Owen bestowed upon us a post entitled "The Raw Delusion: Stick to Subtitles, You Poseurs". For an inexplicable reason he posits that the badass raw watchers (BRW) claim, verbatim: "1. You can learn Japanese from watching anime". I don't know where he got a basis for the assumption he ascribes to all BRWs, since it's manifestly false, at least in my case. In fact, I blogged about the impossibility of learning Japanese from just anime. So, I go to classes [^1], and travel to Japan where I produce sentences as complicated as — or, depending on your PoV, as primitive as — "いいです、いいです。やまるないで下さい。和食が大好きが、ちょっと難しいだけです" [^2]. Now, if we allowed the existence of the said poseur, "doing it out of indulgent delusion", Owen's rhethorical effort is somewhat entertaining, but unfortunately, a typical blogging BRW, such as I linked previously, is not one of such. Owen is welcome to scout the blogosphere for suitable examples and lampoon them.

One noteworthy point here is, why "those actually proficient in the language rarely talk about their ability to do so". I think it's obvious: they ceased to extract the sense of accomplishment out of the already mastered skill. By now they blog about getting their Multiengine rating, or mastering the object system in Erlang, or any number of other topics that interest them. Duh.

UPDATE: DM is an exception that confirms the rule.

[^1] At one point I suggested classes to Steven Den Beste, who replied that doing so "feels too much like work". In a sense, he's right of course, but it's still fun. My day job is fun, too.

[^2] It happened when the employees of the hotel's restaurant lined up to apologize for giving me a fish wish the skeleton still inside; I guess watching me working it was agonizing to them. As likely as not, my utterance was highly inappropriate and/or rude, but hey, at least it's not just anime.