Hey, you gotta watch this video. Sure hit motivation boast.

I'm not good enough to tell how good she is, but if she's as good as I think, I knew it. I've been saying all along you can learn quite a bit of Japanese from just listening. Check out this thread, too. Some guy learned Italian and German by just listening:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...=5525&PN=1

I can't stand her pronunciation. Not the individual sounds but how the sentences comes out, sounds very unnatural. Overall her Japanese is a bit odd at times, but I'd say it's extremely impressive considering she learned it from anime, even though she's Finnish and they apparantly have a pretty easy time learning Japanese because of the similarity in grammar.

Cool to see someone can learn like that, but I would never recommend it to anyone, I think it takes a very special kind of mindset to be able to learn Japanese even to that level by simply watching anime. I think it proves pretty well that one can learn a lot by simply being exposed though so it indeed gives a boost to motivation, can't wait until tomorrow when I will start to watch watashitachi no kyoukasho which seems to be a drama I understand at least 80% of

In any case, it's definitely impressive. Whatever she did to learn definitely worked for her; I don't think anybody asked her if she used only anime yet but she obviously considered it the centerpiece of her learning experience... I just wish she expounded a little bit more on exactly what she did to get to that level and her experiences along the way. I watched her English video, but it contained remarkably little info considering it was about 7 minutes long.

For two years of anime, that's amazing. I don't know whether it's more encouraging or depressing . . . I started Japanese at 17 and I feel so old

Not too shabby. She's pretty good, but I'll have to wait for more videos before I make up my mind. I didn't think it was possible to learn Japanese from anime but I guess I was wrong.

I should mention that it took her 2.5 years (1.5 without subtitles), according to her youtube info. Also, I'm just about at her level, and have to say that her speech patterns were basic. I'm not knocking her, I am in fact very impressed.

Anime otaku rejoice, there is finally proof that if you watch enough anime you will speak 日本語 or be the next 海賊王. (Heisig speak = sea+burglar+king, don't you just love RtK)

Her speech patterns were basic. She has a weird, but cute, accent.
But she was unprepared when she did the video. I'd have as much trouble to do it in English.

She rocks.

she didn't "just listen." she also studied hiragana, katakana, kanji and grammar on the side.

she wasn't trying to argue that you can successfully learn japanese by watching nothing but anime; instead, she was making the point that anime is a useful resource if used correctly.

She may have an accent, but remember all those kids who studied Japanese in classes for 6 years? She sounds 5 bujillion times better than them. "Dow mow airy gare tow gaw zay miss sensay..." She's way better than them.

If this is what anime makes you sound like after two years, what would dramas make you sound like? "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?!...

igordesu Wrote:She may have an accent, but remember all those kids who studied Japanese in classes for 6 years? She sounds 5 bujillion times better than them. "Dow mow airy gare tow gaw zay miss sensay..." She's way better than them.

I took a class with a guy who sounded like that. Catch was, this was in Japan, he had a cute girlfriend, he was actually pretty good. However, his accent was so exaggerated. I can't even describe it. He had very mild southern accent when he spoke English, but when he went Japanese, it was like Larry the Cable guy.

doe-moe, sensei doe-sh-tay...

TGWeaver Wrote:she didn't "just listen." she also studied hiragana, katakana, kanji and grammar on the side.

she wasn't trying to argue that you can successfully learn japanese by watching nothing but anime; instead, she was making the point that anime is a useful resource if used correctly.

Ah, now it makes sense. She did, likely on her own, what has been suggested by others.

Gee, listen/watch something you like in Japanese A LOT. Reinforce it with studying. Where have we heard this before? I think she got around that "sound like an anime character" problem by watching a variety of anime, but I'm only guessing

Nukemarine Wrote:

TGWeaver Wrote:she didn't "just listen." she also studied hiragana, katakana, kanji and grammar on the side.

she wasn't trying to argue that you can successfully learn japanese by watching nothing but anime; instead, she was making the point that anime is a useful resource if used correctly.

Ah, now it makes sense. She did, likely on her own, what has been suggested by others.

Gee, listen/watch something you like in Japanese A LOT. Reinforce it with studying. Where have we heard this before? I think she got around that "sound like an anime character" problem by watching a variety of anime, but I'm only guessing

She says she got around that problem by listening to anime where they didn't talk like anime characters (like Death Note).

Nukemarine Wrote:I think she got around that "sound like an anime character" problem by watching a variety of anime, but I'm only guessing

I've never really understood why people think that anyway. IMO the only way you are going to sound like any character from any form of media is if you actually purposefully try to imitate them. Well, that is unless you watch some sort of weird show that only features one character that ever speaks and you listen no other form of the language except from that show. I think the only people that end up sounding like Anime characters are people who want to sound like anime characters because they think it is "cool". If you've got to the point where you can semi-fluently speak a langauge then you are going to know, for the most part, the difference between slang and normally polite speech are you not?

If you try to imitate anime characters i think Japanese and non-japanese would hate you.

I watched anime (with subtitles) for 10 years before I started to consider learning Japanese. From that time, I knew -maybe- 10 words.

Anime is a great reinforcement of what you have learned elsewhere, and it's a great way to get used to listening to the language and picking out individual words, but the lack of interaction and inability to ask questions are major problems with using just anime to learn Japanese.

As with just about everything else, by itself it's nearly useless, but combined with other study materials it can help tremendously. I can think of no single study method that requires nothing outside of itself. Even classroom instruction isn't enough.

igordesu Wrote:She may have an accent, but remember all those kids who studied Japanese in classes for 6 years? She sounds 5 bujillion times better than them. "Dow mow airy gare tow gaw zay miss sensay..." She's way better than them.

Remember, she's Finish. Their phontics are FAR more similar to Japanese than American English.

Please forgive the barely related nature of this post but I was curious about Tobberoth's claim regarding Finnish phonetics. I went on YouTube to hear some Finnish. Does the girl really have a huge advantage over the rest of us?

The following links will let you compare Japanese, Finnish, and American speakers -- all teaching disco lessons. Anyway, I guess if you can learn Japanese from anime, you can learn from other things.

Japanese: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=rIM15qeGO4I
Finnish: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJj6d5QSYaE
American: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=QVh2ECpTgEA

KristinHolly Wrote:Please forgive the barely related nature of this post but I was curious about Tobberoth's claim regarding Finnish phonetics. I went on YouTube to hear some Finnish. Does the girl really have a huge advantage over the rest of us?

The following links will let you compare Japanese, Finnish, and American speakers -- all teaching disco lessons. Anyway, I guess if you can learn Japanese from anime, you can learn from other things.

Japanese: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=rIM15qeGO4I
Finnish: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJj6d5QSYaE
American: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=QVh2ECpTgEA

Not to worry, I'm Swedish and know several Finnish people, and they've all told me they have a very easy time with Japanese phonetics (Swedish is the same btw, it takes very little effort for us to pronounce Japanese correctly).

Tobberoth Wrote:

KristinHolly Wrote:Please forgive the barely related nature of this post but I was curious about Tobberoth's claim regarding Finnish phonetics. I went on YouTube to hear some Finnish. Does the girl really have a huge advantage over the rest of us?

The following links will let you compare Japanese, Finnish, and American speakers -- all teaching disco lessons. Anyway, I guess if you can learn Japanese from anime, you can learn from other things.

Japanese: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=rIM15qeGO4I
Finnish: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJj6d5QSYaE
American: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=QVh2ECpTgEA

Not to worry, I'm Swedish and know several Finnish people, and they've all told me they have a very easy time with Japanese phonetics (Swedish is the same btw, it takes very little effort for us to pronounce Japanese correctly).

I have seen this working the other way round as well, i.e. a japanese person speaking native-like german, while all english native-speakers I met so far had a very heavy accent.

Here's my take on her video:

1) She's a language prodigy. In the nihongo video, she keeps emphasizing how bad her English is, yet she posted an English language follow-up in which her English is quite nearly fluent, leagues better than her Japanese. So what works for her may not work for us mere mortals. (And as a side-note, I am guessing that she learned her English primarily through book study in school, supplemented by listening to English language TV, podcasts, etc.)

2) Don't agree that she has a "funny" accent. Her pronunciation is pretty spot-on, just that her intonation is too sing-songy. With time and practice, she will probably eliminate even that glitch. Her main problem is that her 言いたいこと is rather desultory-- she has a much harder time thinking and speaking on her feet in Japanese than in English.

3) She admits that she supplemented her anime listening with book study of kanji and grammar, so as others have pointed out, this video does not make the case that you can become fluent in Japanese the easy way just by passive, non-stop anime listening. In fact, she emphasizes that her watching was active, with frequent stops to deconstruct and understand particular expressions. What would be interesting to know is just how much book study she did, and what her trade-off was, time-wise, between learning through anime versus through books.

So the lessons I would draw are that listening to anime is not an easy shortcut to speaking Japanese, but is an invaluable supplement to book study of grammar basics and relentless vocabulary acquisition, especially for improving listening and speaking skills.

Chewie

You Chewie, that's what I believe too. But instead of the books, we do RTK and the sentences from AJATT.
RTK, SRSs and dictionaries are alien, but all the rest of my sources are natural or as natural as media can be.

But I don't think she is a language genius. The people I've been following that did the same as I'm doing had, as I like to believe, better results than her in a shorter time, but I can only speak for myself: I already feel that if my Japanese might be a bit better then hers.

Another impression that I had with this video is that she doesn't need to worry about the form of her Japanese. Her problem seems to be vocabulary.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Another impression that I had with this video is that she doesn't need to worry about the form of her Japanese. Her problem seems to be vocabulary.

I'd say she definetly needs to work her form. She has the basics down and she sometimes pull off some pretty advanced structures flawlessly.. but when I listen, I can't help but think "It would make more sense if you said YYY instead of ZZZ in this case" etc. I think it's purely experience which will matter here and she will definetly get it down with time.

What I like about the video is that it's extremely obvious she's just... speaking, not using any preplanned stuff (which I find common in other japanese youtube videos). It's much nicer to hear someone who actually can speak pretty decent Japanese spontaneously instead of hearing someone who can write Japanese beforehand and then read it out loud.

She's 17. I might be better than her now, but it's kinda sad when I realize that when she hits my age (22) she will probably be lightyears beyond my current ability. I wish I could have been as serious as she is when I was 17.

It's not my intent to turn this into another AJATT discussion, but in my opinion, she was doing AJATT, or more simply, what Khatz did: she constantly immersed herself in Japanese. I bet if you probed her, she'd readily also admit to having speaking practice with somebody. Speaking abilities don't come from pure input, they come from practice.

I agree with her pronunciation, it's great. Not perfect, but if she continues, it will be.

What piece of this is remarkable? She spent a lot of time immersing herself in Japanese and she came out the other side with better Japanese. It took a lot of time, and a lot of hard work. She didn't shortcut the process. It took her 2 years, and she's about where someone should be after that amount of time if they have been seriously studying it. The problem is that everyone wants a magic shortcut solution when one doesn't exist. People spend waaaay too much time on beginner level stuff without realizing that there's a lot more to the language after that.

I appreciate her candor, but this is just going to reinforce the thinking of the otakus that watch anime without thinking or applying themselves. You don't just automatically learn from listening. You have to direct it. You have to look things up. She did that, and she got better.

However, the thread title still reads "learned Japanese from anime," when the truth is more like, "girl worked hard, learned Japanese."

The best advice I can give anyone is to stop thinking about studying so much, and do the actual studying. Read stuff, listen to stuff, look things up, and ask questions. That's all you need to do. Now, get to it. Don't get discouraged. It does take time, but you should be able to see yourself improve by leaps and bounds.

I have old Japanese learning materials that I look through every once in a while from back when I barely knew hiragana. I remember how much I struggled with them, and when I crack them open now I know how far I've come. Then, I look at whatever work I'm currently doing and I realize how far I have to go. Though, I know at some point I will be able to look back on even that as small potatoes.

Tobberoth Wrote:She's 17. I might be better than her now, but it's kinda sad when I realize that when she hits my age (22) she will probably be lightyears beyond my current ability. I wish I could have been as serious as she is when I was 17.

I hear you. I am 22 as well. I wasn't even "unserious" or taking Japanese lightly back then -- I wasn't studying it at all. Didn't start until I was 20...

And the phonetics thing isn't really a big deal. There are only about three sounds that Japanese plainly has and English just does not. There are many small differences in the way we pronounce things, but phonetics is still one of the easier aspects of the language. Seriously, I love learning Japanese because the challenge is in learning new vocabulary/kanji/grammar and improving your ability to utilize all that when you speak. The challenge isn't in pronouncing it (unless you're talking about advanced stuff like tones, but that's much higher level).