so the volume would be 50/50 or 70/20 towrads the news, etc.

i think it makes it less boring. anyone know any news podcast where htey talk really fast or something in a less boring way, well it is news but i don’t konw.

あっ。そうだ！花魁つったら、映画/漫画「さくらん」って奴が有るけど。
あと、多少誇張されているが、「仁義なき戦い」のようなヤクザ映画には安芸弁（広島弁）が頻出するそうです。

京　＝　京都の事？

凄い漢字使ってるね、僕達。まあ、でも、其の方がイイじゃん？漢字の利用制限なんてコッチの知ったこっちゃねーや。

ところでサァ、花魁言葉か京言葉或いは標準語以外の方言を学ぶ資料が有るかどうか知っているの？

>This is really perplexing?!
よく知らないけど・・・
問題は、多分「丁寧語」(-ます)を使ってないからだ・・・と思う
謙譲語を使っても丁寧語まで使わないと、恐らく敬語として成立しない。

あと、上記のように「おる」を使うと、どちらかというとフィクションによく出て来るお爺さんか、方言かという印象が強い。

詳しくは御ググり下さいませ。

As for Chinese, we can blame the Republicans and the Communists for most of the destruction of the remnants of 敬語 left in the language. でござるけれど、結局多分慈禧太后の所為じゃろう、中国の現代化を反対したりしたからね。

出来るだけ、書ける日本語しか書かぬ。もし合ってない表現があったら、誠に申し訳御座らん。

漢字なら我々中国語やHeisigの知識を持っている人たちの勝ちだが、スタイルの場合は絶対日本人に譲った方が妥当かと。何せその辺の専門家だから。

from where else? the news. I gave in and got the TV Japan channel… ($25/month ouch!)

I also watch anime and tokusatsu, but if I watch them too much I start to use annoying interjections and get all high-pitched (I’m female, but there’s a limit). Sometimes I watch commercials, music videos, or interviews with musicians or actors I like, and if I’m not watching something I usually have on music.

Thanks!

Should I be listening to other things in Japanese besides music and Tiger & Dragon- I really want to improve my understanding more than anything, because that is my biggest weakness right now. Listening to Japanese music over and over doesn’t seem to be helping much either- I get the tune stuck in my head but I usually can’t remember the words unless I’ve spent time translating them from kanji to hiragana.

First Japanese. I started watching shows in Japanese without subtitles after one quarter of Japanese class, definitely very much the beginner. You’re right, at first all I caught were single words and the occasional, very simple, sentence. Gradually my skills at distinguishing words from one another increased, resulting in catching more words. Eventually my comprehension increased (beyond the level explicable by just my class) without me feeling like I was consciously learning that many words, though occasionally (once or twice per half-hour episode) I would look something up.

Grammar structures we covered in class started to seem very logical, because I had essentially already learned them. Recently, after about 3 1/2 months, a very cool phenomenon occurred. I had been trying, without that much success, to think in Japanese. There was one word I wanted, but didn’t know - “important”. I didn’t look it up, but kept thinking about it for a couple of days, until one day, when I was doing something else entirely, my brain went “だいせつ”. “だいせつ?” I said to myself. I looked it up, no dice, tried たいせつ, and came up with the following:
大切 [たいせつ] (adj-na,n) important, valuable, worthy of care

About an hour later, I was listening to music, and heard the following:
だいじなもの
And thought, “だいじ? Doesn’t that mean important too?”
Sure enough:
大事 [だいじ] (adj-na,n) important, valuable, serious matter.

So yeah, it works. I have other examples, but this is the most dramatic.
(definitions are from EDICT)

As for French, I started listening to news at an intermediate level, and after about 3-4 months of news 1-3 hours per day, plus the weekly rfi.fr journal en français facile, plus French in Action, plus (for the first month) a regular, university-level course, plus initially 1-4 wikipedia articles and later 1-4 news articles in French per day, I could understand the news, both spoken and written, fluently. Note of course that with French an English speaker has a bit of an advantage - many cognates and similar grammar structures.

That’s very cool! And a perfectly good reason, too. Of course you must have had some interest in news and society if you did that.
In my case, at the moment I have other things that I find more interesting and fun than news broadcasts (unfortunately?). Sooner or later, however, I will have (want) to walk that path too.

Wow! That’s dedication- doing your reviews everyday! I guess after a while it would become like brushing your teeth

I guess I still don’t understand how trying to understand the news at a beginner level is going to help you. Yes it’s helpful to hear intonation and cadence, etc. But when I listen to dramas/anime/etc - the words I understand are the words I’ve learned already. I’ll learn a new word and then hear it more often, but I don’t all of the sudden go, “ah! that word must be X.” How will listening to the news each day make you better?

Inspiring story, nonetheless. When I’m fluent, I hope I have cool stories to tell (back when I did Heisig…)

Phil - Around 5/6 months. I can’t say exactly though, it was more a process of ‘this is getting easier and easier’. That goes for all elements of language though.

Nacest - I needed to understand Japanese news because I wanted to be good at Japanese. That was pretty much the only reason. I don’t live in Japan if that’s what you’re asking.

Tony - I finished heisig about 2 years ago. I still review around 10 characters a day or so in kanji koohii.