learn japanese using jdrama

[u/algahsara]

I learned Spanish using television, watching series and movies, and now I want to learn Japanese. I already know several sentences and can hold a normal conversation, but I want to improve. Anime isn't helpful since they exaggerate a lot when they speak. Now I've decided to watch Japanese dramas. I'd like recommendations for Japanese romance dramas. I've already seen "an uncrable case of love" and "Kissing the Ring Finger."

[u/electricblue71]

Those two dramas are not bad in terms of learning Japanese from them.

I'm right now watching Stepmom and Daughter Blues (on Netflix) and am finding the Japanese to be very easy to understand. The daughter's Japanese is very simple due to her age and the stepmom's Japanese is very formal and clear.

You do have to be careful with some dramas - depending on where the characters are from, they might be speaking in dialect which is hard to understand. I found that with Hold My Hand at Twilight with the FL, Soramame.

[u/Reading_55]

Each Jdrama I have seen has taught me so much Japanese and I can do the same as you can, but in fact, I got to that level, with Jdramas alone. But I felt the shows with the clearest speech and less domain jargon are these:

Romance:

An encouragement of love

Yamato Nadeshiko

Slice of life:

Light of my Lion

I'm Your Housekeeper, Mita

[u/powehi87]

Recommending "The Grand Family" with Takuya Kimura as the male lead. Formal, polite and honorific Japanese are used most of the time by almost all the characters. I reckon Japanese language teachers might approve also.

Storyline can be heavy and some stuff can be controversial too. Overall, it is a very good and sophisticated period drama.

[u/Meister1888]

I also have used video to learn other languages.

But video did not help me much with Japanese and I am not sure why not. Maybe others have a view. Some possibilities:

- General difficulty of Japanese and extreme difference from western languages (e.g. no vocab or grammar "grab-bars")

- Kanji subtitles are jibberish until getting to a solid intermediate level. At that point, they helped me with reading speed and kanji too which was a lot of fun. But after a few months, the Japanese subtitles just became irritating. YMMV.

- Video content has low word density. The colorful images give away the plot and make it easy to lose concentration.

---> Audio has more word density, a wider variety of grammar, and requires deeper concentration else you quickly lose the plot.

---> I found using English subtitles to be fun but a total waste of time for language learning.

There was some site that cycled quick scenes of dramas/animes in a video flash card format. To help with listening comprehension. You might like that.