Since my 5th grade at school I had been watching a lot of movies in English with English subtitles.

When there appeared a word that was vital for keeping up with the story, I always paused the movie, looked it up in the dictionary and replayed that dialogue part once again and kept on watching.

I felt that repeating this process every time I heard an important new word helped with my understanding of movies and made me progress in listening.

Now I'm doing the same with japanese. If there is a word that is vital for understanding of the story ,I pause the drama, write the word to google and look it up with anki.

What's good about it:

*I can practice my recognition of heard japanese syllables and type them in.
*As I don't use any subs, it's the only way to understand the story so I have no choice...
*It helps to learn vocab, at least the most important words in that specific drama.
*It's almost effortless, because it's part of the watching process. Doesn't feel like studying.
*It doesn't take much time
*It's better than only watching...

As someone who has not yet learned a second language:

*I recommend the easiest possible material you can find that's still interesting for you. This way there's more likely to be many words you know and few you don't. It's critical that it be this way. Too many words you don't know will stop you from understanding the meaning, then you'll lose interest, then you'll either not look up words or stop watching.

I am doing a modified version of this with HeartCatch Precure which currently airs on TV in Japan. I don't live in Japan, so downloading TSes is a pain, but at least it airs with subtitles. The modification I use is to watch with subtitles. Why Precure is good:

1) Long dramatic pauses. Not every line, but most of them, have dramatic pauses, and every single character uses them. I have no idea why they actually pause like that so often in Precure. Maybe the voice director just likes that style? Examples later; my work computer does not have Japanese support anymore.
Long dramatic pauses (maybe more like short dramatic pauses?) help for two reasons:
A) they slow down the WPM count, which helps you understand and
B) they identify word boundaries, which helps you understand

2) They use mostly common words. Honestly I thought I could not understand anything in Japanese until I tried this. I was able to understand more than half of it! I understood every scene except for one. I was really surprised by that. Note that I am using subtitles. If you took them away it would quickly drop to less than half. Using mostly common words will:
A) help you to understand what's going on, thus maintaining your interest
B) allow you to focus on words you don't understand

Thanks for posting this. It's solid advice.

I think this advice can only work for more advanced learners. I am at a stage where during a typical drama, I might only recognize half of the words. It would literally take me an entire day to watch a single episode if I looked up the words I didn't know.

Zarxrax Wrote:I think this advice can only work for more advanced learners. I am at a stage where during a typical drama, I might only recognize half of the words. It would literally take me an entire day to watch a single episode if I looked up the words I didn't know.

The key is not looking up all the words that you don't know, but looking up the words you think you need to keep up with the story .

Or even if not this much, then just randomly pick up words which you want to know.
For example I always like looking up words which are said as single words not in sentences.
It's easier to understand the pronunciation and type the word in such sentences.
And usually you hear this word repeated pretty soon as the next thing you hear.
Example:
『彼女。」
「彼女？？？」
『はい、彼女がきました。」

It would be very easy to pick this single word『彼女」 up from a short sentence and it's useful also as it is said several times on different lines.

Remember, something is better than nothing.
And you might as well look up only the coolest words . For I had a desire to know what some words meant, because the more I understand the drama the more fun I can have.

And if there are too much words that are vital for understanding of the main plot, then perhaps you could consider watching easier material.

jettyke Wrote:Since my 5th grade at school I had been watching a lot of movies in English with English subtitles.

When there appeared a word that was vital for keeping up with the story, I always paused the movie, looked it up in the dictionary and replayed that dialogue part once again and kept on watching.

This is very similar to how I learned English, except that I had no access to subtitled media back then (it happened in ancient times before DVDs ). So I had to rewind and listen a few times before I could pick out the words well enough to look them up in a dictionary.

I'm trying to do the same for Japanese now, but I find that I get annoyed when I don't understand 100% of the story. When I was a kid, somehow I didn't care, but now my expectations are unreasonably high

My experience was that while watching TV did improve my language skills little-by-little, the really huge leaps came when I started reading books in addition to staring at the box. Oh, and singing along with music did wonders for my accent...

I read about 10 Murakami books in english during my 9th grade, and my english went from being the worst in the class, getting 3-s ( we have a 5 point rating system)..(equivalent to C?) to getting the best marks, and becoming the best student in class.
My speaking also improved greatly.

Gotta try singing to songs in japanese, if you say it works wonders I will definitely have to try!

I sing along to hip hop a lot in Japanese and I think it helped speaking, particularly.

Reading is also a big factor, as you mention.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:I sing along to hip hop a lot in Japanese and I think it helped speaking, particularly.

Reading is also a big factor, as you mention.

I tried it with this song about half a year ago...damn was it hard to do it THIS fast. Of course the speed will improve, an I estimate that later speaking speed and your confidence with your pronunciation will improve.

Edit: I tried it now again with this song, and I get just the same kind of good rush as before, It gets me high Very enjoyable indeed!

http://www.infinitelooper.com
this is very useful for singing in japanese because you can slide the sliders to loop only part of a YT song and practice!