TLDR: In the following downloadable zip file are karaoke subs that are intended to teach you Japanese. There are subtitle files for three different anime episodes/movies:
- Card Captor Sakura Episode 1 - Subtitles - Madhouse - CLAMP (Cardcaptor Sakura Ep 1.ass)
- Dr. Stone Episode 1 - Subtitles - Toho Animation -TMS / Die4Studio - Riichiro Inagaki (Dr Stone Ep 1.ass)
- Whisper of the Heart - Subtitles - Studio Ghibli - Yoshifumi KondÅ - Hayao Miyazaki - Aoi Hiiragi (Whisper Of The Heart.ass)
Download links for the zip with subtitle files In it:
UPDATE: I created a Github project with the subs that will have the latest version of them: https://github.com/gokenshadow/LearnJapaneseKaraokeSubtitles/tree/main
Google Drive Link: Goken - Learn Japanese Karaoke Subs.zip (324KB)
Mega Link: Goken - Learn Japanese Karaoke Subs.zip (324KB)
The easiest way to use them is with VLC player, but use whatever player you want if you know what you're doing.
NOTE: For Dr. Stone, there are two different versions of the subs, one for Crunchyroll because it has a bumper that extends the length slightly (Dr Stone Ep 1 Crunchyroll.ass), and one for YouTube (Dr Stone Ep 1.ass).
YouTube video that goes with this article:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wF91iArEp0
I uploaded the same video to MEGA in case the Youtube video gets taken down:
https://mega.nz/file/3ogASayA#OUdwA59H8izJBPUwxWte2O9EoPfytdCg-HaqvjRF8zI
I also uploaded it to Archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/jplearn-subs
Here is the completely legal link to episode one of Dr Stone as released by Toho Animation for promotional purposes. You can drag this video link into VLC player to add the subs to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMsNh3oPPTg
Main Article
In theory, watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles should teach you Japanese. It exposes you not only to the Japanese language spoken with perfect pronunciation and proper grammatical structure by native Japanese people, but it also gives you a translation of each and every spoken sentence of that language. It gives you everything you need to to understand what's being said. In fact, it almost seems a given that a person would learn Japanese from it. It seems like if a person were to just watch a ton of anime with subtitles, they would inevitably start understanding Japanese and maybe even be able to speak some of it.
However, in practice, this isn't really the case. Most people don't understand Japanese after they watch anime with subtitles, even a ton of anime with subtitles.
Why is this?
It could be that most people completely ignore the words that are being spoken in favor of just reading the subtitles, that they focus only on the textual meaning of the translated words and in that process, they blur out the actual sounds coming out of the characters' mouths.
But, you know? I don't know if that's true, cause if I were to ask most anime fans the meaning of
- DAIJOBU
- CHIGAU
- SHIMATTA
- ITADAKIMASU
- BAKA
- SHIKARISHIRO
- GANBATTE
- TASUKETE
they’d probably be able to give pretty accurate answers. This tells me people definitely have the ability to learn Japanese from watching anime, otherwise they wouldn't be able to learn these words. But why only these words? What's stopping them from learning other stuff?
I think grammar is the culprit. Japanese sentences are structured very differently from English, and when you translate a Japanese sentence into English, the changes it has to go through to sound like English make it very difficult to understand what word is being said at what time. Let’s look at an example. If I were to translate the phrase
"NIHONGO GA SUKOSHI WAKARIMASU"
into English, it would typically become
"I can understand Japanese a little."
This sentence sounds great in English, but it’s taking a lot of liberties to sound that way. It’s changing the order of the words, it’s removing a word, and to top it all off, it’s adding its own new words that were never there in the first place. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were just trying to understand what was being said, but if you were trying to learn Japanese, you might make some false assumptions. Someone who doesn’t know Japanese might assume that since
"NIHONGO GA SUKOSHI WAKARIMASU"
Means:
"I can understand Japanese a little."
NIHONGO must mean “I”, and WAKARIMASU must mean “little” because of where they are in the sentence.
But they’d be wrong because NIHONGO means Japanese. And WAKARIMASU means understand. The words have been purposefully re-ordered because the original order they are spoken in wouldn’t sound good in English.
Here’s a more direct translation that completely disregards English grammar and just translates word-for-word:
"NIHONGO GA SUKOSHI WAKARIMASU"
"Japanese GA little-bit understand."
See how different that is? The translation into good sounding English completely butchers the sentence from all context that would make it easy to learn the words or even know which word was being said.
How the hell am I supposed to know which word in the sentence
"I can understand Japanese a little."
means Japanese or means understand or means little when the words don’t even go that way in the original sentence? Furthermore, how the hell am I supposed to know that the sentence
"I can understand Japanese a little."
Doesn’t even have the words “I,” “can” or “a?”
And this is just a short, simple sentence. Imagine trying to figure out the words in a long sentence where even more liberties are taken to make it sound good in English. Even if I had a decent sense of Japanese grammar in my head, the amount of mental gymnastics I would have to go through with each and every spoken sentence to even figure out what word is being said at what time with a normal English translation is crazy.
And this is where my theory comes in. My theory is that if we forget about English grammar, and just translate the words, that is if we translate
"NIHONGO GA SUKOSHI WAKARIMASU"
into
"Japanese GA little-bit understand."
While it will definitely be somewhat harder to immediately know what is being said, learning Japanese will become a lot easier and a lot more automatic.
About a year (or four) ago, I decided to test this theory by creating a special series of subtitle files that translated Japanese into English in this word-for-word style. To make them even easier to use, I turned them into karaoke subtitles that lit up each word as it was being said. It was an interesting and somewhat grueling process that went through a lot of format changes and revisions, and I’m not even sure if this is their final format.
In the process of translating, I found that there were some words that couldn’t be translated into English because there were no English equivalent words, so I left them Japanese. To differentiate between translated words and untranslated words I made all translated words UPPERCASE and made all untranslated words lowercase.
Verbs were kind of interesting. Since Japanese verbs have different endings, I translated the first part of a Japanese verb into English, while leaving the ending of the verb as Japanese. This might have made it difficult to understand what the verbs meant or what tense they were in, but my hope was that those things could be figured out by context. Adjectives had a similar format to that as well.
There also were some words that while they had an equivalent English translation, were pretty easy to figure out by context. I’ve found that people tend to remember words better when they learn by context, so I left those easy-to-figure-out words in Japanese.
And that’s pretty much the jist of the format. I kind of stopped working on them after a month or two, and now I’ve decided to share them with the world and let the world cast its judgement upon them.
If you wanna give these subtitles a try, the download links are in the top and bottom of this blog post.
Note: I myself am not fluent in Japanese, and I mainly used a Japanese/English dictionary to translate these words, something that’s a pain in the ass to do and doesn’t give you the most accurate results, so at best, I can give them an about 80% accuracy rating. There may be some mistranslations.
If you are fluent in Japanese and want to correct some of these translations, leave a comment on the video or this blog post. It’d be cool to have these be a hundred percent accurate, but until then know that a word might not mean exactly what the translation says it means.
The first subtitle file is for Card Captor Sakura episode 1.
The second is for the Doctor Stone Episode 1.
And the third is for Whisper of the Heart, the Ghibli Movie that no one has seen but everybody knows about because of that one lo-fi hip hop channel that used the main character as a mascot.
These subtitles are in the .ASS (i.e the.Advanced SubStationAlpha) format, which you can use with many different video players, but I recommend you use VLC Player because it’s simple and easy.
You will obviously need to have access to the raw, untranslated videos of the episodes or movies in question to be able to use these subtitles. I'm not gonna tell you where you can get those. If you can find a legal way to do it, good on you.
Luckily for some of you, there actually IS a completely legal way to do this with Dr. Stone. TOHO Animation, bless their hearts, have graciously released Dr Stone Episode 1 in its entirety on Youtube for promotional purposes, and VLC player -- I’m not sure if many people know this -- has the power to play Youtube videos.
And that’s about it. The download links are where I've said they are. Have fun, learn stuff, and watch some anime.
See ya.
Download links for the zip with subtitle files In it:
Google Drive Link: Goken - Learn Japanese Karaoke Subs.zip (324KB)
Mega Link: Goken - Learn Japanese Karaoke Subs.zip (324KB)
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