Listen & Read Learning Tools for Japanese
This post refers to the Listen & Read method of language learning, whereby you watch a video in the target language and read subtitles, also in the target language.
I myself am studying Japanese, and find it quite difficult to find Japanese video with Japanese subtitles. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to make such a combination for yourself. DVDs and even AVI files have accompanying subtitle and time-stamp files. The subtitle file contains the text to be displayed and the time-stamp file contains the timing of when the text should be displayed. There are many different formats of these, some of them combine both sets of info into a single file, e.g. SubRip.
If you have a Japanese film that only contains English subtitles, it’s possible to replace or add a Japanese subtitles file. In the case of SubRip files, you can just open it up in a text editor and replace the English with the Japanese equivalent. It’s a little more complicated for formats that use separate subtitle and time-stamp files, e.g. VobSub.
You can check the contents of the subtitle files with a program like Subtitle Edit. When you import a VobSub file into SubTitle Edit, look for a Japanese channel. The Japanese version of the VobSub will be stored as image files and not textual data. You can turn the images into text, but you will need a Japanese Optical Character Recognition library. Alternaively, if you have the time, you can step through each image manually, and enter the Japanese for each character (you will need a Japanese IME). I should stress however that creating textual data for the subtitles is not necessary.
If you do not have a Japanese channel, you will need to search for a Japanese VobSub for the video you want to be subtitled. There are few collections on the Internethere and there.
Not all video players will be able to read subtitle files, or be able to switch between different language channels. Fortunately, Media Player Classic is free and does everything you need.
One last point about the VobSub format. The time-stamp file has a .idx extension. Along with the meta-data which syncs the text to the video, there is other information which can set the default language channel, subtitle text size and colour, and subtitle placement. Recently I wanted to add Japanese subtitles that already had English subtitles baked-in to the video. The first problem was that the subtitlies were appear way too early. This was remedied with the following line in the .idx file:
delay: +00:00:14:00
Similarly, I made the default langauge channel Japanese, and moved the subtitles to the top of the screen , so that the English was still legible, using these lines:
org: 0, -350
langidx: 1
Finally, it’s worth pointing out this utility: Subs2SRS. If you have a video, and the subtitles in your first and target language, this program will automatically created a set of flash cards for you. Except these cards will not only contain the English and Japanese text – it will also splice the video up and add it to the relevant flash cards!
Have fun playing
