Tobberoth Wrote:you will only learn conversational Japanese since you won't find anything else in dialogue form. If you want to be able to read essays, novels etc, it might not be a good idea.

There are audiobooks out there,although you might end up sounding like a narrator whenever you speak if you shadow them...

Are you considering only doing audio sentences? No written sentences at all?

It sounds boring to death. I learn 10x faster if I'm interested in what I'm hearing.

Sure. Try it. report back ur finds.

I don't understand many of the complaints about this method. I don't think it's a bad idea, I just think it might waste a lot of time. You could just shadow things without putting them in an SRS and save yourself a lot of time. I was thinking of adding audio to my SRS a while ago, but I haven't because it seems like it will be a waste of time finding it and entering it. However now that I think about it, I could ask my girlfriend of friends to help me. My MP3 player has a mic and if I got a few people to help me I could easily get 100 or more short audio clips. I think your idea is good it's just you need to find a better way to implement it.

Thanks for the input so far everyone. Great stuff.

And BTW as I think I stated earlier I'm not proposing this as something that would completely replace the current sentence method, just more of an addition to or expansion of.

Oh and Samesong I wasn't the one talking about the visual novels. I think you got me confused with Anokorok who is the one that brought that up.

Anyways, I think I'll do a "test run" of sorts with this idea using my Shadowing book and I'll let everyone know if I think it has a significant impact. It has about 45 such dialogs consisting of about 800 sentences total which means if I average only 1 dialog per day in addition to "traditional" AJATT studies it will only take up a month and a half of my time. IMO that's worth the time risk for sake of experiment. I'll be finishing up RTK1 in just a few days and will then get started right away.

mentat_kgs Wrote:It sounds boring to death. I learn 10x faster if I'm interested in what I'm hearing.

Um yeah that's exactly the point.....to take dialogs from things you are interested in understanding, such as your favorite TV shows and movies. Besides it's not like taking random sentences from a grammar book and adding them to an SRS is the most exciting thing in the world yet that is a highly supported practice on this forum lol (not that I disagree, just saying).

it's similar to what I do, but I just watch dramas instead and look at the scripts online. this way, the language are link to emotions

mr_hans_moleman Wrote:it's similar to what I do, but I just watch dramas instead and look at the scripts online. this way, the language are link to emotions

Where do you get these scripts, if I may ask?

The way is to just buy a decent quality recording microphone for my computer and simply let it record straight from my DVD player's speaker output. All think I'd have to do is buy a decent speaker and enough cable so I can run it somewhere to isolate the speaker and the microphone, such as my bathroom.

surely you're computer/laptop has a line in jack already? why not just run a cable from the audio out of your dvd player to the audio in of your computer?

even better if your computer/laptop has a dvd drive there are plenty of software apps that will highjack the current audio out for recording. "audio hijack" does it for mac, i'm certain something similar exists for windows. lastly why not just rip the audio stream out of the dvd and use an audio editor to snip out the parts you want.

Cacawate Wrote:

mr_hans_moleman Wrote:it's similar to what I do, but I just watch dramas instead and look at the scripts online. this way, the language are link to emotions

Where do you get these scripts, if I may ask?

http://www.dramanote.com/ is one

wasurenaide Wrote:The way is to just buy a decent quality recording microphone for my computer and simply let it record straight from my DVD player's speaker output. All think I'd have to do is buy a decent speaker and enough cable so I can run it somewhere to isolate the speaker and the microphone, such as my bathroom.

surely you're computer/laptop has a line in jack already? why not just run a cable from the audio out of your dvd player to the audio in of your computer?

even better if your computer/laptop has a dvd drive there are plenty of software apps that will highjack the current audio out for recording. "audio hijack" does it for mac, i'm certain something similar exists for windows. lastly why not just rip the audio stream out of the dvd and use an audio editor to snip out the parts you want.

without sounding insulting, thats a really ridiculous and backwards way of doing that. all you have to do is rip the dvd and then convert the video file to an audio format. Doing this you wont have to buy anything or degrade the quality of your sound. simply run a google search or on download.com for something to that effect, and you'll find something. i have done it many many times, and then used audacity to slice up clips.

(btw there is nothing illegal about ripping your own dvds -but its even easier if you downloaded the file to begin with bc you dont have to rip it)

duder Wrote:there is nothing illegal about ripping your own dvds

That depends on the jurisdiction. I think it's illegal in Australia which has tighter laws than the USA.

activeaero Wrote:Anyways, I think I'll do a "test run" of sorts with this idea using my Shadowing book and I'll let everyone know if I think it has a significant impact. It has about 45 such dialogs consisting of about 800 sentences total which means if I average only 1 dialog per day in addition to "traditional" AJATT studies it will only take up a month and a half of my time. IMO that's worth the time risk for sake of experiment. I'll be finishing up RTK1 in just a few days and will then get started right away.

i have done what you are discussing with my book called "let's speak." I sliced it up and added into mnemosyne and I can say definitively that it took me to the next level. Through drilling the conversations, shadowing, reading, listening every time that I did a review - i got so much better at Japanese. It was end of that post 3 kyuu Jlpt level when you want to talk, but cant - when you can understand some, but it seems that your conversations totally blow. By drilling those sentence patterns I was able to nail some grammar points in my head so hard, that i stopped translating in my head when i needed to substitute.

I quite frankly dont see the value of adding any cards that dont have sound attached. there is nothing more depressing than being able to read a word, but not being able to understand it when its said.

as for it becoming boring - thats true - it can be very boring, but when you are studying its all about being efficient. If you can get something really tangible from studying, you are more likely to keep studying. This may sound obvious, but a lot of people study so inefficiently that they dont have the time or the energy to devote to what they need to get better.

What im trying to say is that if you can hit for 3 out of 4 (listening, reading, speaking, -not writing) on 1 super flashcard, why would you waste time doing something else.

randomly listening to things, is a really inefficient way to study. Im not saying you cant achieve your goal through constantly broadening your scope, but the person who can persevere through such a method is rare. i simply cant learn some words until i hear them many many many times - something i cant necessarily guarantee will happen if i meander around in japanese.

i used this method to easily pass 2 kyuu the year after I took 3 kyuu by adding 3000 sentences from my vocab and grammar books and having a student read them for me. i estimate that it took me 40 or so hours to complete the task, and while that is insane - i laid some very firm foundations for learning new words, kanji, and the ever so important review. Learning was easy and review even easier.

I would not say that this is a replacement for speaking to people. Its a drill method. However, you cant use something that isnt in your head yet. This is the fastest most effective way to do it. The genius is properly choosing which sentences to enter - thats up to the individual.

for those who hate long winded preachy posts

- this website http://www.tbs.co.jp/
has both video and more or less matching scripts for the news.


you can download the video using the firefox addon "downloadhelper" or some other program. convert the flv file into a sound one using another program - i forget what mine's called- and then match them up in your flashcard program.

The segements arent very long, so they shouldnt take to long to do. I wish someone would start a website or a place where we could easily share cut up sound clips and matching scripts

Raichu Wrote:That depends on the jurisdiction. I think it's illegal in Australia which has tighter laws than the USA.

well then so is recording out of speakers

Duder, thanks for the response. Now that I've finished RTK1 I'm slowly jumping into my other methods but am honestly still waiting for my review piles in RTK1 to calm down a bit. I'm still averaging about 110-180 cards per day in just reviews with a good many fails (adding 50 per day for the last two weeks will do that to ya lol).

I've also realized that I really need to get at least a basic grasp of grammar before jumping into ripping dialog straight from sources like TV and movies. I'm currently going through Tae Kim's site and I think I'm going to start ripping audio sentences from my Shadowing CD/book that coincide with each Tae Kim lesson so that should help in that regard. I'm thinking it might be a couple more weeks before I really get down to business with it though.

I recommend Audacity since it's so powerful and sort of an all-in-one tool. Just have it open, start recording when the sentence comes up and edit the sound file right then and there. Save as mp3 (or .ogg since Anki handles .ogg MUCH better) and import to Anki.

Step one: Download Audacity
Step two: Buy a good quality microphone
Step three: Kidnap a Japanese native....

phauna Wrote:Step one: Download Audacity
Step two: Buy a good quality microphone
Step three: Kidnap a Japanese native....

Oh, so that's what the North Koreans were really up to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea...f_Japanese

just to add a little more - i use
http://www.mediacoderhq.com/index.htm to strip audio from video files

here is a video that i used to learn how to edit some video - if you watch a minute or 2 you'll see how easy it is

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=JjWwlaE8kps

this is about virtualdub, but he uses mediacoder to show how to capture simply sound from video