How to learn Japanese by watching TV shows in Japanese?

Japanese is effectively the sole language of Japan, and almost all of the 128 million natives speak it.  Japanese is an agglutinative, mora-timed language with simple phonotactics, a pure vowel system, phonemic vowel and consonant length, and a lexically significant pitch-accent. Word order is normally subject–object–verb with particles marking the grammatical function of words, and sentence structure is a topic–comment. Sentence-final particles are used to add emotional or emphatic impact, or make questions. Along with kanji, the Japanese writing system primarily uses two syllabic (or moraic) scripts, hiragana (ひらがな or 平仮名) and katakana (カタカナ or 片仮名). Latin script is used in a limited fashion, such as for imported acronyms, and the numeral system uses mostly Arabic numerals alongside traditional Chinese numerals. Outside of Japan, 2.98 million people in 133 countries are studying the language at 13,639 institutions, according to a 2006 survey by the Japan Foundation. This number, up 26.4 per cent from the previous survey in 2003, does not include people teaching themselves or taking private lessons.

TV shows will help you develop an instinctual feel for the pace and flow of actual spoken Japanese; and will introduce you to the kind of spoken Japanese that rarely show up in regular Japanese lessons or textbooks. This includes some street slang, subcultural expressions, shortened words, and even some beautiful poetic lines. Television Shows include Talk Shows, Documentaries, News, Game Shows, Comedy shows, Variety Shows, Sports, Sitcoms, Dramas, Scifi, Supernatural and Fantasy Shows, Soap Operas, Historical Shows, Adventure or Action Shows, Cooking Shows, Cartoons, Reality TV, DocuDramas, Police procedural or Crime Shows. Some if not all can certainly be a value add to your learning and offer a similar if not same benefit as the movies can! Don’t miss watching News in Slow Japanese at any cost. It would be your friend for a lifetime! Choose a genre that’s simplistic to understand in the beginning raising the bar with every lesson learnt efficiently. Remember that the Japanese language has evolved from the way it’s spoken in the 1960s and 70s to how it’s spoken today, so you may avoid learning from old shows.

Steps to follow: 

1. Watch the show fully without any subtitles and record it simultaneously(if not available online to see again). Just soak up on the plot and try to grasp the “feel” of the show, what does it wish to convey.  Go back to the start and re-watch it scene-by-scene: first, with no subtitles. After you’re done watching it in its entirety, watch it scene by scene to see which words you can grasp even without the help of subtitles. Every time you hear a word you’re not familiar with, write it down.
2. Re-watch the scene but this time with subtitles. The Japanese subtitles will help you get the spelling and articles used correctly.  But if you want to check if your understanding is correct, switch on the English subtitles in your 3rd viewing of that particular scene. Pay attention to the vocabulary and the context on how the words were used. Look out for any idioms and slang, and take note of the grammatical structures used in the sentences. Write down anything interesting you noticed, and be ready to review it later on.
3. Listen and repeat new words. If there are some new words that you cannot seem to pronounce, listen to it and repeat the words and sentences over and over until you get the hang of it. Look up the words you don’t understand. 
4. If there are some things about the movie that are bugging you—slang terms, regional jargons, double meanings, wordplays, and subtle humour that you couldn’t quite grasp—do some research or ask a native Japanese speaker to help you understand and appreciate it better.
5. Re-watch the show until you are confident that you have understood the gist of the conversations and the context of the words.

Finally, the last step to learning Japanese with Television is to feel free to watch it as many times as you want—with subtitles and without.

There is no information available about the language’s prehistory or when it first appeared in Japan. A few Japanese words were documented in Chinese records dating back to the third century, but significant texts did not exist until the eighth century. Furthermore, following the end of Japan’s self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages increased significantly. English loanwords, in particular, have become frequent, and Japanese words from English roots have proliferated.

There’s an amazing new way to learn Japanese! Want to see what everyone’s talking about! Click Here.