Additionally, I’ve watched a handful of episodes of the My Little Pony: FiM Japanese dub both out of curiosity and for Japanese practice (since I already know what’s said having watched them all in English). So since then, with few exceptions, I’ve watched every episode of Pokemon Diamond & Pearl raw, as well as all the following series for Black & White (Best Wishes, Best Wishes 2, and Episode of N) and am currently watching the Pokemon XY anime raw.Įven up until today, besides Pokemon, the only two series I watched raw were, again, kids anime that were fairly easy to understand: Chi’s Sweet Home, a series of 3-minute episodes about the daily misadventures of a kitten, and Arashi no Yoru ni, an anime that came out last year about a wolf and a goat becoming friends despite being natural enemies. My Japanese was already at a high beginning/low intermediate level at that point and, well, it’s just Pokemon, a kids anime with dispensable episodes that don’t get too complex. So I figured, what the heck, I’ll just watch it raw. At first I was gonna try to watch it subbed like all my other anime, but the only group that regularly subs the Pokemon anime in English, PocketMonsters, is incredibly slow with their releases, often starting out fast and then falling weeks behind on episodes.

It was at that time that the Pokemon dub got all new voice actors, most of which I didn’t like, so I made the decision to continue watching Pokemon in Japanese rather than English from then on.

It wasn’t until late 2006 that I finally started watching an anime series raw on a regular basis, the series in question being Pokemon Diamond & Pearl.

And watching anime in Japanese with subtitles is still helpful with learning Japanese anyway. I stuck with the mindset I always had of “If I’m gonna watch something, I want to make sure I understand it as best as I can.” I would study Japanese in other ways, but watching anime was always something I wanted to be engrossed in and be sure that I caught everything that was said. Even when I started my formal study of Japanese in late 2004, I still had no desire to watch anime raw. Everything else I watched in those years was either a dub on TV or with subtitles via fansubs or official DVDs. However a recent post by froggykun got me thinking about the what, why, and when of my viewing of raw anime…įor roughly the first six years of my time as an anime fan, I probably watched less than 10 episodes worth of anime raw, basically all of which were episodes of Pokemon or Mon Colle Knights that I watched raw either out of curiosity or because a good sub/dub wasn’t available to me.

In past posts I’ve talked about the subtitle quality in anime we watch, as well as anime dubs, but I never specifically wrote about watching anime in its “pure” form – raw in Japanese without any subtitles.

Raw anime episodes