I'm going to use this comment to post any updates about the subs or how to get them. UPDATE 1: I created a Github project with the subs that will have the latest version of them. I have also added the raw Karaoke subs to the Github in case someone wants to add different FX to them. github.com/gokenshadow/LearnJapaneseKaraokeSubtitles/tree/main UPDATE 2: I have added subs that include the whole line instead of having the words appear as they are being said to the Github. They are in the "WholeLineKaraokeSubs" folder. UPDATE 3: I have added subs that replace the Japanese text with Hiragana instead of Romanji for DR STONE and Card Captor Sakura. They are in the Github in the "Hiragana" folder. UPDATE 4: I have made some tutorial videos on how to create these kinds of Karaoke subtitles. Here is a link to the playlist: th-cam.com/video/J5yGFrEGQG0/w-d-xo.html
Please make a video showing how you created the subtitles so that other people can potentially copy what you did and make their own karaoke subtitles! If this is a project that we want to really work, then there has to be a lot of subtitles available for all to use, not just a few!
@@ddeevviiaanntt I have created a playlist to the tutorials and added it to the pinned comment if you want to check them out. Link to tutorial: th-cam.com/video/J5yGFrEGQG0/w-d-xo.html
I learned English 90% just by watching TH-cam videos. What was particularly effective was the automatic subtitles that TH-cam provides because it's not always quite good enough to understand what's going, so it forces you to listen closely and use context to guess what the words that the auto subtitles didn't catch were and I think your special subs do kinda that but better especially for someone with a lower level in the language. Though I think some time using more "traditional" forms of learning before using your subtitles would still be necessary for it to be effective, especially for a hard language like Japanese
One problem with this is is that Japanese in particular depends so heavily on context and subtext to communicate nuance that you lose something even just directly changing word for word... Probably at least a little bit of transliteration is necessary to be intelligible, at least for a novice. There's also the fact that there are a lot of little rules that change how things are said, especially in the case of politeness/formality, that would be difficult at best to pick up on just by listening. But something like this in combination with more academic/technical learning seems like it has great potential.
I guess my hope would be that if a person watched a huge amount of Japanese media with these types of subtitles, they would eventually start getting an intuitive sense of stuff like that, but unfortunately, the only way to find out if that's true would be to create a ton of subtitles, which is way more than I can do at the moment.
I think pairing it with actually learning the grammar and conjugations a bit would be best. At the very least basic things like masu form vs dictionary form, it's kind of important and feels wrong to skip.
This is certainly for an intermediate learner, but holy crap is this an amazing idea for those intermediate learners to get good fast. 😆 Now we just need to get an AI-powered app running that can make these at scale.
The first 30 seconds of this video describes exactly how I finally started understanding Japanese. It _is_ possible to train yourself to ignore the subtitles and only use them as a convenient source of word look-up when necessary. Understanding grammar intuitively mostly just took lots and lots of consistent, comprehensible input--which is something these subs might prove helpful for to some people. Very interesting concept and I hope it helps people on their language learning journeys!
Yes! I've been doing the same! Probably helps that I'm a very fast reader of English. So I can listen to the entire Japanese sentence, try to understand it on my own, and if I didn't then I can read this sub just before it disappears.
This is perfect for people in the intermediate stage that want to further their studies without constantly looking things up, which ruins the flow a bit. I wonder if using ChatGPT (or perhaps the open source mixtral 8x7b to save on cost, which is close to GPT-4, but runs on gaming cards) and Whisper would allow for automating the creation of these subtitles to work with any show?
This is a long comment, but it contains how I view this concept as a linguist of 10 years and ex translator and interpreter. This is such a well-made video, with a very amazing concept, I am amazed this isnt one of things that blows up and gets 100k views yet. It provides the exact solution to the problem tens of millions of people have: they would like to learn japanese, but dont have the energy or time to fully study it for 5+ years, because it really IS a ton of work, and also dont want to miss out on the story of what they are watching by full immersing themselves for 3000-4000 hours of episodes (which is very inefficient. There would be nothing more useful than the ability to learn a language simply by doing what you arleady enjoy.This is an excellent idea, and as someone who has spend the past 10 years learning languages and looking into all sorts of ways to learn, this is one I have never seen, yet would seem to provide the most practical solution to an unaddressed problem for many people interested in learning a foreign language. Keep up the good work brother. As for why most people dont pick up on most of the language, it is not only about order. When you hear foreign language, combined with subtitles, you hear the words, but assign the subtitle's words to it. For simple phrases, over 20-30 repetitions, this can be easily picked up. but in complex sentences, with 20-30 syllables, it can be hard to pick things out, whcih is why things that characters exclaim loud and clear are best remembered. By reordering them in the way you suggest, viewers would be able to break it down WAY more easily, and now you are assigning a very clear 2-4 syllable set of sounds to a meaning, which makes learning it via repetition very easy. Additionally, since the word order is changed, people watching with your subs would likely have to think more carefully about each individual word said, and after a couple hours of using it, will naturally read the english in a japanese word order, boosting comprehension greatly. Your idea is incredible, and I think, that while simply learning it through a mix of immersion and constant book study would be the most time-efficient way to learn, your method would be way more enjoyable to viewers, way more accessable, and most importantly, way easier and clearer. I would not be surprised if something like this would be popular enough in the future to be a paid service like crunchyroll is, and I hope that enough people will discover this video that such an idea would take off.
Thanks, I'm glad you believe in the idea. It's cool to hear that from someone who has experience learning different languages. I hope it catches on as well.
@@goken4259 Oh boy, you hit something here. This exact concept is something already worked out by a certain women I learned many years ago about. She called it 'brain friendly learning" and had a bunch of other stuff to learn about how you can learn things better. Basically a German motivation trainer doing lots of presentations about how the brain works. Her name was "Vera F. Birkenbihl" and she died due to cancer 12 years ago, leaving lots of videos and text about her learnings. Even a blog where you can find an excerpt from one of her books about what you described in your video. That book was never translated in any language it seems, I would recommend googling her otherwise.
great comment. im pretty sure this is going to blow up soon or get copied everywhere. i also thought this would be amazing on something like lingopie or other similar apps.
Thanks, I'm glad you find the idea interesting. This most likely not the final form it should be, and I'm sure there are things that could be done to build upon it.
THIS. IS. AMAZING! I asked for a feature like this from LLN but never got a response. And, I don't have the technical abilities to do this myself. But, OMGosh! This is an evolution in language learning. Whatever languages this could be done for would allow thousands, MILLIONS, more people to enjoy and learn a second, 3rd, or 10th language. Sorry, I just got to say it one last time. THIS IS PHENOMENAL!
The approach I thought of a couple decades ago while watching Inuyasha and Card Captor Sakura has always been beyond my ability to execute, but has a similar concept behind it. The idea would be to start with some very short vocabulary at the start of each episode, and, as each episode progresses, replace all the words that were in the vocabulary lesson of that episode or earlier with the romanji for the Japanese. I got this idea from the way a lot of fansubbers of the era were basically doing that with words they didn't feel like coming up with transliterations for, or thought lost something with such transliterations. The next step, about 5-10 episodes in, would be to start teaching Japanese grammar and particles, and having some sentences - particularly those with a lot of Japanese being left in the subtitles because they're vocab words already learned - written in Japanese grammatical order. Gradually, as vocabulary increased, all of the sentences would be thus written (which is where your subtitles kind-of are now). Finally, I'd try using it to teach commonly-used kanji and kana by having that same vocabulary lesson replace certain romanji phonemes with the kana they represent, and commonly-kanjified words with the kanji straight-up. I'd probably start with the particles. This "lesson plan" would flow through a given series, intended to be watched from beginning to end.
Certainly a cool idea, but it's a process that would have to work over a massive number of series. Or I guess maybe just all of One Piece and Detective Conan combined. It's a cool idea, it could work (you're right about the fansubs, there's a reason so many weebs know what sugoi/onee-san etc. means) but it really would have to be a coordinated "lesson plan" spanning a vast amount of content.
As I've been learning Japanese, I thought about someday creating a podcast to teach Japanese speakers English, and it would work pretty much exactly how you described, where it starts in their known language and gradually replaces more and more things with the target language. Why aren't more people doing this???
So, I came up with something similar to your idea quite a few years back. When I was about 13 (ca. 2008), I started creating fansubs so my little sister could watch 'Katekyou Hitman Reborn!' with me. I painstakingly did the timing and translated each phrase from English to Polish. Having picked up some basic vocabulary from watching way too many series, I would often translate by ear, though I made sure to look up words in online Japanese dictionaries for accuracy, using the Latin alphabet since I didn’t know kana then. I had always been strongly in favor of preserving honorifics and the surname + firstname order in translations - in essence, I was against localization. I even created some guides for my subbing group on how to translate in line with my vision. And because of those preferences I pondered on an idea which resembles what you’ve done. Wanting to preserve the original delivery, I wondered about making translations match the flow of Japanese speech, disregarding the Polish grammar entirely. After iterating over this idea for some time, I ended up with this concept: - put a dictionary definition on the screen at the time a word is spoken - center it vertically and horizontally - make it semi-transparent so it won’t obscure the visuals It was supposed to work like a speed reading tool :). But I didn’t know Japanese well enough, I still don’t tbh. It also looked like a hell of a lot of work with timing each word instead of a chunk of words. Then came depression, and I was out for a few years… But now that I know typescript and python, many of those issues could be automated. Though there are some things that wouldn’t be that straightforward. I have just extracted Japanese CC subs from Netflix, those are xml files. Those can be converted to ssa/ass sub format later, but xml is easier to parse. I’m not sure if there is some library for segmenting Japanese words - so we can recognize what’s a noun, a verb, a particle, whatever. I’m not sure, but maybe targeting just kanji would work? There is python library called pykakasi that will transliterate it to romaji, and I think it groups kanji and kana. There is jisho-api library so we could get definitions for kanji… I will need to test it out when I have some free time :).
Polish language is surprisingly flexible when it comes to word order, at least compared to English, so it works pretty well with ideas like these, I think.
@@alexprus7953 True. The Japanese reverse grammar we often see, is compatible with Polish. For example Car this one, I drive, can make sense as I drive this car. Although there is emphasis placed on different meanings or the words and the overall sentence. But this still can work.
At first it seemed really jarring and complicated, but this seems like a great idea if you're already trying to immerse into the work in Japanese, kinda like a live vocabulary that won't distract you from focusing on hearing and parsing the Japanese audio. I was planning on watching Whisper Of The Heart soon anyway and debating whether I should go sub or no sub so this might be a perfect middle ground between no sub vs full english sub. Imagine if we had a huge library of these subs, and a script that could substitute your mature words on Anki to Japanese, that would be pretty cool. Hopefully one day something like that will be a reality.
There is no way reading any subtitles won’t make it basically impossible to parse something different being said at the same time, especially if it’s in a new language.
@@Jonas-Seiler If you are an absolute beginner. But I am at a an intermediate level, so listening to Japanese is inherently easier to parse than these freaky subs, I just miss a lot of words. Edit: when I say miss I mean don't know
@@Jonas-Seiler I am also used to watching stuff in English with Serbian subs (when watching with family and in the cinema) even though I can understand and speak English perfectly, and I usually passively parse both the audio and subs at the same time, and get annoyed when the sub isn't correct. It's less distracting to me than having English captions. I already try to focus on the Jpn audio as much as I can when watching Jpn with regular subs, but it's hard to apply the more liberal translation to the sentence I heard to know what is what in a split second.
@@tvsonicserbia5140 ok I see now what you mean. I think what I said still applies, and what we're doing in the situation you describe isn't actually fully parsing either the audio or the subs, but rather relying very heavily on inference, which is only possible with already high proficiency.
Honestly, I think this is genius. Sometimes, when I try to speak Japanese - and it's not just memorized phrases - I have to consciously think about my sentence structure and reverse it. This really trains your brain to process spoken language the way Japanese people do. As you mentioned in the video, English sentences are structed way differently. They're structed in a SVO format (Subject - Verb - Object). For example, in the sentence 'I'm going home,' 'I'm' is the subject, 'going' is the verb, and 'home' is the object. However, Japanese follows the opposite order, SOV, which would be something like 'I home am going.' This reversal is probably why so many native English speakers find learning Japanese so hard, lmao. If this could be more widespread, I know it'd help a lot of people. Maybe have a version with the regular hiragana subtitle's underneath might help with beginners? Just in case they have a hard time hearing a word, they can read it.
I'm more or less at a point where I don't have to reverse anything, since JP is my fourth language. But my vocab does suck, so my acquisition of grammar and context gets hindered. Not to mention, if I see or hear something I don't know, I get easily distracted, and lose track of my wave of thought, so I always prefer pausing if I can.
I talk to myself out loud when I'm alone and as I've been learning Japanese I've started saying "[Object] is where?" for example, like I've really got full on SOV brain rot now xD
I've always wished there was something like this. Even though the subtitle translations are made more for comprehension than accuracy, it always bothered me because once I started learning Japanese, I noticed that some sentences would be completely off and would have words that weren't said or omit words for the sake of clarity when what I really wanted was precision to aid learning. I think this is an awesome idea especially given how difficult learning a different sentence/grammatical structure can be. If one doesn't know what the particles are, they can look them up and integrate that knowledge while reading. However, and this is for me, personally, I would prefer having both those english subtitles and an additional set in hiragana (and katakana when needed) above or below it instead of the karaoke like highlighting. Sometimes I read or listen faster, and the syncing up of the words with the voice would throw me off. I'm one of those people who although I'm a native English speaker, I still need the captions at times to catch what people are saying (call it neurodivergency or whatever you want). That's just my 2 cents though. Either way, super cool for you to have actually put this idea into fruition as I'm sure a lot of people have wondered about this concept and would have liked something like this.
This is a really good idea! I think taking it a step further you should use hiragana in place of the words without translations to prime the brain to think in Japanese. An even further adjustment would be to have two layers of subtitles: one for Japanese with Kanji, and another in your method using the script of the language of the native speaker. Kanji may seem overwhelming, but using contextual situations youd be amazed at how one can pick it up. It takes a lot of adjustment to think in Japanese. Doing this with song lyrics can be a fun way to learn also, and you have the added element of repetition!
Imagine developing a program that automates this process. using an algorythm that automaticly generates subtitles, feeding an API like deepL or something similar and automaticly sorting through words that can be translatet one to one. In theory this could work, but the amount of finetuning involved, to release it as a working product is probably to damn high
As someone who learned Japanese from scratch using the very "theory" you described and dismissed at the beginning of the video, I think I can provide some insight: The basic idea you have is on-point; provided parallel streams of data, information from the known (text) stream should be usable to decipher the unknown (audio) stream. You are also correct that the highest hurdle to overcome is the association of Japanese words/sounds with their meanings (i.e. English counterparts). However, the critical weakness in the format you've come up with is that it sacrifices the integrity of both languages in an attempt to Frankenstein them into a single text stream that's structurally consistent with the audio. This results in a corrupted "known" data stream, which would likely cause partial or full loss of understanding in viewers without enough prior knowledge. This is especially the case for the romaji, which I consider "bad data"; romaji are a crutch used by foreigners learning Japanese, are not part of the natural Japanese language, and are entirely redundant, given the audio stream. Since Japanese kana are almost always structurally and phonetically consistent, we can, instead, modify the method as follows: A second or two before any audio line, begin displaying both a full (English) translated subtitle line, and a full Japanese text transcript (furigana unneccesary) of that line, one on top of the other. Then, as the audio line is played, karaoke-highlight the Japanese transcript, as well as any corresponding translated terms, if applicable. By displaying the 2 text streams early, viewers will naturally begin parsing the known data (translated subtitle) early. If any understanding of Japanese text is present, this will also naturally prompt an attempt to parse and compare against the known data. When the audio then plays, the viewer will already have at least some of the known data stream buffered in working memory, and the karaoke highlighting will sync associations between the 3 data streams. Because all 3 data streams are uncompromised, all associations learned will be consistent with each other and both languages, and won't introduce erroneous or superfluous data. The time-based syncing of the karaoke highlighting will naturally hint at structural and grammatical differences, untranslatable particles, word tenses, and other linguistic detritus. Finally, inclusion of the Japanese transcript not only provides visual anchoring for the karaoke syncing, it also encourages absorption of the natively written language (which wouldn't normally be possible with anime alone).
I like the idea of displaying the kanji and kana as they would be written and highlighting only that text (maybe that could be the final, hard-mode version of the subs or something), but I don't know that having the English translation below it will actually help. The brain, when faced with multiple inputs of data tends to go in the direction of least resistance, which in the case of your proposed subtitles, would be to just read the translation and forget about the other stuff. I'm pretty sure that's would I would eventually start doing with such subtitles, even if I did intend to try and understand the Japanese at first. It gives a person too much of an opportunity for laziness. The idea of showing the subtitles in a "frankensteined" way as you put it is not that someone reading them will have a complete understanding of the meaning, but rather that, based on the "partial or full loss of understanding" as you put it, they will be put into a position where they don't really know exactly what's being said and will have to try and figure it out. Their brain will be forced out of the "just read the subtitles" mode, and they will have to start looking at visual context clues, thinking about phrases that were said before and after, listening to intonations, and other such things to try and get a sense of the actual meaning. Usually when a person is in this mode of thinking, they tend to remember much more of the things that they learn, and that's kind of one of the hopes with these subs. I almost feel like there should be different levels that slowly take away the English translations and replace them with the actual Japanese as you keep watching. Like maybe you could start a show at the beginning with almost everything translated, but by the time you reach the end of the show, nearly everything if not just everything is Japanese. It would certainly be an interesting ride with a really long show. I do wonder about using romanji, though. Like you said, it's kind of a bad input since it isn't really ever used in actual Japanese. I made a version of the subtitles for Card Captor Sakura and DR STONE that replaces the untranslated Japanese words with hiragana because of this, and I plan to do it with Whisper of the Heart at some point as well. But I still don't know. Even if it's useless input in actual Japanese, it is still a much easier step to take into the unknown than just being faced with weird shapes that you've never seen before. It's hard to say.
@@goken4259 This shouldn't be an issue of "laziness" in the first place, since we're talking about "passive" learning, the "laziest" learning method there is, so keeping the experience smooth and enjoyable to maintain the viewer/student's motivation is paramount, with improving memorability a distant second. Frankensteining the known data stream trades the former for the latter, and, judging from other comments, I'm not the only one predicting struggle and frustration with that. The brain will definitely go the path of least resistance, but that doesn't mean that it completely ignores other inputs as a result; Pavlov's dog wouldn't be a thing if the dog just ignored the bell in favor of the smell of food. I wasn't trying to learn Japanese at all when I watched all the anime I did; in fact, I only realized how much I'd been picking up when my brain started telling me *where the subtitles were inadequate*! No; the key barrier here isn't memorability, but, as you yourself noted in the video, that the word order gets scrambled when changing languages. The key point, then, is precisely to get the viewer to load the known data stream as quickly and painlessly as possible, such that it stays heaped in working memory while (otherwise idle) bandwidth is used to follow the (preferably unobtrusive) karaoke highlighting and audio. As Pavlov showed, time-based association (combined with repetition) is an extremely effective training tool, so I suspect people will start picking up the triple associations a lot faster than you'd think.
@@hadrast You could be definitely be right, but you could also be wrong. The only way to know would be to actually create such subtitles and see if they work. That is not something I have the time or the energy or even willingness to do right now. I made these "frankensteined" subs as you call them when I was unemployed and had lots of free time, and it took weeks if not months to get through the grueling work of doing so. I work full time now, so completely gutting and reworking my subtitles to try and prove other people's theories right is not something I plan on doing at the moment. But, if you want to try making your proposed subtitles, be my guest. You can even use the subtitles I created as a starting point for the timing if you want. I have posted some tutorial videos on what I know about the subtitle software and linked them in the description, but you'd probably need to figure out more things on your own to get the highlighting to work the way you envision it with the English translation, but it might be possible. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors and thank you for your input.
Ignoring the questionable brain computer analogy, this is a great idea. I think in practice however there may often not be sufficient time for the viewer to read and understand the English sentence before the speaking starts.
There already do exist anime subtitles that have the text in both Japanese and English, and indeed while these subtitles do serve a purpose for learners, it is ultimately the same problem as showing the subtitles just in English. The website I'm familiar with that has this feature allows one to click on the Japanese words to see their definitions, but it does not have the karaoke-style text highlighting. I quite like the idea of these "Frankenstein" subtitles as Goken created them.
this is a great idea. i love it ! i've been trying to learn japanese for quite some time. i've learnt english by myself just by watching movies and listening to music (and making software) but that didn't work with japanese. so i think you're quite right. thanks !!
Interesting idea. I think it would work but not entirely for the reasons you think. To give some background, I learned Japanese from watching anime, but specifically without subtitles. This forces you to focus on the words, which, when reading subtitles you're not really doing. The main reason some words are picked up is because they're extremely common and said in pretty much the same context every time. So even if you're not fully paying attention you'll probably *eventually* notice that 助けて is used when someone needs help or w/e. These are also words that are often used in isolation - not part of sentences which makes them stand out more. But if you turn off the subtitles suddenly even in the long sentences you have to pay attention now where u might not have before. At first it'll just be meaningless noise, but eventually *because you're paying attention* you slowly start to pick up little bits and pieces till eventually you understand full sentences. Now if you want to speed up the process you can look up words in a dictionary, so now you know words both from context and from looking them up. I think subtitles like this will have a similar effect, they leave a lot of info out so it forces people to listen more and you're getting a definition (even if imperfect) of the word while watching. Tho on the other hand I could also see this maybe having the opposite effect and making it harder to focus because it takes more effort to read the subtitles. When doing immersion learning there's the idea of accepting ambiguity. I think this could be effective if people accepted not fully understanding and focused instead more on the audio with the subtitles being more of a supplement. But it might be hard for people to learn to do that.
I actually think these subs follow the way languages were learned in antiquity. Historically they used interlinear texts that line up word for word even if the grammar is ruined so that you can quickly get the meaning of the words you don't know. This is the same thing but for anime. The only improvement id make is having the actual Japanese subs also visible.
I think you could also translate "Masu" to "I do", like "Japanese ga little-bit understand do" for the example. If you wanted to say : "nihongo ga sukoshi wakarimasuka" it could translate "suka" to "do you" , or for "wakarimashita" it would be "I did", I don't know if "masu" could be considered a derivative of the base form "suru", but I guess it might help the comprehension if someone meets : wakarimasen, wakarimashita, wakatta, wakaranai etc do explain what the varying end of the same word actually means.
I'm not sure it would work with just about anyone, but I keep accidentally picking up bits and pieces, so this may very well teach me enough extra pieces to be able to pick more new pieces in turn. I already sort of understand how to piece a sentence together and politeness levels, and verb tenses fly over my head so I'm just getting them from context anyway, so your translation method there might get the conjugating to stick for me!
Aeron Buchanan's Japanese Verb Chart is useful to have handy as you watch to look up a 'conjugation' (conjugation isn't really the right word, it's more like adding additional words to the end).
@@kevinscalesThere's no additional words added between 死ぬ､死なない､死ねる､死ねない､死なせる､死なせない､ 死なず､死に､and so on. The only one you could at least attempt to call an additional word is ない, which comes from 無い, but it's been turned into conjugation, so it's not really an additional word.
This is amazing. I've been trying to learn Japanese mostly through anime and only recently hit a breakthrough in my grammar knowledge that I can start learning words through context, but if I had this tool I probably would've had that breakthrough 5 years ago. And I've been trying to learn Japanese on and off for 12 years. (and I still only have the fluency of a 3 year old)
This is absolutely awesome de pied en cap and is exactly the type of thing I've been daydreaming about for who knows how long. It'll be cool to see how people try to innovate on this format. This has just given me a few ideas myself, ideas which are maybe good or maybe bad, and the only way to know for sure is by actually trying to make them. I guess my main idea is to place the particles and suffixes above the words they modify, either as hiragana or as glossing abbreviations. This is inspired by sign language glossing.
I wonder how much it would cost to get a professional translator to work with you on this sort of thing and do like an entire season of a show in this style of subtitles. If you were to do that I think I would probably be willing to contribute a bit of money on patreon or something like that. alternatively you could potentially work from actual English subtitles available in some cases.
In order for anime with subtitles to work, you have to understand basic grammer, sentance structure, and about 100-200 basic words so you can get your bearing. _Then_ it becomes a useful learning tool. I watched anime with subtitles (I hate dubbing) for almost 5 years, and learned almost no Japanese (like 5-10 words total). However, in the last _two weeks_ I decided to actually learn Japanese, and I learned all the basic grammer, some basic vocabulary, sentance structure, and hirigana / katakana. Now, when I'm watching anime, I probably learn 5 new words per hour of content, and I'm often pausing to look up and write words down. Often it's a "fill in the blank" exercise where I understand half a sentence but not the other half, so my brain starts to fill in the blanks from context clues. Watching anime has suddenly become very useful to me, when before I learned the basics, the sounds were just incomprehensible chattering that I was never going to understand.
OK I first off want to say THANK YOU for making this video! This hits close to home for me, as someone who self-learned Japanese for over 4 years. So me and my cousin are super close and he grew up watching anime. He understands *a lot*, and we would jokingly talk in our broken Japanese all the time, but his theory, I think, has a ton of merit along with yours. Back in the day, watching Japanese translations, they were mostly done by fan-subbers and usually were as direct as possible (it's why you used to see "TN: " or Translator Notes all the time) - instead of trying to translate it to something that made sense for an American audience, they kept it the same and explained the significance (e.g.: Brock's Jelly Donuts) An example: While watching an episode of One Punch Man, a character appeared behind an enemy and shouted 「おい。どこ見える？」 (literally "Hey... Where are you looking?") and it was translated to "Did you forget about me?!" These kinds of translations mess with our brains and I think there's fatigue from hearing something and not seeing it match the subtitles. Maybe our brains just start throwing it out? So I'd say the first problem is the fact that even the subtitles rearrange the order of words, the fact that the words themselves aren't even correct is a major issue. But secondly, in my experience and opinion, reading & listening at the same time is too hard. I've been working on a site that plays an anime episode and for every voice line, it plays it without subtitles, pauses it, then shows the corresponding subtitles afterwards. This way you can focus 100% on listening, then 100% on reading what they just said. It does increase how long it takes to watch an episode, but I think this, even coupled with your subtitles, could be a major hit!
Wow I just watched episdoes raw and looked up words whenever I was missing something, this is just the super charged version of that. You want to be forced to mentally parse the japanese sentence, which normal subtitles prevent you from doing. For that reason there are also a whole bunch of japanese subtitle resources for anime. I was skeptical at first, thinking that you might still read the sentence in english and overgo whats spoken in japanese, despite the jp grammar, but once I saw it in action I was convinced. Absolutely genius.
I always wanted to watch anime without subtitles for the learning experience, but the fear of missing out on the story was kinda why I never got around to that. However, this would solve all the problems that i mentioned, and it would definitely have a lot of potential to grow into something big, i hope you keep working on this and improving it.
If you're looking for a good anime to watch without any subtitles to try and learn Japanese, I would recommend Inuyasha. Something about the way Rumiko Takahashi writes her stories makes everything that's happening very very obvious, so even if you don't understand the words they're saying, you'll understand what is happening and what the stakes are about 80% of the time.
Kinda reminds me of the Birkenbihl-Methode (by a german researcher about learning) where you translate a sentence in your target language into your own with out paying attention to the sentence structure so that understanding the grammar of the foreign language gets easier
this is amazing! especially the integration of untranslatables into the subtitles. thank you for the efforts of making the experiment. 1. i find the black popping box quite distracting, though. as a user of such karaoke subtitles, i would find it much less distracting and thus more satisfying, if the whole line would appear at ones, and the colour of the words spoken would change according to word flow. 2. also, the option to have both original Japanese subtitle with annotated glossing (word-by-word translation) would be even more satisfying, as it would help connect to the Japanese words. sometimes, perceiving pronunciation is not easy, and seeing the word in written form helps to better understand. 3. there could be several versions, one with latinized transliteration, one with kanas, and one with kanjis+furigana, one with kanjis as original japanese 4. words could also be colour coded by grammatical class i hope this projects will live on and gives some offspring! thanks again
It probably would be good to have a version of the subs with the whole line visible, so I have added a version of the Karaoke subs that include the entire line of dialogue instead of having the words appear as they are spoken. It is in the /WholeLineKaraokeSubs folder on the Github page I linked in the description.
I think it’d also be cool to have some of the untranslated words (especially particles) written in kana. They’re more easily recognisable than romaji imo, and a learner would see them in kana if/when they eventually learn written Japanese, too :) Seems like it would be a matter of “find-replace “wo” with を’ etc., which could easily be automated with a script or smth. This looks really cool though, and I reckon I’ll benefit from these :)
woah I seriously thought this video would have like 10k likes or more! you deserve much more attention for this video, this is such a good idea!!! I recently started learning Japanese again and I will implement this in my studies. Thank you for sharing 🙏
THIS, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I"VE BEEN TRYING TO FIND TO MAKE LEARNING EASIER. there is a dude by the name "pickle jar" making "translation" videos of Japanese songs with this being one set of lyrics presented. The titles always are in the form "Learn Japanese with ". also really great stuff.
I know people who learned by watching with Japanese subs, which is like this except you don't just learn to understand Japanese, you learn to read too. Doubly efficient! Plus the resources already exist for tens of thousands of anime.
This is amazing. I was kinda skeptical at first and it makes it way harder to understand exactly, but it's amazing for practicing that immersion stuff refold people always go one about without being bored to tears. The linking of the audio to the English word ended up being really fluid even for words I don't understand. Kinda wish there was this for a lot of anime so I could practice immersing with it. I'll have to try your subs on the episodes mentioned.
Thank you for your efforts! This is a great Idea and surely a great resource. I have not yet tried it, but I have planed to do so in the future. So Thank you very much!
I think this is a great way to hold someone's hand through the act of learning Japanese. But the same way people can't learn to ride a bike until the training wheels are taken off, I think people need to know this won't TEACH them Japanese but can help them get their foot in the door. Ultimately, the subtitles need to be turned off and they need to get comfortable with the idea that the "bike" is gonna tip over and they won't understand what's being said all the time. But, through their own brain's ability to learn the first language they speak, they will learn this new target language just by hearing it and being surrounded in it. These subtitles are definitely a great way to get started. way better than Duolingo if they enjoy watching anime. it's important to allow people to build up confidence the same way training wheels do. Taking the wheels off is always scary but a necessary step to becoming fluent. So as long as people don't think they can walk into a conversation as easily as they can watch these subtitled videos, i think it'll be fine.
It's enough to just occasionally pick out a random word and look it up in the dictionary, maybe if subtitles simply sprinkled translations for randomly-picked words every so often then that could also be a way for people to learn.
Man I would pay for an entire season of toradora subbed like this, I can imagine this catching on by the time I actually know japanese well enough to not need it anymore is 2-3 years.
this is amazing! I've already gone and learned the language for over 4 years now, (albeit slowly) but I bet if I watch these subs, I'd learn so many new words! Although, if someone used this for the entirety of learning the language, they would sadly talk like an anime character. (Imagine a japanese foreigner coming to america and speaking exactly like peter griffin...)
These subs are really just an idea for a certain style of subtitle, so they don't have to be limited to anime. They could probably be implemented with all sorts of different Japanese media.
Watching subtitled content would ease your way into learning a language, i have learned 2 of my languages that way (English i learned through subtitles, some English classes at school where we were teached the same 50 things under different lights over 8+ years, so i mostly credit my English content consumption with my English learning), the second one i had more opportunity to practice it, the problem is that now days a lot of the subtitles are miss translations on purpose or auto-translations failures and often throw people out of context.
Strong agreement here. I've had basically the same theory for a long time now but haven't put it to paper/screen/video. Good on ya for doing it. I hope it gets traction. That being said, I don't like the way the words pop in. Put the whole sentence up and use some other indicator for what's being spoken at any moment, like a color sliding through the sentence.
There actually is a version of the subs that display's the whole sentence with the words being highlighted as they come. It is available in "WholeLineKaraokeSubs" folder on the Github page linked in the description and pinned comment.
Lol watching the video further, it feels like I read the Japanese subtitles, and skip over the English vocabulary faster. It does help to know how they start and end the sentences.
English subtitled anime taught me quite a bit (albeit slowly), with some study on the side and training myself to really listen. I could see these restructured subtitles making it easier to pick up new things, but I don’t think it would be enjoyable enough or available enough to do for any extended amount of time. So it’s probably better to start learning grammar and kanji, then transition to Japanese subtitles.
Learning kanji and vocabulary would probably be a good idea, but I don't know about grammar, to be honest. Does learning about infinitival phrases make it easier to understand the meaning of "to eat?"
Yeah, theoretically, the way you would really start learning with subs like these is when you watch a ton of anime with them. I doubt people will have the patience to create subs like this, though. I barely had the patience to create these subs back when I was working on this project. But feel free to try them out if you want. Let me know if they help in learning at all.
What you are suggesting one of the most ancient language teaching methods called grammar-translational method. It gained popularity especially in medieval times and was the dominant method up until early 20th century (when science kicked in and we started developing better methods), aimed at teaching people to understand original texts of Latin and ancient Greek literature. You would be given a text where one line is the original, the 2nd line is a kind of a literal translation like what you suggest, and the 3rd line is a proper translation. And you'd be given entire books to read this way, in the meantime they would teach you the theory of grammatical rules like declensions, conjugations, etc. There was no emphasis at all at being able to speak fluently or to understand a language directly, intuitively like a bilingual, without analytical translating it in your head where you always think in your native language and then translate it. It was meant to be a mental exercise stimulating your brain/mind very much like nowadays we use maths at school instead, something very strict and logical instead of intuitive, and being fluent was a non issue because you were supposed to read and write taking just as much time as you need, as opposed to how nowadays we expect to be able to have a conversation with someone as the priority. Therefore it is considered to be one of the worst teaching methods out there for modern use. HOWEVER. What I described above is just for text, not for listening to the sound of language. So using anime that way will give a massive advantage after all in that respect. Also what is more important, we are not talking about someone learning to have a conversation here, but just to understand what they're watching and using something someone spends time on anyway to have an extra benefit for free, so the idea is great actually. The only problems I see is how to include the different writing systems (of which Japanese has 3 besides Romaji and likes to mix them all at once) and also the fact that the way characters speak is usually insanely unnatural, very exaggerated intonation and vocabulary and phrases that make sense in a world the characters live in but not the real world... The Japanese in Anime usually just has about as much in common with everyday Japanese as an extremely over the top unnatural theatrical play using awkwardly poetic style (or any other unnatural style) would. YOU DO NOT WANT TO SOUND LIKE AN ANIME CHARACTER when in Japan, you do not want to embarrass yourself, you want to speak with a flat (almost emotionless) tone in comparison with vivid tone typical for Anime and very different vocabulary. If you get angry and call someobe Kisama they will just burst out with laughter at you and never ever again trat you seriously. But then again, if the goal is to just start understanding what you're watching as a free benefit and not to learn to speak, then that's not an issue. Being able to read and write would be neat though for being able to play video games :D and I guess if this approach was used for some of the live action slice of life kinda series, then a lot of the problems described above with the awkard language could be nullified.
This style of subtitling doesn't have to be limited to just anime. It could probably be used with all sorts of Japanese media if it turns out that it's helpful to teach Japanese.
This deserves way WAY more attention. Learning Japanese via subtitles is slow even in combination with structured learning. I was learning just from the little bit you showed 😂
this is EXTREMELY similar to an idea i had but never quite wrote down! but generally what I had in mind was having the original language up on top and translation below, with words spoken at the time highlighted on both sentences, japanese of course having furigana and rómaji too for the script stuff. (and maybe the IPA pronounciation too to get even more egregious, although with japanese i'd probably just replace the rómaji to clutter things less) however your decision to put the extra grammatical particles from japanese in does also help a lot! (though i probably would've come up with writing their shortened english language technical names for the particle, like TOP for wa, ACC for wo, DAT for ni etc, kind of like how it's done in some examples to show word order; although this might be more confusing for people not as versed in linguistics?)
My thought with the particles, or hope rather, was that with enough subtitles to view, people would eventually be able to understand them in a much deeper way than just their basic definitions and meanings, that they would get a sort of intuitive sense of what they mean kind of like what native Japanese speakers have, but it's hard to know without lots of different subtitles.
I'll definitely try this. I haven't learned a bit of Japanese throughout years of watching anime, but just watching the previews in this video I could feel I was actually picking up words and getting a sense for the sentence structure. I'll be happy enough if I manage to pick up the very basics. Thank you for making this. For the record, I have ADHD, so there's a chance this works especially well for people with this condition.
10/10 would definitely use to learn japanese. While the translation example is a little confusing since there's a better way to translate it, it was probably made that way on purpose since some sentences in japanese are assembled differently from english ones.
HOLY, so you're saying that languages have different structures and grammar??!?! How weird lol, must be hard for English only speakers. And watching anime actually helped me a lot because now that i actually started learning Jap, sentences and grammar just make sense where it goes, what goes, vocabulary. I can basically understand whole sentences in N5, maybe even N4, without learning it just because i watched and remember what it means, so it's a big help for start tbh.
I don't think this can help you learn Japanese completely, but it could help a lot with increasing your vocabulary and word order. Another thing that might increase the effectiveness of this method is to include the romaji alongside the literal English translation, since visually seeing the romaji as it is spoken is better for memory than just listening to the anime alone. Also, your method of karaoke display is jarring. It would be better to have the entire sentence displayed, and then have the words light up or bounce as it is spoken. Ideally, what you would want is to have romaji subtitles, then whenever a word can be directly translated to English, the English word would appear directly above the romaji. For example, a Google translation of "This is sample text for demonstration." we get: ᴛʜɪs ᴅᴇᴍᴏɴsᴛʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ sᴀᴍᴘʟᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ *Kore wa demo-yō no sanpuru tekisuto desu*
@veeloth The biggest problem I see is that anime Japanese is nothing like proper Japanese. Meaning the way that people in anime speak is not the same as how Japanese people normally speak. Not to mention, the are a lot of different dialects and ways of speaking in anime, so it'd be like trying to learn English through a mixture of American, British, and Australian movies plus rap music. Also, Japanese particles don't have a direct English translation, so you'll struggle to know how they are used. And just like with any language, Japanese follows a set of rules, but it also breaks those rules under certain conditions that you wouldn't know unless it was specifically explained to you. So while you are trying to learn Japanese through anime, your brain will try to form patterns to figure out the structure of the language, but every so often, the anime will deviate from the pattern that you've established in your mind and you won't know why.
This might be a little bit out of left field but have you considered looking up "Chants of Sennaar"? It is a language learning game! since you seem interested in linguisticts I thought something like this would intrigue you. :)
This a very interesting idea. As someone who is learning Japanese via immersion essentially what I am doing is looking up words I don't know the meaning of using a pop-up dictionary with Japanese subtitles. So I think what would help your method is more is if Japanese subtitles were on screen and then above them are your English translation subtitles. Kinda like furigana. So in your example sentence 日本語が少し分かります is on screen but above it (in the place of were furigana would be) is "JAPANESE ga LITTLE-BIT UNDERSTAND masu. I think that combination would be the most helpful and would mean people would not have to use a pop-up dictionary all the time.
Ohhh, this is so gooood! I've always thought if someone wants to learn from anime they'd need subs formatted literally, but no paid streaming site would ever put effort into teaching ppl the language cos it would cut their profit, so it leaves learning to the morally ambiguous sites; see if you can get the subs uploaded to the people who run the site for learning from anime AniMelon, & your idea could take off with more fan subs in this style created?
A couple of studies on Dutch and Spanish learners of English tested whether it's better to watch videos in the target language with or without subtitles. Both the studies I read found that putting subtitles in their native language almost completely cancelled out the learning process. The best outcomes were either watching English video with English subtitles or no subtitles at all. I think this speaks somewhat to Stephen Krashen's theory of language acquisition: language is acquired by the process of comprehending messages in the target language. My strategy now is to watch anime in Japanese with no subtitles at all, and just trying to roughly follow the story -- not trying to think about the language or grammar, just see if I can follow the plot. That said, it's a bit tiring and I haven't been doing it consistently, so I can't say it's better than any other approach (although after many years of using flashcards with Anki for other languages, I already think watching videos with no subs is better than that).
this study isn't kinda right i can remember at top of my head but they forgot a variable and it was an important factor for the subs and the whole thing gone to zero. I've learned myself and teach some friends english only using music subtitles. 1st without sub i made them sing cuz there's a lot of sound that don't exist in our native language especially the vowels, 2nd subs in our native language subs that don't aim at precision but in usitng words that give the same context and hen with eng subs so they learn to read. It worked all the times, it is a small sample of course but it's enough to say it's a non zero result.
I think the karaoke thing is an interesting idea, but having the whole sentence already there from the start would probably be a little be better. Just have the words being highlighted as they're said.
3:33 This is so true. I can understand some Japanese. Some of the easier (usually slice of life) anime, I can even watch without subs. I'll miss the odd word, but overall it's fine. However, English subs do very little to help learn new words. I either read the subs, or listen to the Japanese. Doing both is possible, and I do sometimes do that, but it is a lot of effort, not something I can do for a full episode, and often I focus too much on one or the other. (Usually the Japanese. By the time I realise I didn't quite understand and need to focus more on the subs, they are usually gone)
I see your point... basically weebify the subtitles lol. Although I saw in general watching with subs being pretty useful for my journey, because before I watched anime with russian dub so subs was a pretty good for getting my ears used to listening Japanese.. For that reason I tell to every single friend who are interested in learning Japanese that it would be way easier for them to start since their ears are familiar with a language. I don't have any inner voice so by logic I just can learn some simple nouns or phrases that way. I also sometimes get angry of translations - and to me it's just a sign of progress and paying attention. Maybe it isn't efficient - but it works for me - and I already explained why it works in the beginning
The word order is too different to use English subs to learn from them. However if you're learning from a language with similar word order like Korean then it's much more doable. So your idea is pretty interesting. I'm into it.
haha i like it a lot. you basically shown how kanji works in the mind. in this context, capital english words are meanings not sounds. basically the reader sees the word, combines the sounds, fetch its meaning then combine it with adjectives, conjugations etc. you basically made japanese without pronunciation. it's hilarious. one thing is, there is culture. language is never used like a computer, there are some phrases, conversations, conventions that society got used to. that's the real thing what we call a language. and these conventions are transferable so it's in our daily lives, we already know about them like this english text being mostly in latin and greek vocabulary. to convey the message at a dictionary level this method will work very well, and it's so easy to fill the gaps but it won't help you learn because speaking a language is nothing more than thinking like them. the rest is just habits transfered and modified through centuries, you get them by simply absorbing and replicating everyone does it constantly without any effort. this is genius btw, not because it works but for the effort. even being a native doesn't mean you are good at a language or you can communicate with others, that's almost never the case. you only create and people resonate or you copy what's already working and move on. for example in japan it's mostly the latter but ofc there are times you copy but you don't understand. it's really complicated, it's not as it seems outside that's just what could be called 遊び, tourism shall i say. it is very very rare for a foreigner to really learn another language deservingly. you, the reader might find what i said extreme but it's just the truth and why should the truth hurt ? as long as people get closer it's enough. i will benefit from your technique you shared. thanks. (also no one teaches others anything, everyone learns themselves so that's an oxymoron in the first place. "subtitles teaching you japanese" is just deflection of "learning japanese through subtitles". if you don't will to learn nothing can make you learn)
As a person who's fairly fluent in Japanese, I can say that anime *is* useful, but it's in certain ways and you have to actively be using it as a tool rather than passively consuming and hoping it will help. More than anything, it's most useful for learning vocab and pronunciation training: repeating lines said by anime characters and trying to get as close as possible will help a lot at improving your pronunciation, and words that show up a lot will eventually start to stand out to you as you do this. This is where you use the translation for context to figure out what these words mean, and potentially looking them up in a jisho/dictionary if you can't figure it out (or if the translation plays fast and loose, as is seemingly more common these days). You also want to look up words that you don't know/recognize, obviously. What anime will NOT help you with is learning grammar or improving your reading skills. Using the JLPT as a benchmark, I got to probably about an N2 or N1 level of vocab knowledge but still couldn't converse with natives because I couldn't read anything (literally not even hiragana) and I didn't know how to string together a proper sentence. Once I got a proper tutor that taught me those things, however, she said I ended up exploding in skill level and now I'm N2 certified (my vocab/speaking skills are definitely N1 or better according to her but my kanji knowledge isn't quite there yet). Once you get to a certain level, I'd recommend graduating from anime to Japanese TH-cam/NicoNico videos as they will often use words more commonly found in the real world (anime is biased towards certain overly complicated words while omitting some very common and essential ones) and they will be said by a native speaker in a natural setting which means their pronunciation won't always be as clean and you can train your listening skills better.
Have you posted about this on the subs related to this in reddit /discord? Seems like something that could garner some good attention there and I feel this is a pretty revolutionary-like idea that has something going for it imo , i hope this video gets as much attention it can to actually start something up in the anime community
I tried reddit, but you know how reddit is. You post a link to something on TH-cam and it immediately gets downvoted and gets no attention. Discord, I am not familiar enough with. But feel free to share this video or these subs anywhere you want.
I think you may be on to something. I first started "learning" Japanese by accident when I was 14. I was watching "The Queen's Classroom" and before I knew it I had learned lots of short, common phrases such as "arigatou," "gomenasai," "ohayou," etc. Now when I watch anime, it can sometimes be easy to tell that the word order is completely reversed, even if I don't understand it without subtitles. I look forward to trying your idea out, and I hope lots of other people find your video so there can be a larger sample size (and who knows, maybe make the idea take off on a larger scale?). Thank you so much for this video.
In my opinion, the problem is not so much the grammar, but that normal subs don't visualize the Japanese. Only the English. I think that merely being able to see the Japanese alongside the English, would help people significantly more.
@@goken4259 Thank you! That's very kind! I won't lie to you. I probably won't have time. I haven't had time to sit down and watch a full show in years, but I hope someone else gets use out of them
It's definitely possible that is the case, but I think it's good to keep an open mind to other methods of learning in case they end up helping with the overall process.
Huh. Very interesting. By the examples of these two - "Dr.Stone" and "Card Captor Sakur", I actually feel like I actually learned these words. They stay in my head. A little bit of tweaking and this could be revolutionary. Question. Only for these mentioned two subtitles exist? It would be perfect if this would be applicable for every anime but that's utopic dream, that's why I'll take what I can get. 😀 Either way, this incredible!
As far as I know, these types of subtitles only currently exist for the Card Captor Sakura episode, DR STONE episode, and Whisper of the Heart movie I made them for. Hopefully, if this catches on, more people will start making more subtitles, but we'll have to see.
I hope you see this comment. I got the raw videos for which you have provided the karaoke subs and tried it, and damn...this works. It'll work even better with experimentation and strategy. Thanks for existing and sharing this. I don't have the time to look at the provided tutorials right now or this week even, so can you tell me whether they include instruction on how to create the karaoke effect as well?
I think it is because the structure of Japanese is very different. Passive learning probably works much better with languages that have the same structural order.
For something longer like the Ghibli movie, or, say, if someone were to adapt an entire season of anime in this subtitle style, it might be a good idea to only show the romaji variant of a word after it appears 20-30 times. At least for me, I think this would stimulate my brain a bit more and help with memorization. Ideally, by the end you would be reading mostly romaji with a few new words sprinkled it, and you would be able to understand most of it. Still, while I say that, I was having a bit of difficulty following along with some of the examples, the one from Cardcaptor Sakura especially. Maybe the speaker was just talking too quickly, or maybe I'm just not able to read quickly enough, but I was having trouble following along with the subtitles and reading through them before the next set appeared. I do believe this has a lot of promise. And, as some commenters said, it may also be possible to automate this, to an extent. Either way, it would take a lot of work to continue this project. I do hope someone takes up the mantle, though. Seems like one of those things that someone would turn into a subscription service.
Might be interesting to do something like that. I feel like the more words that are in Japanese, the more potential there is for the person watching to learn and remember them.
I pretty was surprised of the capability that just subtitle files have gotten to at this point. Back when I was younger, you used to have to encode the subtitles directly into the video if you wanted them to be Karaoke. Now you can put all that Karaoke data into one sub file and pretty much any computer will be able to play it.
i think this qualifies as immersion and that is a good way to learn a language, but i think people should probably study the basic of grammar even if they want to learn this way. also, just a suggestion if you ever plan on doing more or refining the current subtitles, you should put the romaji and maybe the hiragana in there as well. it would help people learn the written language (at least one of the systems, anyway) and help them keep track of where they are specifically when the speakers get a bit too fast or they want to pause to understand more. whisper of the heart might be the best thing to do this with.
I have made a version of the subs for Card Captor Sakura and DR STONE with hiragana instead of romanji. I will probably also make a hiragana version of Whisper of the Heart at some point, but it's a much bigger undertaking, and I have a full time job, so it might be a while.
honestly, if people really wanted to learn the language, they'd be better off learning the kana and the basic grammar. i don't mean they need to become a grammar ninja, only that they need to learn the basics. the method in the video basically scratches the itch where you feel like you want to learn the language, but don't actually want to put in the effort to do so. Japanese subs (not romaji) is still the gold standard, though they're not very common outside of Japanese games.
Perhaps watching something with subs like these will make people curious enough to start looking up bits and pieces of grammar as they go. Also, it might be cool to have different levels of subs, one that uses Romaji for Japanese words, one that uses Hiragana/Katakana, one that uses Kanji, etc.
I'm going to use this comment to post any updates about the subs or how to get them.
UPDATE 1: I created a Github project with the subs that will have the latest version of them. I have also added the raw Karaoke subs to the Github in case someone wants to add different FX to them.
github.com/gokenshadow/LearnJapaneseKaraokeSubtitles/tree/main
UPDATE 2: I have added subs that include the whole line instead of having the words appear as they are being said to the Github. They are in the "WholeLineKaraokeSubs" folder.
UPDATE 3: I have added subs that replace the Japanese text with Hiragana instead of Romanji for DR STONE and Card Captor Sakura. They are in the Github in the "Hiragana" folder.
UPDATE 4: I have made some tutorial videos on how to create these kinds of Karaoke subtitles. Here is a link to the playlist:
th-cam.com/video/J5yGFrEGQG0/w-d-xo.html
Please make a video showing how you created the subtitles so that other people can potentially copy what you did and make their own karaoke subtitles! If this is a project that we want to really work, then there has to be a lot of subtitles available for all to use, not just a few!
@@ddeevviiaanntt Good idea, I'll see if I can make a tutorial or something like that.
There is utuber @Carykh that v made text to picture script before neural networks.
I guess any image even extra small in corner could be nice too
@@ddeevviiaanntt I have created a playlist to the tutorials and added it to the pinned comment if you want to check them out.
Link to tutorial:
th-cam.com/video/J5yGFrEGQG0/w-d-xo.html
@@goken4259 Thanks!!!
I learned English 90% just by watching TH-cam videos. What was particularly effective was the automatic subtitles that TH-cam provides because it's not always quite good enough to understand what's going, so it forces you to listen closely and use context to guess what the words that the auto subtitles didn't catch were and I think your special subs do kinda that but better especially for someone with a lower level in the language. Though I think some time using more "traditional" forms of learning before using your subtitles would still be necessary for it to be effective, especially for a hard language like Japanese
I'm curious, what is your native language?
@@WHern-gs6im french
@@WHern-gs6im french
That's how I'm learning Japanese rn. I'm watching a shit ton of Vtuber streams with closed captions on.
One problem with this is is that Japanese in particular depends so heavily on context and subtext to communicate nuance that you lose something even just directly changing word for word... Probably at least a little bit of transliteration is necessary to be intelligible, at least for a novice. There's also the fact that there are a lot of little rules that change how things are said, especially in the case of politeness/formality, that would be difficult at best to pick up on just by listening. But something like this in combination with more academic/technical learning seems like it has great potential.
I guess my hope would be that if a person watched a huge amount of Japanese media with these types of subtitles, they would eventually start getting an intuitive sense of stuff like that, but unfortunately, the only way to find out if that's true would be to create a ton of subtitles, which is way more than I can do at the moment.
@@goken4259 this kind of direct substitution would actually be pretty easy to automate in theory. Probably would still need a double check though .
I think pairing it with actually learning the grammar and conjugations a bit would be best. At the very least basic things like masu form vs dictionary form, it's kind of important and feels wrong to skip.
This is certainly for an intermediate learner, but holy crap is this an amazing idea for those intermediate learners to get good fast. 😆 Now we just need to get an AI-powered app running that can make these at scale.
@@goken4259 I wonder if there is a way to get AI to start making subtitles like this because that is a lot of work for a person to go threw and make.
The first 30 seconds of this video describes exactly how I finally started understanding Japanese. It _is_ possible to train yourself to ignore the subtitles and only use them as a convenient source of word look-up when necessary. Understanding grammar intuitively mostly just took lots and lots of consistent, comprehensible input--which is something these subs might prove helpful for to some people. Very interesting concept and I hope it helps people on their language learning journeys!
Relatable
Yep
Yes! I've been doing the same! Probably helps that I'm a very fast reader of English. So I can listen to the entire Japanese sentence, try to understand it on my own, and if I didn't then I can read this sub just before it disappears.
THIS IS AMAZING. there NEEDS to be lots of subtitles like this. this would help me SO much. this so underrated.
Thanks, I'm glad you dig the idea.
This is perfect for people in the intermediate stage that want to further their studies without constantly looking things up, which ruins the flow a bit. I wonder if using ChatGPT (or perhaps the open source mixtral 8x7b to save on cost, which is close to GPT-4, but runs on gaming cards) and Whisper would allow for automating the creation of these subtitles to work with any show?
This is a long comment, but it contains how I view this concept as a linguist of 10 years and ex translator and interpreter.
This is such a well-made video, with a very amazing concept, I am amazed this isnt one of things that blows up and gets 100k views yet. It provides the exact solution to the problem tens of millions of people have: they would like to learn japanese, but dont have the energy or time to fully study it for 5+ years, because it really IS a ton of work, and also dont want to miss out on the story of what they are watching by full immersing themselves for 3000-4000 hours of episodes (which is very inefficient. There would be nothing more useful than the ability to learn a language simply by doing what you arleady enjoy.This is an excellent idea, and as someone who has spend the past 10 years learning languages and looking into all sorts of ways to learn, this is one I have never seen, yet would seem to provide the most practical solution to an unaddressed problem for many people interested in learning a foreign language. Keep up the good work brother.
As for why most people dont pick up on most of the language, it is not only about order. When you hear foreign language, combined with subtitles, you hear the words, but assign the subtitle's words to it. For simple phrases, over 20-30 repetitions, this can be easily picked up. but in complex sentences, with 20-30 syllables, it can be hard to pick things out, whcih is why things that characters exclaim loud and clear are best remembered. By reordering them in the way you suggest, viewers would be able to break it down WAY more easily, and now you are assigning a very clear 2-4 syllable set of sounds to a meaning, which makes learning it via repetition very easy. Additionally, since the word order is changed, people watching with your subs would likely have to think more carefully about each individual word said, and after a couple hours of using it, will naturally read the english in a japanese word order, boosting comprehension greatly. Your idea is incredible, and I think, that while simply learning it through a mix of immersion and constant book study would be the most time-efficient way to learn, your method would be way more enjoyable to viewers, way more accessable, and most importantly, way easier and clearer.
I would not be surprised if something like this would be popular enough in the future to be a paid service like crunchyroll is, and I hope that enough people will discover this video that such an idea would take off.
Thanks, I'm glad you believe in the idea. It's cool to hear that from someone who has experience learning different languages. I hope it catches on as well.
@@goken4259 Oh boy, you hit something here. This exact concept is something already worked out by a certain women I learned many years ago about. She called it 'brain friendly learning" and had a bunch of other stuff to learn about how you can learn things better. Basically a German motivation trainer doing lots of presentations about how the brain works.
Her name was "Vera F. Birkenbihl" and she died due to cancer 12 years ago, leaving lots of videos and text about her learnings. Even a blog where you can find an excerpt from one of her books about what you described in your video. That book was never translated in any language it seems, I would recommend googling her otherwise.
yea this deserves more views dawg @@goken4259
great comment.
im pretty sure this is going to blow up soon or get copied everywhere.
i also thought this would be amazing on something like lingopie or other similar apps.
Keeping the grammatical structure intact is really interesting, this has potential.
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the video.
I think this has some potential and could be built upon. Its a very interesting idea 👍👍
Thanks, I'm glad you find the idea interesting. This most likely not the final form it should be, and I'm sure there are things that could be done to build upon it.
THIS. IS. AMAZING! I asked for a feature like this from LLN but never got a response. And, I don't have the technical abilities to do this myself. But, OMGosh! This is an evolution in language learning. Whatever languages this could be done for would allow thousands, MILLIONS, more people to enjoy and learn a second, 3rd, or 10th language. Sorry, I just got to say it one last time. THIS IS PHENOMENAL!
The approach I thought of a couple decades ago while watching Inuyasha and Card Captor Sakura has always been beyond my ability to execute, but has a similar concept behind it.
The idea would be to start with some very short vocabulary at the start of each episode, and, as each episode progresses, replace all the words that were in the vocabulary lesson of that episode or earlier with the romanji for the Japanese. I got this idea from the way a lot of fansubbers of the era were basically doing that with words they didn't feel like coming up with transliterations for, or thought lost something with such transliterations.
The next step, about 5-10 episodes in, would be to start teaching Japanese grammar and particles, and having some sentences - particularly those with a lot of Japanese being left in the subtitles because they're vocab words already learned - written in Japanese grammatical order. Gradually, as vocabulary increased, all of the sentences would be thus written (which is where your subtitles kind-of are now).
Finally, I'd try using it to teach commonly-used kanji and kana by having that same vocabulary lesson replace certain romanji phonemes with the kana they represent, and commonly-kanjified words with the kanji straight-up. I'd probably start with the particles.
This "lesson plan" would flow through a given series, intended to be watched from beginning to end.
That sounds like it would be awesome. I'd definitely try it if it existed.
that sounds really good! much better than the original suggestion in the video
Certainly a cool idea, but it's a process that would have to work over a massive number of series. Or I guess maybe just all of One Piece and Detective Conan combined. It's a cool idea, it could work (you're right about the fansubs, there's a reason so many weebs know what sugoi/onee-san etc. means) but it really would have to be a coordinated "lesson plan" spanning a vast amount of content.
As I've been learning Japanese, I thought about someday creating a podcast to teach Japanese speakers English, and it would work pretty much exactly how you described, where it starts in their known language and gradually replaces more and more things with the target language. Why aren't more people doing this???
@@mayanightstar because it takes a lot of effrot and is worthless for entertainment purposes
So, I came up with something similar to your idea quite a few years back. When I was about 13 (ca. 2008), I started creating fansubs so my little sister could watch 'Katekyou Hitman Reborn!' with me. I painstakingly did the timing and translated each phrase from English to Polish. Having picked up some basic vocabulary from watching way too many series, I would often translate by ear, though I made sure to look up words in online Japanese dictionaries for accuracy, using the Latin alphabet since I didn’t know kana then.
I had always been strongly in favor of preserving honorifics and the surname + firstname order in translations - in essence, I was against localization. I even created some guides for my subbing group on how to translate in line with my vision.
And because of those preferences I pondered on an idea which resembles what you’ve done.
Wanting to preserve the original delivery, I wondered about making translations match the flow of Japanese speech, disregarding the Polish grammar entirely. After iterating over this idea for some time, I ended up with this concept:
- put a dictionary definition on the screen at the time a word is spoken
- center it vertically and horizontally
- make it semi-transparent so it won’t obscure the visuals
It was supposed to work like a speed reading tool :).
But I didn’t know Japanese well enough, I still don’t tbh. It also looked like a hell of a lot of work with timing each word instead of a chunk of words.
Then came depression, and I was out for a few years…
But now that I know typescript and python, many of those issues could be automated. Though there are some things that wouldn’t be that straightforward.
I have just extracted Japanese CC subs from Netflix, those are xml files. Those can be converted to ssa/ass sub format later, but xml is easier to parse. I’m not sure if there is some library for segmenting Japanese words - so we can recognize what’s a noun, a verb, a particle, whatever. I’m not sure, but maybe targeting just kanji would work?
There is python library called pykakasi that will transliterate it to romaji, and I think it groups kanji and kana.
There is jisho-api library so we could get definitions for kanji…
I will need to test it out when I have some free time :).
Polish language is surprisingly flexible when it comes to word order, at least compared to English, so it works pretty well with ideas like these, I think.
@@alexprus7953 True. The Japanese reverse grammar we often see, is compatible with Polish. For example Car this one, I drive, can make sense as I drive this car. Although there is emphasis placed on different meanings or the words and the overall sentence. But this still can work.
maybe mecab library could work
BTW, these subtitles are amazing and I hope you keep working on it!
At first it seemed really jarring and complicated, but this seems like a great idea if you're already trying to immerse into the work in Japanese, kinda like a live vocabulary that won't distract you from focusing on hearing and parsing the Japanese audio. I was planning on watching Whisper Of The Heart soon anyway and debating whether I should go sub or no sub so this might be a perfect middle ground between no sub vs full english sub. Imagine if we had a huge library of these subs, and a script that could substitute your mature words on Anki to Japanese, that would be pretty cool. Hopefully one day something like that will be a reality.
Cool, let me know how Whisper of the Heart goes if you end up using the subs.
There is no way reading any subtitles won’t make it basically impossible to parse something different being said at the same time, especially if it’s in a new language.
@@Jonas-Seiler If you are an absolute beginner. But I am at a an intermediate level, so listening to Japanese is inherently easier to parse than these freaky subs, I just miss a lot of words.
Edit: when I say miss I mean don't know
@@Jonas-Seiler I am also used to watching stuff in English with Serbian subs (when watching with family and in the cinema) even though I can understand and speak English perfectly, and I usually passively parse both the audio and subs at the same time, and get annoyed when the sub isn't correct. It's less distracting to me than having English captions. I already try to focus on the Jpn audio as much as I can when watching Jpn with regular subs, but it's hard to apply the more liberal translation to the sentence I heard to know what is what in a split second.
@@tvsonicserbia5140 ok I see now what you mean. I think what I said still applies, and what we're doing in the situation you describe isn't actually fully parsing either the audio or the subs, but rather relying very heavily on inference, which is only possible with already high proficiency.
Honestly, I think this is genius. Sometimes, when I try to speak Japanese - and it's not just memorized phrases - I have to consciously think about my sentence structure and reverse it. This really trains your brain to process spoken language the way Japanese people do. As you mentioned in the video, English sentences are structed way differently. They're structed in a SVO format (Subject - Verb - Object). For example, in the sentence 'I'm going home,' 'I'm' is the subject, 'going' is the verb, and 'home' is the object. However, Japanese follows the opposite order, SOV, which would be something like 'I home am going.' This reversal is probably why so many native English speakers find learning Japanese so hard, lmao.
If this could be more widespread, I know it'd help a lot of people. Maybe have a version with the regular hiragana subtitle's underneath might help with beginners? Just in case they have a hard time hearing a word, they can read it.
I'm more or less at a point where I don't have to reverse anything, since JP is my fourth language. But my vocab does suck, so my acquisition of grammar and context gets hindered. Not to mention, if I see or hear something I don't know, I get easily distracted, and lose track of my wave of thought, so I always prefer pausing if I can.
I talk to myself out loud when I'm alone and as I've been learning Japanese I've started saying "[Object] is where?" for example, like I've really got full on SOV brain rot now xD
I've subconsciously wanted something like this for a while now, it makes figuring out words way easier! keep up the good work :D
I've always wished there was something like this. Even though the subtitle translations are made more for comprehension than accuracy, it always bothered me because once I started learning Japanese, I noticed that some sentences would be completely off and would have words that weren't said or omit words for the sake of clarity when what I really wanted was precision to aid learning. I think this is an awesome idea especially given how difficult learning a different sentence/grammatical structure can be. If one doesn't know what the particles are, they can look them up and integrate that knowledge while reading.
However, and this is for me, personally, I would prefer having both those english subtitles and an additional set in hiragana (and katakana when needed) above or below it instead of the karaoke like highlighting. Sometimes I read or listen faster, and the syncing up of the words with the voice would throw me off. I'm one of those people who although I'm a native English speaker, I still need the captions at times to catch what people are saying (call it neurodivergency or whatever you want). That's just my 2 cents though.
Either way, super cool for you to have actually put this idea into fruition as I'm sure a lot of people have wondered about this concept and would have liked something like this.
This is a really good idea! I think taking it a step further you should use hiragana in place of the words without translations to prime the brain to think in Japanese. An even further adjustment would be to have two layers of subtitles: one for Japanese with Kanji, and another in your method using the script of the language of the native speaker. Kanji may seem overwhelming, but using contextual situations youd be amazed at how one can pick it up. It takes a lot of adjustment to think in Japanese. Doing this with song lyrics can be a fun way to learn also, and you have the added element of repetition!
Imagine developing a program that automates this process. using an algorythm that automaticly generates subtitles, feeding an API like deepL or something similar and automaticly sorting through words that can be translatet one to one. In theory this could work, but the amount of finetuning involved, to release it as a working product is probably to damn high
As someone who learned Japanese from scratch using the very "theory" you described and dismissed at the beginning of the video, I think I can provide some insight:
The basic idea you have is on-point; provided parallel streams of data, information from the known (text) stream should be usable to decipher the unknown (audio) stream.
You are also correct that the highest hurdle to overcome is the association of Japanese words/sounds with their meanings (i.e. English counterparts).
However, the critical weakness in the format you've come up with is that it sacrifices the integrity of both languages in an attempt to Frankenstein them into a single text stream that's structurally consistent with the audio. This results in a corrupted "known" data stream, which would likely cause partial or full loss of understanding in viewers without enough prior knowledge.
This is especially the case for the romaji, which I consider "bad data"; romaji are a crutch used by foreigners learning Japanese, are not part of the natural Japanese language, and are entirely redundant, given the audio stream.
Since Japanese kana are almost always structurally and phonetically consistent, we can, instead, modify the method as follows:
A second or two before any audio line, begin displaying both a full (English) translated subtitle line, and a full Japanese text transcript (furigana unneccesary) of that line, one on top of the other. Then, as the audio line is played, karaoke-highlight the Japanese transcript, as well as any corresponding translated terms, if applicable.
By displaying the 2 text streams early, viewers will naturally begin parsing the known data (translated subtitle) early. If any understanding of Japanese text is present, this will also naturally prompt an attempt to parse and compare against the known data. When the audio then plays, the viewer will already have at least some of the known data stream buffered in working memory, and the karaoke highlighting will sync associations between the 3 data streams.
Because all 3 data streams are uncompromised, all associations learned will be consistent with each other and both languages, and won't introduce erroneous or superfluous data. The time-based syncing of the karaoke highlighting will naturally hint at structural and grammatical differences, untranslatable particles, word tenses, and other linguistic detritus. Finally, inclusion of the Japanese transcript not only provides visual anchoring for the karaoke syncing, it also encourages absorption of the natively written language (which wouldn't normally be possible with anime alone).
I like the idea of displaying the kanji and kana as they would be written and highlighting only that text (maybe that could be the final, hard-mode version of the subs or something), but I don't know that having the English translation below it will actually help. The brain, when faced with multiple inputs of data tends to go in the direction of least resistance, which in the case of your proposed subtitles, would be to just read the translation and forget about the other stuff. I'm pretty sure that's would I would eventually start doing with such subtitles, even if I did intend to try and understand the Japanese at first. It gives a person too much of an opportunity for laziness.
The idea of showing the subtitles in a "frankensteined" way as you put it is not that someone reading them will have a complete understanding of the meaning, but rather that, based on the "partial or full loss of understanding" as you put it, they will be put into a position where they don't really know exactly what's being said and will have to try and figure it out. Their brain will be forced out of the "just read the subtitles" mode, and they will have to start looking at visual context clues, thinking about phrases that were said before and after, listening to intonations, and other such things to try and get a sense of the actual meaning. Usually when a person is in this mode of thinking, they tend to remember much more of the things that they learn, and that's kind of one of the hopes with these subs.
I almost feel like there should be different levels that slowly take away the English translations and replace them with the actual Japanese as you keep watching. Like maybe you could start a show at the beginning with almost everything translated, but by the time you reach the end of the show, nearly everything if not just everything is Japanese. It would certainly be an interesting ride with a really long show.
I do wonder about using romanji, though. Like you said, it's kind of a bad input since it isn't really ever used in actual Japanese. I made a version of the subtitles for Card Captor Sakura and DR STONE that replaces the untranslated Japanese words with hiragana because of this, and I plan to do it with Whisper of the Heart at some point as well. But I still don't know. Even if it's useless input in actual Japanese, it is still a much easier step to take into the unknown than just being faced with weird shapes that you've never seen before. It's hard to say.
@@goken4259 This shouldn't be an issue of "laziness" in the first place, since we're talking about "passive" learning, the "laziest" learning method there is, so keeping the experience smooth and enjoyable to maintain the viewer/student's motivation is paramount, with improving memorability a distant second. Frankensteining the known data stream trades the former for the latter, and, judging from other comments, I'm not the only one predicting struggle and frustration with that.
The brain will definitely go the path of least resistance, but that doesn't mean that it completely ignores other inputs as a result; Pavlov's dog wouldn't be a thing if the dog just ignored the bell in favor of the smell of food. I wasn't trying to learn Japanese at all when I watched all the anime I did; in fact, I only realized how much I'd been picking up when my brain started telling me *where the subtitles were inadequate*!
No; the key barrier here isn't memorability, but, as you yourself noted in the video, that the word order gets scrambled when changing languages.
The key point, then, is precisely to get the viewer to load the known data stream as quickly and painlessly as possible, such that it stays heaped in working memory while (otherwise idle) bandwidth is used to follow the (preferably unobtrusive) karaoke highlighting and audio. As Pavlov showed, time-based association (combined with repetition) is an extremely effective training tool, so I suspect people will start picking up the triple associations a lot faster than you'd think.
@@hadrast You could be definitely be right, but you could also be wrong. The only way to know would be to actually create such subtitles and see if they work. That is not something I have the time or the energy or even willingness to do right now. I made these "frankensteined" subs as you call them when I was unemployed and had lots of free time, and it took weeks if not months to get through the grueling work of doing so. I work full time now, so completely gutting and reworking my subtitles to try and prove other people's theories right is not something I plan on doing at the moment.
But, if you want to try making your proposed subtitles, be my guest. You can even use the subtitles I created as a starting point for the timing if you want. I have posted some tutorial videos on what I know about the subtitle software and linked them in the description, but you'd probably need to figure out more things on your own to get the highlighting to work the way you envision it with the English translation, but it might be possible. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors and thank you for your input.
Ignoring the questionable brain computer analogy, this is a great idea. I think in practice however there may often not be sufficient time for the viewer to read and understand the English sentence before the speaking starts.
There already do exist anime subtitles that have the text in both Japanese and English, and indeed while these subtitles do serve a purpose for learners, it is ultimately the same problem as showing the subtitles just in English. The website I'm familiar with that has this feature allows one to click on the Japanese words to see their definitions, but it does not have the karaoke-style text highlighting.
I quite like the idea of these "Frankenstein" subtitles as Goken created them.
this is a great idea. i love it !
i've been trying to learn japanese for quite some time.
i've learnt english by myself just by watching movies and listening to music (and making software) but that didn't work with japanese.
so i think you're quite right.
thanks !!
this is actually insane :0
i cant wait to try this out !!!
Awesome, let me know how it goes if you do try it out.
@@goken4259 absolutely !! :)
Interesting idea. I think it would work but not entirely for the reasons you think.
To give some background, I learned Japanese from watching anime, but specifically without subtitles. This forces you to focus on the words, which, when reading subtitles you're not really doing. The main reason some words are picked up is because they're extremely common and said in pretty much the same context every time. So even if you're not fully paying attention you'll probably *eventually* notice that 助けて is used when someone needs help or w/e. These are also words that are often used in isolation - not part of sentences which makes them stand out more.
But if you turn off the subtitles suddenly even in the long sentences you have to pay attention now where u might not have before. At first it'll just be meaningless noise, but eventually *because you're paying attention* you slowly start to pick up little bits and pieces till eventually you understand full sentences.
Now if you want to speed up the process you can look up words in a dictionary, so now you know words both from context and from looking them up.
I think subtitles like this will have a similar effect, they leave a lot of info out so it forces people to listen more and you're getting a definition (even if imperfect) of the word while watching.
Tho on the other hand I could also see this maybe having the opposite effect and making it harder to focus because it takes more effort to read the subtitles.
When doing immersion learning there's the idea of accepting ambiguity. I think this could be effective if people accepted not fully understanding and focused instead more on the audio with the subtitles being more of a supplement. But it might be hard for people to learn to do that.
I actually think these subs follow the way languages were learned in antiquity. Historically they used interlinear texts that line up word for word even if the grammar is ruined so that you can quickly get the meaning of the words you don't know. This is the same thing but for anime. The only improvement id make is having the actual Japanese subs also visible.
@@Otome_chan311
Definitely.
I think you could also translate "Masu" to "I do", like "Japanese ga little-bit understand do" for the example. If you wanted to say : "nihongo ga sukoshi wakarimasuka" it could translate "suka" to "do you" , or for "wakarimashita" it would be "I did", I don't know if "masu" could be considered a derivative of the base form "suru", but I guess it might help the comprehension if someone meets : wakarimasen, wakarimashita, wakatta, wakaranai etc do explain what the varying end of the same word actually means.
OMG I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THIS EXACT THING , I'VE ALSO BEEN LOOKING FOR ROMAJI SUBS ASWELL
I'm not sure it would work with just about anyone, but I keep accidentally picking up bits and pieces, so this may very well teach me enough extra pieces to be able to pick more new pieces in turn. I already sort of understand how to piece a sentence together and politeness levels, and verb tenses fly over my head so I'm just getting them from context anyway, so your translation method there might get the conjugating to stick for me!
If you've developed a decent ear for it, a few hours of actual study might give you a huge boost.
Aeron Buchanan's Japanese Verb Chart is useful to have handy as you watch to look up a 'conjugation' (conjugation isn't really the right word, it's more like adding additional words to the end).
@@kevinscalesThere's no additional words added between 死ぬ､死なない､死ねる､死ねない､死なせる､死なせない､ 死なず､死に､and so on. The only one you could at least attempt to call an additional word is ない, which comes from 無い, but it's been turned into conjugation, so it's not really an additional word.
This is amazing. I've been trying to learn Japanese mostly through anime and only recently hit a breakthrough in my grammar knowledge that I can start learning words through context, but if I had this tool I probably would've had that breakthrough 5 years ago. And I've been trying to learn Japanese on and off for 12 years. (and I still only have the fluency of a 3 year old)
This is absolutely awesome de pied en cap and is exactly the type of thing I've been daydreaming about for who knows how long. It'll be cool to see how people try to innovate on this format. This has just given me a few ideas myself, ideas which are maybe good or maybe bad, and the only way to know for sure is by actually trying to make them. I guess my main idea is to place the particles and suffixes above the words they modify, either as hiragana or as glossing abbreviations. This is inspired by sign language glossing.
I wonder how much it would cost to get a professional translator to work with you on this sort of thing and do like an entire season of a show in this style of subtitles. If you were to do that I think I would probably be willing to contribute a bit of money on patreon or something like that. alternatively you could potentially work from actual English subtitles available in some cases.
In order for anime with subtitles to work, you have to understand basic grammer, sentance structure, and about 100-200 basic words so you can get your bearing. _Then_ it becomes a useful learning tool.
I watched anime with subtitles (I hate dubbing) for almost 5 years, and learned almost no Japanese (like 5-10 words total). However, in the last _two weeks_ I decided to actually learn Japanese, and I learned all the basic grammer, some basic vocabulary, sentance structure, and hirigana / katakana.
Now, when I'm watching anime, I probably learn 5 new words per hour of content, and I'm often pausing to look up and write words down. Often it's a "fill in the blank" exercise where I understand half a sentence but not the other half, so my brain starts to fill in the blanks from context clues. Watching anime has suddenly become very useful to me, when before I learned the basics, the sounds were just incomprehensible chattering that I was never going to understand.
This is an awesome concept. I'm subscribing and I am going to try this out :)
Cool, let me know how it goes if you try out the subs.
OK I first off want to say THANK YOU for making this video! This hits close to home for me, as someone who self-learned Japanese for over 4 years.
So me and my cousin are super close and he grew up watching anime. He understands *a lot*, and we would jokingly talk in our broken Japanese all the time, but his theory, I think, has a ton of merit along with yours.
Back in the day, watching Japanese translations, they were mostly done by fan-subbers and usually were as direct as possible (it's why you used to see "TN: " or Translator Notes all the time) - instead of trying to translate it to something that made sense for an American audience, they kept it the same and explained the significance (e.g.: Brock's Jelly Donuts)
An example: While watching an episode of One Punch Man, a character appeared behind an enemy and shouted 「おい。どこ見える？」 (literally "Hey... Where are you looking?") and it was translated to "Did you forget about me?!" These kinds of translations mess with our brains and I think there's fatigue from hearing something and not seeing it match the subtitles. Maybe our brains just start throwing it out?
So I'd say the first problem is the fact that even the subtitles rearrange the order of words, the fact that the words themselves aren't even correct is a major issue.
But secondly, in my experience and opinion, reading & listening at the same time is too hard. I've been working on a site that plays an anime episode and for every voice line, it plays it without subtitles, pauses it, then shows the corresponding subtitles afterwards. This way you can focus 100% on listening, then 100% on reading what they just said. It does increase how long it takes to watch an episode, but I think this, even coupled with your subtitles, could be a major hit!
Wow I just watched episdoes raw and looked up words whenever I was missing something, this is just the super charged version of that. You want to be forced to mentally parse the japanese sentence, which normal subtitles prevent you from doing. For that reason there are also a whole bunch of japanese subtitle resources for anime.
I was skeptical at first, thinking that you might still read the sentence in english and overgo whats spoken in japanese, despite the jp grammar, but once I saw it in action I was convinced. Absolutely genius.
I always wanted to watch anime without subtitles for the learning experience, but the fear of missing out on the story was kinda why I never got around to that. However, this would solve all the problems that i mentioned, and it would definitely have a lot of potential to grow into something big, i hope you keep working on this and improving it.
If you're looking for a good anime to watch without any subtitles to try and learn Japanese, I would recommend Inuyasha. Something about the way Rumiko Takahashi writes her stories makes everything that's happening very very obvious, so even if you don't understand the words they're saying, you'll understand what is happening and what the stakes are about 80% of the time.
This is actual genius, good video.
Kinda reminds me of the Birkenbihl-Methode (by a german researcher about learning) where you translate a sentence in your target language into your own with out paying attention to the sentence structure so that understanding the grammar of the foreign language gets easier
this is amazing! especially the integration of untranslatables into the subtitles.
thank you for the efforts of making the experiment.
1. i find the black popping box quite distracting, though. as a user of such karaoke subtitles, i would find it much less distracting and thus more satisfying, if the whole line would appear at ones, and the colour of the words spoken would change according to word flow.
2. also, the option to have both original Japanese subtitle with annotated glossing (word-by-word translation) would be even more satisfying, as it would help connect to the Japanese words. sometimes, perceiving pronunciation is not easy, and seeing the word in written form helps to better understand.
3. there could be several versions, one with latinized transliteration, one with kanas, and one with kanjis+furigana, one with kanjis as original japanese
4. words could also be colour coded by grammatical class
i hope this projects will live on and gives some offspring! thanks again
It probably would be good to have a version of the subs with the whole line visible, so I have added a version of the Karaoke subs that include the entire line of dialogue instead of having the words appear as they are spoken. It is in the /WholeLineKaraokeSubs folder on the Github page I linked in the description.
I have added a Hiragana version of the DR STONE and Card Captor Sakura subs to the Github as well if you want to try them.
that is so interesting to see subtitles like that, I wish subtitles had this feature to me it easily understandable and would help greatly
I think it’d also be cool to have some of the untranslated words (especially particles) written in kana. They’re more easily recognisable than romaji imo, and a learner would see them in kana if/when they eventually learn written Japanese, too :)
Seems like it would be a matter of “find-replace “wo” with を’ etc., which could easily be automated with a script or smth.
This looks really cool though, and I reckon I’ll benefit from these :)
I have added a Hiragana version of the DR STONE and Card Captor Sakura subs to the Github if you want to try them.
woah I seriously thought this video would have like 10k likes or more! you deserve much more attention for this video, this is such a good idea!!! I recently started learning Japanese again and I will implement this in my studies. Thank you for sharing 🙏
This is basically how I structure sentences for my vocabulary cards.
This is such a good video, you really deserve more views!
Thanks, I appreciate the comment.
THIS, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I"VE BEEN TRYING TO FIND TO MAKE LEARNING EASIER. there is a dude by the name "pickle jar" making "translation" videos of Japanese songs with this being one set of lyrics presented. The titles always are in the form "Learn Japanese with ". also really great stuff.
Mordo, jesteś legendą, mad respect :D
never tought of this way of subtitle. Damn it really looks cool.
Thanks, I'm glad you think so.
I know people who learned by watching with Japanese subs, which is like this except you don't just learn to understand Japanese, you learn to read too. Doubly efficient! Plus the resources already exist for tens of thousands of anime.
I think doing this along with jp subs is ideal for beginners. Then as you get better drop the English and keep the jp.
This is actually pretty good when they're speaking slower ayyy this is definitely helpful for the way that I've been learning languages
Cool, I'm glad you find it helpful.
This is amazing. I was kinda skeptical at first and it makes it way harder to understand exactly, but it's amazing for practicing that immersion stuff refold people always go one about without being bored to tears. The linking of the audio to the English word ended up being really fluid even for words I don't understand. Kinda wish there was this for a lot of anime so I could practice immersing with it. I'll have to try your subs on the episodes mentioned.
Thank you for your efforts! This is a great Idea and surely a great resource.
I have not yet tried it, but I have planed to do so in the future.
So Thank you very much!
I think this is a great way to hold someone's hand through the act of learning Japanese. But the same way people can't learn to ride a bike until the training wheels are taken off, I think people need to know this won't TEACH them Japanese but can help them get their foot in the door. Ultimately, the subtitles need to be turned off and they need to get comfortable with the idea that the "bike" is gonna tip over and they won't understand what's being said all the time. But, through their own brain's ability to learn the first language they speak, they will learn this new target language just by hearing it and being surrounded in it.
These subtitles are definitely a great way to get started. way better than Duolingo if they enjoy watching anime. it's important to allow people to build up confidence the same way training wheels do. Taking the wheels off is always scary but a necessary step to becoming fluent. So as long as people don't think they can walk into a conversation as easily as they can watch these subtitled videos, i think it'll be fine.
this was pretty cool, thank you for uploading it 😃
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
It's enough to just occasionally pick out a random word and look it up in the dictionary, maybe if subtitles simply sprinkled translations for randomly-picked words every so often then that could also be a way for people to learn.
That sounds like an interesting idea. It's definitely worth giving a shot. If you want to try modding the subs to be that way, feel free.
It would be really interesting to do a study using these
Man I would pay for an entire season of toradora subbed like this, I can imagine this catching on by the time I actually know japanese well enough to not need it anymore is 2-3 years.
this is amazing! I've already gone and learned the language for over 4 years now, (albeit slowly) but I bet if I watch these subs, I'd learn so many new words! Although, if someone used this for the entirety of learning the language, they would sadly talk like an anime character. (Imagine a japanese foreigner coming to america and speaking exactly like peter griffin...)
some weird anime-esc japanese >> no japanese at all.
貴方は日本語上手ですか？
These subs are really just an idea for a certain style of subtitle, so they don't have to be limited to anime. They could probably be implemented with all sorts of different Japanese media.
Watching subtitled content would ease your way into learning a language, i have learned 2 of my languages that way (English i learned through subtitles, some English classes at school where we were teached the same 50 things under different lights over 8+ years, so i mostly credit my English content consumption with my English learning), the second one i had more opportunity to practice it, the problem is that now days a lot of the subtitles are miss translations on purpose or auto-translations failures and often throw people out of context.
Strong agreement here. I've had basically the same theory for a long time now but haven't put it to paper/screen/video. Good on ya for doing it. I hope it gets traction.
That being said, I don't like the way the words pop in. Put the whole sentence up and use some other indicator for what's being spoken at any moment, like a color sliding through the sentence.
There actually is a version of the subs that display's the whole sentence with the words being highlighted as they come. It is available in "WholeLineKaraokeSubs" folder on the Github page linked in the description and pinned comment.
This might be crazy enough to work for people who already know Japanese grammar rules and are just trying to learn the words through immersion.
Lol watching the video further, it feels like I read the Japanese subtitles, and skip over the English vocabulary faster. It does help to know how they start and end the sentences.
English subtitled anime taught me quite a bit (albeit slowly), with some study on the side and training myself to really listen.
I could see these restructured subtitles making it easier to pick up new things, but I don’t think it would be enjoyable enough or available enough to do for any extended amount of time. So it’s probably better to start learning grammar and kanji, then transition to Japanese subtitles.
Learning kanji and vocabulary would probably be a good idea, but I don't know about grammar, to be honest. Does learning about infinitival phrases make it easier to understand the meaning of "to eat?"
Cool idea, I would like to try this method of learning. Too bad this isnt wide spread.
Yeah, theoretically, the way you would really start learning with subs like these is when you watch a ton of anime with them. I doubt people will have the patience to create subs like this, though. I barely had the patience to create these subs back when I was working on this project. But feel free to try them out if you want. Let me know if they help in learning at all.
fun fact: Yoda talks in the same grammar structure as Japanese.
these subtitles sound like how i speak japanese in my japanese class when i forget vocab 💀💀💀
What you are suggesting one of the most ancient language teaching methods called grammar-translational method.
It gained popularity especially in medieval times and was the dominant method up until early 20th century (when science kicked in and we started developing better methods), aimed at teaching people to understand original texts of Latin and ancient Greek literature. You would be given a text where one line is the original, the 2nd line is a kind of a literal translation like what you suggest, and the 3rd line is a proper translation. And you'd be given entire books to read this way, in the meantime they would teach you the theory of grammatical rules like declensions, conjugations, etc. There was no emphasis at all at being able to speak fluently or to understand a language directly, intuitively like a bilingual, without analytical translating it in your head where you always think in your native language and then translate it. It was meant to be a mental exercise stimulating your brain/mind very much like nowadays we use maths at school instead, something very strict and logical instead of intuitive, and being fluent was a non issue because you were supposed to read and write taking just as much time as you need, as opposed to how nowadays we expect to be able to have a conversation with someone as the priority. Therefore it is considered to be one of the worst teaching methods out there for modern use.
HOWEVER. What I described above is just for text, not for listening to the sound of language. So using anime that way will give a massive advantage after all in that respect. Also what is more important, we are not talking about someone learning to have a conversation here, but just to understand what they're watching and using something someone spends time on anyway to have an extra benefit for free, so the idea is great actually. The only problems I see is how to include the different writing systems (of which Japanese has 3 besides Romaji and likes to mix them all at once) and also the fact that the way characters speak is usually insanely unnatural, very exaggerated intonation and vocabulary and phrases that make sense in a world the characters live in but not the real world... The Japanese in Anime usually just has about as much in common with everyday Japanese as an extremely over the top unnatural theatrical play using awkwardly poetic style (or any other unnatural style) would. YOU DO NOT WANT TO SOUND LIKE AN ANIME CHARACTER when in Japan, you do not want to embarrass yourself, you want to speak with a flat (almost emotionless) tone in comparison with vivid tone typical for Anime and very different vocabulary. If you get angry and call someobe Kisama they will just burst out with laughter at you and never ever again trat you seriously. But then again, if the goal is to just start understanding what you're watching as a free benefit and not to learn to speak, then that's not an issue. Being able to read and write would be neat though for being able to play video games :D and I guess if this approach was used for some of the live action slice of life kinda series, then a lot of the problems described above with the awkard language could be nullified.
This style of subtitling doesn't have to be limited to just anime. It could probably be used with all sorts of Japanese media if it turns out that it's helpful to teach Japanese.
youve done an amazing job!! thanks a lot, ill definitly check them out!
Ariga-thanks Goken-sensei for this lesson
どういたしまして.
This deserves way WAY more attention. Learning Japanese via subtitles is slow even in combination with structured learning. I was learning just from the little bit you showed 😂
this is EXTREMELY similar to an idea i had but never quite wrote down! but generally what I had in mind was having the original language up on top and translation below, with words spoken at the time highlighted on both sentences, japanese of course having furigana and rómaji too for the script stuff. (and maybe the IPA pronounciation too to get even more egregious, although with japanese i'd probably just replace the rómaji to clutter things less)
however your decision to put the extra grammatical particles from japanese in does also help a lot! (though i probably would've come up with writing their shortened english language technical names for the particle, like TOP for wa, ACC for wo, DAT for ni etc, kind of like how it's done in some examples to show word order; although this might be more confusing for people not as versed in linguistics?)
My thought with the particles, or hope rather, was that with enough subtitles to view, people would eventually be able to understand them in a much deeper way than just their basic definitions and meanings, that they would get a sort of intuitive sense of what they mean kind of like what native Japanese speakers have, but it's hard to know without lots of different subtitles.
I'll definitely try this. I haven't learned a bit of Japanese throughout years of watching anime, but just watching the previews in this video I could feel I was actually picking up words and getting a sense for the sentence structure. I'll be happy enough if I manage to pick up the very basics. Thank you for making this.
For the record, I have ADHD, so there's a chance this works especially well for people with this condition.
Cool. let me know how it goes.
10/10 would definitely use to learn japanese. While the translation example is a little confusing since there's a better way to translate it, it was probably made that way on purpose since some sentences in japanese are assembled differently from english ones.
HOLY, so you're saying that languages have different structures and grammar??!?! How weird lol, must be hard for English only speakers. And watching anime actually helped me a lot because now that i actually started learning Jap, sentences and grammar just make sense where it goes, what goes, vocabulary. I can basically understand whole sentences in N5, maybe even N4, without learning it just because i watched and remember what it means, so it's a big help for start tbh.
I’m leaving a like and a comment to boost the YT algorithm
Thanks, I appreciate it.
I don't think this can help you learn Japanese completely, but it could help a lot with increasing your vocabulary and word order. Another thing that might increase the effectiveness of this method is to include the romaji alongside the literal English translation, since visually seeing the romaji as it is spoken is better for memory than just listening to the anime alone. Also, your method of karaoke display is jarring. It would be better to have the entire sentence displayed, and then have the words light up or bounce as it is spoken.
Ideally, what you would want is to have romaji subtitles, then whenever a word can be directly translated to English, the English word would appear directly above the romaji.
For example, a Google translation of "This is sample text for demonstration." we get:
ᴛʜɪs ᴅᴇᴍᴏɴsᴛʀᴀᴛɪᴏɴ sᴀᴍᴘʟᴇ ᴛᴇxᴛ
*Kore wa demo-yō no sanpuru tekisuto desu*
What do you think this lacks as a method to help the viewer/student learn japanese completely?
@veeloth The biggest problem I see is that anime Japanese is nothing like proper Japanese. Meaning the way that people in anime speak is not the same as how Japanese people normally speak. Not to mention, the are a lot of different dialects and ways of speaking in anime, so it'd be like trying to learn English through a mixture of American, British, and Australian movies plus rap music. Also, Japanese particles don't have a direct English translation, so you'll struggle to know how they are used. And just like with any language, Japanese follows a set of rules, but it also breaks those rules under certain conditions that you wouldn't know unless it was specifically explained to you. So while you are trying to learn Japanese through anime, your brain will try to form patterns to figure out the structure of the language, but every so often, the anime will deviate from the pattern that you've established in your mind and you won't know why.
This is super cool, nice work dude
Thanks, I'm glad you like the idea.
This might be a little bit out of left field but have you considered looking up "Chants of Sennaar"? It is a language learning game! since you seem interested in linguisticts I thought something like this would intrigue you. :)
Never heard of it. Maybe I'll check it out.
This a very interesting idea. As someone who is learning Japanese via immersion essentially what I am doing is looking up words I don't know the meaning of using a pop-up dictionary with Japanese subtitles. So I think what would help your method is more is if Japanese subtitles were on screen and then above them are your English translation subtitles. Kinda like furigana.
So in your example sentence 日本語が少し分かります is on screen but above it (in the place of were furigana would be) is "JAPANESE ga LITTLE-BIT UNDERSTAND masu. I think that combination would be the most helpful and would mean people would not have to use a pop-up dictionary all the time.
do you know animelon ? they already have sort of that
Ohhh, this is so gooood!
I've always thought if someone wants to learn from anime they'd need subs formatted literally, but no paid streaming site would ever put effort into teaching ppl the language cos it would cut their profit, so it leaves learning to the morally ambiguous sites; see if you can get the subs uploaded to the people who run the site for learning from anime AniMelon, & your idea could take off with more fan subs in this style created?
I've never heard of Animelon before. I took a look at it, and it looks pretty awesome. Thanks for sharing it.
A couple of studies on Dutch and Spanish learners of English tested whether it's better to watch videos in the target language with or without subtitles. Both the studies I read found that putting subtitles in their native language almost completely cancelled out the learning process. The best outcomes were either watching English video with English subtitles or no subtitles at all.
I think this speaks somewhat to Stephen Krashen's theory of language acquisition: language is acquired by the process of comprehending messages in the target language.
My strategy now is to watch anime in Japanese with no subtitles at all, and just trying to roughly follow the story -- not trying to think about the language or grammar, just see if I can follow the plot.
That said, it's a bit tiring and I haven't been doing it consistently, so I can't say it's better than any other approach (although after many years of using flashcards with Anki for other languages, I already think watching videos with no subs is better than that).
this study isn't kinda right i can remember at top of my head but they forgot a variable and it was an important factor for the subs and the whole thing gone to zero.
I've learned myself and teach some friends english only using music subtitles. 1st without sub i made them sing cuz there's a lot of sound that don't exist in our native language especially the vowels, 2nd subs in our native language subs that don't aim at precision but in usitng words that give the same context and hen with eng subs so they learn to read. It worked all the times, it is a small sample of course but it's enough to say it's a non zero result.
I think the karaoke thing is an interesting idea, but having the whole sentence already there from the start would probably be a little be better.
Just have the words being highlighted as they're said.
There is a version of the subs that does that in the Github page linked in the pinned comment and description of this video if you want to try it out.
3:33 This is so true. I can understand some Japanese. Some of the easier (usually slice of life) anime, I can even watch without subs. I'll miss the odd word, but overall it's fine.
However, English subs do very little to help learn new words. I either read the subs, or listen to the Japanese. Doing both is possible, and I do sometimes do that, but it is a lot of effort, not something I can do for a full episode, and often I focus too much on one or the other. (Usually the Japanese. By the time I realise I didn't quite understand and need to focus more on the subs, they are usually gone)
Great video, keep up the good work :)
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it.
I see your point... basically weebify the subtitles lol.
Although I saw in general watching with subs being pretty useful for my journey, because before I watched anime with russian dub so subs was a pretty good for getting my ears used to listening Japanese..
For that reason I tell to every single friend who are interested in learning Japanese that it would be way easier for them to start since their ears are familiar with a language.
I don't have any inner voice so by logic I just can learn some simple nouns or phrases that way. I also sometimes get angry of translations - and to me it's just a sign of progress and paying attention.
Maybe it isn't efficient - but it works for me - and I already explained why it works in the beginning
The word order is too different to use English subs to learn from them. However if you're learning from a language with similar word order like Korean then it's much more doable. So your idea is pretty interesting. I'm into it.
haha i like it a lot. you basically shown how kanji works in the mind. in this context, capital english words are meanings not sounds. basically the reader sees the word, combines the sounds, fetch its meaning then combine it with adjectives, conjugations etc.
you basically made japanese without pronunciation. it's hilarious.
one thing is, there is culture. language is never used like a computer, there are some phrases, conversations, conventions that society got used to. that's the real thing what we call a language. and these conventions are transferable so it's in our daily lives, we already know about them like this english text being mostly in latin and greek vocabulary.
to convey the message at a dictionary level this method will work very well, and it's so easy to fill the gaps but it won't help you learn because speaking a language is nothing more than thinking like them. the rest is just habits transfered and modified through centuries, you get them by simply absorbing and replicating everyone does it constantly without any effort.
this is genius btw, not because it works but for the effort. even being a native doesn't mean you are good at a language or you can communicate with others, that's almost never the case. you only create and people resonate or you copy what's already working and move on. for example in japan it's mostly the latter but ofc there are times you copy but you don't understand. it's really complicated, it's not as it seems outside that's just what could be called 遊び, tourism shall i say. it is very very rare for a foreigner to really learn another language deservingly. you, the reader might find what i said extreme but it's just the truth and why should the truth hurt ? as long as people get closer it's enough. i will benefit from your technique you shared. thanks.
(also no one teaches others anything, everyone learns themselves so that's an oxymoron in the first place. "subtitles teaching you japanese" is just deflection of "learning japanese through subtitles". if you don't will to learn nothing can make you learn)
As a person who's fairly fluent in Japanese, I can say that anime *is* useful, but it's in certain ways and you have to actively be using it as a tool rather than passively consuming and hoping it will help. More than anything, it's most useful for learning vocab and pronunciation training: repeating lines said by anime characters and trying to get as close as possible will help a lot at improving your pronunciation, and words that show up a lot will eventually start to stand out to you as you do this. This is where you use the translation for context to figure out what these words mean, and potentially looking them up in a jisho/dictionary if you can't figure it out (or if the translation plays fast and loose, as is seemingly more common these days). You also want to look up words that you don't know/recognize, obviously.
What anime will NOT help you with is learning grammar or improving your reading skills. Using the JLPT as a benchmark, I got to probably about an N2 or N1 level of vocab knowledge but still couldn't converse with natives because I couldn't read anything (literally not even hiragana) and I didn't know how to string together a proper sentence. Once I got a proper tutor that taught me those things, however, she said I ended up exploding in skill level and now I'm N2 certified (my vocab/speaking skills are definitely N1 or better according to her but my kanji knowledge isn't quite there yet). Once you get to a certain level, I'd recommend graduating from anime to Japanese TH-cam/NicoNico videos as they will often use words more commonly found in the real world (anime is biased towards certain overly complicated words while omitting some very common and essential ones) and they will be said by a native speaker in a natural setting which means their pronunciation won't always be as clean and you can train your listening skills better.
Have you posted about this on the subs related to this in reddit /discord? Seems like something that could garner some good attention there and I feel this is a pretty revolutionary-like idea that has something going for it imo ,
i hope this video gets as much attention it can to actually start something up in the anime community
I tried reddit, but you know how reddit is. You post a link to something on TH-cam and it immediately gets downvoted and gets no attention. Discord, I am not familiar enough with.
But feel free to share this video or these subs anywhere you want.
I think you may be on to something. I first started "learning" Japanese by accident when I was 14. I was watching "The Queen's Classroom" and before I knew it I had learned lots of short, common phrases such as "arigatou," "gomenasai," "ohayou," etc. Now when I watch anime, it can sometimes be easy to tell that the word order is completely reversed, even if I don't understand it without subtitles.
I look forward to trying your idea out, and I hope lots of other people find your video so there can be a larger sample size (and who knows, maybe make the idea take off on a larger scale?). Thank you so much for this video.
Thanks for the comment. Yeah, it would be cool to have way more subs in this kind of format to see if the idea holds up.
In my opinion, the problem is not so much the grammar, but that normal subs don't visualize the Japanese. Only the English.
I think that merely being able to see the Japanese alongside the English, would help people significantly more.
I have added a Hiragana version of the DR STONE and Card Captor Sakura subs to the Github if you want to try them.
@@goken4259 Thank you! That's very kind! I won't lie to you. I probably won't have time. I haven't had time to sit down and watch a full show in years, but I hope someone else gets use out of them
at that point it is better to learn basic grammar and kanji and start watching with japanese subs imo
It's definitely possible that is the case, but I think it's good to keep an open mind to other methods of learning in case they end up helping with the overall process.
This is probably a very good idea
Huh. Very interesting.
By the examples of these two - "Dr.Stone" and "Card Captor Sakur", I actually feel like I actually learned these words. They stay in my head. A little bit of tweaking and this could be revolutionary.
Question. Only for these mentioned two subtitles exist? It would be perfect if this would be applicable for every anime but that's utopic dream, that's why I'll take what I can get. 😀
Either way, this incredible!
As far as I know, these types of subtitles only currently exist for the Card Captor Sakura episode, DR STONE episode, and Whisper of the Heart movie I made them for. Hopefully, if this catches on, more people will start making more subtitles, but we'll have to see.
I hope you see this comment. I got the raw videos for which you have provided the karaoke subs and tried it, and damn...this works. It'll work even better with experimentation and strategy. Thanks for existing and sharing this. I don't have the time to look at the provided tutorials right now or this week even, so can you tell me whether they include instruction on how to create the karaoke effect as well?
Hey thanks for giving them a try. Yeah, the linked tutorials will show you how to create the karaoke effect.
Awesome, you're gonna go down in history for this one mate.@@goken4259
Great video!
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it!
woow this is so cool! Cant wait to give this go.
Thanks, I hope it works for you.
neat concept
I think it is because the structure of Japanese is very different. Passive learning probably works much better with languages that have the same structural order.
For something longer like the Ghibli movie, or, say, if someone were to adapt an entire season of anime in this subtitle style, it might be a good idea to only show the romaji variant of a word after it appears 20-30 times. At least for me, I think this would stimulate my brain a bit more and help with memorization. Ideally, by the end you would be reading mostly romaji with a few new words sprinkled it, and you would be able to understand most of it.
Still, while I say that, I was having a bit of difficulty following along with some of the examples, the one from Cardcaptor Sakura especially. Maybe the speaker was just talking too quickly, or maybe I'm just not able to read quickly enough, but I was having trouble following along with the subtitles and reading through them before the next set appeared.
I do believe this has a lot of promise. And, as some commenters said, it may also be possible to automate this, to an extent. Either way, it would take a lot of work to continue this project. I do hope someone takes up the mantle, though. Seems like one of those things that someone would turn into a subscription service.
Might be interesting to do something like that. I feel like the more words that are in Japanese, the more potential there is for the person watching to learn and remember them.
Man, I want to add the og language alongside this, as well as a romanized version, too. Cool to see someone else who uses advanced subtitles!
I pretty was surprised of the capability that just subtitle files have gotten to at this point. Back when I was younger, you used to have to encode the subtitles directly into the video if you wanted them to be Karaoke. Now you can put all that Karaoke data into one sub file and pretty much any computer will be able to play it.
i think this qualifies as immersion and that is a good way to learn a language, but i think people should probably study the basic of grammar even if they want to learn this way. also, just a suggestion if you ever plan on doing more or refining the current subtitles, you should put the romaji and maybe the hiragana in there as well. it would help people learn the written language (at least one of the systems, anyway) and help them keep track of where they are specifically when the speakers get a bit too fast or they want to pause to understand more.
whisper of the heart might be the best thing to do this with.
I have made a version of the subs for Card Captor Sakura and DR STONE with hiragana instead of romanji. I will probably also make a hiragana version of Whisper of the Heart at some point, but it's a much bigger undertaking, and I have a full time job, so it might be a while.
THIS IS SO AWESOME ❤🔥❤🔥❤🔥
honestly, if people really wanted to learn the language, they'd be better off learning the kana and the basic grammar. i don't mean they need to become a grammar ninja, only that they need to learn the basics. the method in the video basically scratches the itch where you feel like you want to learn the language, but don't actually want to put in the effort to do so. Japanese subs (not romaji) is still the gold standard, though they're not very common outside of Japanese games.
Perhaps watching something with subs like these will make people curious enough to start looking up bits and pieces of grammar as they go. Also, it might be cool to have different levels of subs, one that uses Romaji for Japanese words, one that uses Hiragana/Katakana, one that uses Kanji, etc.