Mr. FormerAjatter

Passing N1 listening by using English subbed anime

This title is clickbait — I didn’t do this lol.

I’ve been really interested in this idea for a while - how far can english subbed anime take you - even going so far as to create this forum post on tmw1 a couple years back. The closest I’ve found to someone passing a JLPT exam using only English-subbed anime is this guy, but it was only for N3. I still feel like it’s possible though, since I often hear about Europeans watching content dubbed in English while keeping subtitles in their native language and somehow ending up fluent. But I don't know how true that is or whether it was just random forum yapping that I just happen to keep running into. I can’t say for certain how far you can get with using English-subbed stuff as your main material, but I suspect it’s possible.

I’m putting this post out so I can gather more plot points. If you’ve done this, I want to know! Reach out to me on Discord at swaggy.p.

  1. The Moe Way. A discord server for learning japanese (and i think other languages now) and an otaku media server community. More info can be found here