Was just talking to my friend the other day, the one who started studying Japanese for her trip to japan in November
Despite never studying before, she found she already knew a LOT from anime. she knew how to say “happy birthday” and “it’s hot” and “it’s cold” and “that’s amazing” and “ahh, I see”
On the other hand, her partner…didn’t. Even though he also watched a lot of anime, he didn’t remember as many of the words or phrases
I asked why she thought that might be. She said she wasn’t sure, since she didn’t actively study.
She said “I mean, I like to repeat what the characters say sometimes” and I said “oh, we call that shadowing.” She said “I like to look up the song lyrics and then check what the words mean in English, just for fun.” I said “nice. sounds like vocabulary study.” She said yeah and then me and my friend used to joke around by quoting the shows, like バカ！and ごめん and かわいい and…like, 元気ですか？and, uh, あついですね！and i was like “so…conversation practice”
Don’t get me wrong, maybe some people really do just watch a few TV shows on repeat and the language somehow sticks. But a lot of people who “don’t study” just don’t realize they’re studying, or they naturally did some language acquisition things that you had to actively learn how to do
