I’m often listening to a movie I’ve ripped, and then i get to a sentence whose structure I’m unfamiliar with. So I just put a track mark at the end, and at the beginning–very easy to do on a subway, car, class, wherever–and loop it a few times. Then, once I’m bored with (i.e. have memorized) most of the movie, I can delete the longer passages that I know, and just keep the shorter passages whose structure I’m still learning.

Do you have any way of ripping audio from online news feeds, or any way of getting news digests in mp3 form? I think you mentioned looping the news all day at some point, but I can’t figure out how to do it…

just did a google search for “rip dvd audio”
also look for “any dvd converter”

I didn’t rip everything which probably sped up the process a lot. I’ve got a program called “avi-mpeg-wmv-rm to mp3 converter” by Allok Soft that I use to get it into mp3 form in the first place which lets me watch a .avi and when I get to a part I want to rip I can say “ok start here and go for….10 seconds.” A free program that you could use after ripping the sound (if you don’t have that one but another way to do it and it only gives you the whole thing) is Audacity (for windows, but I think there’s a mac version) Then you look at the time on the .avi and match it up with the .mp3 time in audacity which lets you zoom in to rip a little chunk. Then you cut out the section you want, paste it into another window. From there, you can “export as .mp3″ and you have it. I guess if you wanted to make just one string of the characters stuff you could keep pasting into the same .mp3 window (I’m not sure how to word it, but basically it would be like having 2 windows open, and continuing to paste into the new sound file window consecutively.) I hope this makes sense because I changed direction in the middle of rewriting it and switched everything around.

Thanks for the link!
Did it take you a long time to rip just that one character’s audio? How did you go about it?

Tony, I guess I was always nervous that 道明寺’s speech irregularities weren’t limited to the obvious ones where people call him out on it. Certainly telling people that you’ll ぶっ殺す them if they don’t answer your phone call is rather uncommon, IMHO. Gokusen also comes to mind as another great series 松本潤 is in, however that’s also got pretty non-standard sounding speech. (BTW, the Japanese subs for 花より男子 use dots next to the various words that 道明寺 messes up, as well as next to the corrected word.)

For those who have begun speaking, do you find that it’s painfully slow in the beginning? I think I can generally make good, grammatical sentences when speaking, but that usually involves long pauses between the various bits of the sentence. I’m generally formulating sentences directly in Japanese in my mind, but it takes a while to piece things together. It’s probably slow to the point where native speakers would not find it fun to listen to for more than a few minutes. I can speak faster, but that generally involves tripping over words and saying things which are ungrammatical, hence my general decision to slow down. Is going this slow a sign that I still shouldn’t be trying to output things, or more just a sign that I need to do it more to work on my fluency?

you could try downloading it directly from the author’s homepage:

http://www.codevisions.de/ (the link can be found at the very top of the page)

I thought about that when I was thinking about using 道明寺 as well, but since I’m not using everything he says, and it’s pretty clear when he makes a mistake since someone corrects him (in the English subbed version I’ve got it also says what the mistake is and explains it), so I didn’t think there was so much of a problem. If you’re looking to use him as an actor, I don’t know how the subs are, but you could try 君はペット。

Actually, that never occurred to me, LOL! Maybe partly because back in the day, I didn’t exactly own DVDs, if you catch my drift.. Anyway, chapters is a really good idea.

I also considered picking someone from 花より男子 to imitate. I personally ruled out 道明寺 because his Japanese is purposefully odd in a lot of places. Sadly, a lot of the stuff I have where there are characters I’d like to imitate are animated. So that doesn’t work out well for looking at mouth shape, etc.

I don’t know what it’s about since there are a ton of kanji, but on antimoon it said one of the things they did was play Monkey Island and this is some kind of game in Chinese (strongly making that assumption here, I don’t know what the difference is between Cantonese and Mandarin or which one you’re learning…or if they’re written the same way but pronounced differently etc.) where you go looking for stuff. My friend sent it to me and said “Use your kanji skills!” But mine aren’t for this one.