Hi All,

Just throwing out a line for opinions on watching content with Japanese subtitles. I know english subtitles are the devil and really distract my comprehension (my japanese listening practically goes to zero if I read english subtitles, which is an interesting effect but not what I want to talk about here).

So, opinions? Is watching content with exact Japanese subtitles better or worse than watching with Japanese audio only? My reading level is pretty close to "natural" in that reading the subtitles is not very hard, but my listening comprehension is pretty bad overall. In my case I feel like reading the subtitles is a huge boost in that I can get comprehensible references for what I'm hearing, which makes hearing that content all the easier, but maybe it's a crutch to be avoided?

K.

They are a crutch. If you cant understand something without them, then by all means use them. But you should hope to eventually be able to watch material without them.
It may help to watch the same show again without the subs after you have watched it with the subs the first time.
They certainly aren't going to HURT you, but you also aren't going to be building some of the skills needed for just pure listening comprehension.

Thanks for the reply Zarxrax -- I take it your opinion is based on some experience with testing this out?

The foundation of my question really comes with various ramblings on this forum regarding the "comprehensible" part of "comprehensible" input. I feel like there's a difference between how people actually speak Japanese (i.e. how it really sounds) and how Japanese is formed from written page/study to sounds in a non-native learner's mind. At this point when I listen I have almost 100% confidence in terms of identifying words and phrases in that I could with good accuracy write down everything I hear in hiragana, but my comprehension as far as vocab familiarity or ability to think fast enough to parse fast/long phrases together meaningfully is in need of development.

In this light I figured looking at visual cues (Japanese subtitles) to get quick references for words might make my ability to hear those words later actually stronger. But maybe there's a flaw in my logic. To put it another way, when I have subtitles on and I read them and happen to know the words, I have close to 100% comprehension of the audio that is being spoken at the time. But without subtitles I might not be able to pull my precarious passive vocab quickly enough. So I hear some word I passively "know" (i.e. if I read it I would definitely recognize it), but think "oh, hum... not sure what he just said. oh well."

Just my two cents!

K.

Well, I do usually watch with subtitles, mainly because I also can't understand much without them. I find that the main issue is that kanji is the crutch. Without kanji, I really have trouble understanding the meaning of what is being said, or translating the sounds into a meaning. I have the same issues when I play a game like pokemon where its entirely in hiragana.
The only way to really get over that problem, I think, is to not rely on the kanji.

A good training exercise might be to srs some sentences without using kanji. I haven't tried this yet though. (or rather, just some cards where you listen to the audio rather than reading anything)

Japanese subtitles are awesome.

Ideally, in theory, you should try to understand everything without them.
In practice, it doesn't work that way.

The truth is that sometimes Japanese actors mumble/mangle words
to the point that it's difficult to know what the exact words are (so that you
can look them up in a dictionary).

Also, I'd say that understanding conversation is largely a matter of vocabulary.
If you've heard the word before, then it's easier to hear it in actual conversation.
Often, the most difficult words to decipher are the words that you've never
heard before (and that happens often when you listen to drama).

So I'd say that you can try reading drama subtitles as if they were a book or screenplay. Before watching the episode, read the script like a book and imagine the drama in your mind. Learn all the words you can. As time passes by, drama become easier because you've heard the words before.

If you don't believe me, try transcribing a drama scene without subtitles. You'll realize
how hard it really is to accurately write down all the words they are saying. They are so many instances where I'm totally baffled. Then I check the drama subtitles and am totally relieved because I would NEVER have ever guessed that those were the words spoken by the actors.

Btw, on average, a 45-minute drama episode has 400-550 unique kanji characters (I wrote a computer program to figure that out).

chamcham Wrote:Japanese subtitles are awesome.

Ideally, in theory, you should try to understand everything without them.
In practice, it doesn't work that way.


If you don't believe me, try transcribing a drama scene without subtitles. You'll realize
how hard it really is to accurately write down all the words they are saying. They are so many instances where I'm totally baffled. Then I check the drama subtitles and am totally relieved because I would NEVER have ever guessed that those were the words spoken by the actors.

Btw, on average, a 45-minute drama episode has 400-550 unique kanji characters (I wrote a computer program to figure that out).

Same here there's been times where I'm totally baffled whether they're saying something really simple I already know ( but i just couldnt catch it ) or using words I don't know. There's also times where I miraculously catch the word I've never heard before and look it up and find out that's exactly what they said.

I just listened to anime and other media without subs, bringing up the English subtitles (press S in Media Player Classic) when I couldn't catch what was being said and listening to the Japanese again to try to catch exactly what was being said, having been clued into the meaning. Well that and listening to people in real life. That seems to have brought my listening to more or less fluency.

I rarely ever used Japanese subtitles except when watching variety shows.

Dizmox -- thanks for the comments. I think there are many cases like the one you describe. Many of my fluent friends did nothing other than listen and try to participate. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and that's pretty much what I've been doing for a while now as Japanese subs are hard to come by.

With that said, there seems to be all sorts of methods, tools and thoughts on how to _efficiently_ boost all other aspects of the language (e.g. methods for learning kanji, methods for writing kanji, methods for learning to read in graded ways, methods for learning masses of vocab, etc). People have been learning Japanese for decades (centuries) and all of the above methods have made some of the aspects of parts of the language much easier to manage and more streamlined (though this is debatable).

I have zero doubt that if I just keep chugging along with watching shows, listening to podcasts, talking with friends and what not that before much longer I'll be pretty satisfied with my listening. BUT!... I'm just curious if there are methods that can make the listening learning process faster, more efficient or, generally speaking, accelerated.

While having lunch and discussing this topic with a friend today, I came up with an experiment. If anyone has thoughts or possible reasons to believe they know the answer to the below description, please comment

Experiment Goal: Test for a method of increased listening comprehension

Experiment Outline:

*Get two large groups of students of equal average Japanese performance (3rd or 4th year Japanese language students in university classes, for example -- i.e. a group with decent reading ability).

*Have students in group 1 watch with focused attention 10 episodes of some drama without subtitles. Students are required to rewatch each episode multiple times over the course of a week, 1 episode per week.

*Have students in group 2 watch the same 10 episodes at the same pace, same required repetition, but WITH subtitles.

*At the 11th week, have the students in both groups watch the 11th episode _without_ subtitles. Test the students for listening comprehension.

Which group will demonstrate better comprehension?

Comment1: This is a very specific test, admittedly, so it would be testing a targeted type of comprehension (mannerisms of actors, specific style of speech or communication, etc). Realistically life and listening comprehension will be MUCH more varied than learning to understand one style of speech or show or whatever, but that's not the point being addressed here.

Comment2: I think the crux of this question comes down to when you are listening without subtitles and trying to comprehend something you hear, you'll be training (exercising?) your mind to actively recall out of its depths various pieces of information. If you do that a lot, you'll get better at it, certainly... With subtitles present you don't have to do the same type of mental searching for word meaning, as the cues are provided for you by the text and the question is will that process be inferior to subtitle-free recall practice? Or will having that comprehensible input be enough to solidify the same words being heard in the future cases in different contexts?

Sorry for going off on this, I enjoy tossing speculative ideas like this around.

I don't think it matters what you do as long as you keep the subtitles off except at points you really need them, otherwise you'll end up reading more than listening.

@OP
Your vocabulary is +10k and you still have problems with grasping those mere 2k in the naturally spoken language? How surprising (not).

From http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...9#pid75099
“3. Vocabulary count – so you think that 20k vocabulary is going to make you fluent? Well, I'm of opinion that just with 2,000 but well rehearsed and used at will, you have better chances in proving that your Japanese is ok.”

Inny,
I didn't mean to sound like "why can't I understand spoken Japanese if I know how to read so well?!" I think it's pretty easy to recognize that language has many different subsets of skills that need to be developed and all I'm asking about is whether or not people think there are _efficient_ ways to boost listening comprehension.

Almost everyone here has developed or read about methods to increase the ease and flow of doing things like learning to write kanji, learning to recognize kanji, learning readings of kanji, learning to read kanji compounds. It's not like we say "Oh, what, you want to learn Kanji? GO WRITE KANJI!"

So, in analogue, it seems that the consensus on this forum is "to get good at listening you listen" and I whole heartedly agree with that statement. That doesn't mean one can't contemplate how to bolster listening in specific ways. When people learn to speak some people embrace speaking methods* (shadowing, pimsleur, etc), so why not do the same with listening? Or at least think about it and try to propose some ideas?

That's all I'm curious about

*Just giving examples, not saying I think these speaking practice methods necessarily work well

I can see that for other people this may not be the case, but I can pretty confidently say that watching TV with J-subs does almost nothing for my Japanese ability. I used to think I was listening to the audio while reading the subs, but that wasn't the case. I think 空耳 demonstrates this really well. A well done　空耳　video doesn't make me think "it does sound a bit like that", it makes it sound like that is what they're actually saying. This works regardless of language, even English to Japanese, as long I can understand the subtitles easily enough.

I've also tried reading the subtitles only when I can't understand the audio, but I just end up reading them anyway. I even find myself unable to stop reading subtitles in languages I don't understand.

@Splatted: Same here.. But I think my listening improves little by little by listening (a) passive to podcasts on iTunes and the like and (b) watching Detective Conan Episodes with subtitles. I also try not to read the subtitles, but I got kind of used to watching fanSUBS....

P.s.

kodorakun Wrote:but my comprehension as far as vocab familiarity or ability to think fast enough to parse fast/long phrases together meaningfully is in need of development.

These are all things that apply to reading as well listening, so if you're good at them you basically have everything you need to improve your listening, and you just need to learn to apply it, which is an issue of practice. I think that if you really commit to some solid listening practice you'll find that you're understanding improves surprisingly quickly. That's been my experience after starting to work on my listening recently, though it's still lower than my reading ability.

here's the downside to NO SUBS.
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid65347

it was posted by shinsen
Assume that I could acquire the language through listening and watching massive amounts of Japanese radio and TV.

What happens is you reach a point where you understand enough to get by and after that your "noise filter" kicks in. See, there is this filter inside your head that just filters out most of the words you don't know. This allows you to concentrate on what you know and follow the speaker. But, you can hear a word a thousand times and completely ignore it. Now when you actually make an effort to "learn" a new word, suddenly you start hearing it all the time, because it can now pass through your noise filter.

So yes, listen and watch, but cook it before you eat it or it will just pass through your system with little effect.

--------
But I do agree with the downsides of watching with subs because I've experienced that too.... but just wanted to throw this out here.

But if you take the "listening-reading" approach seriously (e.g. something like LingQ) then watching with subtitles is essentially listening-reading for the first part, right? You can always listen and read to efficiently get all the unknown vocab (with additional visual context cues from the video), etc, and then either rip the audio and listen to it on an mp3 player, or simply turn the subtitles off and re-watch, or any such combination. I'm definitely NOT promoting the idea of never having any audio input that is without j-subs, but simply questioning how much of a boost (or detriment, as it may seem) one can get from some calculated j-sub exposure.

@Tori-kun: I really think it's just a matter of practice when your reading comprehension is much better than you're listening. You need to practice extracting meaning from the audio, so if you're using subtitles to understand it, you're not really practicing anything. You may do a little good by associating the sounds with the meaning, but it's not directly addressing the problem, since you already know the words and (roughly) how they should sound.

I don't know about efficient methods so I can only elaborate on things that worked* or didn't work for me.

What didn't/doesn't work for me is listening to a material that is way above or way below my level. The explanation here is simple – you don't learn much if you easily understand the spoken content, and you don't learn at all if the content is not comprehensible. (BTW, the AJATT's picture of a brain implant that you develop by listening to any type of content made me laugh - it's like a big shoot and miss strategy.)

What did/does work for me is listening to content that if I read it, I would understand with no problems. However, while listening, because of my response time to the known vocabulary and grammar constructs not being well developed, I have difficulties understanding. To work on it, I play the audio in a loop**. I listen to the same content and slowly start picking up things that I already studied. The understanding comes in small chunks, a phrase here, a phrase there, and is completely uncontrollable. But after some time I can understand most of it.

Re: subtitles. You want them if you want to understand the content. You don't want them when you want to practice your listening comprehension.


HTH

* At the time when I was studying English - Japanese is a work in progress.
** I'm not sure what's the optimal size of the “loop”, I don't think playing back over and over again the same short dialogue is that good and I don't think that if you hear the same content, let's say, twice in a day is beneficial either.

Like I mentioned, drama subtitles are like screenplays.

So before watching the episode, read the subtitles and imagine the story in your head.
This helps with remembering phrases during actual conversations because you'll be able to recall similar situations from j-drama.

Mark the parts that don't make sense to you and make note of them when you finally watch the episode.

Is there any tool for visualizing or printing vobsub files into one text or location? They seem like binary files whenever I open them, so I'm guessing they are images of some sort.

Bit of googling says DirectVobSub can extract subs to a usable format.

@Howtwosavealife: That's quite a different situation though. He was trying to learn by listening, rather than trying to apply what he'd learnt to listening. The OP already has the necessary vocab and grammar knowledge, and as Shinsen said, once you learn a new word it can pass through your filter.

I think Inny Jan makes a good point about the difficulty of what you're listening to, though it sounds like that would be pretty much anything in the OP's case.

Edit: I've not really tried the listening/reading approach, but I don't think watching TV with J-subs is really like it because the LR method involves multiple other activities, including listening to the audio on it's own.