sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6370 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 25 of 197 30 July 2007 at 1:11am | IP Logged |
Scrythe, sorry to tell you, but I'm just at the gathering of resources phase and won't be able to start using the audiobooks in earnest until a month from now or so. I can see how you might have problems because of the nature of the Japanese language, which is why I'm focusing on going through the Assimil course first, along with going through Heisig for kanji. Off hand I don't know of any other course that is presented in the same way.
Have you considered using some of the easier works? Perhaps listening to some fairy tales or "Le Petit Prince" might help you nail down more of the basics before moving up to the more challenging works like Botchan. Also, based on other people's experiences I would expect your first book to be much harder to get through than subsequent ones.
I believe that getting used to the way Japanese works is primarily a matter of exposure, and that the best thing you can do is just get as much comprehensible input as possible, which is why I intend to follow this method. Hopefully someone else who's using this method has some more advice to give. Good luck!
Edited by sheetz on 30 July 2007 at 1:17am
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sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6370 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 26 of 197 30 July 2007 at 2:21am | IP Logged |
I forgot to ask if you are using Rikaichan to follow the Japanese text. If not then you should install it on your computer ASAP. I don't think it will work with the parallel texts, but you can use it with the regular Japanese transcripts. If you're not familiar with it, what it does is gives you the meaning of any Japanese word you place the cursor over.
Watch this video demo
Rikaichan demo
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sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6370 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 27 of 197 02 August 2007 at 3:19pm | IP Logged |
I've found that the sentences in Assimil are starting to get quite difficult to learn, and so I'm studying that day's lesson for 24 hours before entering it into the SRS. Whoever said Assimil was "easy" must have been much smarter than I am. But then I guess I'm learning the lessons much more thoroughly than how it is instructed to in the book. For me, it feels more like Japanese language bootcamp.
I'm considering not bothering to do the active stage as scheduled, since I've been repeating past lessons so many times I really don't want to see them again for awhile. Also, the SRS will ensure that I don't forget them, either.
Instead I think I'll just continue on with the passive phase to the end of the course, and instead try doing some Listening-Reading, which I'm anxious to begin now that I've gathered a substantial amount of the necessary material.
Edited by sheetz on 02 August 2007 at 3:27pm
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siomotteikiru Senior Member Zaire Joined 6354 days ago 102 posts - 242 votes
| Message 28 of 197 02 August 2007 at 3:41pm | IP Logged |
I’ve no idea how to download the audio files
Soseki Natsume "Ten Nights of Dreams" (66 min)
www.privatebank.jp/modules/kikimimi1/content/frame_html/kiki mimi_03.html#top
An excellent recording at:
http://peperoncino-s1.seesaa.net/category/1530272-1.html
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sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6370 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 29 of 197 02 August 2007 at 4:02pm | IP Logged |
Sorry, I should have mentioned those have to be played with something like VLC media player. I didn't like the peperoncino recordings too much because I thought the woman's voice was too soft. Here's another recording of them in mp3 format that I like more.
http://www.voiceblog.jp/kotoba/car24.html
Edited by sheetz on 02 August 2007 at 4:03pm
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Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6923 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin
| Message 30 of 197 03 August 2007 at 4:50am | IP Logged |
Thanks. This is awesome. Just what I´ve been looking for. Having an audiobook would make it much easier to read a book in Japanese after you´ve finished Heisig I. That was my original intention when I was looking for Japanese audiobooks, after I´ve read about the listening-reading system I will use some of the audiobooks from your links to test this method.
I´ll start with Miyazawa Kenji (Night On The Milky Way Train), and then move on to the little prince (I can´t download file 28) and Natsume Soseki´s Kokoro.
I´m so excited, can´t really believe this. Thanks a lot.
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sheetz Senior Member United States Joined 6370 days ago 270 posts - 356 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French, Mandarin
| Message 31 of 197 03 August 2007 at 5:34am | IP Logged |
Thuan, I'm not sure what you mean about not being able to download file 28--there isn't one. There are 27 chapters to the Little Prince, plus a short epilogue, which is file 29 when you try to download it. You can view the entire transcript of the book in one file here
http://www.alz.jp/221b/aozora/le_petit_prince.html
I also plan to start with Kenji Miyazawa, and go through "Night on the Milky Way Train" and "Tales of Miyazawa Kenji." Those two books are good choices to start with, IMO, because not only are they simple, easy to understand stories, but the translation I linked to for "Milky Way Train" is from a bilingual edition, meaning the translation should be very close to the original. And the same goes for "Tales of Miyazawa Kenji," which is a completely bilingual text.
Good luck, and I look forward to hearing about the results your results.
Edited by sheetz on 03 August 2007 at 5:40am
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Thuan Triglot Senior Member GermanyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6923 days ago 133 posts - 156 votes Speaks: Vietnamese, German*, English Studies: French, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, Mandarin
| Message 32 of 197 03 August 2007 at 8:22am | IP Logged |
Ah, just realized that there´s no file 28. I did a batch download with flashget, saw that the last file is named *29 so I just assumed that there´s a file 28.
Just printed out "Night on the Milky Way Train" and took a look at some other stories. I like his stories, so I might a few of his stories to my list. However, I would like to move on to a longer novel soon. I´ve already read KOKORO in English (great novel btw), so I think that it would be a fascinating experiment to listen-read to it in Japanese.
Do you know of any audiobooks for modern Japanese novels? I have a few books by Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana. I think that the language used by Yoshimoto Banana is easy to understand, so audiobooks would be ideal to read her novels in Japanese.
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