I’ve written before about how anime is a very stylized world, where characters can have impossibly large and expressive eyes along with hair colors and styles that no Japanese person in history has ever possessed. In a similar way, the speech of characters is also stylized, often as removed from the Japanese spoken by actual people as the speech of pirates (yar!) or Yoda from the Star Wars films. A female character might speak a dialect used by samurai warriors from the Edo Period for no particular reason, or might otherwise violate social norms, for example the way Tomoyo speaks with rude Japanese to the other characters in Clannad despite the fact that she’s younger than all of them. When an ojosama (well-bred rich girl) opens her mouth, she’s essentially paying homage to Ocho-fujin from the classic tennis anime Aim for the Ace, and there’s an extensive body of phrases these characters use that you’ll never hear outside of anime. Similarly, every — every! — old man in anime speaks a strange “old man dialect” of Japanese, replacing the first person pronoun with washi for example, though I’ve never met a real person who actually talks like this. In the currently running Persona 4 anime, the bizarre creature called Kuma speaks his own dialect of Japanese (-kuma!), saying the word “kuma” several times during a sentence (-kuma!). It’s quite annoying (-kuma!) in a Jar Jar Binks sort of way. Bottom line, don’t rely too much on anime if you’re trying to learn the language, or very strange things will happen.
Anime is filled with stylized language that doesn’t exist at all.
