TV Method - Accumulated Hours

TV Method - Accumulated Hours
25 Hours

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Investing Time

+10 Hours

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step."

I'm only ten hours in, and I already feel a big change from hour zero to now.  And I don't mean that I'm understanding complex statements or understanding much of anything really. But even though I've already been exposed to the spoken language many times before starting with the TV method, the sounds are more distinct and I'm more comfortable with it. That's not to say that the first 10 hours was a cakewalk.

This is how the first 10 hours went for me...  First I found a drama I believed would be entertaining enough for me to watch without knowing much (or anything) at all. Turns out that I was 110% correct! The drama was Atashinchi no Danshi and it had me bursting at the seams with laughter. The plot was quirky and fun, and I only got lost a few times throughout the eleven episodes.

Second I had to work my way around "hard" subtitles (subtitles merged to the video that have no option to be turned off), because all of the episodes I found in the series had them. They were so distracting! I decided to use the Spanish subtitles over the English because I don't know Spanish and thus would be easier to ignore. Or so I thought. Occasionally a sentence would appear containing words that I could understand and I couldn't help but glance down! Ultimately I covered the subtitles by sizing the window smaller which helped immensely but was still quite annoying. 

Third I found myself battling my own thoughts constantly. My mind would wander, and I would get easily distracted by other activities such as Facebook (shame on me!). The most prominent problem I had to overcome was one I was aware of before even having to deal with it. That problem being my searching of pre-translated Japanese to English (and vice versa) words in my head. My mind would search for a word like a card matching game. The card containing the Japanese word would be flipped and the timer to find the English "match" would be started. And therein lied the problem. During the time that I was mentally flipping those cards, searching for that match, all of the words coming after it were not just being ignored, but being blocked completely! So while searching for a word that I supposedly already "knew," I was missing out on many unknown words and phrases!

Fourth I learned to discipline my thoughts (though not perfectly). Every time I perked up to a familiar word I calmed myself down and refused to search for its so called match. To do so I just felt the meaning of the word and focused on listening to the rhythms of the following sounds. When it became less of a concern I found that I was enjoying myself more!

Lastly there was this slight concern with how to listen to my shows in order to accept the language. And that was the problem entirely! I caught myself listening too closely to the language and knew that I was going about it all wrong...

I listened best when I stopped listening.

It was at this point that I really began to better understand what the conversations were about and in doing so, focused on the story more instead. Why was paying attention to the story rather than the language and it's sounds more important? It allowed me to stop thinking distracting thoughts like what to write on my blog, my hours, and other boring things that don't matter! From there it was just me and a not-so-foreign sounding language.

I found all of this progress to be quite productive and eye-opening. I wasn't sure how this TV method would work out for me, and I'm still not completely sure. It's best to think that putting time into this method is not time spent or wasted but rather time invested. If you're like me, then the "traditional" method (studying) is no less risky. But what the traditional way is more boring. Nothing ventured nothing gained, right? Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.

Here's to many more hours to come!

3 comments:

  1. Way to go!

    Yeah, those hard subs are a real annoyance. And I guess those are in English too. My first 2 Chinese dramas had hard subs in Japanese. It takes a bit of self-training for awhile to ignore those.

    Now the question everybody wants to ask (I suppose). What would you estimate your starting comprehension level to be? In other words, what percent of the spoken language are you understanding?

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  2. Haha, well it's actually really difficult for me to put a number on. Probably not even 1%! I'd rather like to describe what's happening in my mind, such as the fog lifting (Japanese beginning to sound more and more like words than sounds). I'm currently on my second drama and at times I can catch a full sentence (simple ones though!).

    So I'm not quite sure how to estimate anything like that. Any advice?

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  3. Yes, it's always difficult to estimate. I guess you could estimate the percentage of time rather than words. If there was dialog for 120 seconds and you felt you were understanding about 1 second of that dialog, then you could estimate about 1 percent or less. If you feel you understood about 12 seconds worth, then that would be 10 percent.

    A full sentence in Japanese is sometimes just a single word. Anyway, you're at the very beginning of your journey. At some point soon, you'll feel like a big change has happened in your listening ability.

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