Hi All,
First, a confession: My favorite ドラマ is 相棒（あいぼう）. For those of you that don't know it's a police murder mystery show, kind of like a Japanese CSI. It has a good mixture of rough and tough language via the criminals and thugs, some medium-crudeness language via the cowboy-esque police partner and then refined, intelligent language via the refined, intelligent police partner. In general, the show has some suspense to it via solving the murders and other crimes, and by its theme it's probably a little more serious than the average drama but tries to insert a fair bit of comic relief in each episode (but only so much, because at the end of the day there are still pretty serious crimes being dealt with).
Furthermore, each crime in each episode is new and a different type (though there are a lot of murders...) -- the motives, the characters and culprits which come and go with each episode all have different character backgrounds. This is pretty cool because each episode brings a variety contextual, descriptive vocabulary (e.g. in one episode the murder revolved around an art gallery owner, so there was by way of storyline development some art gallery scenes, art discussion, art buying discussion, etc).
In contrast, I recently watched 家政婦の三田, which is melodramatic and mostly unbearable, but it had its quirks and weird parts which kind of interested me (at least for 10 episodes). However, I studied all the vocab in the first and second episode (via subtitles available), and then in each subsequent 1-hour episode there would be maybe 50 or 100 or so new words or phrases. This is great in terms of finding a drama with very specific characters that appear in each episode, repeat the same phrases and have the same style of speech. It's a good intermediate step, I'd say. But pretty worthless in terms of getting vocab-expansion bang for your time-buck.
Fortunately for me there's about ten million episodes of 相棒 at the local TSUTAYA, waiting to be rented. But this got me wondering if people had thought about these feature of specific dramas -- the style, the impact on language, the diversity and all that. What dramas do people think have particular language merits and for what reasons? Also, if the plain text subs in Japanese are available on d-addict's subtitle index, all the better (and even better if the english subs are there too!).
Any thoughts?
First, a confession: My favorite ドラマ is 相棒（あいぼう）. For those of you that don't know it's a police murder mystery show, kind of like a Japanese CSI. It has a good mixture of rough and tough language via the criminals and thugs, some medium-crudeness language via the cowboy-esque police partner and then refined, intelligent language via the refined, intelligent police partner. In general, the show has some suspense to it via solving the murders and other crimes, and by its theme it's probably a little more serious than the average drama but tries to insert a fair bit of comic relief in each episode (but only so much, because at the end of the day there are still pretty serious crimes being dealt with).
Furthermore, each crime in each episode is new and a different type (though there are a lot of murders...) -- the motives, the characters and culprits which come and go with each episode all have different character backgrounds. This is pretty cool because each episode brings a variety contextual, descriptive vocabulary (e.g. in one episode the murder revolved around an art gallery owner, so there was by way of storyline development some art gallery scenes, art discussion, art buying discussion, etc).
In contrast, I recently watched 家政婦の三田, which is melodramatic and mostly unbearable, but it had its quirks and weird parts which kind of interested me (at least for 10 episodes). However, I studied all the vocab in the first and second episode (via subtitles available), and then in each subsequent 1-hour episode there would be maybe 50 or 100 or so new words or phrases. This is great in terms of finding a drama with very specific characters that appear in each episode, repeat the same phrases and have the same style of speech. It's a good intermediate step, I'd say. But pretty worthless in terms of getting vocab-expansion bang for your time-buck.
Fortunately for me there's about ten million episodes of 相棒 at the local TSUTAYA, waiting to be rented. But this got me wondering if people had thought about these feature of specific dramas -- the style, the impact on language, the diversity and all that. What dramas do people think have particular language merits and for what reasons? Also, if the plain text subs in Japanese are available on d-addict's subtitle index, all the better (and even better if the english subs are there too!).
Any thoughts?
But yeah, I do feel grateful for happening to enjoy Aibou because it is the _only_ drama I've found that I enjoy, amongst a sea of... brown liquid. 
