Anime Review: Eyeshield 21

Taken from Learn Japanese Today:

So I’ve been talking a lot lately about this anime I’m watching, Eyeshield 21. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the big draw it has for me is that it’s about American football, something I know a lot about, and so I can just focus on the Japanese. Giant robot shows are all well and good, but you should save them until your nearly fluent. Watch shows with mostly everyday language.

Also, I want to add that this isn’t a regular old anime review. I’m not going to go into character development or art quality or anything like that. This review is for showing you how this anime compares to others for learning Japanese. But, it is REALLY good. The characters are interesting, and I just want to hug Kurita (the big fat lineman that looks like he was drawn by a first-grader) every time he’s on the screen.

Ease of Use: 8

There are a lot of characters that speak in fast, rough male Japanese, which can be hard to interpret, but you have to get used to it sometime. However, the main character and the female characters are usually pretty easy to understand, so you can get sentences for your SRS there. The player on Crunchyroll isn’t ideal for repeating dialogue multiple times, but it doesn’t entirely suck either. I’ll admit at this point, I don’t have a huge amount of experience of mining subtitles from other anime on other players, so I don’t really know. It’s pretty easy to use, could be easier.

Oh. And the subtitle are fantastic.

Authenticity: 6

Again, lots of rough males. This is a way some people talk in Japanese (saying things like ore-sama and temee), but not nearly to the extent shown in this show. The show also has a high tendency towards gimmicky characters, such as an entire team based off ancient Egypt with the pharaoh as the quarterback, and these contrived situations usually lead to contrived dialogue and terrible puns, so watch out for those. Also, a lot of these gimmicky characters tend to speak in weird ways that people don’t usually talk. For example, the aforementioned pharaoh always uses yo instead of ore or some other version of I. Yo means “mine” according to the subtitle, but I haven’t been able to find it in a dictionary. Just watch out for that sort of thing.

Quantity of Knowledge: 7

Well, I’m not sure how to judge this. There are over 140 episodes. Then again, a lot of football related words are in katakana, so I’m inclined not to count them as highly. But generally, there is a pretty high concentration of dialogue in episodes.

Price: 10

Free via CrunchyRoll .

Fun: 10

I’ve been having a ball with this one. I hope you do too.

Overall:8.1

I’m sure there are better shows for learning, but this one is really engaging and not too difficult to pick up stuff from. Also, it’s exceedingly well subtitled, and that’s always good. I really like it, i hope you do too.