Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition Through Watching Japanese Anime with English Subtitles

Abstract

 This study discusses incidental vocabulary acquisition through watching Japanese anime with English subtitles. This study aims to instill the impact of the method on the acquisition of understanding in 25 third-semester cadets from the Ship Machinery Engineering Technology (TRPK) Batch 59 at Polytechnic Bumi Akpelni. These cadets followed an experimental design with a pre-test and post-test.The experiment was conducted in five sessions through the program "Watching Anime for Fun with TRPK." The first session involved a pre-test and initial treatment, where participants watched Japanese anime with English subtitles. The titles including:  Naruto: Road to Ninja, One Piece: Strong World, Detective Conan: Quarter of Silence, Bleach: Hell Chapter, and Pokémon: Kyurem vs. the Force Awakens. Participants were not allowed to use a dictionary or ask friends about the meaning of words, so learning took place incidentally. In the last session, a post-test and questionnaire were filled out. The results showed a significant increase in knowledge acquisition. The average pre-test score of 58.08 increased to 72.64 in the post-test, an increase of 23.95%. The t-test showed a significant difference (4.136 > 2.064). This indicates that watching Japanese anime with English subtitles has a positive impact on cadet vocabulary learning.