You CAN Learn Japanese with Manga & Anime (Using ONE TRICK)

“You’re not going to be using the word “hokage” in everyday life.” Is that a challenge?

Finally, Japanese class is now 10% easier because of Joey.

As someone who struggles with learning foreign languages in general, this is pretty helpful

THIS! This is so true! My beginner level Japanese teacher would hand us very simple baby books to read, and while it's understandable to feel a little embarrassed initially, the feeling of reading and finally understanding EVERYTHING in those books is incredible! All the students who ignored the teacher and tried to jump straight in middle school and high school level material eventually quit or didn't improve from where they started. To those who are language learners, I highly recommend the advice Joey gives in this vid. Remember that the road to fluency takes time, have fun with it and the time spent will be well worth it.

Japanese Teachers hate him for this one trick.

People often forget that language goes hand in hand with culture. So when you learn a language, it's important to find out more about why certain sentences are phrased in such a way, which comes from its cultural background. This is why there are some phrases or idioms (or even words) in any language that don't necessarily have a direct equivalent in another language.

Language learning principles: 1) Immersion—speak it as often, hear it as often, read it as often, think it as often as you can. 2) Scaffolding—start with basics, then add complexity (Joey’s points in the video) 3) Perseverance—keep at it. Never stop. Forgive yourself when you fail, celebrate every success. 4) Diversify—learn from all sources possible: news, pop culture, magazines, literature (fiction and non-fiction), and so on are as good as textbooks with the right foundation. Don’t stick to one source—if you only learn from cartoon characters, you’ll only sound like cartoon characters. 5) Context—knowing why something is going on in the language is crucial if you really want to master communication, which is the point of all language learning (even if the communication is one-way, from the actors/writers/producers to you). This is especially important in a high-context language/culture like Japanese. Have fun!

Through anime, I cannot say that I have learned how to actually SPEAK the language. What I can say however, is that I can HEAR Japanese and pick out key things in their speech. I don’t understand the sentence structure or the explicit meaning of words, but hearing phrases used over and over again in a certain context means that when these phrases come up, I can figure out the rest based on what’s going on.

This is exactly what my japanese teacher told me. I found a couple of kid books in japanese and started to read them, and well, it was hard. But It really, really helps. Now im waiting to enter japan and finally start the classes in the japanese school I enrolled. Great video Joey! Greetings from Chile.

I've been learning for nearly 3 years now, and what I tend to notice is a lot of learners spend more time debating the optimal way to learn Japanese, rather than just learning. e.g. if you post saying you're learning from Genki and with a tutor, you'll get told "oh you're doing it wrong, you should have been immersing" etc. So many videos out there on this topic, telling people the best way to learn, or how "everything you know about learning Japanese is wrong" etc. I think if you're studying the grammar, learning the words, and you consistently study, you'll progress. If that happens to be from manga/anime, more power to you. If it's from immersion only, that's fine too. From my perspective, this language is really hard to learn, I suck at it, so if you're making progress then that's amazing.

Joey, I get what you are saying about having a parent that is a native speaker does not mean you can. But It can also help a lot. I have two examples. I went to high school with a guy that was born in Mexico but moved to America as a young child. His parent forbids the speaking of Spanish in their house to force their kids to be more American. So he could not speak Spanish. So this is an example of what you said. On the other hand, I was in the Air Force with a woman that had a Japanese mother and a Swedish Dad. She could only speak to her mother in Japanese and her dad in Swedish and if both parents were together she had to speak English. So she was fluent in 3 languages. In other videos, you have said your mother basically forced you to speak Japanese to her or she would ignore you. So That was a big help in forcing you to learn it. Also, you said that having someone that can fluently speak Japanese is helpful, so having one or both parents that can speak it is a natural aid.

As someone who basically "freestyle bruteforced" my english learning process and tried doing the same with japanese and didn't succeed, I so much needed this video. Thank you, dude!!!! Reading kid's manga's seems like a great idea, probably will be very helpful!!!

For me, musics is a good way of increasing your vocabulary. The eager to understand lyrics helps. edit: ok to be fair, being a native mandarin speaker also helps a lot in the kanji department.

I think it also depends on your specific goals for learning Japanese. If your goal is to become conversationally fluent in Japanese, then you should be focusing mostly on speaking with natives rather than reading manga. On the other hand, if your goal is to be able to read manga fluently, then focusing mostly on reading manga makes more sense.

Basically it's all about finding comprehensible input. Manga and anime made for kids use less words and often very common words. Also the concepts aren't hard to explain deep introspective topics, they are simple usually fun topics which are easier to understand. I did this type of immersion along with Anki and sentence mining to learn japanese and it worked great.

I like to do everything at once. When I started learning japanese I would constantly watch anime, do duolingo lessons & listen to japanese music. After just a few days the part of my brain that’s responsible for language stuff started hurting.

Anime is a good medium for exposure to the language. Exposure is an important thing when learning a language. When only using anime it won't work. When only using textbooks it won't work. You gotta combine it. Only then will you really start learning a language.

I totally agree with you. My cousin moved with her parents to the US when she was 5, now she is 12 and can't speak Arabic at all even though her parents only speak Arabic at home!

Honestly mix as many learning sources as you can when you can begin to at least slowly digest. Manga, anime, music, news, books, flashcards, and keep adding. The more experiences you accumulate the better you will be able to adapt to different conversations

I love how your advice here is basically BABY STEPS! Throw out all the pride and ego and just try with stuff to meet you at your current target language level.