This may sink or take off but here it goes. What did you do or have you done to further the immersion experience for yourself. I will start off with a little trick i did today.

I would always favor the j-pop over the news/talkshow/etc in japanese so today I stopped taking my ipod with me on the way to work and now all i have it my iphone with podcasts on it so i have no choice but to listen to podcasts on the way to work everyday. Only can listen to music at the gym and at home and stuff..not on the way to and from work (total time 2 hours).

Still cant remove this forum from my visitied english websites to delete list...
has something to do with keeping up with kanji reviews i suppose...
Ok lets here yours! I wanna hear the super creative ones.

saizen Wrote:Still cant remove this forum from my visitied english websites to delete list...
has something to do with keeping up with kanji reviews i suppose...

Lame excuse. You could switch to Anki.

stoked Wrote:Lame excuse. You could switch to Anki.

Guitly as charged...sigh :p
Just dont want to

It's not really that easy. I've been wanting to switch to anki for ages now since I've lost some of my greasemonkey saved information several times now (my Japanese keywords I've added). In Anki, this would never be a problem. However, how would I add them? There's no import, so I'd basically have to start over which I'm just not going to do ^^

I use the kanji-lish plug in for firefox, so even reading this website in mostly english affords some kanji practice.

Spent most of the morning/afternoon playing Travian. http://www.travian.jp/

Game is addictive..

Also, I've downloading near 300GB of Japanese shows and movies and matched them with subtitle files in the last two weeks. I honestly didn't realize there was so much out there. So now I've got a non-stop Japanese tv station on the right side of my desktop

Ben_Nielson Wrote:Also, I've downloading near 300GB of Japanese shows and movies and matched them with subtitle files in the last two weeks. I honestly didn't realize there was so much out there. So now I've got a non-stop Japanese tv station on the right side of my desktop

....holy shit!

Well, the obvious thing I did was stop buying English language books for entertainment. I started out with reading a lot of Japanese language manga, but I'm mostly reading light novels now, and the more of those I read, the better I'm getting... I think. There are still a lot of bits I don't quite get, but I get most of it. I look up some words when I need to, and I've learned some new stuff that way. It's a nice break from flash cards.

Another thing I did was subscribe to TV-Japan and force myself to watch it to find programs I like. (It ain't cheap, so I better use it as much as possible.) It gives me something to leave on in the background, so I can always have some Japanese on.

It's not really creative but for each item in my room that I don't know the word for, I put masking tape with the Japanese word on it (one in kanji, one in hiragana if needed). I think I took this idea from the Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast

Nuriko Wrote:It's not really creative but for each item in my room that I don't know the word for, I put masking tape with the Japanese word on it (one in kanji, one in hiragana if needed). I think I took this idea from the Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast

my dad does that but in swahili

Nuriko Wrote:It's not really creative but for each item in my room that I don't know the word for, I put masking tape with the Japanese word on it (one in kanji, one in hiragana if needed). I think I took this idea from the Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast

In the time it would take me to write it down on tape and stick it onto something I'd have already memorized the word imo methods like this become obsolete with SRS.

I'm taking it slow. I still read and watch English stuff, but I've added in untranslated Manga to my list of things to do at my house. I still watch subbed anime, but I've got a really easy series without subs to start me off... Something I can still mostly understand and enjoy.

Following this road, I'll transition from subbed anime to unsubbed and gradually read harder books as my ability progresses.

Jarvik7 Wrote:

Nuriko Wrote:It's not really creative but for each item in my room that I don't know the word for, I put masking tape with the Japanese word on it

In the time it would take me to write it down on tape and stick it onto something I'd have already memorized the word imo methods like this become obsolete with SRS.

I think the idea of that kind of thing is that you get a bit of repetition of the word without having to use the SRS. Even if you're feeling totally lazy and can't be bothered to do any SRS stuff at all, you're probably still going to end up glancing at the stapler on the desk at some point during the day. So you can save your SRSing time for other words instead...

Ben_Nielson Wrote:Also, I've downloading near 300GB of Japanese shows and movies and matched them with subtitle files in the last two weeks. I honestly didn't realize there was so much out there. So now I've got a non-stop Japanese tv station on the right side of my desktop

I'm sitting on about 160GB of Japanese video right now. Lots of it I haven't watched yet. I tend to concentrate on one Drama/one Anime at a time.
What I should do is make sure I have a drama running with Japanese subs all the time. Thats what I should do anyways, it might happen some time.

I think we should also encourage more Japanese discussion on these forums, I mean the 日本語中級会話 thread remains pretty stagnant.

Where can I download raw anime and manga with japanese subs? I can't navigate the japanese web and american sites are all subbed.

I have a slow satellite internet connection (my only option where I rent) and am limited to 5GB of data per month so I am handicapped as to how much online video I can receive. I buy used Japanese TV DVDs at Ebay for about $1 each in bulk.

cjswanson1355 Wrote:Where can I download raw anime and manga with japanese subs? I can't navigate the japanese web and american sites are all subbed.

I use
http://www.d-addicts.com/ for Drama
http://www.boxtorrents.com/ for Anime
and
http://mullemeck.serveftp.org/jps_beta/ (AKA Jpopsuki) for Music/MusicTV

Some of these downloads are hard-subbed, but many are soft-subbed/RAW. D-addicts even has a number of series with subs in Japanese.
I'm watching ロット6で3億2千万円当てた男 right now with perfect Japanese subs. (In 720p no less)

While this immersion idea is nice, I'm not learning Japanese so that I can deprive myself from reading in French and English or from watching my favorite American TV series. I'll continue to enjoy those while at the same time I can add a whole new world of Japanese books, movies and TV. Sure, it's going to take a little bit more time that way. So what? I'm doing this for fun anyway.

I rip the audio from various sources and play them to myself over and over.　I, sometimes, look up the words I do not know, but for the most part I just keep listening.　I'm with WcCrawford on still watching non-Japanese entertainment though. Sometimes Japanese shows can be a bit...blah.... I think I might start watching and obtaining vocabulary from shows like masked rider, too. Might help get a firmer grip on basic convo.

I'm committing myself to 10+hrs of listening every day from now until, well, I know Japanese really really well. I'm doing this by basically keeping my headphones glued to my head, even while at work. I get some strange looks but they'll get used to it and thankfully the majority of my shift is at night with the office to myself.

I'm definitely doing the "deprive myself of English" method. I've had 25 years of English. Missing english TV programs, music, etc for a while is pretty irrelevant.

ThreadTopic Wrote:What I just did to make my Environment more Japanese

Moved to Japan.

Serge Wrote:

ThreadTopic Wrote:What I just did to make my Environment more Japanese

Moved to Japan.

Dang! I was going to use this.

pm215 Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:

Nuriko Wrote:It's not really creative but for each item in my room that I don't know the word for, I put masking tape with the Japanese word on it

In the time it would take me to write it down on tape and stick it onto something I'd have already memorized the word imo methods like this become obsolete with SRS.

I think the idea of that kind of thing is that you get a bit of repetition of the word without having to use the SRS. Even if you're feeling totally lazy and can't be bothered to do any SRS stuff at all, you're probably still going to end up glancing at the stapler on the desk at some point during the day. So you can save your SRSing time for other words instead...

Exactly! It's a good passive form of memorization.

Since I've been doing combat training recently, there's little I can change about my environment. None of the many linguists I'm training with speak Japanese (only Russian, Arabic, Chinese or Korean). I'm not even aloud to break out a cell phone, camera, iPod, book, nothing despite all the down time between actual training. Maybe two hours of free time at night. However, recently I've been printing out the scripts from dramanote.seesaa.net to carry around and read. Doesn't stand out and folds neatly into my many pockets.

What I quickly found out is that these scripts are perfect stepping stones from manga to full blown novels. It has descriptive and narrative text like any novel, but you have the visuals and dialogue of the show to bounce off of for the mental picture. Plus I can mail them to myself so I can read them on my iPod touch when not in a wi-fi area. Though I'm not doing it, I can easily open up the text file with firefox, activate the furigana injector, copy that text to the word processor so I can print out furigana scripts (with many, many errors but still pretty good).

When I get to Africa, I'll probably have a roommate. No telling how much I'm allowed to alter my environment there.

Ben_Nielson Wrote:Spent most of the morning/afternoon playing Travian. http://www.travian.jp/

Game is addictive..

Also, I've downloading near 300GB of Japanese shows and movies and matched them with subtitle files in the last two weeks. I honestly didn't realize there was so much out there. So now I've got a non-stop Japanese tv station on the right side of my desktop

Ben_Nielson Wrote:Spent most of the morning/afternoon playing Travian. http://www.travian.jp/

Game is addictive..

Also, I've downloading near 300GB of Japanese shows and movies and matched them with subtitle files in the last two weeks. I honestly didn't realize there was so much out there. So now I've got a non-stop Japanese tv station on the right side of my desktop

You move out of Iizuka and all of the sudden you're back to games

As a fun sidenote- Ben and I both lived in the same small city in Japan and didn't know it until he sent me a message on this forum about a month ago! We met up a couple times and *might* have exchanged some Japanese content Unfortunately (or fortunately, because Iizuka sucks) we both moved.

What I did to make my environment more Japanese? I didn't get internet for my new space and so now can only use incredibly slow, random internet that floats in to my apartment every once in a while (like now). I bought a nice LCD TV and watch TV programs , DVDs or downloaded material by hooking up my computer.