俺だけレベルアップな件 S1

Premium slop = ideal immersion material

One of the more annoying things when being in the end-beginner/intermediate stage of learning Japanese is that your ability to understand the language within japanese media is limited. Most good anime are at least around N2 and heavily rely on you understanding the dialogue, or you'll get lost and your enjoyment suffers from it. Therefore I often see myself holding back from watching certain shows and sticking more to my level. Even though those shows tend to be of a specific genre I tend have less interest in.

The problem is that easier content often suffers in quality. In one aspect solo leveling is by no means different. Story wise it's the most generic power fantasy cliche story we've seen being played out in other shows and by no means does it have a good story, but although generic it doesn't hide away from it and instead excels at taking those cliches and making an enjoyable experience out of it. The animation is good, especially the action. The mechanics regarding the main character is pretty game-like and cool to see too.

With that being said, the story being generic had an unexpected plus side to it. It's very easy to follow, even if you understood barely anything you'd likely still be able to follow the main plot somewhat. Not that the Japanese itself is by any means beginner friendly, just that you won't have to worry when you are only understanding for example half of what's being said, because in a show like this you'd really be missing nothing important. Although this can be said for any (slop) show with a similar setting. What sets Solo Leveling apart is its high quality of production and its very frequent action, which makes it very easy to enjoy.

More about the Japanese itself, the dialogue can be a bit hard to follow at times, especially when other characters outside of the mc* are talking to each other (mainly exposition). It also uses tons of more uncommon words that you'd likely not know around N3 (estimation of my level), but many of those unknown words I encountered were composed of kanji known to me and I was able to guess the meaning of the majority of them. The inner monologue the mc has and the action scenes were easier to follow though. Even though it is action oriented it also has a lot of dialogue and so it's also a good resource to better your comprehension grammar wise.

I feel like for language learning this is the perfect immersion material. It has very low invest needed to enjoy, there are barely any consequences when not understanding what is being said and lastly has plenty of dialogue varied in difficulty. You can just put it on and not think too much about it. I've never thought I'd praise this show so much.

Very fun series with pretty good Japanese to study

The anime in itself was very good. The fights, music, animation and voice acting were all top notch. I was very invested in SJW's journey and his development. I found the Japanese to be a little challenging at times, but most of the time I was able to understand. Usually when they got into long-winded conversations I got lost a little.

But overall the concept of the anime is very simple so it's missing a few details isn't a big deal.

Another small problem was the names. Considering the anime was based on a Korean Manhwa, the names in the anime are in Korean and not typical Japanese names you'd expect, which threw me off a couple times, but you get used to it.