the way you learn Japanese vocabulary. When you are more advanced in the language, you can then move to more exotic topics and learn Japanese words that are less common..

There are two different ways to learn Japanese through anime. You can just watch anime in Japanese and use it as a listening comprehension exercise; simply try to understand as much as you can. Or you can choose to watch it with subtitles. Subtitles aren’t as good for listening comprehension but they are really useful if you want to learn Japanese vocabulary.

You can even expand the way you learn Japanese to another famous medium, manga comics. Reading manga comics in Japanese allows you to practice another essential part of Japanese: the three alphabets . The majority of manga text will be in hiragana, but the speech of foreign characters and robots are often displayed in katakana and kanji is used for many nouns. This way you can practice your comprehension of all three alphabets and learn Japanese writing all while enjoying your favorite entertainment style.

If you learn Japanese, it’s likely that you'll already be exposed to anime and manga. So the next time you continue to learn Japanese, integrate your entertainment into Japanese studies and watch your understanding of the language improve. And in the mean time, check out the review of Learn Japanese Software to find programs that can help you reach fluency in Japanese.

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