A few years ago my husband and I returned to a multi-level carpark and found a plain bag on the ground near our car containing some DVDs. The edge of the bag had been driven over, but the discs were all intact. I wasn't studying Japanese at the time and hadn't even heard of anime. I brought the discs home, put them on a shelf, even offered to give them to a friend's teenage daughter, but she wasn't interested.

I've always felt bad for the person who drove home from that carpark and discovered they didn't have their DVDs... but I've finally realised these discs are potentially a Japanese resource for me!

Just wondering if anyone has heard of them, seen them, found them helpful?

Should I watch them with English subtitles first? Or do I just play them in the bg in Japanese (while still doing RTK 1) ?

SERIES 1
NOW AND THEN, HERE AND THERE
- Dischord (sic?) and Doom
- Flight and Fall
- Conflict and Chaos

SERIES 2
LICENSED BY ROYALTY
-Mission File 1: Deceptions
- Mission File 2: Targets
- Mission File 3: Broken Angel
- Mission File 4: Assassinations

SERIES 3
SERIAL EXPERIMENTS: LAIN
- navi
- knights
- deus
- reset

Serial Experiments Lain is an interesting little sci-fi series.
Now and Then, Here and There is really good, but it is incredibly depressing. Don't let the somewhat lighthearted first episode fool you. This show is bleak. You may need some tissues, because the ending is a bit of a tear jerker (at least, I remember crying over it).

How far into your Japanese studies are you? Are you wanting to watch them just for the Japanese exposure, or are you interesting in watching them for the story as well? If you're still a beginner and want to enjoy the story, you could watch them the first time with the subtitles on just so you're not bored and have an idea of what's happening.
After that, there's no reason why you couldn't watch them without the subs as Japanese background sound while you study RTK.

quark Wrote:How far into your Japanese studies are you? Are you wanting to watch them just for the Japanese exposure, or are you interesting in watching them for the story as well?

Thank you! I'd have to say I'm still a beginner, though I've been "studying" on my own for almost 3 years now... I was overwhelmed by the number of resources available and enthusiastically "began" most of them! About three lessons/weeks in, I would come across something else and start on that instead - not because I was bored with the current resource, just because the latest one I'd discovered also looked so appealing.

This year I finally developed some focus and decided to do nothing until I've completed RTK 1, including the new supplementary kanji. Started in April, will finish mid-November. I know that's slow by some people's standards, but it's what I can manage while still enjoying the process. I have a weekly schedule mapped out. I'm up to about 1600. I'm on track.

I'm now at the point where I'd love to do some listening practice at the same time, but find it difficult to concentrate with background noise. When I was at university, I couldn't breathe without music playing, but sadly these days it feels like it takes all my brain cells to focus on just one thing.

I'd love to watch the DVDs for the story, but that seems a lot of hours that I wouldn't be studying RTK. So I wasn't sure if I just played them in Japanese, without having seen them in English, if there could really be any benefit. I guess it's about getting my brain used to the "sound" of Japanese even if I don't recognise the words. Maybe watching the DVDs can be my reward in November!

Anyway, thanks for your feedback. I really appreciate it.

Maybe you could do something similar to what I do - I do 20 minutes studying (reps or adding cards), then take a break and watch an episode of an anime, then back to studying. That way my 'break' still involves Japanese. You can adjust the time spent on each to suit you, of course. It's basically just a timeboxing method, and does seem to have increased overall efficiency as that way you have to account for every moment - no wandering off and getting distracted.

I'd definitely say to watch with the subtitles, as a beginner you pick up new words better that way, provided you can read the subs fast enough that you still hear the Japanese clearly. For instance, I couldn't help but pick up 黄鉄鉱 from Spice and Wolf just now, after hearing おうてっこう at the same time as seeing pyrite in the subs so often.

You're quite lucky to have picked up two really good series (don't know about Licensed by Royalty though). Serial Experiments Lain is one of my favourite series ever and an anime classic.
I think you would get almost no meaning out of Lain without subtitles though. It's hard to understand in English. Now and Then, Here and There is probably difficult too. They're emphatically not children's shows - if you want to use anime as a learning tool there are much better places to start - but seeing as you have them you might as well watch them anyway.

Not sure from your post, but are the DVDs you have the complete series? They should each be 13 episodes long, and it would probably just not make sense if you started halfway through.

Aikynaro Wrote:You're quite lucky to have picked up two really good series

I AM lucky, aren't I?! I'm very grateful to whoever accidentally left them behind in that carpark...

Aikynaro Wrote:... if you want to use anime as a learning tool there are much better places to start - but seeing as you have them you might as well watch them anyway.

I've never considered watching anime before - though I'm aware it's very popular in the Japanese-language-learning community. Hopefully, these discs will broaden my movie-viewing tastes! Just from the covers, they look fascinating.

Aikynaro Wrote:Not sure from your post, but are the DVDs you have the complete series? They should each be 13 episodes long, and it would probably just not make sense if you started halfway through.

Thanks for that tip. I've checked them out now and, yes, each has 13 episodes in total - that's a lot of viewing hours!

Ampharos64 Wrote:It's basically just a timeboxing method, and does seem to have increased overall efficiency as that way you have to account for every moment - no wandering off and getting distracted.

Thanks for your suggestions. Timeboxing is definitely something I've avoided - and not for any good reason. (I'm just procrastinating about how to effectively stop procrastinating!) But I'll give it a go, thanks.