Sunday, December 9, 2007

NHK Videos

The interweb has delivered to me a number of video learning courses in French and Japanese: The French are the Annenberg "French in Action" series of 52 30 minute shows... and the Japanese are 30 various episodes of NHK (Japanese national TV network) Japanese learning videos from the 1980s... The fashion alone is great viewing, as are the "futuristic" bluescreen sets.

But these things do require TIME to do, and unlike audio learning courses, you can't really watch one of these while driving to work or walking through the skyways. Believe me, I've tried. (ok, not really). But as an adult learner, there IS some advantage to hearing it, seeing lips speaking it, and seeing the word at the same time - the Japanese word for pencil (enpitsu) stuck after just 3 repeats in this method, as did eyeglasses (megane) and cigarette (tabako).

I'm at lesson 76 of Pimsleur Japanese now, so close to the end... But I'm still learning great stuff. We just had the illness section. I was watching the Japanese movie "Paprika" - a GREAT Anime about a detective who dives into people's dreams, and a villain who is taking control of dreams - and I was happy to discover that a lot of the dialogue was somewhat understandable to me: Not enough to really "get" the movie without subtitles... but phrases here and there! It was very cool to realize that.

With the stress of the holidays, Japanese is pretty much my one focus for now... But I'll need to get Mandarin going (and maybe some Cantonese) because in my new Job, I'm angling for a conference in Hong Kong in May. I really want to go!!!!