I happened to see an article that officially declared anime and manga to be good ways of learning a foreign language. This didn’t come as news to me, since I’ve used this method to assist my Japanese studies ever since the beginning. Manga can be a good tool for studying Japanese because it’s mostly spoken dialogue, which gives you lots of input to read and understand and (eventually) to use yourself. The kanji used in manga may seem challenging at first, but in truth only 500-700 characters are used in most manga, often with furigana (hiragana characters written above a kanji character to help with pronunciation), so it’s not that hard to get the hang of reading. I also used anime to teach my kids English, “strategically” buying boxed sets of series they wanted to watch then pretending that there was only an English track on the disc. (I also made sure 100% of the movies we watched were imported from the U.S., so they had to get them in English or not watch them at all.) Of course, you have to take the Japanese used in anime and manga with several grains of salt and remember that it’s as stylized and unique as the English used in movies. Don’t make the mistake I did, learning most of my Japanese from Fist of the North Star and walking around talking like Kenshiro, if you can avoid it!
My kids learned English basically so they could watch my “English only” Rayearth DVDs.
