RANT: Learning Japanese from Anime

Welcome to RANT (my subpar stab at a pun which stands for Random Assortment of Nonsensical Thoughts). The topic today is about learning Japanese from anime. Summary: Besides learning very, very rudimentary words and phrases, a beginner should not rely on anime to learn the language. A more experienced learner who is learning somewhere else (classes, books, websites, etc.) should also be careful not to absorb any unusual speaking patterns from anime. If you can take these ideas to heart, then you can actually benefit in learning Japanese by watching anime (in Japanese, naturally). The following is a post I wrote back in July on the animepaper.net message boards. I thought that bringing the post here would be a good idea since some people in our community may be wondering about this issue.

Introduction (why does this seem familiar?)

So some of you may recognize this blog from another particular place. Right, I have moved the blog over to wordpress.com. Although, my blogger blog (. . .) was very, very short-lived to begin with. Hopefully it won’t be the case here. Hopefully. I’ll try to keep the blog updated at least a couple of times a week, particularly on the weekends.

At any rate, here’s to a brand new start. For the sake of keeping a blog recent, I’m not going to move all of my old posts over. However, I may move some things that I find can still serve a purpose here. Thus, you may find some posts that look unusually familiar.

Anyway, if you have as much free time as me (you’re reading this blog, aren’t you?), then you may be wondering exactly what “uruchai” is. If you’re an anime fan who watches anime in Japanese at least some of the time, you’ve probably heard the word “urusai” being thrown around. “Urusai” is literally an adjective for “noisy,” but depending on the tone and context, it can mean “be quiet!” or “shut up!” “Uruchai” is basically just a change in the spelling of “urusai.” While it isn’t common, you can hear it being said repeatedly by Hecate-tan and Shana-tan in Itadaki no Hecate-tan (the girls you see in the image on the top of this post). The last thing I want is someone calling me on my misspelling of the word.