Hey folks,

I wonder if anybody has added cards to his anki deck in order to get a better comprehension of the Japanese spoken in Animes, like, some special words, slang expressions or perhaps even phrases and words that get commonly used on the street, when you hang out with close friends and go to some bar. What I mean is everyday-spoken Japanese, which is - that's my impression - a bit missing in core6k at least.
I do have the "Dirty Japanese Slangbook", but.. I wonder how realistic it is I will get to use this word, when I will not go into the cannabis scene or some red-light circles in Tokyo..

I also wonder what Japanese women consider as male Japanese.

If somebody has a list or even a few cards in his or her anki deck she or he could export sincerely, I'd be grateful to have it. Jaaaaa~

If you try to sound like a tough-guy chinpira, girls will just laugh at you.
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As I've said before, I wouldn't put any directed effort into learning slang. It needs to be something that comes naturally (based on interaction with real people in your social group), otherwise it seems forced when you use it. Doing it naturally will also let you know what is actually used (for a person in your social position) and what was crap just put in to fill enough pages in a book.

Jarvik7 Wrote:If you try to sound like a tough-guy chinpira, girls will just laugh at you.
Foreigners do not have the required image.

It's not a matter of using the slang forms by myself, Jarvik. It would also sound ridiculous when exchange students at my school would start using slang German. You'd recognise something's just 'fake' and does not fit in their image, right? At my stage it cannot be a matter of using special slang forms by myself, but rather understanding them when they get used by.. friends of mine, for example. -- That's the reason I asked for some advice on where to get such lists or if somebody does have such things in his anki deck files.

Slang isn't universal and it has a faster "turnover rate" than other vocabulary. Any list you find could have words that are outdated, geeky, regional, obscene, immature etc. Even if you don't plan on using it, it's probably a good idea to do your best to encounter and learn it naturally, like Jarvik said. If you're watching anime and talking to your native friends, then why not just learn the words you're encountering there?

Yeah I found a book (when i say found.. it was on my hard drive in pdf form and i don't know where it came from) and it's full of Japanese "Slang" i've flicked through it, and some stuff I recognise, but a lot of it I'd be scared to ever say out loud for fear of sounding like a Japanese equivalent of a 90's surfer lingo kid calling shit "radical"

The only slangy stuff I use isn't even slangy but it's just things I've picked up in Kansai, but that's more Kansai-ben than slang I guess.. but even then saying some out loud sounds so forced sometimes, maybe because I know I'm learning it as an accent? and it's not natural to me. Some of it sounds normal to me listening and speaking obviously.. I've never encountered someone saying ほんとう? in months.. always ほんま　so that's obviously bled in.

I do agree, learning out of context is probably pointless, if your speaking to a friend and they say something you don't get just ask.. that's what I do. Still haven't fully clicked onto しんどい means つかれた　＋　つまらない　? possibly.. hence why it's not entered my own vocab.

ps.. no matter how often I say めっちゃ out loud... despite hearing it 200+ times a day... it still sounds awkward as hell.

I totally agree with the above - look up slang words up as you encounter them, but no more.

Interestingly I've been on the opposite side of this. A Japanese friend I met in London had an extensive English vocabulary, including knowledge of slang and British idioms. However, alot of them sounded plain weird coming out coming out of her mouth - they were either really old fashioned, only used by males or worst of all only used in written text, not designed for speech! No idea how or where she learnt this stuff, I guess from books or UK soaps, but alot of it just sounded odd and raised a laugh or two!

That said, her british english was very natural, so whatever she did worked. But the weird ones stood out big time!

If you really want to learn the difference between male and female speech patterns, well thats a different issue. Guess you'll get that from most animes (where its extremely exaggerated!) - maybe someone could recommend a show with natural male / female speech?

Anime is not a good resource for learning casual speech, male/female distinctions, or politeness because (as aphasiac said) they often exaggerate things or use partly invented speech styles. It's all based on real speech, but outside of kids, nobody talks exactly like people from anime.

There aren't that many male/female differences that are actually used on a daily basis. Females tend to avoid だろう and だ at the end of sentences and are more likely to put よ and ね directly after nouns/na-adjectives without だ. (This causes problems for foreigners who don't have a good grasp on the predicate types because 高いよ is gender neutral but だめよ or 先生よ sounds feminine.) Also, women are more likely to use polite or 丁寧語 language in cases where it isn't required (that is, using keigo talking to your supervisor is not feminine, using it talking to a coworker has a higher chance of sounding feminine).

Shindoi:
しんど・い 3
（形）

〔「しんど」の形容詞化。主に関西地方で用いる〕骨が折れる。つらい。くたびれる。
「全部一人でやるのは―・い」
［派生］ ――さ(名)

Tori-kun Wrote:Hey folks,

I wonder if anybody has added cards to his anki deck in order to get a better comprehension of the Japanese spoken in Animes, like, some special words, slang expressions or perhaps even phrases and words that get commonly used on the street, when you hang out with close friends and go to some bar. What I mean is everyday-spoken Japanese, which is - that's my impression - a bit missing in core6k at least.
I do have the "Dirty Japanese Slangbook", but.. I wonder how realistic it is I will get to use this word, when I will not go into the cannabis scene or some red-light circles in Tokyo..

I also wonder what Japanese women consider as male Japanese.

If somebody has a list or even a few cards in his or her anki deck she or he could export sincerely, I'd be grateful to have it. Jaaaaa~

Tell you the truth......


They don't say a lot of slang in anime.

I've seen Naruto, Dragonball Z to Dragonball GTDWBXZY whatever...... don't think I've heard them utter more than like 2 slang words. They just talk normal.

Of course, maybe your definition of slang is different from mine.


I mean come on, Are you SURE your friends are speaking slang??? Or just vocabulary you don't understand?

When you speak in your native language...is it full of slang? I'm sure it's not...most of it is just normal speech.

Well, perhaps "slang" was the wrong word.
When I talk to my friends in German - since we are talking the considerably 'pure' German, called "Hochdeutsch" (something like the British BBC English) - we don't use any dialect/accent or any special German words, but just.. abbreviate, shorten and contract some forms, which can be slightly irritating to some Germans coming from the South or the East. (well, most of the time the Germans living North are understood everywhere, but hell, go to saxony, you'll laugh your ass of! They talk so funnily)

Perhaps "colloquial" Japanese would have been more exact than "slangy" Japanese. Colloquial language or common speech are more exact terms for what I have been looking.

I'm not sure if it's what you are looking for, but I found this page on speech styles surprisingly helpful, even though it's oriented towards anime, I've found it useful with other media as well. Maybe the "school expressions" page would help too.

The skits from Erin's Challenge are also pretty good with contractions.

Bokusenou Wrote:Maybe the "school expressions" page would help too.

Hey, Bokusenou! (how are you?)
Thanks for that link to anime-manga.jp. That's exactly what I meant, man! That side just takes aaaages to load, although my internet is not one of the slowest, I must say. Will be adding those phrases into my Anki grammar deck, I started a few days ago. (Well, basically adding Kanzen Master cards to the All About Particles deck I went through.)

Edit: Really seems like a thorough website. Anyone interested in mining it, including the audio? There is a useful addon for firefox that could download all the audio as mp3 at once.. but somehow don't have the time right now

Tori-kun Wrote:

Bokusenou Wrote:Maybe the "school expressions" page would help too.

Hey, Bokusenou! (how are you?)
Thanks for that link to anime-manga.jp. That's exactly what I meant, man! That side just takes aaaages to load, although my internet is not one of the slowest, I must say. Will be adding those phrases into my Anki grammar deck, I started a few days ago. (Well, basically adding Kanzen Master cards to the All About Particles deck I went through.)

Edit: Really seems like a thorough website. Anyone interested in mining it, including the audio? There is a useful addon for firefox that could download all the audio as mp3 at once.. but somehow don't have the time right now

Hey Tori! (Fine, how are you?^^)

Yeah, the site takes a while to load because there is so much content, but I was pretty impressed with it. When I heard the Japan foundation was making a site about learning Japanese with anime/manga, I admit I was skeptical, but when I saw it , I was happy that it seems intermediates would get more use out of it than beginners, and some of the quizzes were kind of harder than I thought they would be...^-^

Realism Wrote:I've seen Naruto, Dragonball Z to Dragonball GTDWBXZY whatever...... don't think I've heard them utter more than like 2 slang words. They just talk normal.

I wouldn't expect to hear much slang in these shows, since they don't take place in modern Japan. That would be like a character of an English language TV series in a mediaeval fantasy setting saying "Yo 'sup dawg" or something. For more realistic slang/colloquialisms you should probably be looking at stuff like high school slice of life anime, for example Azumanga Daioh or Toradora.

There are a couple of lists of contractions somewhere. There was a thread about it before. One of them is on Wikipedia. That might be a good starting point, since anyone can use てる、とく、たげる、なきゃ、てんの etc. Actually, if you're speaking to your friends, it probably sounds unnatural not to use some of them. I'm guessing you know most of them already though.

Bokusenou Wrote:Hey Tori! (Fine, how are you?^^)

Yeah, the site takes a while to load because there is so much content, but I was pretty impressed with it. When I heard the Japan foundation was making a site about learning Japanese with anime/manga, I admit I was skeptical, but when I saw it , I was happy that it seems intermediates would get more use out of it than beginners, and some of the quizzes were kind of harder than I thought they would be...^-^

I'm also fine, thanks! It's pouring like hell here in the North^^
Perhaps I will find time this night "mirroring" virtually the whole website with all the pictures and audio, adding everything into a spreadsheet and then into an anki deck file. If someone wants to contribute, just write in here! Any help is greatly appreciated, since I'm not a computer freak and would get my head into how to organise all this.
Well, concerning the Japan Foundation, I must say, I have seen a book published by them in my library and it relatively quickly introduces real Japanese to beginners from the grammar perspective. It seems important to them that one could learn how to not starve hunger to death when being in Japan already on the flight in an airplane lol It gives a rough overview.
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For example, I somehow got the feeling that forms like ??/?? and so on, beginning with a 'n'-sound indicate some kind of negation of the verb/adjective. Skipping through the list I found a few forms I encountered in subtitles while watching anime I could not make any sense of, but now it seems like there was found a solution even for that tediously small problem.

@Javizy: Was this list on the koohii.com forum? Would be great if you could post the wikipedia link, as I did not discover it anywhere so far.
I know a few contractions, but due the lack of having them in anki I get them mixed up at times (especially the 'you must/have to' and 'you mustn't' or 'you don't have to/need to', like shown and presented in Tae Kim's guide.) and having them in Anki would fix that issue. とく and なきゃ are the only ones I know, and I'd guess てんの is a contraction of ていないの? Just a guess, though.

Realism Wrote:They don't say a lot of slang in anime.

I've seen Naruto, Dragonball Z to Dragonball GTDWBXZY whatever...... don't think I've heard them utter more than like 2 slang words. They just talk normal.

By all means use だってばよ～ in daily speech

Gingerninja Wrote:ps.. no matter how often I say めっちゃ out loud... despite hearing it 200+ times a day... it still sounds awkward as hell.

My Japanese also "grew-up" in Kansai, and I'm the opposite. I use めちゃ quite a bit but never ほんま. Then again, めちゃ is now used all over Japan and I rarely heard people say ほんま even in Osaka unless they were old.

Tori-kun Wrote:とく and なきゃ are the only ones I know, and I'd guess てんの is a contraction of ていないの? Just a guess, though.

てる　→ ている, やっている　→　やってる
たげる　→　てあげる、やってあげる → やったげる
てんの 　→　ているの、やっているの　→　やってんの

the　てんの is an example of what you'll see come up sometimes where sometimes the ら row gets shortened. It's the same as わからない　→　わかんない

Unfortunately, I don't know where the lists are that he's talking about :/

Jarvik7 Wrote:

Realism Wrote:They don't say a lot of slang in anime.

I've seen Naruto, Dragonball Z to Dragonball GTDWBXZY whatever...... don't think I've heard them utter more than like 2 slang words. They just talk normal.

By all means use だってばよ～ in daily speech

だってばよ　doesn't even amount to 1% of the dialogue, so it don't even matter.

99% of everything else they say is normal, can be incorporated into daily speech or whatever speech (of course just don't talk dramatically like they do)

Realism Wrote:99% of everything else they say is normal, can be incorporated into daily speech or whatever speech (of course just don't talk dramatically like they do)

There is a good reason why most Japanese teachers recommend not studying too much Japanese through anime.

It's because it's not normal Japanese.

kitakitsune Wrote:There is a good reason why most Japanese teachers recommend not studying too much Japanese through anime.

It's because it's not normal Japanese.

i think that once you can distinguish between normal Japanese and weird Japanese, then you can actually learn useful stuff from anime.

a lot of teachers assume that you will be copying it and integrating it into your speech/writing patterns, which is why they tell you not to use it. but if your goal is simply to understand then it's worth learning.

Agreed.

Once you can recognize the differences between regular everyday Japanese and anime Japanese it can be a learning tool as good as any other media.

tokyostyle Wrote:You know who learns to speak Japanese from anime? Japanese kids do.

tokyostyle Wrote:I get entertainment out of the dumb ideas constantly posted here

...for instance, that's a pretty dumb idea :-) Anime is just one part of the huge range of input and exposure to the language that a kid growing up in Japan is exposed to (and I'd bet that the important part is people like their parents, friends and teachers actually interacting with them in Japanese), so claiming they "learn to speak Japanese from anime" is just daft.

(...and "OK in moderation and as just part of your Japanese input" is effectively what kitakitsune and those "most Japanese teachers" are suggesting.)

As long as you know what's real then no problem. Unfortunately, most young foreigners interested in learning Japanese and who have never been to Japan have no idea that most anime Japaneze is -not- how people speak in Japan.

So be careful forming bad habits at the start.

@OP

Japanese the Manga Way's always nice. ^_^ You'll pick up many language features used informally, marked by politeness level (e.g. PL2, PL3).

I think there is this stereotype of people who learn Japanese from anime and go around talking like cartoon characters, but 4 years in Japan and I'm yet to meet one. I've met plenty of people who speak sucky Japanese though (because they don't study) and happen to like anime.