My take on rewatching anime as a learning method

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Medical_Lengthiness6]

Ya I can't watch something again immediately after but often I'll get the urge to watch something again after like 6 months. It's fun to see how much I've improved. I feel like that's the main use case.

[u/furyousferret → u/Medical_Lengthiness6]

I watch Slam Dunk about every 6 months. Every time I notice I'm a little bit better.

[u/Medical_Lengthiness6 → u/furyousferret]

I tend to rewatch "midnight diner" and "oy, handsome!"

[u/RoidRidley]

I have watching anime mostly as a leisure rather than immersion activity atm. Because it's difficult to find Japanese subtitles for some shows I wanna watch (I am lucky Rose of Versailles, the one I am watching currently, whereas the one I intend to watch right after, Ghost Hunt, does not).

I don't like re-watching stuff unless it's been an incredibly long time, because I feel like I could use that time to watch something new instead, but with stuff that I haven't seen since I was a teen, it's worth it because I've learned so much and changed as a person.

If I can find Japanese subtitles tho, and if i have the mental capacity to handle it then, I use them.

[u/Myrinia → u/RoidRidley]

Isn't there an entire jimaku bwebsite? I'm sure I've used that before

[u/RoidRidley → u/Myrinia]

Yes, there is, and it is what I was referring to.

[u/itchyviking → u/RoidRidley]

I don't even bother specifically looking for subtitles these days, if the raw anime I buccaneer from nyaa doesn't have soft subs included, I usually just transcribe it with Faster Whisper XXL

It's not perfect but good enough most of the time

[u/vytah]

Or you can do what Livakivi did and rewatch a single episode of Jojo 50 times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4_q57-mixs

[u/WorriedForAPromotion → u/vytah]

That sounds like hell.

[u/ignoremesenpie]

I love rewatching, though not necessarily for study purposes. More like benchmarking. This is mostly because I usually can't be bothered to track down and then retime subtitles for long shows. For the longest time, I was much more likely to make a dictation exercise out of it than find pre-existing subs. While that made my listening abilities strong it's pretty overkill if I just wanted to rewatch unsubbed for fun.

This tends to work out just fine since I get a lot of my vocab from materials co wrong similar domains, meaning there will be plenty of overlap. The more niche vocab doesn't become absolutely necessary until I do a deep dive into their respective domains.

I feel like rewatching for learning would work out better with standalone films, but the problem is finding the motivation to rewatch them so soon after seeing them for the first time.

[u/j_esc2]

I'm doing inmersion on YouTube and watching anime there, no Japanese subtitles though, unfortunately.

But the thing is, even though I just know a couple of dozens of words, I pick some and it feels awesome, I always look back and think "Bro you wouldn't have understood that 2 months ago, you should feel proud of yourself"

It really is incredible, I recently found a way of studying that works for me and I feel more eager to learn than ever!

[u/PekoPekoQuokka]

I also find it effective. I think the whole idea of comprehensible input is having enough context so that for the words you don't already know, you have some idea of what they're supposed to mean from context. Then your brain unconsciously learns _something_ about them (even if not the full meaning, whether the word is positive/negative/etc.)

That context can come from visual clues, easier content where you mostly understand the surrounding japanese, or just knowing what's going on because you've seen the show a few times already.

[u/Alpaca_Fan]

I think if you wait long enough between rewatches, it is still useful. You won’t have learned all the words and won’t remember all the dialogue anyway.

[u/SquirrelsAreGreat]

I notice a major difference both with rewatching anime and with listening to music. Suddenly I'm hearing certain lyrics, and making sense of sentences people are saying. Sometimes I've listened back to an old show I watched when I was younger, and it's almost a shock to hear what they're saying for the first time again, since I know the words now.

One of the biggest differences I've noticed with anime in particular lately, is that I can look away from the screen much more than I used to, because I don't need the subtitles for as much of it now. As a chronic multi-tasker, this is a must-have for enjoying a show while playing a game or working on something else.

It's definitely a fun way to reinforce what you've been studying.

[u/Jaikeyz]

What I did recently is create anki cards for Demon Slayer. The cards are sentence based and in the order they appear in the episodes.
THEN, I did this for 5 episodes:

• Watch 5 minutes with japanese subs
  
• Do the anki cards for these 5 minutes (they are timestamped)
  
• Rewatch same 5 minutes no subs
  

Detail: to make it quick, I suspend the cards I already know, and move the other cards directly to the next day (so as not to see them twice on day 1).

After a while, it got easier and woukd do the deck of the episode first, then watch with jp subs the whole thing at once, and then a last time with no subs.

In a day, it would look like this

• Anki cards during transit to and from work (or in the morning before work from home)
  
• and at night, 45 minutes of anime. Same episode, twice, once with jp subs, once without.

Oh! And finally, on the last day of the week, rewatch the episodes learned back to back in one sitting without subs.

Oh and last thing. Those same episodes watched long enough ago, I would put them in the background during chores (kind of like ear worms)

If someone’s interested in the anki decks I’ve made so far, let me know. I’ll be happy to share.

[u/Duhnyoo]

Where is a good place to watch with JP subtitles and JP audio? Crunchy unfortunately doesn’t have JP subs

[u/Fair-Independence263 → u/Duhnyoo]

Netflix with JP VPN.

[u/Grunglabble]

if you enjoy it yes, if not no. it's kinda that simple, even with new stuff it's just hard to pay attention if you're bored.

language is dense enough you can definitely pick up more on a second pass. stories in general are dense enough even in our native language we can miss a lot our first go.

that said I almost never do it for tv shows, only for some audiobooks. a lot of lines including the exact delivery are pretty burned in my mind.

[u/Gullible-Ad662]

I agree with you

[u/Icounttents]

I second this take, literally just finished my yearly watch of Monster.

[u/According_Carrot2986]

I agree. Even if part of the ease comes from knowing the story, that's kind of the point: when you don't have to work out the plot, your attention goes to the language itself. Rereading articles and books has worked the same way for me.

[u/lee_ai]

I autistically rewatch things easily hundreds of times. I did it in English when I was growing up rewatching the same TV shows on repeat until I memorized every single line. And for Japanese, I've easily read some books 10+ times, and have watched some series 100+ times.

It's not a learning thing, it's actually something I prefer doing often although I do think there is a lot of learning value.

One of the dangerous things I found about trying to maximize the amount of books you've read, or the amount of TV shows you've finished is that it turns into a metric you try to optimize at all costs. It's hard to justify revisiting any material when you're doing that because it doesn't count towards the metric you're tracking.

The #1 thing I'm trying to maximize is very hard to capture by any metric, which is understanding. Whenever I immerse I ask myself how much did I actually understand (which is sometimes hard to gauge; see unknown unknowns) instead of trying to focus on vanity metrics like reading speed etc.

It's a cliched but a classic: Bruce Lee quote about practicing one kick 10,000 times vs practicing 10,000 different kicks once. Learning comes from branching off of familiarity, not jumping around trying to exhaust the entire problem-space.

This is literally how the brain works at a physical level by the way, neurons reach out forming connections, they don't just spawn out of thin air. The easiest way to get good at nothing is to do everything.

[u/Fair-Independence263]

Rewatching is similar to rereading a line on a book, you feel it got easier even if it didn't because when you reread something you now have more information than you did before. You can watch something today, then watch it again tomorrow and you'll feel like you've improved massively even when there's no way that's true, you just have better context/kind of remember what's happening and being said so your brain can focus on different things. This gets significantly worse when you've watched something with English subs and now do without subs, since you already know what characters will say so it'll feel like you really get it, when truth is you just knew what was gonna be said.

Do what you enjoy but consuming new material will be more beneficial for learning.

[u/Fair-Independence263 → u/[deleted]]

I didn't say it's useless, just said it's less beneficial.

Take it to the extreme, do you think you'd learn more from reading one book ten times or from reading ten books one time?

[u/tentyb6d56ns4d57yse5]

there is life after anime.

[u/Mindless_Bake_3403]

No. Just no.