Shadowing シャドーイング法

[Jembru]

I thought this deserves it's own thread as it's a study method I'm very much an advocate of. Chocopie and I got onto the subject in another thread, and I'd like to carry on the discussion here to prevent too much derailing. Before I reply to Chocopie though, I'd like to quickly explain shadowing to those who don't know of the technique. It's pretty simple really, you just speak after a native model, mimicking their tone and rhythm as closely as you can. The trick is to try to speak just a fraction of a second behind the speaker, so that you're speaking over them.  The amazing thing about this method is that it also improves your listening ability. I've no idea why it does, but it really works. I discovered that if I mouth along when watching something in Japanese, I can pick up way more than if I just passively watch.

Last October, I took a study method I'd created for a test drive.  I had designed it loosely around the classroom methods used by TEFL teachers, so that it flowed in a similar manor and utilised similar techniques. One of the features of this method was that it included shadowing in the first part of the controlled practice section. While it wasn't only down to shadowing, I was quite overwhelmed by the results. At the time, I was close to quitting altogether, because I had been studying for so many hours but while my vocabulary and grammar knowledge were about right for an intermediate student (and you could argue even my kanji wasn't too bad depending on what course you compared me to), but my speaking and listening skills were still very poor, despite being exposed to spoken Japanese a lot more than many other lone students. Yet within the first 3 days of using this technique, my speaking and listening caught up with the rest of my skills. Honestly, just 3 days! Although I was gutted that I didn't keep developing after those 3 days. Now, although I wouldn't call myself an eloquent speaker by any means, it is mainly just the gaps in my knowledge and lack of experience/confidence that hold me back. 

So lets use this thread to discuss the shadowing method. Please share your hints, tips, links, questions or your own experiences of using this method. 

This is quite long, so I'll reply to Chocopie in a separate post. 

[Jembru]

Mar 25, 2014 20:41:25 GMT chocopie said:

The Shadowing Japanese books are indeed for practising Shadowing. There are two books: Beginner to Intermediate, and Intermediate to Advanced. It looks like JP books has the second book in stock at the moment.

They're short conversations on CD with scripts in the book. They have colloquial Japanese explanations at the end of each chapter as well and are seriously good for practising intonation and also how to say 'everyday general life' things. For example from the first book:
A: あ、くつひも、ほどけてるよ。
A: Your shoelaces are untied.
B：あれ？さっきっ結んだのに。
B: What! I Just tied them!

A：あ、えり、立ってるよ。
A: Your collar is standing up.
B：あ、どうもありがとう。
B: Ah, thanks.

A:な～に、その投げやりな態度！
A: What's with that careless attitude?!
B:別に～。
B: Nothing...

Not stuff that would come up in a textbook but useful things to know!

The other grammar book is this one.

Wow, thank you so much for finding that for me! 

Oh what to do what to do...

I'm seriously tempted by that book. It's just that the examples you've given are very much the kind of thing that come up on J-pod though, and I use this for shadowing. I'm wondering if buying that book would give me anything I'm not already getting.

Like, here's a small section from the dialogue I was practicing a few days ago.. there was a large earthquake but the guy couldn't wake his sleeping wife. So he puts on the TV to watch the report. We then get a nice long dialogue that models the kind of language used in earthquake reports on TV, that we can study at our leisure. Then it goes back to the conversation between the couple (the only part I drill: I skip speaking practice of the radio/TV reports or when they're reading out letters and articles.. it's a clever way to sneak in written/formal styles and I do read the PDF, but I want to stick to training my conversational Japanese until I'm more advanced). So then we get something like...

クミ: ちょっと、ケンちゃん！何時だと思っているの？眠れないじゃな
い。私、物音に敏感なんだから、静かにしてよ。

健二: ・・・クミ。君は大物だよ。

KUMI: Hey, Ken! What time do you think it is? I'm trying to sleep here. I'm a light sleeper, so keep it down over there.


KENJI: Kumi, you're really something.

Definitely not textbook stuff, and probably the same kind of thing I'd find in the shadowing book right? There are literally hundreds of dialogues like this and I'm already paying for access to the material. 

So I'm now wondering if I could justify spending the money..

But I want it... It looks really good. There's just something really satisfying about holding a book in your hands. Having the CD's would mean I could use this from work without overloading my phone's memory. The Jpod dialogues also have to be skipped to, something neither my phone nor my tablet are very keen on doing.

Sigh. I've saved it to my basket, but I think I'm going to have to sleep on this one. If it wasn't £25..

..I'm going to end up buying it, aren't I? ^^ 

[chocopie]

Mar 26, 2014 9:31:11 GMT Jembru said:

But I want it... It looks really good. There's just something really satisfying about holding a book in your hands. Having the CD's would mean I could use this from work without overloading my phone's memory. The Jpod dialogues also have to be skipped to, something neither my phone nor my tablet are very keen on doing.

As it's designed specifically for shadowing it is more time efficient. I've used Jpod before so I'll list up the advantages that I think the book has for shadowing.

1) There are markers next to each conversation to indicate whether the situation is formal or casual.
2) Each page is one track so you can just stick it on repeat and go through until you've got it.
3) Each chapter/unit in the first book tells you what grammar is being used. Look at p.7 in this sample pdf. The second book is divided by theme (see p.4). Also the first book seems to cover N5-N2 and so I assume the second book covers N2 upwards.
4) It's convenient having everything in one book! I got kind of annoyed with the pdfs in Jpod.

[Jembru]

Okay! I'm convinced. I'll order it right away. As only the second book is there, I'll have to make do with that for now, but I can keep an eye out for book 1. Thanks for teaching me about the series. I had no idea anything like that even existed!

Edit: okay so it took slightly longer than I'd hoped, but I've ordered it now (note to the wise: check you're not on Japanese input when attempting to enter your paypal password ^^).  

I'm very excited to get this book now. Just read a few pages of the intro on the PDF and I seem to be managing to read it okay. I see that the book itself will have an English translation of the intro too, so I have a free parallel text for my troubles! I admit I panicked for a second when I saw the dialogues, but then realised this isn't taken from book II. Hopefully it will start at about my level and then I can gradually grow with the book. 

Again, I can't thank you enough for your recommendation! 

[Jembru]

Hey it came! I've had a read through the method and listened the the first 2 tracks (section 1). It seems okay. If I can work out how to save it to my phone it would be awesome. I don't have media player though, and the file I managed to save so far doesn't open. I'll work it out somehow though.

My version doesn't mark speaking styles next to the dialogues like you said yours does. It just tells you in the Japanese only section at the beginning of the unit, what the unit entails and thus what style to expect. What it does do on this page that I love, is it tells the learner what characteristics of the language to look out for (abbreviations, onomatopoeia, honorific language and so on), then gives examples from the dialogues. That's pretty cool!

After reading through this book, I'm pretty impressed with Jpod actually. Just because of how much of the content was familiar to me. I think Jpod has done a very good job at exposing me to real Japanese. So I'm thinking of upgrading my account back to premium just until I move beyond the need for shadowing. I think the line-by-line audio would be better for shadowing because you can just repeat the same single line over and over if you want. Then you can switch to playing the dialogue all the way through and do the shadowing method as I had been. My only complaint previously was that they often didn't break down longer lines, so that you could get pretty large chunks of speech in a single playback. I used to repeat after the recording, so longer lines was a real pain. For shadowing though, I think it will be less of a problem.

I really hope this helps with my 'burn out' phases. I noticed yesterday that while the time before it hits me is getting longer, I still just suddenly stop being able to handle Japanese at after a particular amount of time. Yesterday when it happened, for about 30 minutes I couldn't even speak English. I just went really quiet and spaced-out, like I was in a trance. It's so annoying and I just want to move quickly beyond this phase once and for all!

[chocopie]

I think the speaking styles thing may be only in book one then. I've gone back to my Mum's for the weekend and so I've been able to dig out Book 2 and have a look at it. I should probably go through it again actually as I don't get much chance for speaking practice at the moment.

If you don't have media player then you can rip music with iTunes or something like this sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos/. You can probably find some programmes to cut up the tracks as well, although looking at my book I can see I've annotated in the margin the time at which each new conversation starts so I guess I was practising one conversation at a time.

[Jembru]

Yeah, I imagine it would be quite easy to fit this around a busy lifestyle too, when meeting up with other Japanese speakers could be harder to make time for.

I'm taking them a track at a time. I guess because I'm not completely new to shadowing and because I was shadowing entire conversations before, I'm not too bothered by running through a few short dialogues one after the other. Still, I think jpod is actually winning the book vs podcast battle here. Depending on the series, jpod has a slower version of the dialogue that is easier for speaking over the the native speaker, then there is the line followed by English, which I find ideal for repeating after the speaker, because I can talk over the English, then you can play the original track and practice shadowing faster. Some lessons have a casual (or polite) alternative version of the dialogue, usually with some kind of joke or silly outcome woven in. These are dialogue only tracks so you can play them over and over without needing to stop and replay. The downside is that these tracks aren't transcribed or translated, but as they use mainly vocab form the main lesson, it's not too much of a problem. When you add to that the line by line option if you don't mind paying a bit more (okay, it's actually more than double the amount of basic membership, which is a bit steep considering the line by line is the only premium feature I've ever used) and the sheer volume of content, I think jpod is still winning as a shadowing resource for me!

[chocopie]

Oh man! I feel like I made you waste your money! I hope it proves useful to you at some point at least.

[Jembru]

No, no.. I don't feel I've wasted my money. It's harder to use than jpod, but I like that I can put a track on a loop while I'm tidying up at work. I'm following the instructions exactly as it says in the book, so allowing 3 weeks per section. So even though its a lot of text at a time, I should manage to nail it in 3 weeks.

I'm going to do all the intermediate conversations first though. The advanced probably has too many new words for me. 3 or 4 new words per page is about the most I can handle without it taking considerably longer to master the dialogues.

[Jembru]

Well, it's the last night of my first week using this new book and so far, I'm very impressed! It's different enough to how I use Jpod to make it worth the money. I guess I could play the jpod tracks on my phone on a loop at work, but it's not the same as being able to just throw a CD into the player.

I'm not using it exactly the same way as the book suggests, not least because I only use it on nights I'm at work, but it really seems to be working so far. The book said to allow 2-3 weeks per section, but I'm already quite comfortably with pages 18 and 20, and there's only 2 tracks on page 22, so I think 2 weeks is going to be enough to manage so long as I stick to the intermediate dialogues.

It's too soon to say if it will make a difference to my spoken Japanese, but if nothing else, it'll be helping my pronunciation.

[Jembru]

I linked this thread in a reply to Princess earlier, so thought I'd come back and add a list of places you can find free dialogues for shadowing.

For simple sentences, you might like to try About.com's Japanese phrase of the day. There are some interesting/useful expressions in there, and while they're short sentences, they're spoken at natural speed so it's a nice way to ease you into shadowing. One point though; because the sentences are so short and spoken so quickly, you'll often be repeating after the audio rather than overlapping to begin with.

Japanesepod101's Youtube channel has this handy playlist.  Not the most exciting phrases and vocabulary, but I recommend this one for beginners as it lets you practice the te form, and practice forming basic sentences for describing the world around you. 

You probably want something a bit more conversational than this, right? In that case, my number 1 recommendation is Erin ga chousen nihongo ga dekimasu. This is a great resource anyway, but specifically, if you go to a skit, there are tabs above the video that you can select between. If you click on the second one, you get a page like this. You can then play each line over and over until you get it just right. A few warnings though. The sound quality isn't great, especially when there is a lot of background noise, as they've just cut directly from the video's audio, so sometimes you'll be relying on the script to work out if they're saying 'ha' or a 'ba' or whatever. It is also spoken very quickly and colloqually, so sometimes the sounds seems to blur together a little. All the same, for a free resource it is really quite good, especially for those who want to improve their basic conversation skills. 

Looking for something a bit more advanced? Then you could try youtube again and search for 'JLPT listening'. These contain plenty of natural conversations. Of course, these don't come with transcripts so be sure to select a level that you can comfortably follow without translation. The conversations can be quite long and replaying each sentence requires some skilful mouse work (but no less fiddly than the using the purpose made CD's that Chocopie and I were previously discussing), but the speaking style is nice and clear and not too fast that words seem to mash together).

I also sometimes shadow Japanese in slow Japanese. This is difficult to play line by line, unless you pay a subscription fee for premium access, so you need to shadow the entire thing in one go, but they're usually short, and even the 'fast' version is a lot slower than conversational Japanese. 

For those who aren't shy to part with their money, you can also use Japanesepod101. I adore this site as it took me through much of my intermediate level through to upper intermediate. There are some free access lessons too, so you might at least take a look at those. Lower levels have a slow version of the dialogue which some learners might find useful for shadowing. I personally found it tricky to play line by line, so again, I used to shadow the whole dialogue in one go, but for premium members there is a line-by-line option, and even a little voice recorder so you can compare to the original. A pretty useful tool if you don't mind paying a little more money. 

I hope this is useful to those of you who want to give the shadowing technique a try! Happy learning!