Japanese Recommendation Exchange: 2013 Compilation
You at the keyboard: I know you’ve found some really fun Japanese material this month. You came across a great J-drama that brought you to tears. You picked up a book that you ended up reading in a day because of the nonstop thrills it brought you. You discovered a Japanese movie that was so funny that you watched it twice in the same night.
But wait. . . You weren’t going to tell anyone about it?! We can’t have this. The readers of this site are on a constant search for new materials and recommendations to find what will motivate them to study Japanese more, and you are keeping these gems all to yourself? Shame on you.
The purpose of this series is to discuss and exchange j-dramas, movies, variety shows, books, manga, anime, music, media, video games, etc. It’s time to share what everyone is excited about and experiencing right now.
So I ask you:
1. What are you watching?
2. What are you reading?
3. What are you playing?
4. What are you listening to?
2012 ● 2013 ●2014 ● 2015
January
1. What are you watching?
Just watched the drama 電車男 (I think the movie is over 8000 times inferior to the drama, 伊東美咲 was a cutie in the drama too ( ̄▽ ̄;))
Rewatching 池袋ウェストゲートパーク, considerably one of the best J-Drama of all time, gives a good view on the more street life Japan.
Finished watching 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン (original, not the new version)
2. What are you reading?
「前倒し」仕事術 無理無く始められる三つの習慣 by 中井紀之
A good book, I recommend it, many good tips and views on how to expedite your work, a real eye opener.
英語は絶対、勉強するな! is next on my list too.
Almost finished reading the ぼくらの series but stopped on 7, gotta resume soon.
3. What are you playing?
Started replaying ファイナルファンタジーXIII for the sake of understanding the story. When I first got the game in April 2011 I could barely understand anything, now I understand essentially everything, all the plot intricacies that I missed the first time.
ファイナルファンタジーV、ソニックCD、イースI・II完全版 have also been enjoyed their fair share too.
4. What are you listening to?
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Kick The Can Crew (one of the best japanese hip-hop groups ever imo), Kreva is pretty cool too.
Downloaded some NHK高校講座 about Geology and such. I managed to download some NHK news podcasts, but since it was only available by an online streamer, I got to spend a good 30 minutes obtaining it through painful methods. (Used VLC to stream the audio into a .ps file, rename to .mp3, put it in audacity, then export as another mp3 so it’s playable on all devices) Not fun!
And my movies/drama/anime I convert to MP3 and listen to.
PS. Btw, the guy in Sword Art Online who announces or whatever, isn’t that the same guy who voiced 加持 in 新世紀エヴァンゲリオン and the guy in カウボーイビバップ?
1. What are you watching?
Right now I’m watching ‘Yes! Precure 5,’ the ‘DNAngel’ anime, ‘Haken no Hinkaku,’ and ‘AKBingo.’
‘Yes! Precure 5′ is good silly fun, and easy for me to understand since it’s aimed at kids. I really like it since it’s very Tokusatsu-like and it has main characters who play off each other well.
‘DNAngel’ is mostly good until they ran out of manga or whatever the reason was for those silly fillers. Now I’m nearing the ending and it’s getting better but very confusing. Still, the animation is very pretty, and it has Ishida Akira in it which is always a plus.
‘Haken no Hinkaku’ seems pretty nice; I’ve only watched the first two episodes so far but it’s quite interesting and I really want to find out more about the characters. Since I don’t know much business terminology I get a little lost at times.
‘AKBingo’ is really fun. How good it is varies according to the theme of the episode, but I can always find one I like. I don’t even care very much about AKB48, although I’m starting to be able to identify some of the girls.
2. What are you reading?
‘Dragon Drive,’ ‘Hoshi no Hitomi no Silhouette,’ and the first book in the ‘Magical Girl Reina’ series.
‘Dragon Drive’ seems pretty fun although I’m still in the first volume (I have 1 and 2, would have bought 3 but it was in bad shape). It kind of seems like a formulaic shounen fighting series, but there’s a lot that can be done with a formula. The main character is good, and I like the awkward-cute design of his dragon Chibisuke.
‘Hoshi no Hitomi no Silhouette’ is very very good and I really want to keep reading (I’m in the middle of volume 2 at the moment). The characters are all adorable and the mangaka handles silly and serious moments very well. I don’t usually go for straight romance, but this seems to be a very good one. In fact, this mangaka (Hiiragi Aoi) had other works which were made into Studio Ghibli movies.
‘Magical Girl Reina’ is fun so far; I’m almost halfway through the first book, and there are around 20, I think. It’s at a low-middle gradeschool level, I guess. The illustrations are adorable.
Skipped 3 since it doesn’t really apply right now.
4. What are you listening to?
Not much at the moment but school is about to start so I’ll break out my mp3 players to listen to before class. I have a lot of enka and anime/tokusatsu songs.
1. What are you watching?
– (Anime) I’m rewatching a number of series unsubbed: “K-On! and “Aria”, and earlier this month I rewatched the first season of “AKB0048″ in preparation for the second season. While I don’t feel ready to abandon subtitles altogether, it’s amazing how much of the art, direction, and subtlety in the vocal performances I miss when I have subtitles on.
– “荒川アンダー ザ ブリッジ” (Drama) The heir to a major corporation, who has been raised to never be indebted to anyone, is saved from drowning by a woman who asks him to become her lover as payment. Also, she claims to be from Venus. And lives on a riverbank with a host of other eccentric characters.
I haven’t read the manga and always found the anime slightly disappointing for reasons I was never quite able to identify. But the drama is great! Due in no small part to the perfect cast. The anthology nature of the series allows it to move from broad slapstick comedy to very tender character portraits to moments of an almost otherworldly beauty, sometimes all in the same episode. I understand there’s also a movie, I’ll need to check it out sometime.
– “アキハバラ@DEEP” (Drama). A group of otaku are gathered together by a mysterious woman via an online chat site. They become sort of general problem-solvers helping, for example, to catch someone videotaping cosplayers in their changing rooms.
The premise is fun and it’s got some good moments, but at times it seems like the show can’t decide if it wants to be serious or a comedy. In particular some of the performances are so over-the-top-wacky that it takes me out of the story.
(BTW, I have a policy question. I was thinking of submitting entries for these dramas to Nayugen, but since I only understand a small fraction of the dialog I’m limited in what I can say about them. Should I go ahead anyway?)
2. What are you reading?
– I’m going through the complete set of graded readers. I started this once before, but for some reason ran out of steam in the second volume of Level 1. Maybe it’s because I know more vocabulary now, or because going J-J has got me comfortable staying in Japanese for an extended period, but this time through I’m finding it great fun! I’m about done with Volume 2 of level 2, and will probably finish level 4 in February.
– Lots of twitter. I wish I’d done this earlier! I’ve subscribed to a bunch of AKB members and some mangakas I like, and I get a constant stream of short conversational Japanese, at my computer where I can easily look up words if I want. Though often the topics are simple enough (and/or accompanied by pictures) so I can often glean the meaning even if I don’t know all the words.
3. What are you playing?
– “Hatsune Miku and Future Stars: Project Mirai” on the 3DS. Although maybe this should go under “listening” since no Japanese is actually needed to play. It’s your basic rhythm game, ridiculously cute, fun songs if you like this sort of thing (which I do!), some of the PVs make impressive use of the 3D, and there’s fun unlockable content including some great augmented-reality features.
4. What are you listening to?
Musically, lots of AKB48. I’ve also ripped the audio from a bunch of “Lucky Star” episodes, listening to those at work is like hanging out with friends. I’m also enjoying Nakajima Megumi’s “シンカロン!” youtube-cast. I seldom can follow what she’s saying, but I love her voice and the show is bubbly and fun.
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
1. What are you watching?
ポケモン and 日本人の知らない日本語.
And a decent number of 実況プレイ videos – they are great fun, especially if played by a short-tempered fellow who hasn’t played the game before.
Jikkyous seems to be done by those who are little bit familiar with the game, or those who speaks in a machine-gun esque tempo.
And I am also in the process of acquiring Ninkyo Helper of which I saw one episode (sadly with E-subs) and became really interested in the show. Subless streams are hard to find.
2. What are you reading?
キノの旅 (The first one of them)
Brilliant book with lots of easy language and lots of N+1 sentences. (And since I got it as an ebook, it’s really easy to read, and putting stuff into Anki is merely copy-pasting.
Also, reading from a computer screen, where you can set the font size yourself is a much easier alternative for me because of my vision making it very hard to read Japanese books with microscopic print.
3. What are you playing?
Twilight Princess, but I will have to wait until easter to play it again, because the emulator runs really slow on my laptop.
4. What are you listening to?
Nothing new, sadly. Japanese Prog is hard to come by…
I am listening to FM Tachikawa most evenings though. (Why do Japanese raido channel play instrumental jazz during the nights? (or afternoon here in the UK)) I prefer channels with loads of talking instead of music.
Also, I’ve made an almost full transition into J-J. Exception are animals, words like 天文台、気象庁、etc. though it’s been a couple of weeks since I added a J-E card, and I hope that it’ll continue like this.
I’m noticing that the branching process is almost gone – worst case sceninario is that I have to add four or five extra sentences per native sentence.
So even though it has been unproductive because of exams and such, I have still made noticeable progress. 2677 cards now, of which about 1000-ish are J-J :) And J-J definitions are starting to make complete sense now after I’ve become more familiar with stuff like ように, etc.
I’m having trouble remembering hiragana-words though, especially onomonopia. Do you have any advice here?
シェアハウス恋人 has been fairly decent. For some reason it reminds me a lot of Mork and Mindy.
1. What are you watching?
-J-drama 結婚できない男. Absolutely love it! It’s hilarious!
-I watched 百万円と苦虫女 and レンタネコ. And am currently in the middle of 洋菓子店コアンドル which I’ve been watching during down time on my tablet. Two of these movies have Yu Aoi in it, one of my favorite actresses.
I’ve also been watching a lot of Japanese news lately, via TBS and FNN news streams online. I feel more connected to Japan now, and they also often have international news, so I don’t feel the need to watch news in English anymore.
3. What are you playing?
とびだせ どうぶつの森. I’m really enjoying it. I play it in the morning to stop myself from falling asleep on the couch so that I can actually make it to where I need to go on time. I actually worried about not enjoying it, because I pretty much played out my おいでよ どうぶつの森, but the game has enough new features and brings back a lot of older features from the GC version that I instantly loved it.
4. What are you listening to?
JpopSuki TV. It’s a live playlist consisting over 2000 songs, so I’m getting introduced to a lot of new music. I find it has a lot of old (90s?) music, which I like a lot. A lot of styles I just never heard from Japan. But it also has newer music too, such as from Yui and Moumoon. I always get excited when I hear a song I love.
Watching: Love Live! School Idol Project
Link
It’s about a group of girls who start an idol group to promote their school, which is slightly ridiculous. The situations presented are best described as “everyday life,” and the special terms used have to do with music (many of which you already know because they’re loan words). If you like idols, it is a good target for watching without subs.
Watching: Legal High (Again), 吉本新喜劇,A bunch of quiz variety programs(Qサま, TORE, Nep League, etc.)
Reading: レイン~雨の日に生まれた戦士 a fantasy story about a warrior and princess who meet up and change history. It’s the first of a long series of books.
宇宙兄弟 easily one of the best manga I’ve read.
Playing: Divina, an MMORPG that doesn’t have an IP block in the US (!!)
Listening to: HIFANA a breakbeat/hip-hop duo,
虚構新聞ニュースa hilarious fiction news podcast
February
This month I watched the second and third seasons of Gokusen (ごくせん) while keeping up-to-date with my favorite three anime shows: Space Brothers (宇宙兄弟), Magi (マギ), and Chihayafuru (ちはやふる).
If you like plots where someone has to work hard to achieve some goal very important to them, all of those shows are worth a try (and I’d be happy to hear of any you might know of which are similar).
I have been reading A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, as preparation to jumping into the world of manga … and toward that end I have also been reading a lot of reviews on Amazon (with the help of my Rikaikun chrome extension).
Still not sure which one I’ll jump into first, although there are a lot of good options (starting with the above anime shows and including everything from 日本人の知らない日本語 to 子連れ狼 第, which I’m guessing is unfortunately way over my current level).
As for playing and listening to something, I hope doing Anki and Surusu reps (with audio) counts. Not as fun as a real game, but I split up the reps throughout the day so it’s not that bad and I am fine putting the work in as it’s getting me to where I want to be or rather giving me the vocabulary and skills for what I want to do.
Actually, I passed through the 3,000 sentence mark this month, which felt great, and especially since I didn’t stress out to get there. Aiming for 7500 sentences by the end of the year, however, so won’t draw this out any further. I’ve got a “game” to play!
Watching – Taking in some of the NHK高校講座 (found on Nayugen!), particularly the 家庭総合 segment with 千原せいじ. Interesting and educational, but some of the other subjects fail to grab my attention at the moment. These shows will probably be online until April when the new school year starts and they have to reset everything.
http://www.nhk.or.jp/kokokoza/
Reading – The translation of Jurassic Park – it feels very well translated. It’s a strange experience to read a book that I’ve read so many times in English and has so many strong images associated with it, and then have all the characters voices dubbed over in my head. It gets pretty crazy when they’re describing dinosaur biology, cloning techniques and chaos theory! I won’t pretend to you that I can understand those parts! Excellent book, if a bit technical at times.
Also reading the 80′s/90′s manga3X3アイズ (pronounced “サザン”), which I’m really enjoying right now.
Playing – ゼルダの伝説:夢幻の砂時計 and I’m pretty close to 全クリ. Beautifully designed game with loads of great little touches that really exploit the DS and its double screens. Because the regular little DS screens are pretty small, one interesting feature that is included in the JP version is that you can touch kanji and it’ll bring up the reading. A very helpful touch. Overall a fairly easy game that’ll keep you interested for a few weeks.
Listening – Kojima Hideo’s podcast for Kojima Productions. He appears to have finished making new episodes, but there are over 300 episodes available to download or listen on demand, dating back to 2005. The presenters have a really good rappor, particularly in the early episodes, and they touch on a range of subjects from the games industry and Kojima’s childhood, to alien invasions and careers advice. Good listen, especially if you’re a fan of the MGS series.
http://www.kjp.konami.jp/gs/hideoblog/
What! February is already over!!
I’ve been doing so much with Japanese Sign Language lately because of my independent study for college. Much of the research is done in the Japanese language. One thing I learned is that on NHK E-Tele, from 7pm to 8pm on Sundays (JST), there is a whole range of programing revolving around JSL. For anyone who lives in Japan or has access to E-Tele, and is curious about JSL, that’s a good time to tune in.
I watched Scott Pilgrim recently in Japanese, and it was good! I used to hate dubs over live-action, but now, I think I actually kind of like them. It’s interesting to see how the voice actors try to act out the characters and what kind of voice each character is given in Japanese.
Aside from reading my Japanese textbook on Japanese Deaf culture and language, I’ve done some light manga reading. I just started reading 僕等が居た yesterday after finishing all my よつばと! volumes (which I can’t wait to get more of). I read a chapter of ゆずり葉 one day, but didn’t go back to it because I got busy with school. Same for RTK, not much work done there. I probably won’t be dealing with RTK much until May when the semester is over, because school takes up a big amount of my time. Luckily though, I get to study for a big chunk of that time in Japanese (^_^).
>>What are you reading?
Finished のうりん第2巻 earlier this month. Pretty funny story set in an agricultural high school and pretty easy to read.
Also read 冴えない彼女の育て方第1巻 romance story written by 丸戸史明, a famous visual novel scenario writer. I enjoyed it so far, looking forward to next volume.
>> What are you playing?
I’ve been reading the sequel to 殻ノ少女 (Kara no shoujo) , 虚ノ少女. It’s been pretty good so far. Though, some parts are pretty hard to read. It’s my first time reading a mystery story in japanese so I learned many new words like 被疑者、戸籍 etc. Also since it’s set in 昭和時代 I also learned some older words that were used back then.
I’m watching Little Busters! and enjoying it enough that I’m considering getting the game for PSP.
I’m reading ココロコネクト and finding the novels better than the anime, even though I quite enjoyed the anime the first time around. I also read the first 俺の彼女と幼なじみが修羅場すぎる novel, though I found it quite easy at my current level.
I’m still playing Steins;gate on and off, but am still in the first chapter. It’s good, and deserves more of my attention; perhaps this next month I will really dig into it.
I’m not sure if anyone else ever listens to アニラジ, but I’ve been listening to a couple of these for shows that I like through hibiki-radio.jp. It’s not entirely natural conversational Japanese, but it’s a lot closer than the scripted dialogue of an anime or drama.