Sometimes I just want a break from immersing in native materials and I want to watch something that I am familiar with. If I put on some episodes of Seinfeld (for example) with Japanese dubs, I’d be familiar enough with the plot and characters and can focus on the language more. If the translators did a good job, the language should be mostly typical (as long as I avoid picking up speech patterns from a character like Kramer or other eccentric types).
Is this a good method? Can’t hurt, right?
7 comments
To be honest you cannot learn Japanese just by watching tv . With watching any shows you could improve your pronunciation, learn few new words to add to your vacab .
But to truly learn an language it takes more than watching TV shows.
You need to learn writing system , you need to have some basic knowledge of grammar , you need to practice your speaking as well . So you need far more tools to actually learn a new language.
Learning a new language is not so easy and it’s a long process. But good thing is there is a lot of apps and resources to learn a language today , or at least to get some basic knowledge in that language.
My point is you can learn with tv show as long as you ain’t a beginner, maybe intermediate level at best . So you can expand your vocabulary with it .
Yes its fine
Yeah that’s a great idea, as long as the voices being spoken are Japanese natives that’s fine.
The translation may not be accurate.
I just finished watching Sumo Do Sumo Don’t on Disney+ yesterday and while I don’t know a lot of Japanese, I know for a fact some of their translations were off. I watch enough Sumo in Japanese and English to pick up on some of the stuff.
And while not Japanese I heard Squid Game was horrible in some of its dubbed translations from Korean.
I’m a beginner in Japanese but C1 in Spanish and I listened to a LOT of dubbed shows and others on Netflix when I was learning. I think that my ability to understand a lot of very fast and regional Spanish accents comes from consuming all that material. Dubbed shows you already know give you the bridge you need to get to native materials, so why not? Japanese (from an English speaker) is a whole different ballgame as compared to Spanish though, but the principle is the same. Consuming as much N+1 (i+1) as you can is essential. Good luck to you (and me for that matter!).
Specifically in the case of Seinfeld the lip sync is abysmal and in general the voices of the characters might not fit as well as the original voices, but sure, why not :).
If the series was actually *localized*, much like was the case with Star Wars, picking up specific speech patterns won’t be a problem, because they’ll be Japanese and not American.
Yes