Fluent Japanese from Anime and Manga

  Fluent Japanese From Anime and Manga:

  How to Learn Japanese Vocabulary, Kanji, and Grammar the Easy and Fun Way

  5.6 Edition

  Eric Bodnar

  Copyright © 2018 by Eric Bodnar.

  All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: What Exactly Is This Book?

  Chapter 2: Learn From Anime From Day One

  Chapter 3: Kanji and Grammar Are Easy

  Chapter 4: How to Make It Stick

  Chapter 5: 10,000 Pages of Manga

  Chapter 6: Consistency, Routine, and Habit

  WHAT EXACTLY IS THIS BOOK?

  Half of the people who see the title to this book might be thinking to themselves, "Learn Japanese by watching anime? What a load of crap!" Such a thing certainly sounds like a crazy pipe dream that a great number of otakus share. And if you watch anime with English subtitles like most of the English speaking world does, this idea will remain merely a dream. You will not learn Japanese outside a small handful of basic words.

  If you turned off the English subtitles, however, the situation would be quite different. You would be taking your first steps towards a successful Japanese learning program. Of course, this is not the only step either.

  The following steps contained within this book describe a fascinating process of how anyone can teach themselves Japanese to fluency primarily through the material he or she watches and reads for fun. Inside of this book is a system that allows you to learn and never forget thousands of new words, phrases, grammar points, and kanji (漢字) that you encounter from any Japanese source of your choice. This includes anime, manga, dramas, movies, videos, music, video games, and visual novels.

  Common sense says to learn Japanese mainly from traditional language learning courses and occasionally supplement it with fun things like anime and manga. Then again, you have millions of hopeful Japanese learners who begin studying and drop out when things becomes too dry and boring. This remains true even for many of the most hardcore language learners. I can personally vouch for this statement, as I dedicated four years of my life to rigorously studying Korean while living in South Korea before ultimately burning out and crashing.

  I have to also confess that Japanese fiction like anime and manga does use a highly informal and caricatured version of the language. When the student understands the difference between formal and informal Japanese, however, these materials can become a very valuable resource to learn from. Fantasy Japanese contains the same vocabulary, grammar, and kanji found in all Japanese. When you combine this knowledge of Japanese politeness and formalities with the wealth of words and sentence structures that you have acquired from fun materials, you will be able to understand and talk about a large variety of different topics in Japanese whether in casual or polite language.

  Perhaps you are wondering, "How long would it take to become fluent in Japanese with this system?" The answer depends on your definition of the word “fluent” as well as how much time you are willing to put into learning Japanese each day. Do you want to visit Japan and be able to hold basic five-minute conversations with strangers? Do you want to understand everything said in anime and written in manga? Do you want to fall in love with a Japanese person and converse in only Japanese? When you understand how to learn a language the fun and easy way, you will be able to smash all of those goals and go even further than you had previously imagined.

  This is not your conventional language textbook that lists topics to study accompanied by new vocabulary and grammar points. You can find hundreds of those in bookstores and across the internet. Rather than dissect and explain a large hodgepodge collection of words and lines from random anime and manga that you may or may not be interested in, this book will show you a system on how to easily learn from any Japanese material of your choice.

  Classes Can Be Helpful, But...

  But why not just take Japanese language classes and go down the traditional path of learning a foreign language? Learning Japanese from anime and manga seems like a childish excuse to go around the hard work it really takes to learn Japanese to fluency. If you are not willing to go through years of rigorous schooling, it's easy to conclude that you are just not cut out to learn a foreign language.

  Learning Japanese or any language seems so complex and difficult, but it is not. Anyone can learn a second language to fluency by using simple yet powerful language learning techniques and given enough time. This might not make any sense if you have ever suffered burnout from foreign language classes in school or at a university. They can make languages seem boring and convoluted.

  Foreign language classes teach you about languages, but they do not teach you how to learn a language. After lectures and lengthy explanations, you are left to your own study devices to memorize and absorb massive amounts of information in your head. Old-fashioned study methods say to memorize vocabulary lists, do workbooks, reread old passages, and repeatedly listen to the same audio tracks found in the coursebook CDs. It can be extremely dull at times and expensive as well, but if you are studious enough, you will finish and graduate.

  Even upon graduation, however, you will find that school alone does not train our minds to understand the wide variety of vocabulary, sentence structures, and seemingly blazing fast speed that native speakers use in real life. To truly reach an advanced level in a foreign language, more work is required. Classes aren't enough.

  The Language Learning Bubble

  Doing even a small amount of research on the topic of language learning will net you an endless list of tips and techniques, but polyglots or people who speak several languages can offer us some critical insight. Interviewers, news stories, and viral videos with millions of views make polyglots out to be language geniuses, but if we look more closely at their stories rather than their abilities, there is a deeper truth. They often struggle intensely learning their first foreign language, but something finally clicks within the gears of their minds. They learn that first one and go on to easily learn three or four or even more.

  Most polyglots weren't always good at learning foreign languages. It's a skill that they develop with each new language they take on. This is why the first one can be such a challenge for everybody. Without that language learning skill and experience, trying to learn and memorize thousands of Japanese words, phrases, and grammar structures can seem like the ultimate test. And then, native speakers spit all of this out at seemingly a bazillion words a minute. It certainly sounds like a lot of hard work and study will be needed.

  It's hard to argue against the value of hard work. It creates high-quality results. It pushes people to do what they need to do. It gets things done. But in the case of learning a foreign language, hard work can be very misleading.

  Beginning language learners might put themselves through hell to learn all of this information. They might try to learn a language like they studied in school. Old-fashioned study methods worked back then, so why can't it work now? Rereading, rewriting, and re-listening to the same vocabulary, sentences, dialogues, and short stories is enough to ace school exams via your short-term memory, but they are not very effective means to learn and retain new language or any kind of information in the long term. They are also tedious and not very fun ways to learn.

  Some exercises can be taken to frustrating levels of difficulty with the intention to learn faster. These often have the opposite effe
ct. For instance, you could use flashcards to try to translate entire English sentences into Japanese near-verbatim. They may get you to think in Japanese, but they can be immensely stressful. Stress can be a good thing but not so much for the kind that causes you to lose motivation and take extended time off from learning.

  If you have ever reached the intermediate stages of a foreign language, you might have experienced some frustration in trying to manage all of this learning. You forget words. You forget grammar rules that you have read multiple times. And of course, native speakers still talk too fast. It's quite easy to find yourself in language learning hell or eventually just quitting.

  A handful of hardcore Japanese learners out there may determine that they just need to study for three or more hours a day to achieve the results they desire. I personally understand this deep and burning desire to learn, and I even used to identify myself with this level of hardcore study when learning Korean many years ago.

  The truth is, however, that you don't have to study for three or more hours each day to achieve fluency. You can get fluent in Japanese with 45-90 minutes of self-study followed by a strong habit of regularly reading, watching, and listening to a variety of native Japanese materials in your free time every day. This is considerably easier to maintain in the long-term and can generate greater results through consistency.

  45-90 minutes of self-study each day might not seem enough when there are thousands of words to learn. It might seem like we should spend three or more hours studying every day considering all of the phrasebooks, short stories, coursebooks, grammar books, newspaper articles, apps, and online tools available.

  It's very easy to stay within a bubble of instructional materials designed for language learners. The real Japanese language and the real fun in learning it, however, lies outside of this bubble.

  When you understand how to easily learn from native Japanese materials, you will understand why easy and fun wins in the end. And when you enjoy the learning process as a whole, you'll be willing to put in the extra hours of work every single day and naturally make faster progress.

  If you are aiming for just a conversational level of fluency that allows you to hold basic conversations with Japanese people, you may not need to put in these extra hours of work every day. But if you want to understand everything native speakers say to each other and reach a truly high level of Japanese within a few years, you'll need to put in the hours of work each and every day.

  So, What's the System?

  Polyglots use a variety of methods and strategies including by not limited to learning from native materials, high frequency word learning, intensive and extensive reading, phonetic training, Anki and active recall, the Goldlist method, context-based learning, Shadowing, immersion, and frequent communication with native speakers. We will explore how you can apply these strategies to create your own self-learning program to master Japanese to fluency and beyond.

  This includes an approach that I would like to share with you that combines all of these language learning techniques into one. It is by no means the standard approach that all polyglots use, but it is one application of these faster and more effective methods that will allow you to easily learn from almost any native Japanese material that you like. I enjoy it so much that I felt compelled to write this book to share this system with others who might be looking for more fun and effective ways to learn Japanese and other foreign languages.

  Each chapter of this book will cover powerful language learning techniques and gradually expand on the overall main approach this book offers, but for now, here is a brief summary of that approach. Immerse yourself in any kind of Japanese material of your choice without any English subtitles or translations for roughly 20 minutes or so. This includes watching an episode of anime, reading a few manga pages, watching an episode of a drama, reading up on topics that you are highly interested in, or even playing video games in Japanese.

  For this brief amount of time, very carefully listen and look for words unknown to you and that are repeated multiple times. Without stopping the video, audio, or reading, quickly jot down in a nearby notebook the unknown words that appear several times. Feel free to write down a few crucial moments that you greatly desire to understand as well. Include the video time, page number, or even in-game screenshot for later reference.

  When this period of approximately 20 minutes has passed, use online dictionaries and grammar resources to quickly break down all of the words and lines on your list to learn their meanings. This will be easier to do with written materials, but for anime, we can locate the lines using the free Japanese subtitles at http://kitsunekko.net.

  After fully learning these lines, pick up to two of them to create very specific reading, writing, listening, and speaking practice exercises using a free program called Anki (www.ankisrs.net). These exercises will help you practice and never forget both the lines you select and the more practical example sentences you find in instructional materials and grammar resources. As an alternative, you may use the Goldlist method to practice these lines and example sentences.

  As you mine a particular series or topic and regularly do these exercises, you will come to understand it more and more over time. You'll be actively searching for the high frequency words and learning them. These words are the key to slowly understanding what everyone is saying and what is going on in the story. Once you have a strong grasp on the high frequency words, you will be able to piece together more and more of the meaning of new content from all sources as you first hear or see it.

  So how do you get fluent from mostly just reading and listening? For the most concrete proof of the power of extensive reading and listening, I say look at the amazing language abilities of the polyglots who endorse it, namely Alexander Arguelles, Luca Lampariello, and Steve Kaufmann. There is also the overwhelming body of research on extensive reading and listening within the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) community.

  I am not well-versed in the study of linguistics, but this is how I would explain it using plain English. In general, the more input you receive and understand the more references you gain on how a native speaker would say something. When you receive and understand thousands of hours of input through reading and listening, you build a massive library of references that slowly transforms into a natural intuition of how to use the language like native speakers do. As a result, you understand nearly everything, and you can speak fluently while also sounding near-native.

  Alternatively, you can also practice communicating with native speakers and receiving corrections to fill in for some of these hours. Learning via output does have its advantages. It offers a unique learning experience through active recall and corrections from native speakers. It can also be used to gauge your progress.

  The decision on how much you should practice outputting Japanese will be left to you. Extroverted people, or people who gain energy from meeting and talking to other people, will find speaking and writing Japanese much easier, but introverted people may see more disadvantages than advantages here.

  Will I Sound Like an Anime Character?

  Yes, if you did not learn about the basic differences between casual and polite Japanese forms before attempting to communicate with native speakers. Although when we are aware of this difference, it becomes very easy to change a casual Japanese sentence found in anime and manga into its polite counterpart. How to do this will be addressed in a later chapter.

  Even if you are in the beginning stages of learning Japanese, early attempts to learn from native materials are highly recommended as you progress through learning the basics. Reading, breaking down, and learning from native materials like anime, videos, and websites will be slow at first, but it will immediately connect you to the real language used by Japanese native speakers every day. This connection will be sure to bring you excitement. It will also help build an early habit of freely reading, listening to, and watching native Japanese materials without English.

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; Ultimately, the decision on where to start studying Japanese should be left to you, the reader. That's what makes the learning process fun and exciting! Some people want to get started by taking classes. Others want to embark on serious self-study routines, so they begin with coursebooks. And then there are folks like me who have burned out from traditional language learning methods in the past and decide to start learning Japanese primarily from anime.

  Regardless of where you choose to start, this book exists to encourage all Japanese learners to incorporate native materials like anime as early as possible. In learning any language, there is no point where we become ready for native-level materials. You just have to start. In the next chapter, we will cover how you can begin learning thousands of Japanese words through anime and other native Japanese audio and video content starting today.

  LEARN FROM ANIME FROM DAY ONE

  Watching anime with English subtitles is an English reading exercise with Japanese background noise. It's entertaining for sure, but you will learning nothing outside of "chotto matte" and a few other words. I have heard, and perhaps you have heard a few folks claim that they can understand 80% of Japanese dialogue after years of watching anime with English subtitles. Oh, the wonders of having the meaning automatically provided to you!

  If one of your primary goals is to one day watch anime with no English subtitles, you can accomplish that goal on day one. Regardless of your Japanese ability, this is the first step that any serious Japanese learner should do starting now. You can turn them off on streaming websites like Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Netflix, but when they cannot be removed, you will need to physically block them by placing a thick sheet of paper over your computer screen.