Anybody learning Japanese who likes anime will be hard-pressed to find an actual guide on how to watch raw anime without English subtitles or their native language subtitles.
This is a guide on how to do exactly that, watch anime without subtitles (or add Japanese subtitles).
Here is a video version of this guide:
When you try to search for legal ways to watch raw anime, you’ll come across a lot of results that never talk about legality. The way we do this is simple- we can legally watch raw anime by doing the exact same thing a Japanese person would do- whether this is convenient or even doable for you is a different thing, however.
This is the first and most obvious step, however, whether this works or not is wholly dependent on whether the Anime Blueray DVD is still being produced, whether the DVD is still being sold, and whether or not they ship it to your country.
Many sites actually support legally streaming raw anime, some even have Japanese subtitles. To legally watch raw anime online, check out the following sites:
Abema
Crunchyroll
Amazon Streaming
Please note that you may need a VPN to access all of these sites as they could be region locked. On the Japanese sites, you may also need a Japanese Credit Card or a Japanese Address, which I can show you how to get for free in my video on how to get Japanese Audiobooks off Amazon Audible.
If all else fails, go onto the anime’s website and see where they tell you to watch the raw anime. For example, on the website of the anime “Odd Taxi”, it lists all the services you can watch the anime on.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that these legal methods are inconvenient for foreigners. That being said, it’s totally understandable as the biggest market for Anime IS Japan after all, dominating 43% of the market.
The following will be convenient methods for foreigners to watch Raw anime without subtitles or with Japanese subtitles.
Where can you watch raw Anime online for free without English Subtitles or with Japanese subtitles? The answer lies in “Closed Captions” video players. What this means is that any video player on any website that supports “Closed Captions” will give you the ability to simply turn off the subtitles.
One website that supports closed captions on anime is 9anime.vc
This streaming site offers a wide range of anime with closed captions so you can disable the subtitles and watch the anime raw. The anime on this website are also all in HD.
The only downside is that you cannot use Japanese subtitles, but fret not!
You can use Animelon.com to watch Anime with Japanese subtitles instead.
Animelon does not have as many anime available and the website is also very buggy, which means many anime simply won’t load or will bug out in one way or another.
However, when the site DOES work, it is a very simple way to watch raw anime with Japanese subtitles online for free.
This is the ancient tried and true method. The easiest way to watch raw anime without Japanese subtitles is to block your screen with a piece of paper.
This method comes with the pros that it’s extremely easy and anybody can pull it off. However, it comes with many more cons as the entire bottom of your screen is blocked, and more importantly, you can’t use Japanese subtitles and export those subtitles as Anki cards to actually learn Japanese.
The BEST method for watching raw anime with Japanese subtitles is to download the raw anime, then download the Japanese subtitles independently and put them together ourselves. (We don’t need to time the subtitles.)
Download raw anime off Nyaa.si (Torrent)
Download Japanese subtitles for anime from Kitsunekko.net
Once you have these two files downloaded, you already should be able to watch raw anime with Japanese subtitles using any video player by dragging both files in.
You can automate the subtitles going into your video player by using VLC media player and having the subtitles in a folder named “subs” in the same folder as all the video files, then make sure the subtitles have the EXACT same name as the respective video files.
Simply watching the anime is fine, but to truly learn Japanese from watching anime, you’ll have to integrate an SRS system like Anki to actually help make some of the vocabulary and grammar structures stick.
Download the Migaku extension for Chrome (Affiliate)
Migaku is one of the most useful tools for any language learner. We can use Migaku to help us watch raw anime with Japanese subs and automatically mine the anime to create Anki cards SPECIFICALLY with singular words we don’t yet know.
Let’s wind back a bit.
First of all, Migaku knows what words you know and don’t know.
It does this by integrating with Anki and having its own database of all your known words. You can tell Migaku at any time whether you know a word or not and said word will be automatically highlighted and underlined if you don’t know it.
You can instantly look up the definitions using Migaku
Similar to Yomichan, you can import your own dictionaries and frequency lists into Migaku and when you hold Shift while hovering over any word in those dictionaries, the definition will automatically pop up.
You can instantly create Anki cards with Migaku
Once again, similarly to Yomichan, creating an Anki card with an unknown word is simply 1 click away. It also comes complete with the definition, native Japanese speaker audio, example sentences, pitch accent data, and an image.
Automatically create N+1 Sentences using Migaku
“N+1 sentences” are what’s known in linguistics as “Sentences that are slightly above your level”. “N” here refers to your current level, “+1” refers to adding 1 extra word or 1 extra unknown grammar point to that level.
Migaku allows you to easily do this as it can scan the entire anime for every single line spoken- then check which lines have ONE single unknown word and automatically create Anki cards for you.
It also has a feature to make sure you don’t get duplicated words, or to scan for EVERY single unknown word period.
This makes Migaku far more superior than tools like Subs2SRS which may create thousands of junk cards that will never be used.
Cards created by Migaku using this method also comes complete with recordings of the anime so you don’t have to go out of your way to record the audio separately.
These are all the methods to watch raw anime with Japanese Subtitles so you can learn Japanese from anime!
Thanks for reading and I hope it helps!
