Sharon Domier's blog

This may be a game changer for a number of people who want to learn more Japanese through anime and film.

Scott Wilson, a UMass Amherst alum who majored in Japanese, reported on the new extension in an article in Sora News 24. He walked through the process of setting up the options and provided screen shots. Being able to read Japanese closed caption with romaji or furigana, option of dictionary lookups, and ability to turn on and off translation is amazing. Scott is right, it is almost too easy:) https://soranews24.com/2020/01/12/free-language-learning-with-netflix-extension-makes-studying-japanese-almost-too-easy

His article is really making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter, garnering all kinds of excitement. Some people just want to watch Terrace House, while others are thinking about the Japanese films that they can watch/read. Keep in mind that there are errors. I was watching one where the text said ? and the reading provided for it was shu but the actor said “sake”. Since you can read, listen, and watch all at the same time, if something weird pops up you can pause the video and double-check. I can’t think of a better way for language learners to add in L2 reading during down time.

Once you download the free extension for Chrome (Language Learning with Netflix) you can also click the link to see recommended programs for your target language (in this case Japanese) and your country of residence (in this case United States). There are 82 listed for me, including a number of series/movies that I have watched in the past. A good mix between anime, series, and movies. Plenty to keep me busy and it is nice to have a quick list to look at rather than browsing all the possibilities (although I will do that as well).

The catalog currently includes 82 titles for Japanese drama/anime/movies that work well with LLN, but there are many more than that in Netflix. For the LLN extension to work correctly (for Japanese language learning), Japanese subtitles need to be an option in Netflix for that title. For example, I checked a Japanese anime A Silent Voice. It has the option of English or Japanese audio, and a number of different languages for subtitles but Japanese is not one of them. So, the first thing you need to check is the Netflix audio/subtitle options.

Giri/Haji is an example where the audio is English (original) but a number of the conversations are in Japanese. Set the subtitles to Japanese on the Netflix side. That will give you the Japanese text (with lookup info). But even if you turn on the Translation language and Display Human translation on the LLN side, it doesn’t work. This would be why this title doesn’t come up on the recommended Japanese list in the catalog. But, it does work for my purposes.

As I play with it, I am coming across things I think I should document so I can save time recreating my steps later. If it is a Netflix Japanese original film and the subtitle option is Japanese (cc) sometimes you will need to turn off the LLN option or nothing appears. That means that you won’t get furigana or the pop-up dictionary options. Other times it works – like Terrace House.

One of the tweaks that I made to my own setup for Japanese is that I chose hiragana rather than romaji for furigana and I turned off the English “human translation” so that I wasn’t tempted to cheat and read the English. Depending on the video, I can easily turn it back on.