名探偵コナン S1

A fun detective comedy that is easier than you may think!

A fun episodic detective comedy!

I think this show is more approachable than the high difficulty rating may make it seem (35 at time of writing), and I think it is a great pick for learners.

I'll start with the most difficult thing about the show, and that is talking speed. Sometimes the characters talk very fast, and each episode's new case introduces new characters that will will have varied talking speeds/voices.

But this show has a lot of pros for language learning!

• The vocabulary used in the show is filled with common words. The main specialized words are a handful of words related to crime that you may know already (witness, suspect, murder, etc).
• After the first couple episodes set up the premise of the show, there is almost no ongoing plot development during the season. Each episode is an entirely contained case (or rarely, a 2-episode case). If there is an episode that is more difficult for you, you never have to worry about it again! Even if you miss some details in a particular case, you won't be missing some crucial detail for an overarching plot.
• The episodes are very formulaic, and the show does a very good job of acting out the details of the crime visually. So even if you get entirely lost in the dialogue, you will still be able to tell from the visuals who did it, so you can still get some satisfaction from the episode.
• There is a lot of it. The series has been running longer than One Piece, and has even more episodes (over 1,100). So if you enjoy it, you have a lot of great practice material you can go through.

I recommend watching with JP subtitles if you can, so if a line of dialogue is way too fast you can pause and read it instead.

P.S. If you watch this on a streaming site that auto-skips the end credits, make sure to cancel! There is about 1 minute of episode after the end credits of every episode.