The 🤼 プロレス thread! Learning Japanese through pro wrestling

Most of my most broadly applicable tips are in the guide I linked at the beginning of this thread! Though I hate to say it, haha, but consistency is probably one of the most important things (maybe the single most important thing), more so than any one tool or method.

For a more exhaustive list of resources/methods that I’ve personally used to get where I am, my level 60 thread goes into a fair amount of detail. Some stuff has already changed, though, like some of the WK scripts I relied on no longer work, so just keep this in mind.

The biggest thing that has helped me was basically getting dragged kicking and screaming into having to follow my favorite promotion on my own without translation. Actually, it’s kind of strange to think about, but I’m coming up on my two year anniversary of becoming a fan translator, which means that I’ve almost been watching TJPW without Mr. Haku’s translation for longer than I watched it with his work…

But yeah, having to translate all the post-match comments myself has basically forced me to develop a consistent habit of practice, haha. I work on the TJPW translations almost every single day, though the amount of time I put into them each day varies a whole lot. I definitely don’t necessarily recommend getting into full-on translation like I have; it’s a big time suck, very energy-intensive, and you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time on like “how on earth do I word this in English?”, which is time spent not learning Japanese.

But I do think it’s super beneficial to follow the same promotion over a period of time! rodan and I have talked a fair amount about this, how much we’ve benefited from having the same set of voices we’re working with when trying to translate TJPW. You learn people’s individual speaking quirks, which is both really charming as a fan of the wrestlers and also really helpful for understanding them easier. And you have all of the accumulated story knowledge and the context of the matches from following the company over time, which helps clarify things that might be confusing otherwise.

The thing that is most helpful—and most painful—about doing full translations, though, is that when you’re translating, you have nowhere to hide. You have to understand every single sentence. So all of my (many) mistakes are publicly out there in this thread for all to see haha because I need to ask about the things I don’t understand in order to get help on them.

But the flipside of that is that it has given me a very good idea of my own weaknesses. Just a few examples of some things I’ve struggled repeatedly with: long sentences, understanding who the subject is sometimes, 逆に, and as pointed out just above, “よ?” getting interpreted as a sincere question :sweat_smile:.

I guess maybe I’d recommend picking a specific project, though it doesn’t necessarily have to be as big as “translating all of the post-match comments for an entire promotion”. You could follow a wrestler’s twitter account, for instance, or maybe try to read match reports or interviews. Then you can use that to be your source for words to put into Anki.

I restricted myself pretty heavily at first to avoid overloading myself with flash cards. I started out only adding words if I knew all of the kanji in them, and I didn’t add kana-only words. Recently, I’ve started focusing more on onomatopoeia, but they needed a slightly different approach than usual, so I have a different Anki deck for them with entirely different formatting. As far as I know, there are no existing frequency decks for wrestling, and other frequency counts aren’t really representative of the medium, so you sort of have to make your own decisions there. I’ve always just added whatever words I want without really paying much attention to frequency.

I talk about this in my guide, but as far as sources for reading go, the holy grail for me personally has been shupro’s mobile site show recaps (accessing them requires a monthly subscription). This is where I get transcripts of in-ring promos and post-match comments and such. It’s a mild pain to copy and paste them, but it’s not too bad, so I just collect them into a gdoc and then upload each show into smartcat (computer assisted translation software) to work through the translations line-by-line. If you’re reading on the actual site and want to use Yomichan on it, you might need to use an adblocker to zap away the blocks they put in front of the text.

But most promotions have official recaps up on their own sites, so if you’re not after the wrestler dialogue like I am, you could just try reading those without having to pay shupro any money, haha. You’ll learn loads of common wrestling words by reading match recaps, and they’ll typically quote at least some of what’s said in-ring as well.

Shupro also has the magazine, of course, which I know rodan has gotten a lot of use out of! So that’s another option for practicing reading, however, I personally have a harder time with it because the format isn’t conducive for easy look-ups. I have a digital subscription to it that came along with my subscription to the mobile site, but I don’t read the magazine terribly frequently unless I have a lot of free time or am terribly curious about something, because it’s just a lot of work to manually look up everything that I don’t know (and when I tested it, mokuro doesn’t parse shupro very well, so that’s not really a solution).

I guess I personally favor stuff that I can get in a digital text format that I can highlight and copy/paste (and therefore can use Yomichan to read it and create easy flash cards from it). And there’s really no shortage of that in wrestling, so it just comes down to finding something that you can motivate yourself to read! Another possibility, too, are wrestler autobiographies and such that you can get in ebook format.

I guess I should mention that I’ve paired this with regular textbook study this whole time, so it’s not like wrestling is my only teacher or anything, haha. But it is the vast majority of my exposure to real Japanese, and it’s offered me literally daily immersion practice for probably four years now.

I’m looking forward to reading it!! :blush:

I spend a lot of my time talking about stuff either in this thread or in my study log, and I can attest to the fact that it has helped motivate me a whole lot!

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