Wisher
Member
From: Los Angeles
Registered: 2008-04-24
Posts: 65
Im not sure if this has been discused, but, is it a good idea to get phrases for the 10,000 sentences to learn from the AJATT method?
In other words, it seems to me that a good place to get sentences is listening to J-Pop music, like Kiroro, and take the lyrics and go phrase by phrase. Think about how much you get from a whole album. And you are killing two birds with one stone, assuming you like the music to begin with.
Is this a good idea or a bad one?
Are there bad habits in speech to pick up from it? (Like in manga)
And a cultural question. In japanese, is it important to rhyme words together at the end of phrases, or do they do something else? I have not really noticed. What does japanese rap sound like?
Wisher
zwarte_kat
Member
From: Netherlands
Registered: 2006-09-24
Posts: 53
I think when integrated correctly, this could be a powerful way to study sentences. Here are my thoughts on it:
-the use of rhythm and repetition helps you remember them, as far as I know many songs rhyme
-it is fun and easy if you like the song
-if you pick songs that you like, you could listen to them at anytime on your mp3 player/computer
-KARAOKE!!!
-iknow seems to be the perfect thing for this, it is probably being done already (didn't check)
You should be carefull though that the sentences are actually correct, even in the original song. Also I wouldn't use song sentences exclusively and aim for more variation.
phauna
Member
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2007-12-25
Posts: 500
Website
Just to be negative, think about some English song lyrics and tell me whether you think they're a good model to study from. Songs are unnatural in structure and word choice so they can rhyme and fit in with the music. You could learn vocabulary, sure, but grammar and sentence structure will obviously be pretty unnatural. I'm sure a few sentences here and there would be okay, but too many would mean you see weird Japanese too much in your deck.
Listening, okay; sentence mining, not so okay.
Last edited by phauna (2009 January 18, 4:54 am)
Dragg
Member
From: Sacramento, California
Registered: 2007-09-21
Posts: 369
Also, there is a high level of vocabulary overlap in song lyrics (especially pop) so ten thousand song-based sentences dealing with themes like love is not even close to being worth that many normal-difficulty sentences. Listening to an hour of pop radio, I won't be surprised if you hear a word like 心 dozens of times. As others have said, the actual sentence quality in terms of practicality tends to range between mildly to severely unnatural. It's poetry set to music so you have to expect all the oddities that come with that.
Not necessarily bad to incorporate this into your learning, but I wouldn't derive most of my exposure from it.
BTW, I've never noticed rhyming in the Japanese music I've listened to so it seems to be a non-factor.
Last edited by Dragg (2009 January 18, 5:41 am)
Dragg
Member
From: Sacramento, California
Registered: 2007-09-21
Posts: 369
iSoron wrote:
EnjukuBlack wrote:
No, rhyming isn't really a factor in Japanese. It's just too easy to rhyme in Japanese (everything's going to end in one of five sounds - a, i, u, e, or o) that it's never been considered a show of 'skill' or 'refinement' in poetry or music.
Source?
I know quite a few songs that use rhyming. A random example.
But I agree with you, it's way easier to do it in Japanese.
Just put everything in the continuative form. 
Other than ending coupled lines with the same particles, and ending verse fragments with the same verb conjugation and tense (which could arguably happen anyway), I don't see much evidence of intentional rhyming in your example. If you are implying that words like 流れて and かいて rhyme, that is like saying that words like jogging and lingering rhyme in English. But I guess it all depends on what you mean by rhyme.
Due to the fact that Japanese sentences end in verbs, and since people tend not to change tenses very often when speaking, I think you will see that this kind of rhyming is often more unavoidable than intentional.
In fact, my guess would be that the haiku was invented partially because bored poets wanted a challenge.
Last edited by Dragg (2009 January 18, 3:27 pm)
iSoron
Member
From: Canada
Registered: 2008-03-24
Posts: 490
Dragg wrote:
Other than ending coupled lines with the same particles, and ending verse fragments with the same verb conjugation and tense (which could arguably happen anyway), I don't see much evidence of intentional rhyming in your example.
Sorry if it wasn't clear. I was referring to the chorus:
駆け出す 飛び込む 奇跡へ
見上げる 手を振る 光へ
揺らめく 近付く 明日へ
奏でる 夢見る 未来へ
Here's another example, incidentally, from the same show:
忘れたいと 忘れないと
ゆらゆら 廻りながら
And here's another, from another band, featuring rhyming, consonance and assonance:
そこから覗いていた時間が
たいしたものはなくたって 輝いてたんだ
Semi-kana version, with 'beat' morae bolded:
そこからのぞいていた 時間が
たいしたものはなくたって 輝いてたんだ
All these rhymes are clearly intentional.
Rhyming in Japanese music may not play as big a role as it plays in western music, but it is a factor, nevertheless. Which is not that surprising, considering how fundamental it is as a concept.
Songs:
1. http://www.jtw.zaq.ne.jp/animesong/to/t … ectia.html
2. http://www.jtw.zaq.ne.jp/animesong/to/true/sekai.html
3. http://www.jtw.zaq.ne.jp/animesong/ke/g … idama.html
Last edited by iSoron (2009 January 19, 2:49 pm)
Dragg
Member
From: Sacramento, California
Registered: 2007-09-21
Posts: 369
Again, it really depends on how you define rhyming. To me, rhyming has always meant perfect or near-perfect sound similarity aside from the initial consonant. This would be "ravage" rhyming with "savage" or かるい rhyming with わるい. I understand that everybody's definition may not be the same. It is difficult to determine whether or not those verse fragments in those lyrics are set off from each other to express partial rhyming or simply to emphasize the message. Especially when you consider how many parts of the song do not rhyme, even though it is quite easy to do so in Japanese.
For example, there is a really high natural chance of any given sentence or even partial sentence ending in the sound う. In normal polite Japanese, it might even be as high as 90 percent. To a non-Japanese speaker this may look like intentional rhyming, but it is not really clear if it's intentional or not.
The few verses ending in へ are your best example IMO, and even though it is the exact same word used twice, I guess somebody could interpret this as rhyming (or at least something similar) especially since it was obviously planned that way. I do believe that all good lyricists pay attention to sounds, and that a kind of satisfaction is achieved with some sort of similarities within sound repetition, but it seems up to the individual if you want to call this rhyming or not, but most of the time it probably isn't.
Last edited by Dragg (2009 January 19, 4:24 pm)
I think they're good for starting out, you know keeping it fun, learning the basics, easy to remember sometimes (cause you know the song just flows)
Actually this is what I did but after that I "explored" into other areas so I realized how much I learned from music (which was 1000 + words and 650+ kanji - reading/reocgnizing)and how much I couldn't possibly learn from music (I don't know some words or some sentence structures/words would just never appear in song but could be somewhat frequently used in speech or whatever).
Just think of music as one area you can "conquer" but certainly, there's more out there.
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i don't know about that weird example for rhyming with that anime song. i think that's just an example of how anime songs are most of the time /usually cliche/boring lyrically so it's not a big coincidence it seems "rhymed up" to you.
i'd say dive into real music after you get all the popular words in anime songs......
and there's really good japanes music out there btw... lol outside of anime nusic. you just gotta dig, undergrod ftw.
there's like real music you know outsie of anime music...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWuiXPQm … re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bm26VoRSqQ
Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2009 January 20, 6:48 pm)
