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NANA -- general discussion.

I really love NANA for how real it seems, even when it is very soap opera-ish. I guess it just shows how life can be a soap opera, because I believe that everything that has happened so far could really happen.

That's one of the nice things too, I really don't know how this show will end up resolving itself. I can't wait to see.

Ah I see what you mean about the subs. Only one group is subbing it (which is a shame really), but I think Nana is one of the easier raws to understand. I'm not *fluent* in Japanese, have only studied it for about 4 years, but a lot of the situational dialogue is pretty easy to understand in this anime. Most of the time they use casual speech, in varying dialects, and maybe you might have to look up some words or phrases such as spoiler[tsuwari or tamashi, or whatever...(watch enough subs and even cliches that no one uses in real life will come second nature without the subs)] or other less known contextual words. But they speak in terms that normal people can understand, and even these contextual words are normal phenomenon, and you'll know what I mean in a second...

Compared to watching raws of other anime such as My-Otome or Last Exile or Eureka7. Wow I tried that. In addition to the normalcy of speech, you throw in a whole slew of specific contextual phrases derived from Kanji compounds that mean somthing very specific to the show (such as the phenomenon in Eureka, or a lot of other technical, mainly action shows) and then you really have to know what they're talking about in order to make sense of everything. I liked Stand Alone Complex enough to want to watch the raws for that, but I got so frustrated that I ended up just buying the Licensed dubbed DVDs, (and I don't mind the VAs too much for the Western release anyway)

And it's not extremely flowerly Japanese either, like in Ouran or OtoBoku, so you don't have to go mentally truncating off the endings to understand everything. Of coure to begin with maybe my understanding of Japanese from this point is not the best approach, but you learn a lot if you start somewhere like that.

Of course if you really aren't that knowledgeable in Japanese, don't worry about it. Even though I studied it in school, there are great websites like 'about' and 'kanji-a-day' that I used pretty much every time I'd sit down and study Japanese.

And yeah, I love the unpredictability in shows like this because they try to emulate the unpredictability of life as well (like Honey and Clover did)

Just watched episode 35. Is it just me, or is the spoiler[Reira/Takumi] thing completely random? I didn't pick up on it at all O.o

It's not that no one's following it; we're all trying our hardest to follow it, but the fansubbed episodes come out once a month, if we're lucky. I just started trying to learn Japanese this year, so there's no way in heck I'd be able to watch raws. Maybe with a shounen series, but NANA is just too dialogue intensive.

And I agree, not having sound in the manga takes a lot away from the experience, especially if you've seen the anime first.