Okay, now i'm interested in how you people are seeing all these shows? You're either spending a lot importing DVDs from Japan or just buying the UK versions. Or watching them on whatever channel they end up on?

Oh and do most of you understand Japanese to an extent?

Well I'm popping to Japan in a couple of days, so might pick up some DVDs. Then there's the wonder of YouTube, where we can catch a few episodes to see if something's worth a purchase. Sky also have an Anime channel, which shows a few things.

Generally what we do, though, is risk a few bob on something and see if we like it. Play.com are great for the occasional Anime sale :)

So is it a bit hit and miss? I was thinking, as we share DVD reigon with Japan we could just buy theirs and learn Japanese.

--edit

I just realised I'm on a website where people are talking about anime they are watching... and why they may be doing that given the above question.

Rental, baby! If you subscribe to an online DVD rental service, you can sample shows at your leisure or watch whole series for buttons. Pop a couple of titles you like the look of in your rental queue, and if they turn out to be pony you've lost nothing but time. Using this method I discovered (and later bought) among many others, Vision of Escaflowne, Serial Experiments Lain, Haibane Renmei and PlanetES - some of the best shows of the last ten-plus years.
Now if Revolutionary Girl Utena could be reissued on Region 2, my life would be complete....

I can't speak for others but I can attest that if you watch enough anime you will begin to imagine you have a working understanding of Japanese. Not true! (or for form's sake, perhaps I should say Chigau !)

Yes indeed. I have known many people who have picked up what could be considered a decent vocabulary through watching anime (in that they knew a lot of words), but in reality they had no real understanding of how the language works and were completely incapable of holding a simple, everyday conversation in Japanese.

Fun fact: a lot of Japanese courses and schemes like the JET Programme tend to pass you over if you tell them you're an anime/manga fan. And having known enough of these sorts of people, I have no doubt it's because there's no small number of lazy anime fans who have enthusiastically signed up to such things in the past, only to quit after a few months when they realise they have to actually do some work and can't just get away with shouting "neko genki wai!" at people.

Which languagy thing they use is used most in Anime / Manga? A japanese work collegue suggested Hirigana (?) then Katakana (?) No way I'd learn all those Kanji.

Which lettering system you use won't matter so much for anime - you're listening to the words then, rather than reading, so it's more important to grasp vocab and grammar.

For reading and writing, you will have to learn some kanji. There is no escaping that. Kana systems are phonetic lettering systems - hiragana for Japanese words, katakana for foreign words - and while it's important to learn them, if you only learn them you'll be crippled. The Japanese consider someone who can only read and/or write in kana to be very infantile and under-educated.

A lot of manga do help you out by having furigana - small kana text that acts as a pronunciation guide for kanji - so if your vocabulary is good you can figure out the meaning from that, but there are a lot of homophones in Japanese so knowing the kanji makes things a lot easier. And if you want to read seinen manga (Death Note, Monster, Gunnm, to name a few), there won't be any furigana at all.

In short - you don't have to learn every kanji, I don't think even the average Japanese person knows every single kanji. But you will have to learn some.

Yup. The basic set is only 2,000. Consider that akin to learning 2,000 new words. Bearing in mind that you're speaking English, a language with approximately 600,000 words in common vocabulary (unlike, say, French which only has 200,000 in common usage), so picking up another couple of thousand isn't the hugest challenge in the world if you really crack down on it. Even just half an hour a day practicing Kanji will get you a long way in a short amount of time.

An excellent starter book is Teach Yourself Beginner's Japanese Script by Helen Gilhooly. I found it most useful because, unlike a lot of kanji learning systems, it teaches you the word in Japanese as well as giving you the English meaning - just learning the English meaning of kanji really ticks me off.

It also teaches you the origins of more complex kanji, which helps considerably when it comes to figuring out what unknown kanji might mean.

It's complex though, all those written languages.. I tried to figure out how to spell Igniz or Ignis in Japanese, and ended up translating back into Latin and that into fire or "hi" or ひ. Apparently.

I'm just glad it's not in chinese.

But anyway, with me behind the curve i'm thinking of Seriel experiment: Lain, Mushi-shi and maybe Kino's journey.

Kept seeing trailers (in Japanese) for Kino's journey and thinking it was a boy on some bike fighting people, having looked it up it sounds completely different.

But ひ in and of itself does not mean "fire", it just means, well, ひ. If you went with 火 instead, then you'd have a symbol that meant something.