Japanese TV and My Quest to Learn Japanese
Sunday, July 27th, 2008I have been trying to find programs in Japanese to watch on TV as the more Japanese I hear the better. In the past I watched Infomercials but sometimes these just don’t hold my attention. For a while the only thing I watched in Japanese was the F1. This has taught me some interesting phrases for describing how cars move around a track but I wanted to find more to watch than this.
In the past month I have found a couple of new things to watch. One of these is karaoke TV. We have the Star Karaoke channel which plays a lot of karaoke songs and the Popular Music Channel which has charts of karaoke songs. Being able to listen to someone sing the words whilst I read them is really helpful. It is improving the speed at which I can read hirigana and the 200 kanji that I have learnt as well as improving my accuracy. These programs can be hard for me to watch as they contain a lot of Japanese music that I don’t like but they do play lots of slow songs with the words written underneath. And sometimes I do hear something I that I like. Today I heard a group which I think was called “Tenjochiki” which I quite liked at a first hearing.
The second thing I have been watching is the Sci-Fi channel. I hadn’t realised we had this channel, as it wasn’t one of the ones we selected when we got the Sky Perfect box, but I’m glad I have found it. They have been showing Buffy the Vampire Slayer dubbed in Japanese. I have all of Buffy on DVD so I have been watching the episodes in English and then watching the Japanese versions. These are really hard for me to understand but I am starting to understand some of the things being said.
What I would really like to find is something that was made in Japanese that is interesting enough for me to watch even if I can’t understand most of it. Most people suggest anime but so far I haven’t found any I like. And I can’t even easily tell people what I have been watching as I can’t read the titles of the programs!