Maybe it's obvious, but it occurs to me that customer reviews on sites like amazon.co.jp are a good source of sentences for digesting after having finished RTK and Tae Kim.

Context is obvious for each review, and they're generally short enough to not be intimidating. If you're looking at just movie reviews for example, the same pool of words will keep coming up, and it'd be even easier if you're familiar with the reviewed item. Further bonus: copy-and-pasteable and Rikaichanable.

Thoughts? Any other blindingly obvious (and easy/free to access) sentence sources?

Drama Scripts
1000 Moji site
Subtitles from d-addicts
Manga scripts
Video Game scripts
Anime subtitles
News (FNN)

Granted, I'm now more for conversational type sentences so I go with subtitles and subs2srs.

For the news, if you use FNN, I tried Audicity and inserted markers at the sentence stops, then exported as pieces to match up to sentences. Easy.

Yeah, tons of sources for sentences now for almost any type of pleasure. So don't go crazy and add everything.

Nukemarine Wrote:For the news, if you use FNN, I tried Audicity and inserted markers at the sentence stops, then exported as pieces to match up to sentences. Easy.

That's genius... cheers!

One thing to keep in mind about reviews is that the reviewers are going to reflect whatever market base the product is. There's a huge disparity (yes, that is my favorite word this week, and I WILL use it in all my posts, and you can't stop me! Mwahaha) between something like reviews for a rap CD or teenager video game, versus reviews for more high-brow literature, for example.

There are tons of idiocy, awful writing, and errors in product reviews across the board, but it's a lot more prevalent in things that kinda' appeal to the average person, as opposed to things like scholarly works, etc, that are marketed to a pool of more educated people.

Sorry if that sounds elitist, but it is fairly true

Aijin Wrote:There are tons of idiocy, awful writing, and errors in product reviews across the board, but it's a lot more prevalent in things that kinda' appeal to the average person, as opposed to things like scholarly works, etc, that are marketed to a pool of more educated people.

Haha, fair enough. I'd read somewhere that stuff like Yahoo! answers and so on were generally much better written in Japanese than their English counterparts, so figured it might also apply to other stuff too. Thanks for the heads-up though!

I don't think Chiebukuro postings are perfect either. Look at say: http://hi.ly/zuex6

The best answer post seems pretty casual to me.