Will immersing in certain genres of content for a long time make my speech inappropriate for my identity?

Hi! In the past I have heard other Japanese learners say that women speak Japanese very differently from men and that learning Japanese purely from copying slice of life/CGDCT material will make you sound obviously effete and feminine if you are a male. Is it something to worry about?

Yes, there are sizable gender differences in Japanese. Men and women speak and act differently, use different expressions, pronouns and sentence endings. People also change how they speak as they age. A 75-year-old man doesn't sound the same as a 15-year-old girl. This is true for many other languages as well.

When you're a beginner, you're still mastering the basics. The basic, common components of the language are the same across all language domains. You're free to choose any domain with easy language, and slice-of-life anime is a good choice. The fact that the average Japanese person on the street can understand the Japanese in an anime without special study or work shows that the language used isn't that far removed from natural everyday Japanese. Otherwise, Japanese people wouldn't be able to understand it.

Copying how girls talk in anime will make you sound like an anime girl. But it's usually easy to notice and learn the differences between male and female speech patterns in Japanese. The differences between anime Japanese and real-life Japanese, men's speech and women's speech, etc., are mostly surface-level things such as first-person pronouns and sentence enders. These are surface dressings that give a certain type of Japanese its own flavor, but beneath that surface dressing all of the fundamentals are actually the same.

So it's hard to imagine someone with high comprehension in Japanese who still doesn't understand how to sound male or female in Japanese, or who doesn't know the differences between anime Japanese and real-life Japanese. The more you immerse and get exposed to different domains of the language, the more differences you see, and the easier it gets for you to shape your own speech. In AJATT, you don't start speaking from day one; instead you wait until you understand speech perfectly, and by that time your language intuition will be up to the task. You'll know how anime-girl speech differs from real-life Japanese, that anime girls often don't sound natural, and that you shouldn't copy them. So even if hypothetically you learned Japanese entirely through slice-of-life anime, realistically it would only take a few weeks of listening to natural and scripted Japanese for you to learn how to shift the surface-level features of your own speech to match natural everyday unscripted Japanese.

Overexposure to certain domains, however, can cause you to accidentally say something inappropriate. This can be fixed with imitation exercises and with immersion in a wider range of domains. Of course, the best way to learn how to speak natural conversational Japanese is to immerse in everyday conversations. You can find those on YouTube, for example.

Don't use any anime, especially CGDCT anime, for imitation practice. I.e., don't repeat anything anime girls say because no one speaks like that, not even real Japanese women.

Lastly, if you're a beginner and you're watching CGDCT anime all the time, consider also watching something with male characters, like Hokuto no Ken. The language in that anime is still quite easy. There are almost no cute girls to teach you the wrong speaking habits. Even better is something that features real people, such as YouTube, documentaries.

Tags: faq