Creating an immersion environment

I confess I've fallen behind in my Japanese studies (though I have published a book about Video Game Programming, so it's not all bad :D).

I've decided to kick start my learning once again and I think one of the places I was suffering before was not enough natural Japanese exposure. I used Anki a lot and it has tons of content which I'm very familiar with but with out natural Japanese exposure my knowledge of how it all glues together is very limited.

To that end, I decided what I really needed was to live in Japan (which I'm not going to do at the current time) or have access to non-stop Japanese TV. I'm fortunate that I live on my own and can therefore easily create an immersion environment without annoying anyone else too much.

An immersion environment also gives me an excuse to buy some new toys mostly guilt free :)

I ordered the following two items and HDMI cable:
(I already have a TV but it's a CRT and doesn't support HDMI and I want things to be as simple as possible and as high quality as possible)

Samsung SM2333HD 1920 x 1080p 23inch HD Monitor/TV

UK     US (equivalent)

This was the TV that seems to have the best trade off between cheapness, size and quality for my immersion environment needs. There was some mention of the sound being a bit tinny but I'm pretty sure it will be good enough quality for my immersion environment needs.


Acer Aspire Revo R3610

UK     US (equivalent)

The Revo is the blue box on the back of this TV. If you are a bit techy you may have heard of the atom cpus. These are new CPUs that are ultra low power and still quite fast. The acer is a cheap, extremely small, low noise, lower power desktop machine that has HDMI out and is very, very easy to use as a media center. Connecting the Revo to the TV with HDMI means that I can watch Japanese television in high definition.

This is the computer that will play (and to some extent store) all my Japanese television programs.

(I shopped around and managed to find a slightly newer version cheaper on eBuyer than on Amazon but this probably varies day to day. I must add: the eBuyer website and in particular it's registration / checkout service are terrible and needlessly complicated and invasive. But slightly cheaper is slightly cheaper!)

Putting it all together.

My internet is not really fast or reliable enough to stream Japanese TV and I find such streaming sites can be slow or suddenly disappear. I want the immersion environment with as little fuss as possible - no messing around if I suddenly lose internet connection, or a streaming site goes down - just simple always on immersion.

I have quite a lot of video files of Japanese drama and some anime on my computer so I'm going to fill up the revo and have it shuffle them. I'll leave it on like background TV and that's it - simple. The revo is a full computer and it can play 1080p files, it won't have any codec trouble which something like the Xbox 360 or PlayStation certainly would (speaking from experience). With some tweaking it can be turned into a full media centre with remote control and a nice flashy GUI interface using something like the XBMC.

I can also grab more drama from sites like d-addicts. If you are going to use d-addicts they've recently changed how the torrents work if clicking the green arrow next to the torrent name doesn't work try clicking the red arrow :D

When choosing a suitable media centre computer I also considered the ASRock ION but it was more expensive and seemed to require a lot more tweaking to get it ready (installing operating systems and so on). It was also a bit bigger and forum posts said it could be a bit noisy - which is the exact opposite of what I'm after. I don't need something like the Xbox 360 where it's a like a small jet engine shuddering away under the TV :)

Update

I'm now happily using this set-up. Nodame Cantabile is playing in the background at a nice high resolution totally divorced from this computer which I use for anki / web browsing / programming.

The default OS for the Acer is pretty rubbishy so I followed this very handy Lifehacker article and installed XMBC (using the Live Disk put on a USB key. My Revo has no net connection but luckily this proved to be no problem, I can just copy everything across).

The Samsung TV has a bit of overscan too which is very simple to correct in XMBC, there's a video calibration mode where you can pull the corners of the screen in. It's very happily playing 720p at the moment I don't have any 1080p files on there yet but from what I hear it should all be fine.

I had to fiddle a little with the options to get the HDMI sound working but it's all great now, total setup was maybe an hour or two.

How to get more exposure to Japanese

I think mindset is the most important thing. This is represented excellently by Luiz from Brazil in this blog post:

The day has 24 hours. Assuming you sleep 8 hours a day, you have 16 hours. So if you listen 8 hours of L2, you have heard more L2 than your mother language. It’s simple, not?

You don’t need to listen more L1 because you already know. Spend your time listening L2!

When you’re studying or working, you are listening a lot of things passively, right? So change all to L2! Put you headphones and imagine you are in the country where the language is spoken.

Remembering the calc:
(24 – s) / 2, where ‘s’ is how much you sleep in hours.

Where can I get Japanese language films in the UK?

This was a question that baffled me. I wanted to get as much Japanese input as possible. But it's very hard to get access to Japanese media in the UK (especially outside of London). I ordered some DVDs from amazon.co.jp but this proved to be extremely expensive and I had to pay tax.

The current solution to this problem, for me, is LOVEFiLM. There's a two week free trial at the moment (though you still have to enter your card details, and if you don't quit before the two weeks are up then it automatically starts billing you. Anyway it's reasonably cheap £14 pounds a month for the option I chose)

LOVEFiLM is an online DVD rental place, like netflix in America.

The option I chose I can rent two DVDs at once. I chose some films (I can even queue up a selection). They send my the DVDs with a prepaid return envelope. I can hold on to these for as long as I like. When I send them back then they'll send me the next DVDs selected in my queue.

So far so good right? The last remaining question is - how many Japanese language films do they have? Well this is a hard one to answer because search by language is broken, this is super annoying and I almost didn't sign up because of this single issue. But if you find one Japanese film, then you can click on the director or actor and find linked films.

There seems to be a vast amount of Anime films and series, Yakuza and Horror . . . and not much else :( But I'll give it a go and I'll be updating this blog with info about the films I watch.

This is my list at the moment:

[15] 20th Century Boys     
[15] Alive     
[15] All About Lilly Chou-Chou     
[18] Azumi     
[15] Blood - The Last Vampire     
[18] End Call     
[15] Gantz - Vol. 1     
[18] Graveyard Of Honour     
[18] Infection     
[15] Kai Doh Maru     
[18] Legend Of Ando Family, The - The Road To...     
[18] Marebito     
[PG] Millennium Actress     
[15] Shogun's Samurai     
[18] Sonatine     
[12] The Place Promised In Our Early Days     
[18] The Triple Cross     
[15] Tokyo Drifter     
[18] Village Of Doom     
[15] X-Cross 

20th Century Boys

My current plan is to check these films out see what I like and once I run out I can just quit my subscription. It should work out far far cheaper than amazon with much greater variety. I can try to do something similar to Khatz's sampling 100 cantonese films in a month. Though I'm probably looking more 60ish is I have two dvd plan.

How to make a Japanese immersion environment - Tip 1

If I reflect on how I waste my time, a lot of time seems to be spent flicking through the various music channels. I like music videos, I like new music so it's not hard to find myself doing this. Though it doesn't help my Japanese.

What would help my Japanese is having a Japanese version of MTV! But where can I get Japanese music videos? Youtube of course.

I want my Japanese MTV to play in the background, I don't want to be actively searching through youtoube everytime I want some background music with pretty pictures. So I will download the youtube videos!

How can I download music videos? Well I'm using Firefox (other modern browser such as Chrome and Opera probably have ways to do this to) so I use a firefox plugin. The plugin is called Video Download Helper. It was the first one I found and it works nicely.

It adds a icon over the youtube player. If I press the icon it downloads the video.

The only task remaining was to find some good Japanese music videos. Music video in Japan is abbrievated to PV (promotion video). So a good search term might be

"radwimps pv"

This will get me a nice list of radwimp videos to download.

A few other interesting Japanese language artists include:
Rip Slyme
Dragon Ash
Zeebra
Aktion
HI-D
BoA
Ogre you asshole

If there are any more you recommend add them in the comments!