This will revolutionize how you study Japanese. That’s right, a dictionary. No, not this piece of shit. No, not your phone. And not even this cool DS dictionary I was
using in Japanese school because they wouldn't let us use our phones. No, I’m talking about proper instant dictionary
for weeaboos. Let’s talk about ALL of them. Once you reach a certain level of Japanese,
the single most important thing you can do is absorb the language. That means reading lots of books, listening
to lots of music, and yes, weebs, watching lots and lots of [redacted]
But there’s ooooone little hiccup with this approach. Let’s say you’re watching “anime.” When you get to a certain level, depending
on what you’re watching, you’ll probably understand almost everything you come across,
and you’ll probably understood most of what you DON’T know just from context alone. But beyond stuff made for children, there’s
no way you’ll understand 100% of the words you hear. Traditionally, you might be tempted to pull
out this bad boy. Imagine stopping, pulling out a dictionary,
trying to make sense of Japan’s ass-backwards kanji radical system, and looking up a word. Horrible. With your phone, this is a billion times faster,
but it still takes you right out of the experience. Dear god there’s nothing worse than stopping
mid-fap to look up some slang for butthole, amirite guys? Probably the most relatable thing I’ve ever
said. But with one of these bitches, you can wiggle
your mouse as you wiggle your cock and fap at an almost native level pace. God I have no idea how anyone learned Japanese
20 years ago. It’d take so long to get off. Minutes. Hours, even. Oh my god. So let’s talk about each of these dictionaries. First, the most versatile and simplest one
is the mouseover dictionary. Now, I’ve been reading a lot of really old
forgotten visual novels on a PC-98 emulator. And you wouldn’t believe how satisfying
it is to fap to something that maybe no one outside of Japan has ever fapped to before. God I love living in the future. So anyway, the big benefit to this one is
there’s dictionaries that’ll parse images, I’ve been using one called Kanji Tomo. The PC-98 resolution is, and this is putting
it generously, kind of low, so it’s not 100% accurate, but for even this it works
great. So I guess it’s kind of niche, or whatever,
but discovering a truly unique fap is like, a lifelong goal for most people, and yet,
with this, anyone can do it. I feel like a fucking wizard, man. Oh, I guess you could use this to play games
or read manga or whatever, if you're a weeaboo. Tch. So there’s probably similar, maybe even
better mouseover dictionaries out there, but let’s move on to this kindle. Now as much as I like visual novels, I am
a fan of holding a physical book. The thing with this is, you can’t attach
a dictionary to this. So this sucks. Maybe move into the 21st century, Violet Evergarden. The next best thing, however, is an e-reader
so I picked up one to read books in Japanese. There’s lots of brands, but a kindle is
easily the best deal if you set foot anywhere near Japan just because Japanese read a shitload
so there’s like, a LOT of these you can find used on Mercari for pretty cheap. The paperwhite seems to be the popular one
because, while the extra resolution might not matter for English, when you have kanji
you kind of need it. I picked up this bad boy for about 7000 yen
with a case. And you can attach a dictionary to it. Just tap and hold... and bam, instant fap. Spice and Wolf? More like, Spice and Waifu, amirite? Yeah, baby. I can’t tell you how good it feels to be
able to fap with just one touch. Hey, listen, if I don’t do it, how are you
gonna know whether or not it’s worth it to get one? That’s right, I’m doing this for you. You sick fuck. The last thing is for anime and I guess like,
3d normie shit, if you're into that? Imagine, all of this, but able to use it on
anime subtitles and not just books and shit. And being able to create your own flashcards
with one click from any of these things. And here’s where you need to learn about
on app called Yomichan. It's basically a mouseover dictionary integrated
into your browser AND allows you to make flashcards from anything you can parse text from, in
just one click. That means websites, ebooks, and, with the
right bonus add on, YouTube videos and Netflix videos. I made a video about koohi.cafe and studying
Japanese with books because context is key. And I just talked about immersing yourself
in the language, and this is basically both of those two things combined. So basically read or watch whatever and then
later with the context you gained. brilliant, right? You can do this with the aforementioned Kindle. Takes one or two extra steps because you need
to move this to the computer, but very very handy nonetheless. A couple caveats to Yomichan. One is that it needs text. So images are a no-go. And videos would be without the add-ons that
turn it into text, so no hentai, probably. Sorry, I know, you can stop watching now,
I understand. The other is it is slightly jank and takes
some setup, but once you get it going it’s VERY seamless as it integrates with Anki,
and it will create customized flashcards for you with a single click. I have Yomichan set up to show me the word
and the context sentence, and then on the back it'll have the English meaning. You can also do stuff like take audio for
words and screenshots for when you're, say, watching Netflix, so that brings us to watching
video. YouTube subtitles are text-accessible but
Netflix is not, but it IS with this cool add-on, Language Reactor, previously Language Learning
with Netflix. This great app will show you the subtitles
and then has a little bar on the side with all the subs together, and there’s a function
that’ll actually HIDE the subtitles until you mouse over them allowing you to focus
on listening. VERY handy. So you’re saying I can ACTUALLY just learn
Japanese by watching anime?? What?! And... kind of. This comes with a caveat that for beginners,
watching anime and stuff should be a REVIEW, not learning new material. Because if you’re trying to look at stuff
you don’t know and create flashcards out of them, for beginners, what you don't know
is going to be literally everything. Go study, and then come back an watch anime,
and start with stuff that's appropriate to your level. Watch this video to learn what kinds of anime
you should be watching. I should mention that Language Reactor has
their own flashcard integration you can pay for, but you can just use Yomichan for free. So now let’s talk about one last tool, and
it’s actually a paid app similar to Yomichan, and the developers actually offered to send
me an affiliate link but after trying it out a bunch, I really like it but I don't think
I can recommend it it because it’s missing way too much to offer anything close to my
hearty recommendation. And in fact, I’m going to shit on it a whole
bunch in hopes that they will fix all of these things because I REALLY do like it, but there’s
just so, so many questionable decisions being made with it. And because while I do like theirs the best,
you can basically do everything for free with Yomichan. So no free internet money for me today, but
you know, shikataganai as they say amirite. Maybe next time. The first thing I should talk about is what
I REALLY like about it, which is their player. Similar to Language reactor, it can pause
after every line, but it’s also got a couple more features. Migaku can turn off subtitles until you pause
it, which is way better than blurring subtitles because the keyboard is way faster. And it’s got a feature that will pause after
it comes to a line containing a word you don’t know. More on this in a second. For me, the subtitles on pause is the best
general one because it’ll test the hearing but let me quickly get access to the kanji
if I need it, but I can see a lot of these working for a lot of different people. So this is just a way better and more robust
experience, which is questionable because Language Reactor’s name was Language Learning
with Netflix. That’s the only thing it does, how is it
that your app is not the best at this? That’s just sad. So you’re probably wondering about that
words you don’t know thing. That’s Migaku’s other core feature, besides
creating flashcards at a single click, it’ll keep track of the words you don’t know so
it can create even better flashcards and help you study more effectively. THAT is really cool and is poised to make
Migaku the centre of your language study. But the problem with this, and the reason
I can’t recommend it, is because you can ONLY import known words from Anki. If you’ve used LITERALLY anything else to
study, you CAN’T import words. Case in point, I’ve used Anki to study textbook
vocabulary, sure, but I’ve also learned probably half of my vocabulary from WaniKani,
which includes like 8,000 words, and that's not even the only other thing I've used to
study vocab. You’d think you could just take a text file
and say hey, I know these words. But no, you can’t. And that would be fine if, like Yomichan,
you could take the word AND the context sentence but Migaku ONLY takes full sentences, and
then creates flashcards containing all the words you don't know. And if there are too many unknown words in
it, the app crashes. Guys. Most people. Do not only study language with Anki. Anki is great, sure, I've used Anki, sure,
but there are like 10,000 vocabulary I know NOT from Anki. So I literally cannot use your app for its
intended purpose. Fix this. It can’t POSSIBLY take that much effort
to implement this, even the koohi.cafe guy has done this with his website that he runs
for free in his spare time. Sure it’s super jank but this is really
necessary, which is why it's in there. I brought this up to them and they were like
oh yeah that’s on the road map. What? How is literally being able to use your app
not top of your priority list YEARS into development? That’s fucked. I have a couple more criticisms. There’s a button that says give me the default
settings for x language but then you have to go and adjust the dictionary settings for
card creation anyway. Uh... what does the default setup even do
then? I should be able to just hit set up for Japanese
and go to town, not follow a guide on your site. It’s fine to have customizable settings
for cards, but if you have a default recommendation, just give me that. I don’t know how I’m supposed to use your
app. I’m an idiot. It’s your job to decide this, not mine. And I get that it connects to Anki, but any
instructions for this should be given directly from the app. I know Yomichan is kind of jank and I had
to spend probably even more time figuring out how to set it up the way I wanted, but
it’s free. Yours isn’t. This is 2022. Not acceptable. And the player doesn’t actually let you
mouseover words to create cards and instead will only take what’s actively playing no
matter where the mouse is. When I asked about this, they said this is
more intuitive, but given that this is how the reader works, they’re DEFINITELY smoking
crack here. If I’m the only one who assumed it works
the same way as the reader, I’ll eat this doujin on camera. There’s this button you can click with the
mouse but you should really be able to use the keyboard like the rest of the app. So there are a couple other reasons to use
Migaku that I wanna highlight here though. One is that Yomichan is only for Japanese,
or, theoretically, Chinese too. There might be other free options for, say,
ick, French or something but I wouldn’t know. But also, Migaku has some super neat language-specific
colour-coding features, like pitch accent for Japanese, or gender for romance languages. That’s cool as fuck. This’ll make your eyes bleed at first but
you’ll probably get used to it, and honestly you might even want Migaku just for this because
honestly that’s a super sick idea. Lastly, there’s one more thing I wanna criticize
Migaku for and that’s their incredibly stingy free trial. It’s only 7 days, and they even restrict
some features with it. You know how long it takes to learn a language,
right? You must. 7 days is like 5 minutes in language learning
years, why would your trial for this be so stingy? It should be least 3 weeks, ideally a month. Why? Because that’s how long it takes to form
a new habit. If you’re going to be using a language app
productively, you need to make it a habit. And 7 days is not nearly long enough to do
that. Between this and the Anki thing, it’s almost
like you don’t want people using your app. Seriously, if someone’s gonna be using it,
it’s gonna be a long-term thing, you can be a little more lenient with your trial. Also, I’d like to see a free option like
Language Reactor where you can just have the dictionary and/or the player but all of the
study features are paid. Because, there are already free options for
a Netflix player and for mouseover dictionaries and stuff. All you REALLY need is something to parse
Netflix subtitles into text, so anything that does this plus Yomichan is going to be enough
for most people. If people want to start out with just immersing,
which is the most important part, I’m just going to point them somewhere else, which
is a shame because Migaku’s is a better experience. I do think Migaku is better, arguably way
better, but I don't think it's hundreds of dollars vs. free better, especially not with
all the stuff that's broken and missing. Migaku’s known words thing is super cool
and even revolutionary, but I couldn't recommend it even if I wanted to because it doesn't
fucking work. I’ll leave a link to Yomichan in the description. So this is the latest episode of my series
on learning Japanese with anime, I hope you found something you can take away from it. If you haven’t seen the other episodes,
you can watch them right here, as well as my other videos on learning Japanese. As always, thank you so much for your time,
friends, and I will see you in the next video.
