Well For a short time now, maybe about 5 years or so I have been Listening To Japanese Music and Japanese Dialogue not necessarily constantly but a Significant amount. About 14-16 hours a day. I only Like Japanese music. Now the funny thing is not to say that my Japanese is the worst, but my listening and speaking skill is still near non-existent. I Listen to music more than anything else, but I think the one thing that messed me up all these years was that, Because I am a musician, I only listen to the music and not the lyrics in the songs.
So Since I started the AJATT Program, I have been avoiding my favorite Japanese songs because my ears usually begin to focus only on the instrumentals.
Also, Apparently I try too hard to hear what the actors are saying (as I’ve been told many times by my friends who can understand more than me). When I listen to Japanese dialogue I tend to focus on what it said and try to make sense out of any words I might know but by the time I can do that, they are already on a different subject which usually gets me left behind.
I have been into Japanese culture and Language study/play for about 5 or 6 years before I came across your method. So my question to you is, For a musician/ tidious perfectionist like myself who tries to hear every word in a dialogue or song; How do you suggest I listen to Japanese?

Since reading this post, I’ve been pondering how to go about achieving the goal of 10,000 hours of listening. I don’t have that many Japanese songs, and I can only watch TV/anime/news/radio when I’m at a computer. Hmmmmm, methinks there must be a better way…

Well, I recently stumbled upon this wonderful realization: all you have to do is turn everything Japanese you own into an mp3. EVERYTHING. Turn everything that has audio, NOT just music and audio books, into an mp3 and load it onto your mp3 player. When you’re done, walk around with the mp3 player on shuffle ALL day long. Mmmmmm… 10,000 hours, here I come!

The method is simple: Get a program that can hijack the audio driver on your computer and record whatever is playing to an mp3 (“Replay Music” is good, but not free). Proceed to play every anime or drama episode you own! Watch news on websites and record it, too! While you’re at it, go for the NHK 高校講座 series (both TV and radio versions) as well (by the way, thanks for the link Khatzumoto).

I’ve been doing this with my entire collection of Japanese shows, and I’ve amassed about 250 hours of audio.

[Feel free to skip this paragraph.]For me finding input that I could repeatedly listen to was extremely difficult. A Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde audio book is fascinating and all, but not the 4th time or beyond. So I figured out pretty quickly that I would have to find MUSIC that I like, but I had no idea where to start. I tried getting recommendations from others, but they could never get anything good for me. So one day whilst watching FMA, the idea came to me:

Get music from the band that sings your favourite anime theme song!

So I took the time to listen to all of the themes for the various anime that I enjoy, kicked out the bunk, and ended up with a list of good songs with their bands. I’m short on cash, so I went for the one that had the most occurrences: Asian Kung-Fu Generation [アジアン・カンフー・ジェネレーション], and got their discography [a compilation of all their albums]. To kill two birds with one stone, I got the Japanese formatted version [the titles and whatnot are all written in Japanese] so as to increase the immersion!

[I particularly like the albums ソルファ [Sol-fa] and フィードバック・ファイル [Feedback File]]

For repetition’s sake [and the fact that I, and others like me, only read the first and last sentences of a post that holds no direct interest]:

Get music from the band that sings your favourite anime theme song!

Yeaaaaah this reply is really late and you probably won’t see this but (if you don’t already know) there’s a website: gendou.com, where you can download japanese music but they’re only from animes. There’s ALOT of them so you can download to your hearts content and not worry about being bored with a song. Hope this helps and once again great post Khatzumoto! ^.^

Stu

just to let you know that many psychologists and scientists studying the development of language in children agree with your intuition (unsurprisingly they belong to a category of people defending an INPUT-based theory of the acquisition of grammar (see Tomasello and many others whose name I have forgotten)

I don’t have the means to go out and buy loads of Japanese music; the music I DO have is limited (and mostly classical!) and I don’t want to listen to it to death and end up detesting it. Even when I find artists on the internet that I like (usually through youtube), I’m not able to download the music and so listen to it elsewhere, as far as I’m aware. My limewire doesn’t seem to be associated with anything Japanese except the most well-known artists.

You must have an enormous collection of audio Japanese if you listen to it 24/7 without getting bored of the same stuff! How can I… I don’t know, find more resources?

I would just like to add that recent research has suggested that unconscious learning and the unconscious mind in general isn’t as potent as it was often believed to be. It has been excessively talked about by people like Freud and such, who gave it a very big role in the way we behave and how our bodies and minds work in general (saying that many people have subconsciously contracted (if you can use that word like this?) trauma’s in their childhoods that keep on haunting them all the way into adulthood without them being aware of this consciously etc.), and the current thinking is that it’s not as important after all and doesn’t have as big effects on our functioning. I’m not too sure about the specifics here, but in this case having Japanese on in the background without paying attention to it doesn’t help as much as we’d be tempted to think – same with sleep-learning. I’m not saying it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever (I actually think it probably does), I just think when you’re being conscious and alert to what’s happening and pay focused attention, you’ll learn a lot faster (although it is also more demanding/tiring, unfortunately).

Just wanted to throw that in. I still think having Japanese on in the background is a good idea, in part because, as I mentioned, I do feel that it probably has some effect (although this might just be society’s influence on me talking).

But apart from all that, as I said… great post

fast-foward. Our final one year was to go to the sakura festival in philly that we have annually, and interview some people in japanese. I was like i can do this no problem! Got to the festival and sat for like 5 hours. staring at people. I am pretty sure, I scared everyone. Black guy, Army trench, rasta hat like *glare*. It was gettin late, and people were starting to dash, I had to interview 5 people atleast or fail. So I gathered up what remnants of my balls were left and ran to the first family i seen and burst out a “あの。。すみませんが。。” and they ran like hell. THEY RAN. So I sat down for another 30 minutes. Unfortunately, my ability to reverse time didn’t work on saturdays. SO i got up one mo’ gin and ran over and tried a different person, and got a O_O! “お！日本語がじょうずですね？！” from the guy and then i made a stain in my pants =/ and then i answered his question! we have a light convo, and in about 20 minutes. I finished my final.

As time went on, I got more an more comfy. Now i spit with friends all the time, i dont understand everything. but the point is, im in. Go ahead, embarass yourself. The sooner you do it, the sooner it’ll go away. I promise!

I am definitly a shy dude, although I’m a good liar and people don’t believe me. I’ve once waited 10 years to ask a girl out. if that aint shy. i dunno what it.