Hi there! I started learning japanese 3 weeks ago. It’s been a really wonderful experience so far, and I’m enjoying it much. I started learning hiragana with Duolingo, and I’m able to read and write on it. Katakana is still pending, but it will come soon. I alao started with the free Wanikani levels in order to not let the Kanji nightmare for the end, and it’s going quite well. I alao got the Genki books, and I’ve started working on them. I don’t plan to rush it, since I work and play on a team sport, so I tend to dedicate 2-3 hours a day along these resources. I believe this IS also a good way to not getting burnout early on.
However, this post came to my mind while learning kanjis/vocabulary through Wanikani. I realised how I already knew some words due to anime or videogames that I watched during mynlife. Things like 水 sui (Pokemon Suicune, the water/ice monarch), or Gohan (fron Dragon Ball) felt incredibly easy to remind due to them being attached in the back of my head to concepts that I’m really familiar with. Due to this, I wanted to create this post in order to ask anyone to drop any word like this.
There’s obviously the loanwords that made it into popular english, too. 津波、カラオケ、空手、寿司、さよなら(?)、切腹…
It’s kind of a two part, MHA is a bit of a special case since everybody has pun names in that one, but also Japanese is one of those languages where meaning was preserved in the characters of names that are simultaneously considered normal. English/other language names obviously also contain meanings, but they usually get divorced from them – nobody remembers Ryan means ‘little king’, for instance.
First that comes to mind is Riku and Sora from Kingdom Hearts.
Then there’s this anime that was very popular with my age group 銀牙流れ星銀 ぎんかながれぼしぎん(Silver Fang in English) which had lots of untranslated names like Akame, Benizakura and Akakabuto.
There’s also Dragon Ball, Inuyasha, One Piece, Death Note, Naruto and some others that I read in in Finnish so it’s mostly the names that have helped with learning language.