Any tips for watching my first anime in Japanese?

Japanese
#1

I’m thinking of watching Nanoha in Japanese next weekend.

  • Will watch it with JP subtitles.
  • Create a vocab deck in Bunpro and watch the episode after learning all the Vocab for it.

Any tips or advice to make it go better?

In particular, how do I ensure that I correctly understand what is being said?
While doing reviews in Bunpro, I notice that I have a tendency to “hallucinate” and give myself incorrect translations of sentences.
Should I just keep pausing/unpausing to check? That feels a little tedious.

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#2

When I started, I just listened to each sentence. If I didn’t understand it then I looked at the subtitle and read it. If there was a word I didn’t know I’d add it then. Then I replayed the sentence I got stuck on.

You don’t have to do this but I prefer to have 100% comprehension of stuff otherwise it bothers me.

Nowadays I’m much better at listening so don’t have to pause so much

#3

In my opinion, learning to tolerate ambiguity is an important part of consuming native language material. When watching a show, you have a lot more continuity and context than looking at individual sentences on bunpro, so your ‘hallucinations’ are more likely to be correct. Finding the right balance between word by word 100% understanding and very loose/impressionistic understanding is something you’ll have to figure out yourself based on your current skill level, the difficulty of the material you’re consuming, and your own personal preferences.

Practical suggestions:

Personally, I find learning vocab after seeing it in context to be much more effective than learning it beforehand. That way, you’ll be able to use the context you first encountered it in as a memory aid, which I’ve found to be a lot faster than the alternative.

I would also recommend experimenting with watching on something like .9 or .8 speed when starting to get better comprehension without having to constantly pause, but you do sacrifice some ‘natural-ness’ of speech by doing this.

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#4

I think the 2 most important things are:

  • pick anime suited to your level of comprehension, so slice of life is better than philosophical ones in the beginning
  • don’t get frustrated (easier said than done, but for me it really helped starting to be ok with not understanding everything as long as I still understand the overarching plot)

personally I am not really someone to stop each sentence and put vocabs into my anki or so, because that interrupts the watching experience and transforms it from something I do for fun, to something I purely do for learning purposes.
I am sure it yields amazing results tho, if you can get yourself to do it.

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#6

There is a hidden deck (I think it’s still a beta version) called “Non-JLPT” with 12 points that personally have been very useful to understand some concepts, like how you can shorten a negation with ん (at first I thought it was a random negation, actually it is not!) or to finally understand the omnipresent やがる.
This is the first Non-JLPT grammar point: ぞ (JLPT N0) | Bunpro
Unfortunately there isn’t the audio sentence yet.

PS if you encounter Kansai-ben in your anime, there is a special deck on that subject. I haven’t studied yet but it looks promising!

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#7

Install Memento player + yomitan dictionaries to use in there and watch it like that. Any kanji you want can be translated instantly on mouse hover and mined into anki with one button (if you want to do that). I started watching anime that way around 6 months ago and frankly it made the impossible quite bearable for me. Watched more than 15 titles that way already and it gets easier and easier with each one.

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#8

Memento player looks good. Will give it a try.

#9

Anyways, my first problem now is that I have 600+ vocab for the first episode.

That’s probably because I didn’t track all my vocab knowledge with Bunpro. I will probably do like 50 per day or so (because I know most of them) but I probably won’t look at the first episode until I get my vocab decks sorted.

#10

There is an interesting personal balance between watching for fun and for learning purposes… and what to gain from the experience.
Personally the main plot is important, I don’t look up every unkown word / kanji. I only try to look up important kanji / words or ones that keep repeating (because looking up everything is not fun for me lol).

What I like the most but it took some time to figure it out:
Watch an episode in Japanese (no subtitles at all) and switch on the English subtitles (or if brave lol Japanese subtitles) from time to time just to make sure I understood the overall plot. After I finish the episode, I may re-watch parts with English subs, just to double check. Over time I realised that having Japanese subtitles is a bit distracting - I would read them vs actually watching haha

Depending on the anime / how I feel:
For some anime, I watch it first with English subs / read a bit of the light novel or manga first. That way I have a good idea what is going on and I can just try to enjoy the anime in Japanese with hardly any look ups (even if I don’t understand every sentence).

Edit: I initially started with One week friends, Horimiya etc - slice of life where hopefully the vocabulary / grammar is (fingers crossed) not that complicated. Or anime adaptations of light novels / manga that I have already read in Japanese and “should” know the vocab as I have added it for reviews lol.

#11

If you want to maximize the chances you’ll understand more of the anime then I’d recommend starting with something like Crayon Shin-chan or Doraemon (something to that effect).

#12

I recived similar advice to what other people are saying here. This is what worked for me:

  1. It needs to be something that can be enjoyed without understanding
    This is why slice-of-life and picture books didn’t work for me. I can enjoy delicious food and have played D&D, so Dungeon Meishi was fun. I watched all of the Ghibli movies in Japanese, because they are still an engaging fantasic story with beuatiful land scapes and epic showdowns.

  2. For your first time, I recomend using Japanese sub titles and “ひめさま- I know ひめさま” That’s a “の”. Be excited if you understand 10 words, not dissapointed it’s not 1000.

  3. For my first manga I studed radicals only- then went through a volume of a beloved shonen manga and read only the radicals. 怖 scared, 逃 run away, then used the pictures and my knowlage from reading it 5 years ago, to guess what is going on.

  4. don’t pause/unpause to check if it is tedious. Do practice listening comprehension with native audio and learn new vocab- you don’t have to do both at the same time. studying vocab while watching anime just sucked all the fun out of anime for me.Alternitively- I got Language Reactor working 2 weeks ago and I hope it will get me out of the Japanese limit I reached 15 months ago (High N4/ Low N3).

#13

Does Memento have the same tools to automatically capture dialogue/screenshot as ASBplayer? It looks like a cool program but the website doesn’t have too much information.

#14

It does. It’s the same as Yomitan when picking out words and let’s you put a word in one field and a sentence in another field, or whatver else you want to capture, it also has a field for screenshots.

It’s based on mpv which is a pain to configure if you want to make changes to the player outside of Memento’s configuration, but other than that because it’s based on MPV it loads instantly for me and supports pretty much every modern video codec there is.

By default you can use Z+X to readjust subtitles (https://jimaku.cc) if they’re desynced. Usually it’s not more than a second if you got a matching video and subtitle file. Not all subtitles are good.

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#15

Personally, I lean in on the just shut up and listen approach and it helps with anime. I’ve never studied from anime, but over time I’m understanding more and more. especially in a series like 夏目友人帳 I started with struggling understanding anything but now I come across a few new words every episode, but I catch on very quickly as to what things mean.

It’s great if you’re lazy like me and can accept ambiguity.

#16

Yes, it also automatically captures audio/screenshot and subtitle text, but you need to setup the details of how it does that. For example whether the front of the card shows the full sentence or only vocab.
I would share the guide through which I have set it up, but unfortunately it is neither in English, nor in Japanese.

#17

For me personally, that approach would be less enjoyable and less educatonal. This is not lazy and is kinda like bruteforcing your way through and would require a lot of willpower just to sit through a single episode. But I am also kinda torn whether I should prioritize mining and SRS or watching more content.

#18

That’s kind of a poor way to put it. Many, many people advocate for the full immersion method like that. Are you wanting to understand the language or translate every single bit? Ambiguity will always be a part of language, as other have said. Embracing it will break down barriers much faster than disecting everything someone says. What are your goals though? like are you wanting to speak the language? are you wanting to just translate the language? or what?

#19

The problem is that there is often simply no way to understand some things from context without prior knowledge or translation.
I assure you, that there is still plenty of ambiguity even when there is a translation tool, simply because I try not to pause too often. When I first began, one episode took around 100 minutes and my head literally hurt after. Now it is less than 30 and I can do it all day, which means that comprehension really improved in that period.
In other words, if we go with the famous i+1 language input theory, watching anime as is is not i+1 for me, but maybe i+3 (if it is something interesting and not just slice of life). Maybe you and people who argue for full immersion are closer to i+1 level, so for them it feels more natural (not for me yet). It is also kinda like training wheels (though it is an imperfect comparison).
As for my goals, I want to be able to comfortably consume native level content without dictionaries and am slowly moving in that direction. I think another year will get me there.

#20

Are you not watching the anime? If you’re listening this makes sense, but if you’re watching there’s tons of ques to understand the character’s meaning, motivations, personalities and whatnot. I’m not interested in arguing, but this just isn’t true for 99.9% of anime. Unless you’re watching Stein’s Gate or Dr. Stone (and have no experience with chemistry) then you should understand at least 70% of the main idea.

Trust me I know ambiguity sucks, especially if you don’t understand most of the dialogue. The goal is to understand the main idea at first though. Think of it like a painting, you don’t start with color do you? you start with sketching, or even planning. I’m not even all for full-immersion. I use study guides all the time and even write down words I’m not aware of when playing rpg’s or watching anime. The difference is if it feels like a chore or like an obligation, you’ll lose motivation. Like I can read Dr. Slump very easily at this point, and I am loving it. But I’ll switch over to 現実主義勇者の王国再建記 and understand like 50% of the political stuff, which feels like a drag. I don’t want to read the latter because of it’s difficulty. (Even if it really isn’t that much harder than Dr. Slump, just it’s light novel versus manga that makes it hard)

Either way the point I’m really getting at is pay attention to the main idea at first then build on that. Ambiguity sucks, yeah, we all agree on that, but saying there’s no way to understand isn’t the case, unless you’re reading a novel and you haven’t the basic reading comprehension to understand it.

#21

Attempting to study every single word and have complete understanding of everything that’s said is generally more trouble than it’s worth. Especially with native media, you have an opportunity to directly access understanding of a word or phrase or conjugation through seeing how it’s used by natives. Imo that’s far more valuable than looking up a general English definition of a word and trying to grasp the meaning of a Japanese word by proxy through English. Plus, there will be lots of context-specific uses of words or phrases that don’t really capture a word’s meaning or use all on their own. It will take a lot of exposure to words like that in order to actually develop understanding of their meaning and usage.

Consider a phrase like おつかれさまです. You can translate it into English, but there’s really no culturally equivalent meaningful analogue, so if you want to understand it, it’s best to simply see how native speakers use it and mimic that until you have your own internalized intuition for it. Incidentally, that’s generally how people acquire their native language; from watching other native speakers use it.

I recommend watching an episode or two and studying words that are repeated a lot, or seem particularly interesting or useful to you, then periodically going back and rewatching earlier episodes after having studied words from them for a while. I would not recommend waiting until you’ve studied every word from an episode to move onto the next episode; that would drastically slow your progress and probably make watching the show much less interesting too.

It’s also important to note that seeing more examples of a word in context is far more effective study than reviewing a flashcard for that word a hundred times. You might study 忙しい and be able to draw up the word “busy” when you see it on a flashcard, but your understanding of and ability to remember and use 忙しい will be vastly better if you watch a dozen examples in context of someone saying ごめん、忙しいけど, or 今忙しくない？ or うわ～、今日めっちゃ忙しそう！ because our brains require connections to access memories, and words understood in context are far more connected than compartmentalized vocabulary study. So while actively reviewing individual words is still useful, it’s much better to review a little and consume a lot.

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