Learn Japanese with Netflix: Turn Entertainment into Learning

Ahh, yes. Here you are are. You love watching anime, and now you've gone to Google to ask if you can learn Japanese by watching anime on Netflix.

Well, yes. Yes you can.

The same answer applies if you're interested in Japanese movies, television shows, or dramas.

Listening comprehension is an incredibly important part of your journey to learn Japanese, and Netflix has a conveniently curated library of hundreds of Japanese shows you can watch from anywhere in the world.

In this article, we'll get into:

Why Netflix is great for learning Japanese

As if you need convincing to watch anime, j-dramas, and Japanese movies, right? The first and most obvious reason to incorporate Netflix into your learning routine is that it's fun, and we learn languages better when we're having fun.

That aside, here are a few "real" reasons why a good chunk of the time you spend learning Japanese should be spent watching Netflix.

1. Your goal is to understand Japanese, right?

I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm a linguistics geek and I love grammar. I have Japanese reference books in a few different languages, and my idea of a good time is writing lengthy Reddit comments about things like how Japanese doesn't technically have a past tense.

... but that's not what gets most people excited about Japanese.

Chances are, you're not terribly interested in Japanese in an academic sense. No; you're learning Japanese because you want to use Japanese in some capacity—you see Japanese as a means to an end. Having a certain level of Japanese will enable you to do certain things that you would like to do. You know, like watching anime and stuff.

To get good at that stuff, you need to actually spend time doing that stuff.

Now, I'm not saying that it isn't important to study grammar. At Migaku, we think that grammar study is part of how you build the foundation you need to do cool things in Japanese. I'm just saying that it takes ~5,000 hours for the typical learner to pass the JLPT N1, the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, and that you shouldn't spend all 5,000 of those hours with your nose in a textbook.

2. The visuals will help you to understand the dialogue

Reading is great, but for quite awhile, written Japanese will be little more than squiggles on a page. It takes effort to turn these squiggles into the world of your story.

By contrast, if you're watching a Japanese show, you'll see a person sitting in a chair say よいしょ (yoisho) as they press their hands down into their knees and stand themselves up. You might not quite catch everything they say, but you'll be able to tell from the tone of their voice if they're excited about what they're going to go do or not. You see, comprehension isn't a binary matter of all or nothing: there are shades of understanding, and sometimes being able to watch the action play out will give you that last 10% of information you need to follow along.

You'll also see all sorts of gestures, such as this below "pinky in the air" one that means someone (already) has a romantic partner—not that they're going in for a pinky promise.

Simply put, the audiovisual nature of movies and TV shows gives you more information than naked text to work with. Early on, this additional context will help you make sense of things that you otherwise couldn't with text alone. Even as an advanced learner, the ability to see what Japan looks like and how Japanese people go about their daily lives will provide you with important cultural information.

3. You'll learn Japanese pronunciation by ear

Do me a favor for a moment and click the play button on this word:

This is the most basic Japanese word for "I", and it's a literal minefield of pronunciation challenges. If you're a native English speaker, and you follow your instincts, the letters w-a-t-a-s-h-i look like something you would know how to say. As another native English speaker, it's unfortunately precisely this kind of "baggage" that we carry from English that leads us to mispronounce watashi and many other words in Japanese. Japanese, English, and each language have their own pronunciation conventions, and they don't always line up.

I'm not going to make you wade through all of challenges presented by this word, unless you're interested in nerdy pronunciation stuff. Just know that this one word will trip up native English speakers in six ways, which is kind of incredible.

So rather than reading a book and letting your eyes mislead you as to how a given word should be pronounced, you can instead just listen to native Japanese content and hear native Japanese speakers saying different sounds—no erroneous interpretation required.

To reframe that more positively, watching Japanese content gives you an entire additional layer of information (audio) that is completely absent from written Japanese.

4. The content adapts to the effort you expend on it

All written text shares a certain fundamental nature: if you do not exert effort to read it, the flow of information stops.

This is not true for television.

The result of this "flexibility" is that you can comfortably get in several hours of Japanese listening in a day, where you might not have the Japanese ability or mental stamina to do the same amount of reading.

5. You get the advantages of reading and listening

The great thing about Netflix is that, unlike a podcast, Japanese television shows are more than just pure Japanese audio. It contains visuals, as we mentioned above, but most shows also come with Japanese subtitles.

This means that you essentially get the best of both worlds:

How to find Japanese shows to watch on Netflix

So, we now agree that Netflix should be part of your Japanese learning routine.

But how do you actually find things to watch as a beginner?

Explore Netflix's catalogue on unogs.com

Netflix has a wonderful repository of content, but it can be somewhat hit or miss in that not all shows are available in all regions, and sometimes Netflix will have a Japanese show but won't have Japanese subtitles and/or Japanese audio.

uNoGS (unofficial Netflix online Global Search) presents a solution to this issue, making your life much easier as a language learner.

Go to unogs' website, and then click the big blue "Advanced Search" button in the center-top region of the page.

You'll now see a somewhat overwhelming list of filters. You can explore these more by yourself, but to start with, do three specific things:

You'll now see a list of all of the Japanese shows that are available in your country that have Japanese audio and subtitles available.

Scroll through this list and find something that you'd like to watch.

Once you've found something that seems interesting, you've got two options.

Option one is to look for your show on Natively. This will show you roughly what JLPT level the content is, and will also let you see how difficult other learners thought it was.

Option two, if you're a Migaku subscriber, is to simply boot up your show in Netflix. Migaku will compare the words in the subtitles with the list of words you've indicated that you know and the list of words you've created flashcards for, thus giving you an accurate estimate of how difficult this show will be for you.

The best Japanese shows and movies on Netflix

Above are instructions on how you can find things to watch on Netflix for yourself, but if you'd like to skip the hassle and get a few beginner-specific recommendations, here you go:

[Reality television] Terrace House

Terrace House is a hit Japanese television show with a simple premise: three men and three women who don't know each other are moved in together under one roof.

What's special about Terrace House is that it's not a game show and isn't intended to be dramatic. All of the hosts chose to live in the house and they all have their own lives—they just happen to be living together. The show captures the mundane moments of them doing things like cooking dinner or cleaning.

What's great about this show for learners is that the vocabulary is pretty straightforward—it's the sort of stuff that comes up in everyday life—and, being totally unscripted, the dialogues are completely natural.

[Anime] Haikyuu!!

The only thing that Shoyo Hinata, the star of Haikyuu!!, ever wanted was to play volleyball. Unfortunately, he's very short and his middle school team wasn't very good. He enrolls in a high school which used to have one of Japan's best volleyball programs... and discovers that he'll have his arch rival from middle school as a teammate.

This anime has all of the elements of a good story: it's about kids being kids, underdogs striving for the win, and relatable characters overcoming personal weaknesses for the benefit of those they care about.

Especially good news for learners is that the whole anime has less than 4,000 unique words, making it a very accessible watch for low-intermediate learners.

[Movie] Drawing Closer

Drawing Closer will make you cry.

17-year-old Akito, an exceptional artist for his age, has a dream: he wants to get one of his pieces into the Nikaten Art Exhibition. Instead, a tumor is discovered in his heart, and he is given only one year to live. He gives up on life—and then he meets Haruna, a girl who is drawn to the beauty of life and is optimistic, despite having only 6 months left to live.

The simple nature of this story—a romance between two young people learning to enjoy the simple pleasures of life—makes it easy to follow, even for beginners. Additionally, the calm nature of the story means that the characters speak in relatively slow and clear voices, making it easier to understand than many other movies.

How to learn Japanese with Netflix

(Note: We'll also provide advice for how to learn Japanese with Netflix without Migaku.)

Language learning is pretty straightforward: if you consume content, and you understand the messages within that content, you will make progress.

The problem for beginners is that, unfortunately, there isn't very much content that is both interesting and understandable.

And that's why we made Migaku.

Migaku is a platform that adds functionality to text in other languages, allowing you to do things like:

These features all work with Netflix's subtitles, allowing you to watch Japanese shows that would normally be too difficult and also to create learning content out of that content.

Here's how to learn Japanese with Netflix and Migaku:

Boot up your favorite show

Open any show with Japanese subtitles on Netflix, and Migaku will parse those subtitles to make them interactable.

The changes are subtle! But you'll quickly notice above that the word 直訳 (ちょくやく, "direct translation") has furigana over it. Normal subtitles would not have furigana, but Migaku has added it because this user has not yet learned this word.

Click on any words you don't know

So, remember how we didn't know the word 直訳?

Just click on it.

Set to translate, Migaku displays a pop-up dictionary definition of what this word means and also an AI translation of the sentence it appears in.

The user could also choose to see:

This effectively lets you consume Japanese content as if you already know tens of thousands of Japanese words—you can look up unknown words in real time with a single click.

If you aren't using Migaku, then we recommend using an OCR software (see step #2 here for free/paid recs), capturing the words you don't know, and pasting them in an online dictionary such as Jisho (bilingual Japanese<>English) or Goo (monolingual Japanese).

Create flashcards out of useful words you find

If you decide that you want to learn a particular word, you can just click the orange button shown in the top-right corner of the above screenshot. Doing so will automatically create a flashcard that looks like this:

This contains:

And Migaku uses spaced repetition to create a personalized learning schedule: you'll be nudged to review this flashcard periodically until you can remember it even if you don't see it for several months.

If you don't use Migaku, you can also create spaced-repetition-powered flashcards in Anki, an open-sourced flashcard program, but you'll have to design your own card layout and manually add all of the above types of information.

Challenges and FAQs

You now know everything you need to know to find interesting, level-appropriate shows to watch on Netflix, but there are still a few questions that might be on your mind.

Subtitles or no subtitles?

When you go to watch a piece of content, you have four options so far as subtitles go:

And research has actually been done on this very topic, finding that, for intermediate learners:

This in mind, I recommend you to:

Then, Migaku offers several subtitle configuration options, creating some stepping stones between these levels. You can choose to:

This experience can be frustrating: it takes many hours of listening to build your listening comprehension skills. Know that every minute you put in is beneficial, and that, eventually, you will naturally reach a point where you feel confident even without subtitles.

What if I'm still a beginner and can't understand Netflix yet?

In that case, you're in luck. It takes most people years of directionless study before they learn enough Japanese to start making gains by watching their favorite shows... and as people who love anime and j-dramas, that annoyed us.

So we spent 10,000 hours creating the perfect Japanese course for beginners who want to watch netflix.

Check out the video below to see what's so special about Migaku Academy, or check out this blog post to see the science behind what makes our course so effective.

Do I have to make flashcards?

No, you do not have to create flashcards, but they do allow you to get more value out of the time you spend watching content on Netflix.

In my opinion, the flashcard dilemma ultimately boils down to these two quotes from Steve Wozniak, the founder of SuperMemo—the first spaced-repetition (SRS) flashcard tool

Simply watching Japanese content will naturally expose you to thousands of sentences, and this exposure will enable you to naturally learn new words and review old ones. Making flashcards enables you to speed up the process of committing new, important-looking words to memory.

We recommend that you make flashcards out of sentences if (a) they only contain one new word, (b) that word is useful or interesting, and (c) the sentence looks practical to you. Some people do this for every single sentence, others make a certain amount of cards per Netflix session, and others make no flashcards. Where you fall along that spectrum is something you'll find for yourself as you spend more time interacting with Japanese content.

Balancing enjoyment with study

As language learners, we find ourselves in a dilemma: there are many things we'd like to watch in Japanese, but we don't just want to watch. We also want to learn.

This is a balance you'll have to find yourself, but know that both approaches are useful in the long run:

If this is something you struggle with, we recommend watching seriously until you have created a certain amount of flashcards. After reaching that checkpoint, you can watch casually for the rest of your session.

What if I don't have enough money to pay for Netflix?

No problem! Netflix is great, but there's tons of high-quality content available on YouTube for free. Everything we've said up above also applies to YouTube, and Migaku also works with YouTube.

If you check out our Migaku Japanese YouTube channel, we've organized thousands of videos into playlists for total-beginner, upper-beginner, and intermediate learners. You'll be able to find something you enjoy that's suitable for your level 💪

In other words...

Yes! Watching anime or j-dramas on Netflix isn't just a fun way to spend your evening. The audiovisual exposure you get from Netflix is also an incredibly important component of learning Japanese. You'll need to do more than just watch Netflix to learn Japanese, but the majority of the several thousand hours it will take to learn Japanese should be spent consuming real Japanese content.

And if you want the easiest way to turn your binge sessions into genuinely practical learning opportunities—click the button below to try Migaku totally free for ten days, watch like three seasons of some show, and realize how great of an idea this was.