Anime Japanese Decoded is a lookup dictionary for the Japanese you actually hear on screen.

It holds 640 words and phrases, arranged A to Z by romaji, so you can find a word the moment you hear it. Every headword written with kanji carries its reading in kana as well, because the kana is what a Japanese dictionary, a phone keyboard and a search box all run on. Every entry answers the four questions a subtitle never answers: what the word means, how polite or how rough it is, what learners get wrong with it, and which kind of character actually says it.

Written in Japan by a native speaker of Japanese.

The register line is the heart of the book. Japanese carries social distance in almost every sentence, and anime is full of speech that is deliberately far from ordinary polite Japanese. KISAMA and TEMEE are both translated as "you", but one belongs to a villain's monologue and the other to a street fight, and neither can be said to a real person without ending the conversation. ORE, BOKU and WATASHI all mean "I" and all tell the listener something different about the speaker. This book states, for every entry, who says it, to whom, and what happens if you copy it in real life.

The 640 entries are tagged with eight themes: pronouns and names, greetings and set phrases, feelings and reactions, rough and rude speech, sentence endings and particles, fights and shounen, school and daily life, and sound words and effects. Two indexes at the back let you read the book by theme or by importance instead of alphabetically.

A second section covers 50 pairs that are constantly mistaken for each other, with a comparison table, a test that separates them, and the specific wrong answer learners give.

You do not need to read this book from front to back. It is built to be opened at the moment a line confuses you.

Rights: The author name “Yuka Mori” is a pen name of the publisher (Wayuu Bunko), not the name of any other person. The text was written in full by the publisher and contains no reproduction or quotation of work owned by a third party. The cover was made by the publisher and uses no photographs, illustrations or fonts owned by a third party. The book information, the text and the cover are all cleared for use with no rights issues.

Length: the body text runs to about 84,000 words (excluding the table of contents). The number of pages shown on your device changes with the font size you choose.