Learn Japanese with Anime – New Free Resources!

July 2020 Update

Animelon and ANJsub now fully functioning (please let me know in the comments if you have news)

We’ve always advocated learning Japanese with anime here at KawaJapa. It can be done and it should be done!

However, to actually learn anything you need subtitles. Japanese subtitles. English subtitles won’t help you learn Japanese with anime, and just listening to things you don’t understand or barely understand won’t do much good either.

Back when I started, and when I started writing about it, getting quantities of Japanese-subtitled anime was a somewhat complicated business. Usually you had to find the anime and the subtitles in two different places and tie them together by hand – often re-timing them several times.

Fortunately for you (you young folks have it so easy these days) there are simpler ways to do it now.

We are currently aware of 4 sites that stream Japanese subtitled anime with a variety of useful features for learners (if you know of others or any changes, please let us know). All of them are free and while there is considerable overlap in the anime they serve, between them they cover a very wide range:


Japanese-subtitled Anime: free resources

Animelon The oldest-established free Japanese-subtitled anime streaming site.

ANJSub is now functioning again and you can find it here.

If you become aware of others please let me know.


This video gives a full introduction to sites of this type and how best to use them for actually learning Japanese:

All sites have both Japanese and English subtitles and allow you to turn them on and off at will. I strongly advise not watching with English subtitles because the human brain is hardwired to take the line of least resistance and you won’t learn much even if you think you will.

However, English subtitles can be useful for when you aren’t sure what a particular expression or way of speaking in Japanese means. If you use them for this, it is better to do a quick check by switching a single subtitle to English while paused and then switching back to Japanese before restarting. Think of it as a quick look-up tool rather than a functioning subtitle.


Side-note: if you find you’re having to use the English a lot, you’re probably having trouble with grasping Japanese language structure. No one teaches it the way it really is. Please watch this series.

/side-note


Also note that you can use Yomichan to pick up, read kanji, get definitions and auto-create Anki cards directly from the on-screen subtitles. You can even have it scoop up the anime sentence in which a word appears and place it on the back of your card as a sample sentence.

There is a lot of good anime between the various sites, including all of Ghibli on Anime Japanese Subtitles and the delightful Shirokuma Cafe on Animelon. Not to mention all the regular shounen stuff that I tend not to bother with.

I used not to be a fan of streaming anime, but these two sites have changed my habits radically. Recently I’ve been enjoying Flying Witch, Hotarubi no Mori e and Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo. Being a doll I tend to like gentler anime with fantasy themes, but whatever your taste you’ll find things you like on these sites.

If you are starting to learn Japanese with anime, life just got a whole lot easier!

14 thoughts on “Learn Japanese with Anime – New Free Resources!

  1. Using the video and subtitle sources from the Anime Japanese Subtitles website, I made which loads faster and has no ads.

    1. Thank you for letting us know and my apologies for the slow approval. For some reason our security bot thought your post was spam. I’ll take a look at your site later and probably add it to the main article. No ads would be a blessing!

      Thank you for your work.

      EDIT: The link you supplied was a dead link. Please re-submit with a working link.

        1. I’m terribly sorry! I somehow missed your comment and left your location uncorrected! It’s correct now. If you change things again and don’t get a response from me, it will be because I’ve somehow missed it. Please feel free to nag me in my Channel comments or anywhere – I do try to keep information up to date.

          I’ll be doing a video on anime learning resources soon so I hope that will give you a boost.

          1. Thanks for the information. I’ll update the article shortly. Hoping to get the video out at the end of the week.

  2. Netflix is the only option on this list without a free version, but Netflix is worth the $7.99 a month for instant streaming. My favorite part about watching anime on Netflix is that you can switch seamlessly between watching with Japanese audio and English subtitles to watching the dubbed version with English audio. Dubbed or subbed? You decide.

    1. But can you get Japanese audio with Japanese subtitles? That’s the only thing that’s any real use for learning Japanese.

      1. You can play Japanese audio with Japanese CC subs. With the Language Learning for Netflix Chrome Extension you can learn just like on Animelon.

      2. Hey, Cure Dolly, sorry for the late answer, but I just started using Netflix and I can confirm that some of the shows do have both Japanese audio and Japanese subtitles. Sadly, Inuyasha, for example, only has Japanese audio, but Evangelion has Japanese audio and subtitles! This being said, I find it very useful that shows like Inuyasha still have the Japanese audio with no english subs as we can still read the subtitles separately on another document, or watch the show without subs for listening practice. I struggled to find anime on the web without english subs to the point that I had to put paper on my screen to block the english words! Netflix really makes it a lot easier, so I was happy to find this out. I hope other people can get use out of Netflix, too, if they have it or don’t mind paying. Thank you for reading, Dolly!

        1. Thank you for this information. I don’t have Netflix myself so I am happy that you shared this for others.

  3. Looks like Daiweeb is down. It’s a shame, ’cause I really liked that one. But, the show must go on, even if every website gets taken down. Thank you for the resources, Dolly.

  4. Hey. Thank you so much. I’m scouring your videos. I’m desperate to learn Japanese. I’m using animelon in conjunction with anki, but is there an easy was to get the audio off their site, or do I have to go elsewhere for that?

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