i think this is probably easier to do, than say, russian or chinese, since japanese is a very emotionally driven language so that you can probably pick up the meaning from context or situation to which you can relate words (like when someone is doing a classic cheesy love confession even if you didnt know what suki meant or how particles or sentence structure work, you could figure it out) and then connect the strings together later to figure things out.

anyway, if you’re still pursuing this project, let me know if you find anything worthwhile in learning more japanese through watching raws. i’m interested in this too because, i’ve honestly picked up a large amount of my vocabulary (a lot of which my teacher is like what? how do you know that?) from watching anime and listening to japanese music.

to one of the above posters…if you want to learn japanese to speak or to watch tv or whatever, you don’t need to take anything past maybe elementary japanese where they teach you how to use things like wo ga no -tai -teru etc and basic adj/verb conjugation since you don’t need what goes on in the upper levels, just like how we don’t need to be english majors and know all the meticulous MLP rules or how to read old english in order to watch house. all we need is american sense of humor and basic understanding :p

I don’t know about that though…I just started watching raws to help with listening comprehension. I’m already intermediate on grammar, and have been learning speech and vocab from audio tapes for the past couple of weeks. I think if your serious about learning, raws are no substitue, but can be a good supplement to a number of other learning angles you should be using. Right now I’m watching Bleach raw because I already read the manga and know the storyline anyway, so I’m not missing anything aside from filler eps.

I remember watching the new Initial-D episodes in raw because they weren’t fansubed yet. I couldn’t understand anything, but sure it was fun

I have been learning with books for a while now, but I gave it up for exams this year, and I mean to pick it up again over the summer. I do have someone to practise with, who is great, but I can’t help feeling that I would do better for myself by just giving up and just going to Japan and working there for a year or so.

Probably wouldn’t help much with the reading, but would probably do wonders with the speaking.

I think that to really learn something by watching fansubs, you have to first learn Japanese up to an extent that you can understand the sentence structures and work out which words are verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc, then you can watch and improve your vocab.

It goes without saying that I am jealous of people who can learn as such. ^_^

Good luck Hung!