BritVsJapan

Using Reddit to Learn Japanese

Are you trying to immerse in Japanese but find yourself using the English side of reddit everyday?

Have you already reached a high level of Japanese and want to expand your cultural knowledge?

Are you a beginner of Japanese, looking to dive straight into native content to speed up your learning?

Whatever your situation I highly recommend you make use of the Japanese threads that are available on reddit.

These subreddits are on a variety of different topics and they can give you a real insight into normal everyday Japanese and “internet Japanese”.

One thing to note though, Japanese don’t tend to use Reddit as much as the English side of the internet do.

In fact, reddit is pretty much dead in Japan. But even if it’s dead, you can still learn a lot from old posts in these subreddits.

This post is a great resource though as you will find a massive variety of Japanese sites that you would never have known about before, so I definitely recommend going through and taking a look at some of the subreddits here.

If you want a similar experience to reddit then the Japanese have a similar site, which is incredibly popular, called 2ちゃんねる which I also suggest checking out.

What is Reddit?

From wikipedia: “Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Reddit’s registered community members can submit content such as text posts or direct links. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down that determines their position on the page.”

It is essentially a massive forum that contains content for just about an topic you can think of. Food, pets, books, games, meditation, literally anything!

It is an incredibly popular site that contains a lot of amazing high quality content, but most of it is in English and it is pretty difficult to find “subreddits” that are in another language besides English unless you already speak that language.

So today I have gathered as many subreddits that are written in (native) Japanese for you Japanese learners out there looking for native content to get your teeth immersed into.

I started writing this post ages ago and forgot about it. Some of the translations may not be accurate as I suck at translating between the two languages and because I translated a lot of this way before I reached fluency. I got the original list from some link I found on the Japanese side of the internet somewhere which I’ve since lost track of.

Please also note that I haven’t checked every single link either. There maybe some content in this list that you might not want to look at in front of your family members or at work, you have been warned. I’ve tried to remove most of the NSFW threads from the original list as possible but if you find any please tell me and I’ll remove them. 

So without further ado, here’s the list.

The Ultimate List of Japanese Subreddits (SFW)

Technology

Reddit

SciFi

Social Media

Anime and Manga

Internet

Card Games

Gravure

Ｇrotesque

Games

Sports

Smartphone Games

Software

TV/Radio

News

Comedic Material

Internet

Online Games

Internet short stories

Programming

Horror

Mascot characters

Mystery

Media

Lifestyle

Radio

Personal

Photos

International

Entertainment

Studying

History

Religion

Commentary

Home Electrical Products

Reddit Browsers

Technology/Engineering

Politics and Economics

Literature

Travel

Film

Morning soap opera

Combat Sport

History

Law

Animals

Images

Society

Science

Jobs

The Arts

Questions

Hobbies

Other

Chatting

Music

Food and Drink

All in all I think there could be some gems in here that will be very useful to some of you. I haven’t checked all the threads myself though so if any are inactive or have content that isn’t appropriate then please tell me and I will remove them from this list. 

Hopefully you found this post useful and as always,

Thanks for reading!

Matthew Hawkins

Undergraduate Software Engineer and Language Enthusiast.

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