Eh?

When hearing Japanese from various sources,  you can eventually listen in on the language itself. I call this listening comprehension. The better you get at listening comprehension, the more the words form separately in your head. This mostly leads to actually understanding the words itself as opposed to a foreign language being unintelligible technobabble.  An obvious source for many people is anime. But can anime alone be enough to improve listening comprehension?

I honestly just experienced an odd thought while watching the latest episode of K-ON!! (Episode 10). It felt like these characters finally sounded like they were supposed to. If I were to say it another way, I was able to hear a broad range of noises and intonations more numerous in episode 10. Why only now? Would it be that they (the voice actresses) really only just now were able to flex their character voices? Or was it my listening comprehension improving? Yui and company suddenly sounded like themselves, and not like voices that were tailored to fit the characters.

It’s a hard sell. It can’t just be because of anime – I had chosen to broaden my audio sources of Japanese to radio stations, talk shows, and news coverage, increasing my exposure to casual/formal and faster speaking Japanese people. Anime has the language slowed down because of whatever reason. For the most part, anime has proven itself a rather weak tool from which to increase your listening comprehension to the Japanese language.

It's Houkago Raep Time!

But are shows that are made for entertainment sufficient tools? I’ve met two guys that came from Italy, and their English was quite spot on. Other than maybe studying it in a regular environment and with traditional methods, they had also watched American cartoons and sitcoms. A primary source of their learning was The Simpsons. I thought it was ridiculous, but thinking about it more made me realize the writers for The Simpsons didn’t hold back when it came to language usage. It was apparently a very good place to learn English in the way that Americans use the language, and is also challenging due to the type of humor that is used. How much of English subtext understanding could be learned this way is anyone’s guess. But the fact remains that the show The Simpsons is actually a good English secondary language learning tool.

So how good of a learning tool would a show like K-ON!! be? You’d learn how to talk like a high-school girl whose lines were written by ‘professional’ staff, that’s for sure.

My listening comprehension is probably less than average, but this last episode might have been me leveling up. The idea is that anime is a good stepping stone, but that alone won’t get you to fully understanding Japanese dialogue. If you didn’t grow up with the language, it just becomes that much harder to appreciate the acting. The different language increases the chances of you not caring, because you don’t fully understand it. I know I don’t, and there are limits to how much I’m able to enjoy anime in Japanese. I find myself doing the obvious and picking the English track when the quality isn’t terrible enough to make me grit my teeth, and picking the subtitles with the least amount of literal translation, preferring English that simply reads better and faster.

Small shout out to CoalGuys, for being coal, and having silly translations that read better instead of being way too literal.

-maserbeam