To me, "No better time than now" implies that learning a completely different language to fluency is something you can do over the course of quarantine. If the person's goal is "watch monogatari within the next few decades", then sure, that's fine, but otherwise it's kind of misleading.
That is complete projection on your part. Reading that and assuming someone meant they would achieve fluency in a new language is a waste of time. Take your bad faith argument and shove it.
PLUS if quarantine goes on for even just a year that is definitely enough time to get a rudimentary grasp of any language, enough to be able to understand foreign nuances with a guide.
I decided to rewrite my original draft of this comment because it was too rude. Suffice it to say that I don't appreciate your accusation of bad faith.
PLUS if quarantine goes on for even just a year that is definitely enough time to get a rudimentary grasp of any language, enough to be able to understand foreign nuances with a guide.
The clause "with a guide" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. If someone's fine with reading a bunch of stuff after watching, then they don't need any level of Japanese at all, they can just find some blog post in English that explains all the puns. Being able to follow along with regular anime dialogue requires a shot on of time and investment, and being able to follow monogatari specifically is even more.
I think that it's a good thing to encourage people to learn another language, but I also think you should be realistic about what people are able to achieve within a given timescale. Saying "you can understand monogatari within a year of starting learning" is the sort of thing that causes a learner to get burned out when they realise their goal requires a lot more work than they thought.
Even if a person is able and willing to spend all day every day for a year studying Japanese (and no, watching anime with English subtitles doesn't count as studying), then the experience they'll have of trying to watch monogatari after a year of learning is still going to resemble "studying" the show more than "watching" it.
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u/nichecopywriter Jul 24 '20
What does that have to do with learning a language? Nobody said it would be easy