Don’t mind me, I’m just piggybacking on the topic of the moment if only to go off on an entirely unrelated tangent in order to get this weight off my chest, hence its relevance-yet-not-quite. The title references something you may or may not be familiar with; of special note in that article is the quote by Robert Pirsig that goes “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”
Now, substitute “religion” in that sentence with “raw watching” and you’ll see where I’m going with this.
Don’t walk away yet! I’ll make it worth your while, I promise, and not just because I’m using something called ‘logic’, a rare and underutilised substance in these parts.
First of all, though, here’s the Raw Hypothesis in easy to digest point (and numbered!) form, a hypothesis which, I presume in turn gave birth to the practice of raw watching:
- You can learn Japanese from watching anime.
- Following which, if you watch enough subtitled anime, you reach a point where your understanding of it raw (i.e. in its original format, sans subtitles or translation of any sort) is good enough to never need translation of any sort.
Perfectly reasonable, right? Well, I’m sure this might be shocking to some of you, but here’s what happens when we substitute this supposedly sound theory with other things. Other more regular and orthodox examples that you see on media, for example:
- You can learn cooking from watching episodes of The Naked Chef.
- Following which, if you watch enough videos of renowned chefs cooking, you reach a point where your understanding of cooking is perfect, enabling you to cook anything whatsoever.
Or how about another?
- You can learn golf from watching replays of Tiger Woods.
- Following which, if you watch enough matches of skilled golfers playing, you reach a point where your understanding of golf is so complete that a hole-in-one becomes child’s play.
Quite convincing, isn’t it? Not. This reasoning, which would seem asinine anywhere else, is uncomfortably tolerated in this corner of the internet to the point where disastrous things like the return of the hilariously inaccurate subtitles are considered non-noteworthy, something to be ignored, or even worse, defended! Such fallacious thinking in this post-modern age of stupidity The Land of Do-As-You-Please the internet disgusts me. Since when did faking it become cool?
There seems to be nothing but confusion with regards to the intricacies of a language, or what the stuffy English major in me knows as lexical content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and function words (pronouns, conjunctions, determiners, prepositions etc.)–something that seems to fly over the heads of most self-professed raw watchers, especially those who claim they don’t need subtitles anymore. A tip: Knowing the latter doesn’t mean you do the former. Since when did familiarity with stock phrases and sentences mean proficiency in a language?
Here’s a clue–all because you know the fundamentals of syntax and grammar, and are barely able to wrap your pitiful mind around those concepts doesn’t mean that everything else is going to fall into place. So you know where what the wa determiner does, or that the copula desu doesn’t go after every sentence, or something like that. Great! All you need to do now is to get that gargantuan bulk of yours off that chair in front of your PC and your hands on Japanese For Beginners, and we might be going somewhere.
If you ask me, the very idea of raw watching and Japanese osmosis through anime is an affront to all those out there who learn Japanese the hard way (not anime, you idiot, real classes)–hell, I’d say that it’s an affront to all those who have learnt or are learning a second language, and worked their butts off for it. What you’re trying to say is that watching 20 minute episodes of animation somehow acquaint you with the language through prolonged exposure, right?
So here’s the deal: If you lay off telling me how you are magically able to comprehend raw anime through mere language osmosis and nothing else, I’ll get off your case. For all purposes, I think Zyl’s recent public self-flagellation is a positive step in the right direction, for what better way to admit you have a problem than to start by shamefacedly admitting that you actually know a whole lot of nothing?
Oh, I can already guess how the arguments are going to go. “Owen, you poor sod,” you say, “not everybody thinks that way! You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, precisely because the people you mix with are a warped, vocal minority, a pretentious, facetious bunch that desire to tower over those filthy plebeian sub watchers!” Believe me, I know. But the fact remains that there are people who claim to understand Japanese in order to demonstrate their so-called superiority over you, and when they fail to back that claim up, well, it’s nothing short of pitiful.
For every ten people who do out of sheer desperation, there’s going to be one or two who do it out of indulgent delusion. For every sane person who isn’t convinced that they are now Nihongo par excellence as a result of their weekly ‘education’, there’s going to be another who thinks otherwise, and won’t stop telling you in a casual yet oh-so-infuriatingly-vapid manner that they’ve seen and heard it all, much quicker than you ever will. This isn’t a case of the emperor’s new clothes anymore, it’s an entire village parading in the nude!
I don’t get it. You, the average raw watcher, can no more comprehend 80-90% of what is being said in your average anime than I can conjure up swords from thin air, yet you claim to do so through repetition alone! Maybe if I mutter “Trace, on.” and “Composition, analyse.” to myself long and hard enough, I might be able to forge some blades out of nothing.
And I’m not talking about the internet swords that I use to cut people down to size, either. It’s amusing to note how those actually proficient in the language rarely talk about their ability to do so, but I guess that’s what they mean when they say that the emptiest cans rattle the loudest.
Loading ...