Do you have both of the books? I mean "Shadowing: Let's speak japanese!" 1 and 2.

I bought them both recently, started shadowing 3 days ago, when they arrived. I intend on shadowing everyday for at least 30 minutes. I really hope this develops my skills.

I'm also interested in knowing about books for shadowing, I still have a lot of shadowing to do with these books but if this actually works I will have to find more shadowing resourses within a few months.

I think the short stories in this thread:
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7318

would be pretty good for shadowing, over half have transcripts now.

I personally couldn't hack the that shadowing book for very long.

If you have finished genki 2 and core 2000 I think you could take on an easy manga so long as you don't mind not understanding every sentence.

CarolinaCG wrote:

Here you go

http://www.whiterabbitpress.com/product … amp;page=1 book 2

http://www.whiterabbitpress.com/search. … =shadowing other shadowing books whiterabbitpress as

Looks good, I might get it as well

Is anyone else doing shadowing? Did it work for you? I hope speaking gets easier, just like listening did, through immersion. I intend on shadowing at least 30+ minutes per day everyday, a bit in the morning and at night.

I will try to shadow the news too, just to see if I can keep up with their speed (using the pause button many times of course).

You could try shadowing with the core sentences. I hope haven't misunderstood the concept of shadowing, because I don't have any of the specific 'shadowing' books. However, what I do is go through the core words in an Anki deck. (corePLUS shared deck), going from sound to English meaning, then on the back of each card I have the Japanese sentence, written and audio (the english sentence, I have printed in white text on a white background so I don't have to see it). Most often, when I have time, or I an not in public, I repeat the sentence once or twice. I find this quite useful. After a while the sentence patterns become ingrained and the patterns can be re-used, when constructing your own sentences. It also gives useful context for the words you are actually learning. The sentences aren't too long or complicated, which could be seen as a good or a bad thing, and you won't learn much about joining sentences together. But since you seem to be doing a vocabulary deck anyway, you could easily try this in addition to other listening.

Do those that have them find these shadowing books in any way better than shadowing  dramas and stuff, or is it just that they are more convenient?

rachels wrote:

How do I delete a duplicate post ?

The delete function was recently removed

Last edited by Splatted (2011 February 12, 5:19 pm)

thurd wrote:

Recently I bought the first Harry Potter book and incidentally I have obtained an audiobook of the exact same copy. Book has furigana, doesn't have overcomplicated grammar and at some point it might be possible to try to shadow it all.

There is an audiobook for Harry Potter? Any other audiobooks for English translations?

The book Japanese with Ease by Assimil is perfect for shadowing. Check it out.

I's using that book. After 2 weeks I started feeling a difference, but until now I havent felt any more differences. Started like 3 months ago.

I usually:

-read
-understand
-listen and shadow several times

Well not so much lately, I'm in the last section of the first book and there's still vocab I don't know. Because I don't focus on understanding (even though I read a first time) but rather on imitating and speaking. I will starting to add the vocab in anki I don't know (5%??), but not right now because I have loads of tests and would rather add jlpt vocab and grammar.

Within less than one month I will focus on all shadowing skills.

Any questions feel free to ask. I have the second book, I can tell you that the second book as looong dialogs to shadow. Like this for instance

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ysdZ9llnpig/T … C04155.JPG

I've been using the Shadowing books since March.  I finished book 1 and am about 1/3 of the way through book 2.  I use simple Anki cards in order to help myself remember to do it daily and review older dialogues.  Just plain text cards with the audio track information, no multimedia effects.  I leave the audio files as regular MP3s to play in my usual audio software because a lot of the material feels like tongue-twisters at first and I like being able to easily pause/rewind/repeat tricky parts.

My experience is that within the first week I noticed an immediate improvement in my pronunciation and fluidity in real-life conversation, and there are a few patterns creeping into my speech now that I didn't use before.  The beginning was very encouraging, but the rate of improvement quickly dropped off.  Most likely I'm continuing to improve, just it's so gradual that I can't see it myself any more.  However, if I miss a day of shadowing, it's painfully obvious that I'm worse the next day.  So I keep doing it in order not to suck more than I have to. 

I've also gotten better at reading casual speech.  Like interviews or manga dialogues with mumbly-style pronunciation instead of textbook spelling, or abbreviated expressions.

After I finish Shadowing 2 I'll probably try doing the audio in the 聞いて覚える話し方　日本語生中継 series.
http://nihongo.9640.jp/66
My language teacher recommended these books for listening practice, but I think they'll do for shadowing as well.