here’s me transcribing what he said: “english subtitles for anime but the english words are restructured to match the sentence structure of japanese (so not coherent english but the words line up with when you hear them in japanese).” I recognize that due to the fundamental differences in how grammar works in japanese it wouldn’t be all that good for teaching grammar but it might be good for semi-passively learning vocab compared to just anime with normal english subtitles. also im aware of animelon and the like and that’s fairly close to this but i just wanted to see if this *exact* idea already exists somewhere
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Language doesn’t work like that.
English is an analytical language, it gets its meaning *from the sentence structure*. I get that you’re just thinking of it as a vocab look-up type deal, but the problem you’ve got there is that [pragmatics](https://www.masterclass.com/articles/pragmatics-in-linguistics-guide#pragmatics-semantics-syntax-and-semiotics-whats-the-difference) is a thing. A lot of meaning does not come from words individually, but how they are used in context, and detaching them from context with a 1-to-1 word-by-word translation that breaks the meaning in English will teach you nothing at best, and misinform you at worst.
This is actually how I write my mini-lessons. Because it would have been easier, to me anyway, if learning resources had done this.
[Excuse the FB link](https://www.facebook.com/kitsunenonihongo)
[Twitter too but less detailed](https://twitter.com/KitsuneNihongo)
I haven’t found any official resources that do this though.
I tend to just walk through shows with a dictionary, anymore.
How would this app deal with the words that either aren’t translatable or translate into multiple-word phrases? Or with words that are compound words? How would it (would it?) deal with
inflections?
For example, お手数ですが書類は木曜必着で発送して下さい
Would that be
1) お手数 ye olde bother です is が but 書類document はre: 木曜Thurs. 必着Must-arrive-byでwithin-the-framework-of 発送 send してdo 下さい please
Or
2)おye olde 手数bother ですが although it is 書類は re: this document 木曜必着で while knowing it must arrive by Thursday 発送して send 下さい
No idea whether this resource already exists, I just wanted to let you know that this is actually a technique of language learning advocated by Vera Birkenbihl.
I think this is a good idea if you were doing something like an interlinear gloss, but I can’t imagine how this would work with subtitles in real time. Different people read at different speeds so how would they keep it in synch? (You’d hear the spoken Japanese, and you’d see some English text in a weird order, but how would you know which goes with what?) I suppose maybe something like a typewriter effect could work as long as you always read at that exact speed, but this would get annoying. Or maybe show the whole interlinear gloss on the screen in place of subtitles, but that’s too much information to make sense of *while simultaneously watching the anime*.