I learned a ton of Japanese from anime. I also took two semesters in college, but anime was a huge portion. I signed on as a translation cleanup guy for a fansub group back in the day. We had a guy in Japan who could write broken English for the dialogue in anime episodes, and then I was the guy who was excellent with English but only had a basic grasp of Japanese (grade school level). Between us, we could get a script.

I learned more from cleaning up his scripts than I EVER did in two semesters of college.

Nowadays, I am not sure what the word for it is, but I can understand spoken Japanese at a high level but I cannot speak back very fluently. My spoken word is full of pauses as I try to think of the right word. But if you speak to me in Japanese, I understand very well.

So… is the meme accurate? I guess partially. It’s not like I would ever call myself fluent. I can just watch anime without subtitles now.