That's a cute sentiment but there is no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language. I think you're confusing the movie 13th Warrior for reality.

I have friends who religiously watch subtitled anime only and they are no closer to learning Japanese in any real sense of the word than a person who would watch the dubs, except for picking up a stray random word here or there, but knowing that kawaii means "cute" doesn't give you even a superficial understanding of Japanese. For that, you need to at least pick up hiragana and katakana.

Learning a language requires deliberate work. There is no shortcut.

English and Japanese are very different.

I speak Spanish. Subtitles have helped me a lot when languages are similar. I watched three seasons of a Catalan TV show subtitled in Spanish, and now I can follow conversations and read it. Before that I wasn't able to understand spoken Catalan.

Some language pairs were this may work are:

- Spanish/Catalan

- Portuguese/Spanish

- Dutch/German

> no evidence that merely being exposed to a foreign language necessarily allows you to learn that language

Um, that's how babies learn, I think there is plenty of evidence in every baby on the planet.

People stop learning this way when they start thinking of languages as barriers.

Subtitles won't really help with sentence structure or conjugations, but it does help a lot with building vocabulary once you have the basics of sentence structure.