StarOcean on 03 January 2016
No, they don't help. Unless you know the basics of Japanese (1 to 3 years of taking Japanese) watching anime will not be able to help you learn the language. It might be different if you are Chinese which Japanese borrows from, but if you're going from English to Japanese, it won't help you much at all XD I took Japanese in high school, it's a very different language from English 
If you want to learn a different language, take a language course. If you use anime as your only point of reference for anime you end up only learning to speak weaboo... ugh, flashback to the anime clubs back in high school x~x
