My Neighbor Totoro

I watched this with Japanese and English subtitles at the same time (both Japanese and English text on the screen). Or rather, I watched it with Japanese subtitles about 1-2 seconds ahead and the English subtitles as normal. I added a total of about 40 vocabulary from this movie. None come to mind at the moment. I'm not a little kid anymore so it was pretty boring. I'm not saying it's a bad movie. It's a good movie. I just find it boring. But I did like Totoro and the cat bus. I also like how there were no obvious good or evil characters unlike Disney movies. It's just a movie about a family who have a little conflict and then get over it.

There was one more interesting thing in the movie. Do you think you're good at Japanese? Then let's play a game. Suppose a little girl ran up to you and said: おじまたゃくしが好き! So, what did she say? I'll give you 3 hints below.

The translators did not "translate" おじまたゃくし into English in the English version. Actually, they did. Just not properly.

Now for the hints.

Hint 1: Obviously, it's a noun.
Hint 2: A little girl said it.
Hint 3: Swap it.

Laputa: Castle in the Sky

I watched this with Japanese subtitles and if I didn't understand it, I rewind and switch to English subtitles. This time I added significantly more vocab to Anki. Can't remember how much maybe close to 100. Also, there were some military-like vocab here like officer (将校) and such. Other vocab that come to mind include 極秘 (absolute secrecy), horn (警笛) and fuse (信管). So far so boring.

As for the movie, this had more action than Totoro but again, I'm not a little kid anymore so it was still relatively boring. A good and boring movie.

Kiki's Delivery Service

I watched this with Japanese and delayed English subtitles at the same time. The English subtitles I had were dubtitles and they were atrocious. What should have been just images of scenery and Joe Hisaishi's calm soothing music, they added conversations where there should be none. Disgusting. Also, the Japanese vocal song (comparisons to Grease) while she takes to the skies near the beginning is way superior than the English one (too sappy and uplifting).

As for vocab, a decent amount was added. Ones that immediately come to mind include お転婆 (tomboy), 脚線美 (nice legs, usually female) and 軟派 (lady's man). Don't ask me why those came to mind. At least it proves that I have good recognition and output.

As for the movie, it was good because it's a Ghibli movie and Ghibli movies are always good. That doesn't necessarily mean I like it but I don't dislike it either. One highlight was the fact that the witch lost her ability to talk to her cat. I found that sad and moving.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

I'm only about 10 minutes in but due to being bored by this movie and the previous 3, I'm finding it hard to continue. But I always finish what I start. 3 Ghibli movies finished, 17 to go.

You seem to have different tastes in movies than basically the entire nation of Japan, haha.

Also, sarcastic/cynical movie reviews? I'm not saying they're bad... just boring.

Tzadeck Wrote:You seem to have different tastes in movies than basically the entire nation of Japan, haha.

To be fair, based on the information available at the moment, my taste in movies are unknown or near unknown so a judgment can't really be made.

Tzadeck Wrote:Also, sarcastic/cynical movie reviews? I'm not saying they're bad... just boring.

No sarcasm.
As for cynical, I guess that depends on how you define it. If you define cynicism as being old (not a child anymore), then yes those are cynical movie reviews.

So to clarify my position, those 3 Ghibli movies listed above are good. I have every reason to like those movies. There are no reasons to dislike those movies. But I don't like them. Yet, that is too strong a statement because I don't dislike them. I find them boring while at the same time, fully aware and agree that those are good movies even though I find them boring because I am my age. If I was 10 years old, then sure these movies would be my top 3 movies of all time. But I'm not 10 years old anymore, so they're not. So to sum up, those 3 movies are again, good. Despite being good movies, I don't like them nor do I dislike them.

Those of us who are past thirty and still really enjoy Ghibli movies might take a bit of offense at the implication that a person wouldn't find them interesting past the age of ten.

Okay, so Ghibli movies aren't quite your thing. So what?

How about find a show on with jsubs on kitsunneko that you do whole heatedly enjoy? There are quite a few of shows in that corpus of subtitles, don't worry about how difficult the language is, the important part is to find something interesting. Try just first episodes, if you don't like it, find something else. Honestly, every season I watch a ton of first episodes completely raw till I find a show I can enjoy and understand well enough to keep up with.

If anime isn't your thing, try Jdrama. Find something you enjoy and can stick to, no matter how difficult the words and grammar are. Just be sure you put effort into understanding it. And when you find something you do like, subs2srs and the Morphology plugin can be rather handy to learn the words you don't know.

Honestly, I'm not sure read ahead on Japanese subs is useful, I prefer to hear exactly what I'm reading as it's being said. If it's something you truly enjoy, it's something you can watch multiple times, rewatch with just Japanese subs, simultaneously both at the same time (while focusing mainly on the Jsubs), and even no subs at all. But only do this if you like the show enough.

Kitsunneko itself has quite the impressive variety, children's shows like Pokemon, Pretty Cure, and Ginga e kickoff!; Slice of Life comedies like A-Channel, K-ON!, or Acchi Kocchi; Visual Novelish dramas like Clannad, Kanon, Little Busters!, and Angel Beats!; other more mature shows like Another, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Baccano!, Madoka Magika, Bakemonogatari, Spice and Wolf, Denpa Onna To Seishun Otoko, Ghost in the Shell, Fate/Zero, and Psycho Pass. I don't know what you like but this is hardly breaking the surface, I could go on and on. Some of this stuff is pretty hard as far as language goes, but if you find something that can hold you interest long enough to want to watch and learn from the dialogue then who cares. If there isn't anything on this long list that satisfies your language appetite, then well, I dunno. Just remember to drop something if you don't like it.

Edit:

qwertyytrewq Wrote:2) They're short (about 1 hour and a half) so it's faster to get feedback on whether I'm doing well or not. My main purpose of watching these movies is not to enjoy them but to develop my Japanese skills so I don't want to get bored on the same product (like a 20 hour video game or 26 episode TV series).
3) I'm saving the best for last. There are things that I want to do in Japanese for the purpose of fun but I want to save it until my Japanese is much more advanced. I don't really have much interest in watching older Ghibli movies but as a Japanese study tool, they are good enough in terms of entertainment and is a better option than for example, reading legal documents or reading Japanese newspapers.

I really think you should be enjoying as much of the language as possible. You don't need a 90 minute movie to dip you hands in to something you don't like. A 24 minute anime episode is more than enough time to figure out if you enjoy something. I hope the early part of my post clarifies that there are plenty of options to find something interesting.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:9) I have never read a Japanese book, watched a Japanese movie, read a Japanese manga, play a Japanese game, from start to finish COMPLETELY IN JAPANESE. But... I have randomly flicked through them, reading random passages to confirm I know the Kanjis I know. So I do have exposure to Japanese "in the wild". The only difference is that I'm not playing with the lion, I'm just watching it from a safe distance behind a glass wall.

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Despite having knowledge of 6000 vocabulary, and knowledge of Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced Grammar, I still don't feel ready.

Honestly, if you have this much vocab under your belt, you want to also be reading books. Find a light novel you enjoy and read it. Reading random bits here and there doesn't really do much for your reading and comprehension skills. If fiction isn't your thing you could read Japanese motivational books like I believe Khatz does.

Looks like some members are in my opinion taking too much offense/being offended that I bad mouthed Ghibli movies.

2 points to make:
1) You're assuming I dislike/find boring ALL Ghibli movies.
2) The Ghibli movies are so good that I want to watch them even if I might find them boring. I find Ghibli movies boring. I also find the Transformers movies boring. But the former is a must watch, the latter is disposable. That's a testament to the quality of Ghibli. High praise from me if I may say so and you should recognize it as such. It's like a Christian who has 100% faith in god yet feels it is his duty to explore world of atheism.

With that said, I will continue my Ghibli quest with no movie left unwatched (pun of no stone left unturned).

qwertyytrewq Wrote:2) The Ghibli movies are so good that I want to watch them even if I might find them boring. I find Ghibli movies boring.

Okay, I find this statement contradictory. Boring is often associated with not fun and not enjoyable. But I find it's pointless to argue the semantics over these words.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:With that said, I will continue my Ghibli quest with no movie left unwatched (pun of no stone left unturned).

If that is what you want to do be my guest, I was trying to point out that you can find something you like, that isn't boring. I don't understand your absolute desire to stick with Ghibli films. Some of them are great, some of them are not. If you want to watch them, great, but don't forget to expand your horizons. Every genre and every author has their own specific vocabulary corpus, you will learn more with variety.

So you have watched some movies. Why not part of an anime series? What about a manga, a light novel, or even a game? You gotta leave your comfort zone to grow.

I think it's more the implication that only ten year olds should be able to enjoy Ghibli and that the movies shouldn't be of interest to anyone over the age of ten that's rubbing people the wrong way. You act as though adults should be incapable of enjoying things targeted at children.
I think it's sad for you that you feel that way, because you won't be able to enjoy a lot of very good things.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

As far as vocab goes, pretty standard. Like Laputa, there was some military themed vocab (I now have a bunch of Japanese vocab like officer, general, commander etc I can't tell the difference). Also, a challenge for Japanese language learners is movie specific vocab. In other words, made up words that you will never find in a dictionary so you'll have to guess at it. In this movie's case, 王蟲 and キツネリス. Of course, these examples are is easy even without context.

The WWWjdict dictionary is an exception:
王蟲 【おうむ】 (u) Ohmu (fictional gigantic insect from the Miyazaki anime "Nausica of the Valley of the Wind"
However, there is no entry for キツネリス. Since there is no entry for キツネリス (a made up movie specific word), one questions whether there needs to be an entry for 王蟲.
The fact that WWWjdict is customizable by users is useful. The fact that it is also brings up whether there is any quality control (in terms of translation accuracy etc) in the entries.

Also unfortunately, I had trouble comprehending the conversations between the Armor Woman and her Right Hand Man. I can understand the grammar in isolation, I can understand the vocab in isolation, but when they are combined into freeflowing conversational sentences, I fail to get what they are talking about.

As for the movie itself, it's okay. About on par with the movie straight after (Laputa). Interestingly however, the "bad guy" in Nausicaa (Armor Woman) as a character is more fully fleshed than the Sunglass Wearing "bad guy" of Laputa (standard bad guy descendant who finds power and destroys everything). Armor Woman is more interesting. When she was about to helplessly go down along with the burning ship and Nausicaa selflessly offers Armor Woman a place on the getaway plane, did Armor Woman get a newfound respect for Nausicaa or did she make the choice out of mere self-preservation and grudgingly accepts the offer? Most character award probably goes to the Old Man who kicks a lot of butt despite his age (though he nearly got killed by bugs in the beginning). The main flaw with the movie is that Nausicaa comes back alive instead of staying dead. The human characters watching the bugs attend her funeral would be a more powerful scene if she stayed dead. Nausicaa is supposed to be a family movie though so perhaps that would be too dark.

Next movie to watch: Grave of the Fireflies. Since the main characters are a teenager and his toddler sister, hopefully the conversations are easier to follow like Totoro.

Maybe look into sub2srs and if the movie is boring u have the right to fastforward or god forbid stop watching it. For the conversation with armor woman and the other person did you end up understanding it with the aid of English subs and japanese subs ?

Ugh, the Japanese subtitles for Grave of the Fireflies don't work on my system (font problem).

The only other available Jap subtitle is the 10gig file from bakabt but the subtitles aren't a seperate file and I don't want to dl 10 gigs. Stupid mkvs.

In the meantime, I tried the online JLPT sample questions. Ignored the speech questions because I suck.

N5 was easy.
N4 easy.
N3 easy but reading the passages was boring and took a bit too long. I get the correct answer though but if this was a timed test, that would be bad.
N2 vocab, reading, "pick the word with a similar meaning" was surprisingly not bad. I skipped the long passages though because it was boring and it would also take me too long to read.
N1, vocab was again my strong point. Screw the rest though.

So obviously, anything to do with vocab (Kanji, readings etc) are my strong point and to a slightly lesser extent, grammar. Speech sucks, reading long passages take too long and too boring. Also, I suck at the "form a sentence using 4 parts" questions. For some reason I despise them.

Finished Core 10000. If anyone is interested, I'll post up the Anki stats. I won't be doing any more vocab decks in the future apart from my custom one, I've reached the limit of how much I can handle boring (but efficient) vocab burning. Even without adding new cards, I've still got 200-300 reviews to do each day in the short term future.

My Ghibli movie watching was put on hold because I decided to do Core10k. When I resume, hopefully I can pause less often to look up words.

Can't think of anything else to say except no more Core. Please.

Erm... I have nothing near 6,000 vocab and I have only read halfway into Tae Kim's guide (I also have the Japanese for Everyone textbook which I have learnt some other grammar from) but every day I watch a least one episode of Japanese drama and read Japanese manga. At the moment I am reading Doraemon 1 and a manga called Ijime borrowed from my half Japanese friend who is the ungrateful recipient of much manga from her grandpa and previously I was reading the Naruto 1 volume she bought me from Japan without even knowing how to read katakana properly (though I already knew the story), but in the future I plan to buy some more from cdjapan.co.jp and the Japan Centre and JP books shops in London. Then while I do any mindless work I listen to Japanese music, interviews of my favourite band Scandal, audio from my dramas to try and learn from the repetition and let's plays from Japanese people on youtube like the L4D2 one I'm watching right now.

I don't understand a lot, but I choose visual media to aid me: dramas and manga (with furigana) rather than radio and novels. I'm actually finding Doraemon harder than Ijime because now I have a few kanji under my belt they really help with understanding and Doraemon leaves out kanji that seem really basic to me, just making the reading awkward (but Ijime is depressing so I enjoy Doraemon more). In my dramas, I have learnt to avoid ones about complex subjects like banking (failed at watching Hanazawa Naoki), though I did tackle Soratoubu Kouhoushitsu's military speak, since I was eased into it with a simple to follow plot of friendship, tragedy and romance, and I focus on understanding what is going on, more than what is being said. With manga I have similar priorities and will start reading aloud if I get bored which is great pronunciation practise along with singing to jpop.

What I'm saying is, it's never too early to tackle the monster - it's not even scary, just take a posotive attitude and expect to gain enjoyment not unerstanding. If you don't enjoy the Japanese you're consuming, it's becauase you're watching/reading stuff that's not interesting because you're afraid of not understanding (the only exception to this "no limits" rule is trying to read without furigana before you're ready - it will kill you, don't do it!).

Without all this fun stuff I do, I could never bring myself to write out kanji and do grammar excercises. Have you seriously never endulged in Japanese media and yet still maintained your drive to learn? Hats off to you! I also think the fact that pretty much all media I consume is Japanese makes me very comfortable with listening to Japanese, to the point where it feels natural, as if I understand, even when I don't, and I find myself babbling japanese that I don't even understand (really, I need to look up these words that keep spilling out of my mouth).

And on the subject of Ghibli (I sort of wrote this entire thing just after reading the first post): I and many others like Ghibli but I don't care if you don't like Ghibli because I don't like the Frozen song. However, what I do care about is the fact that you're forcing yourself to watch something you don't enjoy. Go watch a jdrama! As I said above, immersion stuff is fun and if it's not fun you're doing it wrong. What do you like outside of Japanese? Write a list of your interests or something and then consider how you can consume material on those subjects in Japanese.

qwertyytrewq Wrote:Finished Core 10000. If anyone is interested, I'll post up the Anki stats. I won't be doing any more vocab decks in the future apart from my custom one, I've reached the limit of how much I can handle boring (but efficient) vocab burning. Even without adding new cards, I've still got 200-300 reviews to do each day in the short term future.

My Ghibli movie watching was put on hold because I decided to do Core10k. When I resume, hopefully I can pause less often to look up words.

Can't think of anything else to say except no more Core. Please.

Intensive reading/watching like what you are doing (looking up every word, etc) is fine. However, fluidity in a language really depends on volume, so I would urge you to read and watch A LOT more and don't limit yourself by having to look up every word. You can look up words for some of the stuff you read/watch and not look up word for other stuff.

For myself I finished 10k vocabulary last year and now I'm reading lots of novels. Sure there are lots of words I don't know, but my understanding and speed have improved a lot simply by sheer volume. That's not something you can get by consuming media slowly and looking up every word.

Oh, and really, go read a manga or novel! You are definitely ready for it.