What's the general consensus on getting films and other TV media that don't have native subs? There's a trade off between buying films from, say, amazon.cn and amazon.co.uk between price (huge difference) and the language of the subtitles.

So I guess the question is, how useful are native language subs to you? Essential? Or not worth the extra money of importing?

I say its super important to get native subs. The non-availability of native subs for a particular drama is enough to make me not watch it.

It is the single most important source of study material that I use now.

When you say "native subs" do you mean "subs in the watcher's native language (eg English)" or "subs in the native language of the drama (eg Japanese)" ?

My comprehension seriously skyrockets when I use Japanese subs while watching dramas and so forth... it almost feels like cheating (also shows how weak my listening is compared to my reading...). I like them enough that I've manually timed and subbed most of an episode of 魔王 that was missing J-subs. Plus, Japanese subs = subs2srs goodness, which is an incredibly powerful tool.
I'd definitely say that they're worth the price of admission. Well, as long as you can find some semi-decent deals... Japanese DVDs can be retardulously expensive.

Perhaps before dropping the phat cash, try a drama or two with Japanese subs (via d-addicts) and see for yourself, if you haven't already.

Other interesting question -- are Japanese DVD subs typically exact transcriptions, or do they sometimes abbreviate to fit things in two lines, and so on?

Translated films will be different, films originally in Japanese will be reasonably close if not exact. Exact subs aren't critical, but they are nice.

The subs on Harry Potter 1 very rarely match with what's being said.

The subs on Final Fantasy 13 (the game) always match exactly.

I don't know which to think is the more common, though.

PS The subs on FF13 are a God-send. I really need to find anime subbed in JP and watch it that way.

pm215 Wrote:When you say "native subs" do you mean "subs in the watcher's native language (eg English)" or "subs in the native language of the drama (eg Japanese)" ?

Target language, so Japanese in that example.

Interesting that it's so important for studying. From the subtitled stuff I have, I tended to find that they were something of a distraction from the spoken word (especially when it wasn't strictly the same as what was actually being said).

I don't need Japanese subs(not currently). I watch anime and such for listening comprehension, not reading. I find Jpn subs pretty distracting in my limited experience.

The Japanese subtitles for the dramas on d-addicts are EXACT subs, which means they are EXACTLY what the actors are saying.

I think it depends on your learning method and level of listening/reading. If you follow a traditional method and try to get the most out of a very small amount of exposure, I don't see any reason not to have closed captions and/or dubtitiles that match dialogue. Captioning allows you to learn the proper kanjification when you hear a word, and probably you mishear it less frequently.

But if you're immersing yourself in the target language, I don't think it matters much. Closed captioning is nice and very helpful, but you'll come across the same phrase soon in different materials many times anyway. You'll find the kanjificiatin of a word soon if you read a lot. You'll correct misheard words pretty quickly because you hear them spoken by different guys in similar situations and find them in books, blog posts and whatnot. If you don't meet them often, it means they're obscure expressions or simply you're not immersing yourself in Japanese.

That said, I think it'd be frustrating if you can't catch most of the words spoken in a movie and whatnot. So your listening is still very poor, it might alleviate the pain. Also, this might give you an "I'm learning something" feeling more, though I think simple listening is as effective because it's quicker and gives you more opportunities to come across the same phrase.

If you're already pretty fluent, probably you're learning obscure words that rarely appear in real life. In this case, maybe you can't afford to miss the rare opportunity to learn kanjification and such even if you're doing hardcore immersion.

Also, captioning is very good if you're using subs2srs. It also saves you time when you manually SRS sentences from dramas, movies and so on.

So closed captions and dubtitles are good, and if you like them, you can take advantage of them in various ways. But if you feel they're absolutely necessary, it probably means your learning method severely lacks input. Limited input with captions would work a lot better if you're not interested in naturalness, native fluency and such because you can make do witout tons of input this way. But if you're a serious learner, the benefit of captioning is limited because exposure to a huge amount of Japanese more or less takes care of itself. I think it's nice if a sub is available, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary.

For me, japanese subtitles (especially the exact subs they now have for japanese dramas) is a godsend.

Like it was suggested before, I try not to let SRS get in the way of listening.
I never SRS words while watching drama.

So basically here's what I do.

For the first episode, I read the script beforehand (printed out in a nice PDF format) and highlight all the sentences I don't understand (or think are useful to to say).

Then when I SRS, instead of SRSing individual sentences, I SRS whole conversations.

So I go through all the highlighted sentences and each Anki card represent one full conversation. This is because dialogue tends to build off of what was just said. So IMHO SRSing individual sentence results in a significant loss of context (at least when talking about drama).

This whole process of reading the script, SRSing, and studying takes almost a week for me. By the time I get to studying my Anki cards, the next episode is already on d-addicts and the process repeats (watch episode, read script, SRS, study, watch next episode).

So far I've been doing this with Ohitorisama and it works like a charm.
For now, I can only handle one drama a week like this, but I hope to get
it to 2 or 3 dramas a week.

In the future, I plan to cross-reference grammar in my Anki cards with the corresponding page number in my japanese grammar books (especially "All about Particles" ).

It sounds like a lot of work, but isn't as much as it sounds like. When I read the script, I just highlight the sentences I think are cool or have words that I don't understand. I don't even bother grabbing a dictionary. It's basically "do I know this? do I not know this?".

The actually studying is when I study my cards in Anki. No studying is done when reading the drama script.

Ima go with the consensus here, absolutely love em! It enables you to catch things you wouldn't have heard and brings them to your attention in such a way that they can be looked up easily if you need to. Then there's the option of using sub2srs which i've done a tiny bit and it is marvelous.

It's also nice sometimes to not use subs to really test listening comprehension too

Subtitles, especially starting out. Yeah, it does feel like cheating, but then you have to say to yourself "Self, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot over. You're using Japanese to understand Japanese. How the Hades is that cheating?" (/khatzumoto-mode).

Is there any other forum about learning Japanese that when one talks about watching with subs, they mean Japanese subs by default?

magamo Wrote:You'll find the kanjificiatin of a word soon if you read a lot.

What have I told you about learning English from reading George Bush speeches? :o

I've only come across two anime that had Japanese subs, but in both cases I think it made me remember things better.

How do you find a drama that has the Japanese subs with it, on D-Addicts? I think I'm missing where to look...

TheVinster Wrote:How do you find a drama that has the Japanese subs with it, on D-Addicts? I think I'm missing where to look...

Starting this season (fall 2009) nearly all jdramas will have Japanese subs.
Go to the main site.
Click on "subtitles index" on the left navigation bar.
Scroll down to the Japanese subtitles section.

I see it now, thanks.

^The call and response type of card you mention sounds like a good idea. You'll have to make sure you're copying the right way of speaking though. For example, I should find responses that only guy would make.

Speaking of which, I just came full circle with my 'imaginary conversations' idea that I'm still not ready to implement. That is, I just decided to, then read how I'd already written about using call-and-response cards to prime in the SRS for the imaginary conversations set up in Audio Lesson Studio.

I have some ideas for streamlining the process since then, but nothing worth commenting on yet. Mostly involves clever tagging and an open mind when it comes to SRS as a heterophenomenological life partner, though.

nest0r Wrote:Mostly involves clever tagging and an open mind when it comes to SRS as a heterophenomenological life partner, though.

My feeling on the subject is this.

You must have passive skill first. If you have sufficient passive skill that you're ready to practice active, you're much better off writing a blog, making penfriends, moving to Japan, or dictating your autobiography in real time than trying to make your SRS into a conversation partner--by definition an AI-hard problem. And no excuses about how you never have a chance to produce--get a digital camera and a cat from the local humane society and you've got blog. Don't forget to enable comments.

(No offense intended against catbloggers; I enjoy うにの秘密基地 myself.)

My SRS is a special TV/radio/book that only plays stuff that I haven't understood recently where "recently" is computed from my computer's guess of how well I remember it. It has a place and fills it well, but no more.

If it works for other people, cool. But I must admit I'm for the time being too put off by "heterophenomenological partners" to try it.

Gosh, I think you guys mean captions.

Subtitles are those short sentences you find under a photograph.

In any case, do we really need a thread about this?

wildweathel Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:Mostly involves clever tagging and an open mind when it comes to SRS as a heterophenomenological life partner, though.

My feeling on the subject is this.

You must have passive skill first. If you have sufficient passive skill that you're ready to practice active, you're much better off writing a blog, making penfriends, moving to Japan, or dictating your autobiography in real time than trying to make your SRS into a conversation partner--by definition an AI-hard problem. And no excuses about how you never have a chance to produce--get a digital camera and a cat from the local humane society and you've got blog. Don't forget to enable comments.

(No offense intended against catbloggers; I enjoy うにの秘密基地 myself.)

My SRS is a special TV/radio/book that only plays stuff that I haven't understood recently where "recently" is computed from my computer's guess of how well I remember it. It has a place and fills it well, but no more.

If it works for other people, cool. But I must admit I'm for the time being too put off by "heterophenomenological partners" to try it.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...2#pid81532

The term 'heterophenomenological life partner' is a tongue in cheek reference to creating a flexibly automated virtual reference point external to oneself yet dependent on what one puts into it that has nothing to do with AI (well, you could spin it that way, and I have before, but in this context it's not a useful metaphor outside of gratuitous decoration). In this context it refers to the very rigid, narrow-minded views about Anki/spaced repetition that I often encounter, which flies in the face of, in my observations, common sense and the scientific mechanisms underlying SRSing. I won't bother going into specifics, this argument I am referring to seems to occur in every thread about SRSing in general, hehe. More related: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3842

PS - I also don't differentiate between passive and active knowledge, as it's based on flawed assumptions about how the brain works, when it's--as with many notions in cognitive science--actually an area of considerable debate, but I'll save a repetition of that argument for a rainy day...