Has anyone on this forum tried using Japanese subtitles for a substantial amount of time to increase listening ability?

If so what were your results?

I thought I'd clarify a few things about this thread really quickly, I'm asking about increasing listening ability long term, not short term. I am aware that subtitles help with comprehension of what you're currently watching, what I am asking is if they help your listening ability in the long term.

The other thing is I'm not asking for suggestions on how to increase my listening ability, I'm just asking if this one method works or not, so please no subs2srs suggestions or anything like that. I'm just talking about simply watching something with Japanese subtitles (as opposed to watching raw without subtitles) and if it shows results in the long term for listening comprehension.

Sure, it helps.
You do have to stay focused on the audio and make sure that you are 'reading along' and not just 'reading'.
It helps more if you also rewatch the same programs without subtitles.

It also helps to incorporate learning techniques from L-R

There's an important thread here,
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840

And a digest of the important parts here,
http://rawtoast.eurybia.feralhosting.com...ssages.htm

Anyway, as long as you are doing focused listening and not just reading the subtitles, the only issue is that the subtitles give you clues on where the word breaks are. Until you mix in a certain amount of raw media, you will have trouble telling where word boundaries are, which can cause some confusion.
It's also helpful to rewind and rewatch a passage if you misheard it - if for example you were to read がんばってください　while thinking you heard 'だんがあけぐばさい' .... that's an extreme example and unlikely to mishear on such a common phrase, but it illustrates the point. If you mishear a consonant, hear a long vowel where there's actually a っ, etc., replay it a few times until it you can catch it to train your ear. (If you still mishear it after a few times, move on -- you may not be ready yet to hear it correctly or it may have been actually mispronounced, and there's no knowing which.)

Thank you for the response. The links you posted are partly why I created this thread. I was skimming through that page yesterday, and an interesting part I found was this:
http://rawtoast.eurybia.feralhosting.com...c346179180
Where it says that subtitles don't count.

The other reason why I made this thread is often times I'm able to understand something with subtitles, but then turn them off and understand nothing. In the same way I can read kanji easily and not be able to write any of them because I didn't go out of my way to practice writing, it feels like I can comprehend audio with subtitles, but take them away and I'm lost again. It seems they are a crutch.

This is going to be short, but basically. If the subtitles are comprehensible, then subtitles can help your listening ability. If the subtitles are not comprehensible, then they will not help your listening ability.

Last time we discussed subtitles, this good overview paper was linked:

http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2004/v4...9021ar.pdf

I feel that it won't help.

EratiK Wrote:Last time we discussed subtitles, this good overview paper was linked:

http://www.erudit.org/revue/meta/2004/v4...9021ar.pdf

Thanks. It seems to suggest that it will help if it's already comprehensible input, but not help if it's way beyond your level.

It helps me. How else are you supposed to find out what a word/phrase means if you can't even hear the sounds properly?

That being said I also watch movies with English subtitles and sometimes I use no subtitles at all. I find this works good to avoid any one method becoming too much of a crutch.

This is a very interesting question and there seem to be a few different views on it, ranging from "you learn to hear and wean off the subtitles naturally" to "you are reading rather than hearing so it doesn't help your listening at all".

I am very keen on using Japanese-subtitled anime for learning Japanese itself. How far it is good for listening comprehension is a matter of debate. I use a mixture of Japanese subtitled and raw material currently. I guess it is always hard to be sure what is helping (unless one sticks rigorously to one approach for a longish period, and even then what works for one person doesn't necessarily work the same for another).

One thing I definitely think is important though, is that if you watch material with Japanese subtitles and find you can understand easily, then when you watch very similar material (the same series etc) without subtitles, you know that the problem is mainly with listening comprehension itself and not with vocabulary, complexity etc. Which makes this good material to try watching raw.

I would suggest a mix of the two, some raw and some (Japanese) subtitled.

I'm more keen on studying the subtitles than having them on while I watch. I've found subs really helpful for languages with alphabets but somehow the kanji... well it's just not the same. I feel like you need to listen to the language without the help of pictographs to help you too much.

I had believed from what I'd read online that using English subtitles is useless, but I've still been doing it for fun (not counting it as study). Recently though, I quite often seem to be parsing a complete sentence in Japanese and filling in the words I don't know from the English, so I'm probably learning something from that. Perhaps my listening is ahead of my vocab, while it sounds like it's the other way round for a lot of people. (Ideally I'd watch again without subtitles, but most things I don't want to watch twice.)

Japanese subtitles do more to help your reading speed than they do your listening. They can still be very useful, though. You just might not get the benefits you're attempting to get.

They were useful for me in allowing me to enjoy Japanese media without the use of English subtitles. So I found myself consuming much more Japanese media than I would otherwise. They did eventually become a crutch, though, and I still haven't fully weaned myself off of them.

The only thing that I found improved my listening was watching things without any subtitles or listening to things like podcasts. It can be a bit hard to find comprehensible input, though. There's not really graded listeners in the same way there are graded readers. Written material like novels tends to be a lot more consistent in terms of comprehensibility.Comprehensibility can vary wildly from scene to scene in something like a TV show or a movie.

There really wasn't much to do besides try a lot of things and stick with the ones I felt were helping me. I started mostly with children's shows(Sentai, Kamen Rider, Precure) and dramas set in high schools(LIFE, GTO). I then expanded to more talk shows, variety shows, and other kinds of dramas.

Precure is probably the best show I found for bootstrapping listening. The episodes are short, and half of the episode is usually devoted to a topic that's closely connected to real life. The more fantastical elements can sometimes be difficult, but the overall concept of the show is usually quite easy to pick up even though it might have more made-up words and situations.

My Spanish-speaking subtitle-senpai (who became fluent in English with English-subtitled movies and was the initial inspiration for my anime method) said that after a while the subtitles became unnecessary to her.

One thing I find in helping people with Japanese is that people are probably more different in the ways they learn than one might expect. What happens with one person really isn't necessarily what will happen with another.

Analyzing my own experience, one thing I am quite sure of is that the "you aren't listening, only reading" is not true in my case. What I do find is that my watching with subtitles is far faster and smoother than either my reading alone or my watching/listening alone. The two do seem to form a symbiosis. This may have partly do do with the fact that I am not a fast or terribly comfortable reader in English either so I lean on the audio more heavily than someone else might.

Now whether one is a "crutch" for the other (and if so which) obviously a question one can consider. And obviously one wants to end up both reading and listening perfectly without the aid of the other (though I note that a lot of regular Japanese shows throw up text to help with listening comprehension for native speakers).

But if one is in my situation - that is very clearly exercising both skills and not just one - subtitles certainly aren't the worst thing. I do use raw material too, and like the OP I do particularly want to develop listening comprehension.

However, I also think that (unless one has a reason to be) one does not necessarily have to be in a great hurry. The fact that one can enjoy shows without any English is quite a reasonable plateau to be on.

I don't want to sound over-complacent (actually I am not) but one is in this for the long haul so one might as well be enjoying it.

PS I love Precure too! I tended to find the fantasy parts easier than the real life parts, but that may be just this doll. One thing though is that (unlike, say, Sailor Moon or Nausicaa) the made-up words are 90% katakana-ized English.