Unpopular opinion: The Little Prince royally sucks

FRENCH
My goal isn’t to be fluent or to get good very quickly. I know how to learn a language while being inconsistent/sporadic in my efforts. I’ve had many half-baked attempts at learning french since 2015?? 2016?? I’m okay with it since there’s only so many hours in a day and I have a lot of stuff I want to do in English, Japanese, Korean and I have a life and I want to practice self-care and all that.

I think once I read 10 books in French I’ll feel more comfortable/intermediate but I have a life so I don’t have time so who knows when I’ll get there (I have zero interest reading french translations !) .  Plus I’m interested in Spanish so I may read 10 books in Spanish first. I’m torn but I have no time anyway! I’m leaning towards French because I love how French doesn’t drop the subject while Spanish like Korean ALWAYS DOES whenever possible which is a nightmare for language learners and it’s a no-biggie for native speakers of course! Plus learning Spanish while knowing English and French is easier than just knowing English right (If I do the French -> Spanish route) ?? I gotta make decisions.

I read the little prince in 2016? I had the English translation at hand to reference it so I understood it. Anyway, the Little Prince sucks. I have nothing against kids books but I have something against kids books that are poorly written. I have so many recommendations for interesting, well-written kids books in English for kids between the ages of 5-10. Why is this book being recommended so much? I am truly stumped.

Besides being an awful book it’s horrible for language learning
!

1) I hated it. Unfortunately I read it to the end instead of stopping!!

It is not because of unwarranted high expectations because I know it’s an extremely old, kids book. Actually, children’s book have STIFF COMPETITION…  I’ve read children’s books in English because I was once a child and this book really sucks compared to whatever I read as a child. There are so many wonderful children’s books out there and some are so good that even adults enjoy them. The little prince was unremarkable in every single way.

2) It’s random and illogical.
Those are pretty much the worst characteristics of sentences/word-choice for language learning. I don’t mind random if it’s executed well ie when it’s witty, funny, interesting, entertaining. For the little prince it is never any of those adjectives.

It felt like random for the sake random in the worst way possible. I never knew random could be this dull. The
sentences are not conducive to language learning. You could’ve told me ivrogne means thomeless/stripper/dancer/pedestrian/hula-hoop (it really means drunk) etc I would’ve believed you and also promptly forget the word and meaning because it’s arbitrary. I have to mention that I subscribe to STeve Kaufmann’s belief that you may need to encounter the word being used 20-30 times sometimes to have to it stick so I don’t have unrealistic expectations of coming across magical sentences left and right that make the word effortless and easy to remember on the first encounter. Even taking that into account, the sentences/story in Little Prince are not good for language learning.

I also hate alice in wonderland. I never knew how much the book sucked until I actually tried to read it. Holly from girls next door quoted from that book a lot and the quotes make the book seem much better than it actually is. It’s astounding how much a book can suck despite its popularity. Well there’s 50 shades of Gray but I never really tried to read-read it lol.

I listened to the audio using workaudiobook while reading so one thing I definitely learned is that petit prince is pronounced PETI PRAN in French. Or at least that’s what it sounds like to my American ears. I’m still working out the phonetics in French. Which reminds me I can’t pronounce petite prince because of the French R and I can’t pronounce cinq  (probably because I can’t hear it)

For good children’s books in English for people learning English I would recommend Roald Dahl of course and My Father’s Dragon.

i recommend the WHO Is SHE STORIES on lingq for anyone who is beginner. It’s fairly fun and entertaining while the little prince is dull as paint drying on the wall

On a positive note, I learned my lesson and gave up on The Stranger very quickly (maybe after 1 chapter). It was not drawing me in whatsoever. I don’t think I’d read it even if i was fluent in french or only knew french etc. When I read fiction in English that doesn’t click with me I usually just stop or skim like crazy or skip pages like crazy and I may or may not read the end just to get it out of my system. I gotta go with my gut feeling. It’s hard to find good fiction books in English because I’m very picky about writing style. I want to read something that feels enjoyable and effortless or not effortless but worth reading. I recommend the martian, perfume (german book translatd to english and the translation won an award. the translator is brilliant), you by caroline something, and octavia butler ( thanks Oprah).

On an even more positive note, I started reading Jamais Assez Maigre de Victoire Maçon Dauxerre in french with the english translation at-hand and no french audio. I’m confident I can read it to the end and pick up on whatever words/sentence structures that repeat a lot. I listen to korean/japanese music while reading it since it’s not that distracting.

The book isn’t amazing but it’s entertaining enough and useful for learning French. Coincidentally or not I am watching America’s Next Top Model haha. I make anki cards while reading book because I have a .txt of the French book but I don’t go crazy over it. I am very picky because I know words will repeat and I don’t want to spend too much time making anki cards. If I come across a sentence 2 words I don’t know I usually just choose one or none or if I come across a sentence with 5 words I don’t know (ie list of nouns) I choose one or none. I’ve been trying to hone-in on my decision making skills and I am very aware of natural SRS when you just read a lot! I use autohotkey and excel to collect the text and make cards so I try to keep it efficient. I have to use EXCEL because I can only tolerate cloze cards! Also I can easily make all the words bold/huge/etc  I can’t imagine clozing the whole word. I cloze 1 character usually. I cloze 2 characters if I think the word is easy and I should push myself. I execute that by sending the sentence to one of the 2 different .txt files using authotkey. I haven’t imported any of the cards yet. I think I’ll do it after I finish the book.

Here is an example:

Si elles deviennent gênantes , il suffit de leur jeter un sort pour *-{{c1::b}}rider -* leur magie .
*
If they become annoying , just cast a spell on them . to bind/ *-{{c2::re}}strain -* their magic .

in anki it looks like:

mediafire links for librecalc/excel codes:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/rm7f1165hbofeyh/french-cloze-codes.ods/file

http://www.mediafire.com/file/bdv7k1brfyti78v/french-cloze-codes-excel.xlsx/file

As I explained thoroughly in my posts about anki and Korean, anki is merely a tool and

passively reading sentences over and over doesn’t do shit for me unless it’s in the context of REAL LIFE or of reading an actual book if some sentence structure happens to repeat etc. Passively reading sentences in anki is especially unhelpful for remembering or learning words. Cloze facilitates active recall which is so much more useful than passively reading crap. Also like Korean I use very lax settings in anki so I push shit out far which lets me figure out which words are actually hard and which are actually easy.

__-=-=-=-=-

Also I use lingoes pop-up dictionary and DEEPL since I have the .txt of the French book in addition or in lieu of referencing the English translation. In hindsight, I’m very glad that I dragged my feet and didn’t accomplish much French learning in 2015/2016 because DEEPL’s pop-up translation windows program only became available this year or last year.  It’s an amazing tool! It’s superior to google translate for French, German, and a bunch of other languages.

In conclusion, I should have dropped little prince 3 paragraphs in, and the same with The Stranger. I cannot make myself like something and my gut tells me that it has nothing to do with my level of French. English is my native language but that doesn’t mean I love Charles Dickens or How to Kill a Mockingbird or whatever bullshit book that is supposedly amazing. You have to read stuff you actually like. there’s so many books out there and you don’t have to read a book that makes reading feel like a chore. It’s a cardinal rule of AJATT and it’s something I should always keep in my heart and mind.

I was going to blog about what a nightmare it was to read a Korean short story but I can’t find my draft. It’s a nightmare that never happens in Japanese, French, or English.

HAPPY READING!

 

as much as I hate the story, it doesn’t prevent from liking stuff that are inspired by it. So long as nobody forces me to read the original story, I’m aright

PRE-MADE ANKI DECKS FOR JAPANESE

No I am not writing to write platitudes about the benefits of making your own deck. I
don’t understand how those Japanese language learning bloggers write platitudes and common sensical statements about the most banal topics. I don’t blog that frequently because I have to be smart with my time and only blog about stuff that’s worthy of my time.  I’m gonna talk about the pre-made Japanese decks that I found indispensable and time-saving. Especially in this day and age some pre-made decks may have the potential to be amazing with the advent of plugins like wordquery, sanseido.

The 2 types of decks that I found indispensable were the HEISIG deck WITH the top stories and the onomatopoeia decks

So if you get the deck HEISIG deck with top 2 stories and then combine it with the deck with japanese words in addition to the keywords for RTK you save a lot of time! Now I can test myself with writing kanji without wasting time thinking of what the keyword is referring to or manually typing hiragana or copy pasting stories. My heisig deck got messed up years back when all my cards duplicated and I didn’t know how to fix it. So I ended up creating a new kakitori deck where I added words I wanted to know how to write. Just in case you didn’t realize, if you do Remeber the kanji you still have to practice kakitori to write actual Japanese words. I think I have 500 cards in that deck and it’s a struggle because I don’t have stories in all of them and I ain’t copying/pasting from the koohii site so some cards are easy and some are hard etc. I always wanted to go DO THE RTK again with an amazing pre-made deck and now I can.

as for the top 2 stories as an uncreative person I appreciate them a lot. Also a lot of them are dirty or funny in a perverse way so that makes remembering the stories easier. I absolutely don’t mind. I live in America so I am used to filth!

ONOMATOPOEIA
There are 3 decks that are shared currently. One of them is from tofugu and it has over 900 cards. There’s a cornucopia of onomatopoeia out there and it’s never-ending lol. For some reason I thought once I’m 5 or 7 years into Japanese I’d see all the onomatopoeia and get used to them by then but it’s just never-ending and you can’t expect yourself to know/memorize 100% of them. Also I thought 10 years in I’d be able to just feel/infer the meaning of most unknown gion I come across based on how it sounds and the context but half of the time either I have no idea what the gion is alluding to or means or after I look it up I go I was not definitely feeling/guessing that (It is pure serendipity when I do guess correct or am close and of course I am filled with glee! :D). Also this tends to happen more often with novels than tv shows. I attribute this to the audio and additional available context. People on Japanese TV try to tell stories in an interesting/scary/funny/etc way and there’s usually emotions involved and people tend to emphasize certain words when they talk and gion is emphasized OFTEN especially with the HUGE Japanese text they plaster all over the screen. Now that I think about it watching talk/variety shows was the most effective way for learning gion in my japanese leisure time experience(I don’t like using the word immersion because people may think that means I’m watching shit that i don’t understand and may feel ambivalent about lol.  I only watch the cream of the crop when it comes to talk/variety shows. i encourage people to be picky af ). Also, I’ve also picked up gion effortlessly from songs since they’re so catchy and memorable like shanari shanari (the word sounds so pretty too). Clearly due to the nature of gion, audio is indispensable and emotional usages are especially memorable. Guess from now on I won’t bother looking up gion in novels unless it really intrigues me since there’s no audio which is the key to making gion easy/effortless to remember. So I’ve accepted that it’s A never-ending journey but I thought it’d be a good idea to have a deck purely dedicated to onomatopoeia with huge anki intervals. So I did just that by importing these decks, tagging them, and combining them. With onomatopoeia the Japanese dictionary is usually more helpful but English can be helpful/more memorable too so I ran sanseido, wordquery for daijirin, meikyo and the j-e-dict to supplement the meaning to the cards. Then what I did was set up SPECIAL DECK SETTINGS. I made huge intervals so I’m not seeing them every day as you would with the default settings (that’s what it LEGIT  feels like) and I made the STEPS a RIDICULOUSLY huge number like 190 years from now. I did this so I could get through the cards more quickly since not all the cards are worth learning whether it’s too easy/common or it’s low-quality for whatever reason which is possible since I didn’t make this. It’s easier for me to hit AGAIN than suspend on my nook ereader. Because I can’t hit AGAIN for the sake of again I only go through NEW CARDS for the day since I don’t actually have the option of pressing AGAIN for a card that I’ve already seen. Once I make it through all the cards I will look for the cards that are due in 190 years in that deck or search for stuff that’s in the learning phase and suspend and tag them, then I will change the anki settings so that I can mark AGAIN on future reviews and set the step to something reasonable like 2 days from now. RIGHT NOW I’m still in the phase of going through all the cards since I imported a bunch of crap from a Japanese site.

From doing this deck I can confidently say that going after gion like this is helpful. I wish I did this earlier! Sometimes I like reading the description/definition of the gion and it does aid in deepening  my understanding of the gion. I did the same thing for korean after I realized how helpful this was. But then when I made the deck from tables and whatnot from the japanese websites and the wordquery/hanseido plugin I was reminded that my onmatopoeia game in Korean is weak. It’s much harder to do the premade onomatopoeia korean deck than the premade onomatopoeia japanese deck… some of the onomatopoeia just doesn’t sound like what it means or I can’t remember it (the sound or the meaning or both). It’s just harder to remember or hear what I’m supposed to hear or feel what I’m supposed to feel. SO I realized that I should give myself more credit for my japanese onomatopoeia skills.

I’ve tried getting other pre-made decks for Japanese but they’re not helpful since I’m already advanced and I already have a huge backlog of crap I want to add to anki AND it’s so easy and effortless and efficient generating anki cards with RIKAISAMA on PALE MOON.

<– Soyu has been saying  some fierce, cut-throat stuff on Produce 48…. I loved how she said this. It reminds me of the lyrics 前髪の造形に神経を奪われて  from shiina ringo. I’m sure YOU KNOW someone like that. I sure do it’s damn irritating to be around people with bangs. They always put in a dramatic pause or sound effect before the trainers give feedback to the trainees. Of course as a viewer i try to predict whether they’ll say something positive or negative.

RECENTLY I found out about this site for japanese onomatopoeia!

http://thejadednetwork.com/sfx/

cheers!

I can’t recommend any pre-made decks for Korean but I generated some cool decks from Japanese sites with HUGE TABLES and quizlet.

How to read Japanese Books

So i pretty much agree with AJATT  on the skip page(s), skip whatever etc etc. What I personally do… is similar to the way manga is read which is sorta weird cause I hate manga ~  what i mean by that is that I read the dialogue ONLY. it really cuts out the tediousness. and if the DIALOGUE ONLY READING METHOD for novels does not work then the book must be really awful or you have really low compatibility with the author.

I only read the WHOLE PAGE as in all the WORDS if the writing really is that good and compels me to do that. I have done that before many times and it was absolutely enjoyable and  it made me go i love my hobby of reading.. you know how writers are soo good that they make READING enjoyable, effortless and makes japanese seem like such a wonderful language.   Even with english, it can go from beautiful in writing to downright awful incomprehensible mainstream gangsta rap. I sometimes do the dialogue reading even with authors I really like because not ALL their books are amazing and not all parts of the books are equal in quality or at leaset i don’t find all the pages equally interesting. sometimes i’m like oh god we’re going to this scene/place/arc and i have a strong inkling that it’s gonna be boring (and ends up being boring). so i just read only the dialogue  and i don’t read byousha (the crap between the dialogue) unless it compels me to because it’s really good and pulls me in or i don’t know what th hell is going on and care to know and want to find out. reading byousha gets so tiring and annoying sometimes (of course if the writer does a good job and doesn’t do go on and on with it or is just really good at writing i will read in its entirety and whatnot).  When the byousha does no resonate with me it feel so tedious reading. It feelsl like the byousha is just there because the author is REQUIRED to right byousha between dialogue and they have to describe that’s happening (technically that’s true). It must take a  lot of talent and time and effort to make byousha reading enjoyable and fun. Just use the AJATT reasoning for justifying this which increases your enjoyment/fun which is that even if you skip this or this chunk if it’s that important it’ll come up again.  Don’t treat japanese books as special… there’s nothing to prove by reading every frikin’ word on the page it just becomes torture if the writing quality is low enough or incompatible enough… and if you think that’s the case then do the dialogue reading or stop reading and finding another book or another author etc.

I sorta wrote “shit” about one of the books I read but people still niced it  to give an

example of what i talked about above… recently i read a book by higashino kei?go ? and i could not read his byousha because his writing is boring and soulless (i don’t feel anything? lol) . it’snot awful because i know there’s worse writers but it doesn’t do anything for me. so i had to just read dialogue otherwise i couldn’t finish it and i did that and it was SO MUCH better… his characters just feel average,boring,1-dimensional drama characters in a crappy japanese drama lol… by that i just didn’t care about the characters. i thought the ending was sad but the characters just didnt’ do much for me either. i guess this is what i should expect from FAMOUS POPULAR AUTHORS from japan j/k…. what I SHOULD HAVE DONE is like skipped like 350 pages lol…. and I definitely should’ve skipped the first 40 pages… it’s just boring. i recommend otsuichi/mori eto for easy/compelling japanese reading instead of higashino keigo…. no idea why he’s popular but then again i could say that about a lot of things.

And doesn’t is feel good when you realize that you read 50 pages or 100 pages I think you should and could still feel that way even if you read only the dialogue to get to that page lol…  not all books are worth reading at least not in their entirety

And a little segue about japanese subs. So I was googling around and this japanese person wrote on his or her blog he or she tried to slayers try but there were no subs s the person had trouble cathcing everything everything so she was like i didn’t enjoy it as much as i should’ve or whatever. Then they went on to say I found the episodes with japanese subs. They are as far as i know japanese subtitles are only available on the KOREAN dvds. what I am saying it is ONLY on the korean dvds, it’s not on the japanese dvds. I have no idea why they do this. it makes no damn sense.  I googled around and people were bitching that a lot of anime are AIRED with subs yet when they’re relased there’s no subs. they mentioned stuff about the format of subtitle file and maybe that’s why and if that’s the csae then convert it by taking the time or change the format so it’s compatible throughout different platforms (not the correct word right?).   somebody on amazon was like i sent my letters to the people who relesae dvds saying i’m deaf i like watching my shit subbed and they just send me the default template message… thank you for your input again and again. so on. notice all the 放送字幕 in the corner if you watch fan-subbed anime that subs from the airings on tv… it means THERE’S SUBS that no one bothered extracting or recording that we don’t have lol….. or maybe somebody did.  so I’m glad there’s others who like subs too and are doing something about it though it doesn’t like anything will be done about it.  The point of this whole mumbo-jumbo is that there’s japanese subs SLAYERS TRY! i saw it and i was so excited and so i assumed slayers next would have japanese subs on the korean dvds too but they don’t… it’s on slayers try. WTF. but whatever i’m grateful for whaever i have. it’ll definitely save me time and make for a very enjoyable viewing. i’ll post my slayers crap LATER.

I learned lots of slayers season 1 japanese-wise… there’s a bunch that made me go wow i haven’t heard of these japanese expressions before. it’s really great to learn from anime because you have this amazing/interesting context with rich japanese expressions. even if the expression is awesome if you don’t have contxt you’re not gonna remember it or it’s going be painful trying to remember it… I think rich expressions are getting more and more scarce in usage with japanse media… I feel this way when i watch some japanese tv program that aired 6 years ago or 10 years ago or even with anime…. i don’t know what it is but i always hear an expressions go oh that’s a good expression i don’t hear it that much on japanese tv nowadays or not as much ro wahtever and they use way too much english in japanese nowadays.. it is negatively impacting the richness of the expression.

Japanese Listening Comprehension.

so i’ve always had doubts even from the beginner/intermediate stage that there will never come a day where i will be able to catch japanese as well as i can catch english in x y z situations ie japanese movies. like when i read khatz say stuff like I understood 100% of drama and movies and whatnot i was like bs. that’s complete bs. 90- something is one thing but 100% … come on I gotta call that bullshit. if it’s the case that you have japanese subtitles and you catched all of it, that makes sense, i can do that too.
IN FACT i read this ajatt entry in Japanesee… or rather skimmed it but what he said was i like watching my japanese movies/drama with japanese subs got a probelm with that? or he said i have to watch my ~~~~ got a problem with that? so that means either he agrees that it’s impossible to catch 100% OR he just agrees it’s easier to watch and understand with subs which i think anyone will agree with unless they read at a pace of a snail which i think only happens if you avoid reading your whole damn life. or you are dyslexic but nobody diagnosed you (talk about missing out on life) like that poor glee character.

So ANYWAYS I just googled about it bc I really really FEEL THAT WAY. AND I ALSO asked a question on chiebukuro which has 3 answers thus far.
from my googling there seem to be legit reasons as to why people have trouble catching stuff. and people also gave some hliarious 自己完結方法 AFTER ALL whether you understood all that they said only matters to you… maybe I”ll take some of their words and apply them to my life lol. so by all means i’m not just going to blindly say oh japanese sucks i can’t catch it no matter how long i listen to it blahblah. i’m just bringing up the theories that people mentioned on the japanese interwebs and i’ll link evrything as much as i can. in fact one of the theories even applies to english media. it’s especially true for MOVIES. JAPANESE MOVIES.

>> update from my last post… pikaru no teiri …. what they did since i last watched it very interesting. so i was watching the shiratori thing and they seem to keep getting all these hot actors and have to hold back their laughter in the conto. i like the actors facial expression of…. being in love? being infatuated? lol. I was thinking how ayabe and yoshimura’s acting is good. i know ayabe is in some drama and so i don’t know if his acting in that drama is over-acting or whatever but i thought in general they’re acting is good. the reason i ‘m saying that is because i saw a clip of sasha gray acting in entourage (this show sucks btw) on youtube and she was doing this arguing scene and i just thought it sounded so fake like she’s acting. acting is pretty hard i thought after watching that, even talking like in a normal daily conversation for acting is actually very arduous. I’ve always held the notion that acting is difficult but seeing clips like these make me ponder on that YET AGAIN. 改めて

so here are my gripes with japanese listening comprehension. so i don’t know why but i have the hardest time at times at understanding dramas, movies, and commercials but i have no problem with talk/variety shows ( of course there are times i re-listen and re-wind but still don’t get what they say or i have to listen again to catch what they say but it’s not frequent especially compared to the former) . BTW somebody did mention in one of the articles that they cannot undersatnd commercials with like children talking really fast or in a high-pitched voice etc etc. i really seriously have the hardest time understand japanese commercials. it’s not that i care to watch it and i don’t really watch japaense commercials frequently just bc i watch streaming on the internet but i just notice that i really cannot undersatnd it but at the same time i don’t wnat to care about understanding commercials (it’s a waste of my time to rewind to try to understand the commercial). i can’t buy the said product first of alls.

so in numbers talk/variety 90% to 100%

drama without subs 50% to 70% lol. Now if it’s a really shitty cliche poorly written drama, obviously it’s going t obe 90% lol.

drama with JAPANESE subs 95%-100%

hmm I wonder if dramas have just as much issues as movies with the sound quality issue or is it the same

Like you can say well those tlak/variety shows ar epractically subbed. while that is true and i do rely on it sometimes it’s not all the time and sometimes i’m okay without it. like i was watching atsuatsu black mayonnaise show and i closed my eyes and just listened to what the guy was saying and i followed everything he said and understood it/caught it for like 2 minutes or maybe more. but basically even though i can’t really predict what he’s saying i stlil had no trouble understanding him. so that’s my only example against that lol. but yeah i do appreciate the text. i do think it enhances it unless it really big and blocks stuff like the people and their clothes? I love how they do the font style and colors and borders and whatnot. it is japanese with the kanji and everything. so i’m okay with it.

also there’s manzai and konto. for that it just might be me and japanese people have no problem. that’s whole another thing too but i do enjoy it or at least what i can catch of it. sometmes people write transcript on their blog b.c. they loved it so much. i’ve seen somme funny manzai and konto. i really love konto personally. there’s a lot of japanese media so venture into so i haven’t seen manzai in a long time. but by all means there are people with horrible enunciation　滑舌悪い who work as actors, comedians etc so by all means if you come across that, blame them not yourself but obviously if it’s that you don’t understand bc of your lack of immersion/listening hours then it’s YOU. but just wanted to write this post so that people don’t have unrealistic expectations (100% all the time etc etc) or feel really down on themselves over this….. Sometimes if i find an interesting manzai or conto and i missed out on a joke b.c. i can’t undersatnd it no matter how many i listen to it usually the people chiebukuro clear it up for me with their super japanese ears and awesome inferencing skills

here’s my chiebukuro question
http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1199687436

so I posted the text/links on tumblr
http://tsukinofune.tumblr.com/day/2013/01/04
there are all the japanese text on this subject that i enjoyed reaidng. there’s also articles about why old japnasese movies (‘m guesing from the 50’s) are so hard to understand and so if you don’t care about that, don’t read the articles about that. k.
some of them i only took parts of the text on the page that especially found funny or true so if you want to not miss out and have a burning desire to read all of it then go to the source link and read it.

So one of the points that people brought up was “acting style”. they were saying there’s some new trend of making the acting more “realistic” so the actors end up talking reallysoftly or mumble. yeah that’s realistic but if the viewers can’t understood what the hell the’re saying how the hell are we supposed to understand the movie. of course people brought up the point well if they talk/enunciate too clearly then it would be too fake or it would even be like the performance from yoshimoto gekijou (lol…) they were saying it’s the worst when they mumble and talk fast. and also there’s sometimes where the perosn is screaming inthe movie and they still can’ t understood what they’re saying lol. AND i found this article in english about mumbly actors and they mentioned some bbc movie/drama thing and i chcekd out the trialer and indeed that it MUMBLE. MUMBO JUMBO.

on top of this, they were saying how ghibli movies are horrible bc there’s always somebody in a ghibli movie whodoesn’t speak clealry and that’s bc this person is not really a voice actor. ghibli is obsesed with realism and whatnot but then people were like them voice actors are understandable while these ” movie actors” are not as clear.

also there was something after recording… how japanese movies don’t do it while americans movies do it. the after-recording thing. yeah i’ve seen american actors after-recording on entertainment show before in the past and they were like actually we do after recording for __ scenes. i don’t remember exactly. so the reason for japanese movie people not doing it is budget.

there was this long article about how american movies take the sound aspect more seriously how they have a position in the movie crew for someone to perfect the sound while there isn’t one for japanese movies? I just didn’t feeli like reaidng hta tarticle.
they also brought up the point that japanese actors are just not trained. they were saying most american actors (holly wood is famous and all) have been to college and majored in theater or acting or whatever so they know how to enunciate clearly. so apparently that’s not as common in japan unless the person does butai (stage acting). I mean japanese people complain about how japanese actors suck at acting all the time anyway (they do have good actors though) . they were also mentioning how the young actors juts aren’t trained with speaking properly and clearly something about them not moving their mouths enough lol. somebody mentioned that there’s a lot of actors in the industry right now who just do not have the fundamentals of speaking in an understandable way down lol.

they were like even if i bring up the volume the damn backround music is so loud the neighbors will attack me or there is an explosion sound in between the quiet talking lol (war movies lol)

peoplewere also even pointing out trends in story-telling that they’re relying too much on lines to convey the scene/feeling/etc.

so HERE ARE THEIR SOLUTIONS or rather giving up!!! lol.

one person said I DON’T go to movie theaters, i wait for the dvd and watch with the subs.

some poeple they understood what they were saying fine in the theaters but then when it got converted to dvd, the quality turned to shit and then they couldn’t understand what they were saying lol… there’s this case too.

one person even said the dvd for a movie only came with english subs so they turned that on to figure out what they saying in japanese lol. it is helpful… as in better than nothing. and for them it’s also english learning/practice.

聞きとれない俳優A「ボソボソ」
聞きとれる俳優B「～～。」←で直前のAの台詞推測
another person’s suggestion is… actor a says something in a really quiet mumbly way that nobody can understand.
actor b says speaks clearly after actor a. and from actor b i try to guess or infer what actor a said lol.

another person was like oh i just try to get infer from the atmosphere of the movie or as long as i enjoy the atmosphere of the movie.

some people are like i give up. as long as i get the gist. i don’t give a shit about every detail.

THIS MADE ME LOL.
もうBDはゲームみたいに音量設定できるようにしてほしいわ
BGM80％、SE75％とか
あとできれば俳優ごとに音量変更

I wish blue ray disks could allow us to set the sound the way we want like 80% bgm, se 75% like games and make it change the volume based on the actor who is speaking. LOL. but no really, i want that option too.

I know my listening skills is definitely NOT up to par with japanese natives who have listened to japanese for 10+ 20 + x+ years from birth and only know japanese but I’m not gonna get down on myself bc of actors with shitty enunciation. to some extent i can tell whether it’s bc of my lack of whatever with japanese and whether it’s the actor’s fault or the staff’s fault for not making the actor speak more clearly. so by all means i’m not just gonna automatically come to the conclusion that i couldn’t catch what this person said bc this person has crappy enunciation. there’s other reasons toooooooooooooooo lik eme etc etc.

so the reasons are

1) the actors themselves. either them or the directors telling them to talk not clearly/softly/quietly by telling them to talk naturally. also none of the people on the movie staff/crew won’t care about the movie-goers enough to realize hey it’s impossible to catch what that persons says if i didn’t have the script right in front of me so maybe they should speak more clearly and loudly blahblah.

2) the actors themselves being really shitty as speaking japanese as in proper enunciation techniques et c etc. i mean i think it’s pretty obvious they have a lot of shitty/untrained actors and actresses in japan. but there are also some really talented ones… some so talented i feel so bad for them when their talents are wasted on shitty/half-baked films or whenthey have to star with no talent actor/actreses/

2) there’s no after-recording. they don’t really put much care into the sound aspect of the movie… i think this is a big reason why it ‘s so hard to undersatnd.

3) the director or whoever does the sound effect or bgm cares more about the bgm and sound effect than the actual lines so either the bgm or sound effect will make it hard to undersand the lines or the bgm or the sound effect will be SO DAMN loud you can’t even raise the volume for the actors who talk mad quietly for no damn good reason without killing your eardrums.

HERE ARE MORE links

http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1364321668

MUST READ

http://www.logsoku.com/r/movie/1021005871/

http://filmmania.blog.so-net.ne.jp/2009-09-05

http://sooda.jp/qa/176431

http://smcb.jp/ques/23644

so I woludn’t put 90% to 100% comprehension of japanese movies without subs as a realistic goal for fluency i would say that with JAPANESE SUBTITLES is realistic just because they just don’t give a shit abaout it…. with the sound aspect and they do have a lot of shitty actors. sorry it’s true. I relaly love the talented ones but they have a lot of shitty ones lol.

>>

so i revised one of my check-off list for japanese fluency FROM

understanding japanesemovies 100% raw without any subs to understan japanese movies 100% with japanese subs! or ghetto japanese subs from korean subs lol. this is realistic and ican do this actually because i READ FAST. and provided there aren’t words i don’t know or they reference i crap i don’t know, i should be at 100% since there is also context and actual people talking. damn you KHATZ why you spread  lies like that. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND A JAPANAESE MOVIE 100% NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES YOU WATCH IT . if for some miracle all the crap i mentioned above does that occur then YES it is possible to catch 100% but that is rextremely unlikely. he even said it himself on his blog that he loves watching japanese crap wit hjapanese subs which means HE HATES watching japanese crap without japanese subs. now that logic may seem forced but not to me. bs is bs.

P.S. i googled kikitori niku and kikitoridurai  with helter skelter and i got hits! yay I’m so happy i’m not alone. apparently there are japanese subs on the japanese dvd but people dont’ share that on the internets. WHY. so i had to watch it with ghetto korean subs because the korean person who made it sucks at japanese more than i do. omgs. but the movie sucks it doesn’t matter? some lines i was really curious what they were saying because the scenes were so sexual lol.  but no matter how many times i rewound it, i couldn’t understand wtf the people were saying. the movie’s awful it’s like wachinga japanese av and i’ve never even seen a japanese av. it’s very dirty. you’ll feel dirty. either look away or fast forward. it’s so ugh… i just don’t want to be associated with the movie. i liked mizuhara kiko’s short short shor tass monologue at the end. that was the only part that was good and made sense. everything else is shittttttttttttttttttt. everyone hates the director who’s real job is photographer because she makes shitty movies like this. go watch if you want to watch a sawajiri erika P0RNO or the closest thing to it.

喝を入れたくて反省文的なことを書きます。認めます （したた）

喝を入れたくて反省文的なことを書きます。認めます　　（したた）
I remember browswing the AJATT blog a couple years ago. One thing that stood out to me was that I came across entries he wrote in Japanese as well as entries he wrote in english and then he wrote the japanese trnaslation/equivalent next to random english words/phrases/concepts  or the other way around (I thought it was really cool that he knew all these words in japanese that he knows what to translate/say his free-flowing english it to in japanese… it was really specific english vocab— just random nouns– that i don’t use at all so just that right there was enough but he also knew how to say it or directly translate it to japanese. i found it impressive. don’t know abt you.)
so recently I went on his blog again because he put up a new entry and i wanted to find this entry that he wrote in japanese… in a way or maybe it goes without saying “in a way” that that’s his way of
proving/showing how much japanes he has learned with his method and whatnot. I read it now, and i’m still impressed with his writing. some of it is a little sabui or donbiki さぶい・ドン引き just because that’s what it sounds like to me.
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/category/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E

EVEN taking his usage of pre-war kanji or kanji that is never used ie (the OTHER kanji for shimau. i only knew of 仕舞う since i’ve only seen that in the henkan and i’m using GOOGLE IME for god’s sakes) into consideration, I still find it impressive. personally, my japanese output is not that good imo. i’ve had people say to me, you seem so fluent in japanese by some japanese leraner lang-8 and obviously it’s only because they’re not as far as long as i am. i am hardly fluent and i don’t findmyself 100% satisifed with my japanese writing and i don’t feel as comfortable writing in ajpanese as in english and it takes longer to write (taking out henkan… just the time it takes for me think up stuff and how to word it or deciding which thing is the best)

the reason i’m so impressed is… i feel like what he wrote… i’m just assuming here … is unedited/uncorrected, just written by him and as far as i cantell, i don’t see any errors and i won’t even bother to check to see if the kanji usd to write the words that are never written in kanji are correct bc i know it’s correct without checking. he just has no reason to show-off or make his japanese seem better than it is. his japanese is what it is. i was looking at his entry in 2008 and i don’t remember if he started leraning japanese i n2004 or 2005 or 2006, i don’t remember the year and i don’t feel like browsing his site to find out but considering it’s a few yeras… it’s very impressive.

so reading it made me feel like i’ve been too lazy? brainwashed?  it’s a different type of motivation compared to my initial motivation of starting out in japanese which was half irritance/maybe jealousy of i can do that shit better and faster than you (check out the ABOUT ME page if you wanna know). rather than, omg he can write japanese this well, i can totally write just as well as he does or even better (he learned japanese fast so it’s like there’s no point in that either lol. my japaese was mad shitty at the 1.5 yyear mark especially output)…. i just feel disappointed in myself, losing to technology like the other idiots in this generation. im’ not pissed that my japanese writing is crapper than his, i accept it. that makes complete sense. it’s like those people that only come into contact with x language only in class and can’t speak/understand it. i’m just like wHAT ELSE DO YOU EXPECT.

what i’m saying i could be so much better at writing and understanding than the level i am at now.   but unforutnately this past year has  been a mess as far as efficiency and producation or whatever is concenered because of that damn iphone. BTW I think the way you position arms to use the iphone is not good for your health especially with prolonged periods AND ESPECIALLY the looking down pose.. LOOK UP DUDE LOL.   I know that i could be as good as him, or better or whatever if i was more focused and less distracted by stupid crap. by improving my writinng, i mean inputting like crazy. by inputting lke crazy, i mean enjoy the input …. that’s the only you can input for significant amounts of time.

by  losers in this generation losing to technology i mean people who only do facebook on their phone or computer or whatever or listen to rap or music really loud in their earbud – damaging their hearing to deafness and beyond, pissing eveyrone off, giving people unnecessary stress, subjecting people to noise that does not be subjected, play games on ipad/phone all day (especially people who do not turn the volume off). it’s one thing if you’re pissing away your time and potentital doing nothing with tecnolgo y but if you’re also going to bother other people  around you while you’re doing it, that’s just bs. that’s an exemplary example of failing at life in my opinion. especially people who do not care or are not EVEN AWARE (WTF DUDE. maybe it’s bc i’m asian but that shit really pisses me off). that’s copmlete bullshit. i hate people like that.  it’s another reason why eveyrone has every right to call americans or college students or black people or whoever lazy and that there’s no reason for illiteracy or monolingualism just because lots of poeple have lots of time that is being PISSED AWAY.  I’m not gonna go on to say my speech on how i feel so superior bc i spent my time with japanese/korean immersion and i got better with understanding etc… it’s just no matter how i look at it… time waste is time waste.

I always looked down on those people because they are frankly losers. some of those people are of course college students that i’ve seen/encountered since igo to college which is very expensive by the way.

technoology has gotten in the way of my studying of japanese. not even studying, just doing stuff in japanese because i’m at the advanced level. for example, my reading of japanese books has substantially  decreased compared to the previous years. it has to be attributed to the iphone.  because i just look up stuff/sites and read it on the iphone and bam my hours are gone. maybe half the stuff i read is japanese and half is in english . I just read whatever’s interesting but i just feel like i’m losing to technology.  i just don’t think it’s efficient . like yes, i can copy and paste the sentence i want but it takes all these clicks (jabs? what do you call this) to get to that area where i can paste it so i can acess it on the ocmputer later and sometimes it takes a while for that to load or wahtever. basically, a computer is more efficient for obvious reasons. and also just reading on that thing is just tiring and BAD for your EYES .  it’s just so easy to piss away time with smartphones with all them apps. I’m so glad KHATZ did this thing before smartphones became prevalent for some reason.  honestly, im’ just writing this as another reminder to myself DON’T BECOME LIKE THOSE PEOPLE. DON’T BEA LOSER (as in loser and as in losing).  i remind myself or think about it all the time but i can’t seem to stop this time wasting habit.

what the iphone is benenficial for, for me is the photo option because i can take pictures of stuff i want to look up later to add to my srs. so what i sorta wish is I never got a iphone and just got a really useful camera so i can take pictures of crap i want to look up that’s in japanese.  so what I’m saying I’m PRETTY SURE my japanese time was probaly better without the iphone just because i have mp3 player, my japanese books, the computer. but then again, the computer can distract me as well.  Idon’t know… tsk tsk. i’m just writing this for myself so ican stop pissing away time like them other losers. i don’t wanna be a LOSER!

Secret Garden UPDATE

Yes it’s been months and I’ve finally seen episode 6. and yes this is where the fun begins. Episode 6 is the episode I watched with the least fast-forwarding in fact I watched like the whole thing? Wait Iskipped a scene or two with people that i don’t care about…. you know those old people… over 40 or 50 lol.

Well the acting is good. If the acting was crap the drama would be ruined… it wouldn’t be funny at all. I’m sure or at least it seems like both actors really put in a lot of effort. even if you don’t understand korean I’m sure you can tell what they’re doing with their voices and obviously even if you don’t understand you can tell with their facial expressions that the acting is top-notch.  I didn’t see the last part of episode 5  so i have no idea happened. I’mm gonna go back and watch the episode 5 and then keep watching while it’s still fresh and fun. and then if it gets boring then I gues si’ll through the lines of episode 6 especialy in particular and find out what was said… what i didn’t catch etc etc.

There were also bloopers at the end of ep 6 which were fun to watch except i couldn’t catch some of the stuff being said like the talking in the background.

Recently I estimated the number of words i learned over the sumer for korean  since ihvae paper cards so i have estimate otherwise it’s a waste of tim.e it’s like almost 600 so I want to do monoligual once i hit 2000. this is because i personally feel that korean has more words/vocab etc that is used in daily conversation… it must be at least twice the amount for japanese  (khatz said monoligual when you hit 1000 cards which i’ll just take in as 1000 cards for japanese = 2000 cards at lesat for korean). Somebody tell me if i’m just deranged and confused but i seriously do believe that japanse is easier because the daily conversation just really involves a lot of vague language and all that stuff... while in korean they don’t. they describe they want to say in all the details and facets and nuance.

I think I’ll give tofuguben’s shadowing method a try. just the shadowing part not every single step cause i don’t personally believe in it. It seems fun and like I said I skip any scene with old people lol… you know anyone i don’t care about and so I would only shadow scenes of interest either before looking up words or after because you don’t need to read kanji with erratic readings with korean.  🙂 I think it’ll help remember the words the conjugation/ sentence structure etc etc. I think more so with korean than japanese. practice saying korean is more important because the verbn conjugations is realy logical and easy to learn if you teach your mouth/tongue.. notice i wrote say and not speak. because it’s hard to speak korean with the verb conjugation crap and my tongue always just goes opposite of what  i want to say you know like ㅗ instead of ㅜ for some reason so it’s just best just read what is correct.

and reading in korean on the comp like websites doesnt really work for me becase i just start reading japanese crap or do youtube in japanese or english lol which all starts with me looking up something that i want to know. someboody give me an interestin’ korean site?

========================================

and for fun I remembered the nihongo kentei shiken. ting.

I remember reading a wikipedia article on it and iwas surprised that some guy from kat-tun and thsese other japanese people have the highest level on that. it’s like really hard.

Link to 2 questions Igot right. (it this sheer luck? cause after that i kept getting crap wrong lol) I set it at 1 = hardest level, and keigo because i have no idea what’s correct for keigo sometimes. this is why i wouldn’t say i’m fluent in japanese or anything because I’m useless at talking to customers correctly if i was hired and working in ajapan. how do you know keigo? do people just learn from experience from what they hear/what they get said to them when they go to a store/movie theater and so forth. do they memorize it? I don’t get it. I just answered based on feeling so iknew like 2 of the choices are definitely wrong and all that stufff. I rememberd yet again that I still suck balls at japanese cause I don’t know keigo. I keep thinking i’m gonna read the articles online about the keigo but i keep forgetttttttting.

Link to the test click on the left side box

WAIT WAIT WAIT. I made a mistake.  The hard test that I was shocked that random talent people passed was the kanji test. 　It’s called　日本漢字能力検定

nihon kanji nou ryoku kentei.

I was so surprised that those talent on tv actually got it. even level 2 is like really hard but anyways this is the level 1 thing which is like 6000 kanji and basically they’re like we’ll just test you on rare crap that no one will ever see or we used to use but no longer anymore. and obviously all the kanji readings you’ll be tested on…. will have no pattern… they’re just like pure memorization right? it is1-kyuu.

1級（大学・一般程度、対象漢字数5657字）
程度 常用漢字を含めて、約6000字の漢字の音・訓を理解し、文章の中で適切に使えるようにする。
領域―読むことと書くこと 常用漢字の音・訓を含めて、約6000字の漢字を読み、その大体が書ける。

• 熟字訓、当て字、対義語、類義語、同音・同訓異字などを理解すること
• 典拠のある四字熟語を理解すること
• 国字を書くこと（怺える、毟る など）
• 地名・国名等の漢字表記（当て字の一種）を読むこと
• 常用漢字体と旧字体との関連を知ること

領域―故事・諺 故事成語・諺を正しく理解する。
※約6000字の漢字は、JIS第二水準を目安とする。

ただし、上記の出題範囲のうち、平成14年度第3回からは、「地名・国名等の漢字表記（当て字の一種）を読むこと」と「常用漢字体と旧字体との関連 を知ること」に関する問題が出題されなくなった。一方、動植物名その他の熟字訓・当て字の読みを問う問題は依然として出題されている。

一般的には用いない難解な漢字や読みが多く出題される。

But seriously even if you read a lot of books i doubt you’ll encounter all that stuff… I would feel like most of te people who passed this probably just studied cause how else are you supposed to see these rare kanji. or are therebooks that are written for really smart people that i have yet to come across yet that has lots of weird kanji. i looked at example problems for 1kyuu and i knew the reading for like 1 or 2 kanji out of the 30. the rest i’ve nver seen ever lol.  I just personally see no point memorizing stuff just to get the 1kyuu or 2 kyuu and then just forget it…. it just seems like such a waste of time.  if it’s like you read lots of books and you’re at leevel of _kyuu and then you ge t it it’s fine. you’re just proving what you know. But seriously can you really encounter all the kanji in the 1kyuu just from reading ??? do you have to read mad jidai geki crap? meiji era crap? heian jidai crap? lol. seriously where the hell do you encounter that crap?

I tried taking the kanji test a wee-bit just to see where I stand with my self-educated japanese knowledge formed over the the past 4.5 years. It’s really more like 2.5 though cause for the first 2 years I wasn’t using effective methods… maybe it’s more like 3. just going by ACTUAL time with Japanese by seconds /minutes.

2級　高校卒業・大学・一般程度（1945字、他に人名用漢字）
so out of the readings . the first section I knew 18/30 for 100% sure. well for a couple I typed out what Iwould guess and then it was correct so I included those… it’s like I knew the onyomi read for both kanji but i’ve never seen that word so i wouldn’t know if the word was that conventional with the kanji it’s made out of.

3級　中学校卒業程度（1608字）
3kyuu-am i smarter than mdiddle schooler lol. so this is what middle schoolers, I’m going to guess 9th graders know… which is when middle schoolers graduate middle school.
28/30 for the first section! yays.

OMGS I realy need graduate from da japanese high school. lolz. I wonder how long it’ll take lolz.  I graduated middle school with flying hours in my 5 years j/kj/k which is more like 3 yeras or 2 years even to be honest.
18/30 is passing? or maybe it’s not. I’m too lazy to lookup.

I only took the first section of the mock test they have on the site. FYI seriously I defiitely know how to read more than 1945 kanji… I don’t know how many exactly it’s definitely 2000 something. AT LEAST.. I don’t think I hit 3000. It really depends on what they ask and sometimes I know the reading for onyami for both the kanji but for some reason when you put them together neither or those matter anymore or there’s some weird onten or whatevers.  to be honest sometimes you don’t know really need to know how to read it, you just need to know the meaning which you can tell form the 2 kanji.

But anyways I would never take either of those tests just because it’s a waste of my time.  and i don’t see myself going to japan or wokring gthere and i already my mention whole thing with keigo. you can’t work in japanese if you’re not gonna learn keigo. before isaid memorize but it’s more like learn because you have the analyze the wohle situation with who you’re tlaking to and if you’re inferior them or ont and all that crap lol or whether you’re tlaking about the person that you’re supposed to put above or a thing that’s associated with the person who’s superior to you cause apparently you don’t have to use keigo or some verb conjugation that makes it less direct for the thing associated with the person but there’s also the o/go thing but i’m sure they’re two different things you know the sonkeigo vs. KENJOUGo or somethin. what i just mentioned was one of the explanations to one of the answers of the quiz i took on that site.

Listen to Japanese Efficiently. AJATT

As far as drama/anime/anything with soft subtitles.

1) Sub2SRS

http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=2643

2) Join the mp3 files with:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/mp3albummaker.html

3) truncate silence

Usually with this the end-product is at least half the length. It depends on the show obviously and how much you filter.  in the time it takes to listen to the whole episode once you can listen to it twice, maybe three times even, or maybe even 4 times.

===========

I guess it works out best with drama because most of the time you download the raw andsubtitles separately@ d-addicts.  If you’re learning Japanese from drama like via’

http://dramanote.seesaa.net/

it speeds up the process.

HERE ARE SOME AUDIO FILES THAT I MADE with this process.

I’m just uploading it so i can delete it off the computer cause i don’t need them anymore. I tried to like filter the subs to take out lines that show up like really often like “i’m sorry” “thank you” since i did the sub2srs with english subs to grab just the audio.

Here’s the FOLDER on MEDIAFIRE:

Contains bakemonogatari episode 1 & 2  (15/16 minutes each)
Suzumiya Haruhi no yuutsu: Episode 21 to 24
JIN episodes 1-7
London Hearts – I think this ep is from 2010… it’s the one where they rank the geinin by their wives (YOME…dakaretai). there was memorable part where chihara junior said to inoue 美容師が途中で死んだ?
GONZO episode 4
Liar Game II episode 1-7
Samurai High school episode 02 04  3
MOP GIRL episode 6-9
Saito-san episode 10 (the last ep?)
Baptista team season 1 episode 01

ANDMORE!
edit: ADDED one for  korean drama secret garden

For sub2srs decks go herE:

http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Sub2srs_decks

PRO-TIP: I recommend listening to the condensed audio at faster speeds like 1.3 or 1.5x etc ! There’s definitely something to this. Listening to the condescend audio at speed slower than 1x is a waste of time in my opinion.