people they’ve given no other choice or recourse
I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.
For about 1 year my two sons and I played Rock Band, mostly The Beatles, everyday when they came home from school. At least an hour each day. We played other versions of Rock Band, but the Beatles was easily our favorite.
It directly led one of them to learn the piano and eventually get a master’s degree in composing, and the other to enjoy playing in bands and performing in musical theatre.
I’m currently reading in 3 languages, but a bit more narrowly than you.
When I was a young teen, and reading SF&F books voraciously (sometimes a book a day, or more if I had them), I ran across the Perry Rhodan series.
Finally something I wouldn’t run out of! It started in Germany in 1961, and published a novella weekly since. (They haven’t missed a week, and are currently past issue 3,000.)
The first 150 or so were translated into English and I scoured used book stores until I had all of them.
Now, 50 years later, I spent a week in Germany and bought issue 3323 in a railway station bookstore. My German was never great, and is now worse, so Google Lens has helped me get through it.
When I came home I did some searching and found all the English translations as e-books. I’ve read a couple dozen of the early ones and they are pretty dreadful. My 14-year-old self was not very discerning.
I also found e-versions of the German originals up to about #2000, which I could read laboriously, and French translations of the first 1,000.
The latter is a game changer because my French is good enough to read with only occasional dictionary lookups. Reading with Google books allows me to tap as word and see the English instantly, so it’s quite convenient.
Where we are, these things are stupidly expensive. Almost twice the cost of normal oreos. Is there something there you see something no there’s nothing
That would explain why a pencil, which contains a “lead” (actually a polymer or graphite now) is Bleistift
Accelerando by Charles Stross.
Well, not terribly subtle, but if you are fighting with your spouse and they complain that you never say anything nice about their family, you can respond with:
“Well, I have to say that your in-laws are better than my in-laws”
The other thing I would mention is that even if you learn standard Japanese anime is going to have a huge amount of slang and idioms.
The good thing is that, as in most modern Japanese, it will also have a huge amount of English loan words. The pronunciation may be slightly different, but you can recognize things like “hambaagaa” or “paypaa”.
Of course, sometimes it can go too far, like when I lived in Japan in the 90s and on days when they encouraged people not to drive themselves, it was a “No mycaa dayi” (“No my car day”).