As mentioned in my previous post, I want to thank Volte, from how-to-learn-any-language.com for tipping me on the fact that I may have been doing something wrong in L-R if I had not noticed a significant increase in comprehensible audio within the timeframe of about 20 hours, after having tried this part of the method for a week I must concur with Volte.

I have been trying this important step for four days now and can say that I am beginning to feel like my vocabulary recognition in Japanese is beginning to take off, similar to the feeling I got as I came closer to 'natural listening' in both German and Swedish. Now I know I still have some weeks before this occurs but it is moving at a very rapid pace now.

I also found that Shadowing the audio that I am listening to while reading the translation in English helps me stay focused on the audio material. Total number of hours spent doing this system comes to around ten hours for the week total. I feel confident to say that next week I will have at least another ten and expect to double my vocabulary recognition perhaps even triple it!

I decided that I should try this system with French as well and can say that though it may not be necessary for my French learning, I’m going to finish Les Ames Vagabondes at least one time using this system, perhaps even two times. I have noticed that there is hardly any utterance made in French that I do not understand completely. As soon as I am done with the book, listening to it two more times, I will listen to some audio I have never read before in French, to see if I have really acquired natural listening, as it is hard to gauge whether I have brought my French vocabulary into a quick enough memory level.

Using this system for learning a foreign language is amazing, not only does one learn words used all the time in a foreign language, one also learns obscure and at times funny vocabulary. Someone on a forum recently said that this method is pure rubbish because as one will spend time learning words that are useless to the beginner; to this I say rubbish! Weird words are fun but they are also helpful in learning a foreign language. I find that the more words I know in a text, regardless of how useful they are, the more words I can learn from context.

This was a productive week in Listening-Reading for both Japanese and French. I plan to continue what I did this week and will report any obstacles I run into. I will also be on the look out for some new headphones, my favorite pair of Sonys, the ones I used 75% of the time, broke today. I have probably put somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 hours on them, so I’m not too disappointed or surprised.

I've finished the first 5 chapters of Harry Potter reading the English while listening to the Japanese... I'm not far enough along to say how effective or ineffective it is yet so I'll bite my tongue for now

If you can get to the point in Japanese that you can understand every utterance, as you can in French, I'll be impressed. I think that's going to take a long, long time though- how long did it take you to get to that level in French?

Quote:how long did it take you to get to that level in French?

I have L-R French for about 40 hours total.

I just wanted to make sure I understand this method before I try it. So you read Harry Potter in English while listening to the Japanese audio. You also have the Japanese Harry Potter book parallel to the English one. Is that basically it or am I missing something.

So from zero understanding of French you can understand anything said in French in 40 hours?

Quote:So from zero understanding of French you can understand anything said in French in 40 hours?

I don't understand everything in French by a long shot... I haven't even tested my knowledge in the real world. My statement was actually meant to be about the book I'm using to L-R French, Les Ames Vagabondes by Stephenie Meyer. It is a novel that takes up 27 hours in French; however, most anglophones already have a strong vocabulary in French due to the high number of words that have similar meanings in both languages. I'm sure others can give a better number than I can as to how many words are cognates with the two; the point is that they are heavily related.
More importantly, I am fluent in Spanish, as it and English were my first two language as a child. So that gives me a big advantage over others, though I don't think the amount of time required to learn French would be that far off either way.

Quote:I just wanted to make sure I understand this method before I try it. So you read Harry Potter in English while listening to the Japanese audio. You also have the Japanese Harry Potter book parallel to the English one. Is that basically it or am I missing something.

The way that I am L-R Japanese is as follows... I read the two Harry Potter books in English and watched the movies before even doing anything in Japanese. One must internalize the material before beginning to try understanding it in another language.

I then listened to the audio without any translations on their own. That took around 20 hours, I should note that when possible I shadowed the audio.

Now I am reading the text in English while listening to it in Japanese when possible. The rest of the time I am just listening to the Japanese audio by itself.

digitlhand Wrote:Weird words are fun but they are also helpful in learning a foreign language. I find that the more words I know in a text, regardless of how useful they are, the more words I can learn from context.

If you enjoy learning obscure words, then go for it of course. :-) But I'm not sure your second reason makes much sense. Yes, a larger vocab improves one's ability to infer unknown word meanings from context. But this a reason for learning more common words - to enjoy that benefit more frequently and in a wider variety of texts. If the goal here is to test how rapidly you can develop reading skills in different languages ...
[edit: er... maybe listening skills is the focus, not reading]

So you're really putting in a lot of hours- as you mentioned earlier you wake up at 5am just to follow this method. As the first Harry Potter book is about 10 hours, and you've read in in English, read in in Japanese while listening to the Japanese (as you said on your website- this really needs a verb!) and listened to the audio multiple times for the first and second book, you must already be approaching 50+ hours of time spent doing something in Japanese?

Quote:you must already be approaching 50+ hours of time spent doing something in Japanese?

Yes, I am approaching 50 hours if I haven't already passed that.

Quote:But this a reason for learning more common words

Definitely Thora. Totally makes sense.
In L-R though, it's really hard to concentrate on which words I will learn faster than others, it really has to do with words that appeal to me for whatever reason audibly as well as how many times I hear them.

I think it's more about your choice of book (based on enjoyment) and what effect that might have on your experiment. I didn't mean to suggest you should only listen for common words. ;-) Your vocab will affect your ability to "test your knowledge in the real world". It could make it difficult to compare results across languages. I recognize vocab is only one component, but as you say if affects how quickly other aspects of comprehension develop.

You're investing a great deal of time and I think the results could be interesting. But I suppose there's too many variables and fuzziness to draw much in terms of comparisons. [Your results with Japanese alone will be interesting though :-)]

Has anyone tried doing the LR method with subtitles from a movie/drama as a source?

I was thinking trying LR with Korean, but I'm having a hard time finding any* Korean audiobook (and then there's finding the actual book and a translation...), so I thought maybe I could use the sound from a movie and then use Korean subtitles as the L2 written material and English subtitles as L1. (I'd extract them into a text file, so I could read the whole things at once)

* Really the only thing I've found is the bible, which is better than nothing, but it might mean old, weird language, and also I've no idea which version (which translation) they're reading from! (There are tons of them.)

Problems I can see is:
1. not enough spoken material (movies aren't as dense as audiobooks)
2. simply too short (90min vs 20+h), I'd need a lot of movies
3. spoken language not clear, lots of background noise, audiobooks are typically much clearer, as they are spoken more slowly, carefully
4. not as filled with recurring sentence patterns (like, XXX said ....), and much shorter utterances. Or maybe they're just different?

Quote:I was thinking trying LR with Korean, but I'm having a hard time finding any* Korean audiobook

Apparently none or hardly any exist according to many many Koreans I have asked.

Vaste I think the problems you outlined are correct... I think movies can work, but it will take much longer, due to the amount of actual dialogue you hear, maybe 30 minutes from a 2 hr movie if that.

For Korean, when I get to it next year, I'm planning on paying someone to read the Twilight series for me... that would be about 60 - 70 hours of audio. Unfortunately due to copyright laws I won't be able to share.

@digitlhand. What books are you planning on using for Japanese?

I know that HP 1&2 are available on audio book. But afaik, LOTR and Twilight are not.

I'm trying L-R on French. I was using parallel texts before, but in a slower more analytical way. I spent quite a long time collecting about 8 hours of audio that I understood thoroughly, and replayed this same audio a lot of times as "passive listening" after I understood it. This was definitely working, and more efficient than anything I'd tried previously, but I see the value in going for quantity rather than detail.

Regarding the age of source materials, from what I've read on the subject, French hasn't changed much in the last few hundred years while Japanese has. I guess Korean has too? How bad is it? What would be the results of using a lot of input from the 1800s?

Might there exist some long works in modern Japanese or Korean under a free license? For fiction, I've not even found any in English so far (-ND won't do if you want to make an audiobook), so that's unlikely. Non-fiction audiobooks maybe? =P

oregum Wrote:@digitlhand. What books are you planning on using for Japanese?

I have recently started experimenting with L-R using Harry Potter. I would love to find more texts as well. So far my plan is (other than Harry Potter 1/2):

-Voice blog materials (http://www.voiceblog.jp/japaneselistening/)
-Read Real Japanese (nice parallel text, but the stories are short)

I searched for audio book on amazon.jp and found quite a few texts by natsumi soseki, but those would be not modern Japanese and I am unsure how true the translation is to the original.

oregum,

I am trying to to see how far I can get with just Harry Potter at this point. I plan on learning Korean and Arabic afterwards and because there are no audiobooks that I can find for either language I will have to pay someone to read books I want. That will be very expensive so I'm trying to see if I can get by with 20 hrs of audio. If I can't I will post here what my next audiobook will be.

If there were a legal way to do it, not sure it's possible, I would pay for someone to record audio and share it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a legal way to do that.

Vaste Wrote:I was thinking trying LR with Korean, but I'm having a hard time finding any* Korean audiobook

I think this site sells audiobooks(but they might not be very long), but I can't navigate or understand the titles.

What I was getting at in my last post was that you can pay someone to record audio and share it if you choose source material with a license that allows this. The question would be whether anything appropriate exists.

digitlhand Wrote:If there were a legal way to do it, not sure it's possible, I would pay for someone to record audio and share it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a legal way to do that.

That's an interesting idea. There are a lot of Japanese voice actors who put up excellent quality audiobooks on their blogs. I wonder if they would be willing to record, say, the rest of the Harry Potter series and I wonder how much they would charge.

sheetz Wrote:

digitlhand Wrote:If there were a legal way to do it, not sure it's possible, I would pay for someone to record audio and share it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a legal way to do that.

I wonder if they would be willing to record, say, the rest of the Harry Potter series and I wonder how much they would charge.

I would be willing to pay into a pool for something like this. If four of five of us got our money together it wouldn't cost too much, legal issues aside.

I asked the question in another forum as to whether or not that would infringe on a copyrights, and it seems that it would.

If that is not the case and 4 or 5 of us can do something like that, I would put up $1000 dollars myself. The total time to read the rest of the Harry Potter series would be about 140 hours straight through.

yukamina Wrote:

Vaste Wrote:I was thinking trying LR with Korean, but I'm having a hard time finding any* Korean audiobook

I think this site sells audiobooks (but they might not be very long), but I can't navigate or understand the titles.

Which site?

I think it would be illegal even for someone to record Harry Potter and send you it privately. The copyright holders probably wouldn't care, but the reader might.

sheetz Wrote:There are a lot of Japanese voice actors who put up excellent quality audiobooks on their blogs.

Where? And what do you mean by "audiobook" here?

Maybe one way could be to simply ask for permission from some not-too-famous (or not-too-greedy maybe?) Japanese authors? Surely a lot of them would be interested in this for-the-good-of-humanity project? Pretty much anything fairly interesting that's long enough would be good, right? Or maybe one could just use several short stories (also meaning a more varied language)?

Though that would probably mean that would be no translations available. Maybe we (or some Japanese guys) could collaboratively work on translating it to English, with proofreading etc?