Expert: Akire - 11/20/2009

Question
Greetings. I'm interested in studying Japanese. I'm self taught and I'm thinking anime could be good supplemental material. I'm a huge fan of Studio Ghibli, but I'm on the look out for more good anime. I'm also a Christian and I'd like to stay away from explicit nudity and sexual content. Could you recommend an anime called "Last Exile" to a guy like me? Also, are there others you can recommend? Thanks.
- Erick

Answer
To be honest Erick, I haven't seen Last Exile so I couldn't really tell you how it is. Even if I looked up an episode guide, the best I can do is find summaries so if there are minor details of things that are not too accepted by your beliefs, then I wouldn't know. Of course, the best resource I can give you for that anime is it's wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_exile

If you want anime as a supplement, I honestly don't recommend anything but what are considered children shows such as Doraemon and Anpanman. The reason being that most anime series have very informal and fast, at least to those who are not fluent in Japanese, way of speaking. To try to learn from it wouldn't be as helpful as you think, even for conversation. I am generalizing, and a lot of series may be explicit by your standards due to things such as fan service.

In short, for Japanese, the best thing, as for any language, is immersion. If you have friends who are fluent in Japanese, converse with them. I also recommend taking a class, as a language such as Japanese with completely different characters and grammatical placement from our own language of English may be very difficult to grasp without an instructor.

I hope somehow, what I said has helped and that you pursue your education, but don't rely anime alone to teach you.