It makes sense, right? Newborn babies learn languages by listening to them. By the time your were five months, you already had five months of constant English exposure, and even then, your English was still terrible! How do you expect to speak Japanese well without that constant exposure?
That's good and that's fine, but that's not always possible. Not everyone can drop everything and move to Japan. If you live with someone who isn't on an immersion program (a roommate, spouse, child), they're gonnna wanna watch English media. And of course, not everyone has the money to buy and endless supply of Japanese movies, music, TV shows, and books.
Besides, you're not five months old anymore. You're capable of studying a language consciously - five-month-olds can't look up words in a dictionary. Constant exposure is good, but going back and figuring out what all those words meant is even better.
Here's something that will help:
LibriVox is a public domain Audiobook website. Everything on it is free, and they have a decent-sized Japanese language collection.
Let's start with free - free is good. LibriVox has hours upon hours of Japanese language content for free. Better yet, unlike your Japanese textbook audio CDs, this content is aimed at native speakers - meaning it doesn't suffer from Example Sentence Syndrome.
A-san: "This is a pen."
B-san: "Duh. Way to point out the obvious, A-san."
Better better yet, since you're listening to Audiobooks, it's easy to go back and "check the script" to review difficult sections. Since these works are all in the public domain, getting an eBook version to read along with the Audiobook version takes just a quick Google search.
Now for the downside: since these are public domain works, they're fairly old and many use old language. They won't help you learn modern slang. But then, all that slang goes obsolete, and fast. The shelf-life on classic works of Japanese literature is longer than whatever Japanese comedian is hot right now.
Over the last few weeks I've been using this LibriVox recording of Botchan (坊ちゃん) with this eBook version ($2.99 on Kindle). I've been having a ball - first listening to a chapter to see how much I understand with just sound, then listening while reading to combine sound and sight, then looking up words/phrases I didn't "get" to build vocabulary.
If this concept sounds like an onion Santa Claus (oddly familiar) that's because it's basically literary karaoke. Sound & Reading, right? Karaoke is an effective study tool because you're combining speaking, listening, and reading. The more levels of comprehension you're hitting at the same time, the better. And combining Audiobooks with Bookbooks has a similar effect.
So instead of brushing off my N1 Big Book of Boring Grammar Examples for the thousandth time, I've been enjoying a fish-out-of-water comedy about a big city teacher living in rural Shikoku. It's a better use of study time (natural language), a more enjoyable use of study time (a fun story), and you better believe it's made for some interesting discussions with Japanese co-workers.
Even Japanese beginners can use this to get used to how Japanese sounds. Remember this post about the A I Us? You can do a similar thing with Audiobooks - don't try to understand the meaning of the words, try to pick out what sounds the reader is making. It'll take you farther than you might think!
Alright, that's it for this Beyond Karaoke. Keep looking for new opportunities, and keep Studyokeing!
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