LogFAQs > #980087047

Lobinde posted...

Wrong. The key is to immerse using a variety of sources of native japanese language material (including but of course not only anime). If you, like in your other example exclusively learned japanese from news channels, your speech and range of vocabulary would also be "unnatural" but in a different way (you'd sound super formal and specific all of the time which would be weird in more casual everyday conversations).

Most people have the common sense to understand that if they watch a shounen anime for instance, monologueing about obscure ninjutsu and shouting stuff like kisama probably isn't something your average japanese salaryman does on a daily basis, but you still get listening practice and can pick up other words that are more useful. And even if you did talk like a shounen protagonist, your speech would still be more capable and natural than someone who sticks to robotic-sounding-ass textbook sentences.

News channels generally have people that come on and have conversations. So no, that's not wrong. People talking on the news to other people and doing interviews is going to sound a hell of a lot more like a normal ass conversation than a cartoon. And sounding overly formal is less of a problem than sounding like a non-human speaker. As a matter of fact, it's one of the comments that a lot of countries say about Americans when they speak in other languages, that they sound far too formal in the first place. Example, a lot of Brazilians say that Americans say "please" way too much. But it's better to be overly polite than rude.

You'd think that, but there are plenty of people that watch anime and think that is how the Japanese speak. If you spoke like a shonen character, people would think you were incredibly childish and you might not even have an accent that is anything but a verbal tick that characters are given in the show. To make it easier to get, it'd be far better to sound like News Anchor Craig Melvin than it would to sound like Dwight Schrute from the office. Because one is a person trying to sound professional and informative. The other is a character in a television show.

Anime is something that can be used to help you learn words, yes, but you should *not* speak like them.