Given that learning a new language is kind of a nightmare, and progress can seem so slow, I wanted to make a potentially morale-boosting suggestion that is not only changing my game, but helping enormously with my biggest problem, which is listening comprehension.

I always made the most progress in music learning through transcription; namely, listening to what is being played on a recording (sometimes slowing it down to hear better) and learning the performance by writing it down and practicing it, which reinforces multiple skills at once: listening, writing, playing, harmony and musical syntax. It occurred to me that I could do the same with language learning. There is an excellent phone app called Anytune Pro, which can play back any recording at absurdly slow speeds without altering the pitch, and it works great for speech.

To test this experiment, I chose a recent video by Bobby Judo on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TqQUv48Fc4) because he does most of his videos in natural-sounding, fluent Japanese. Surely, choosing native Japanese speakers is an even better choice, and no doubt I will go there, but Judo is easy to understand and speaks well and is a good model for where I want my own Japanese to go.

I made my chart with four columns: the full Japanese text, a list of vocab or usages I didn’t previously know, a kana version of each sentence, and the English subtitles, which of course help one’s choice of Japanese words, particularly if you are only able to sound them out and look them up in a dictionary.

If you’re interested to see any of it, here’s a link (there may still be lingering mistakes):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gjjcm21pvvhj4gs/Bobby%20Judo%20%E5%A4%96%E5%9B%BD%E4%BA%BA%E3%81%AB%E8%81%9E%E3%81%8F%E3%81%B9%E3%81%8D%E8%B3%AA%E5%95%8F.pdf?dl=0

I hope you find it a helpful exercise and good luck.