You watched it HOW MANY times? - Let's Rewatch thread!

I have to go the other way, my listening skills is my worst of all =P
I have done it with Harry Potter though, so not like I never do listen first. But I catch a whole lot more of what they say if I read first and “know what to listen for” =P

I also learned the method as “know it first” (Watch with English sub first, listen without subs after)
I see more benefit that way than opposite way to be honest

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TL;DR: I strongly recommend, based on personal experience as someone who willingly – and at times incessantly – rewatches his favourite series while looking words up, that you turn more of your viewings into study sessions. 60 viewings is probably going to be way too much, and it’s not necessarily going to be rewarding from the entertainment and Japanese learning perspectives. Aiming to reach ‘no sub’ level within as few viewings as possible is much more efficient, will teach you tons more words and grammar in a short time, and will also be much more fun in the long run because after that, you’ll be able to watch the episodes while hearing exactly how characters feel in Japanese, which is often more authentic and enriching than what the subtitles provide. (Also, no offence meant to people who enjoy dubs, but because of differences in how each language expresses things and the need to match timings and animated mouth movements… dubs will never procure you the same level of enjoyment as the original. There’s a different feel to how characters behave. You need a language with similar forms of expression in order to achieve a similar feel.)

I guess I’ll just follow this thread because I’m curious how it’ll go. Plus, maybe it’ll be a good place for me to recount my own rewatching adventures! However…

I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but this sounds really hard, even if you absolutely love the series. One of the first anime I’d ever watched, which I really adored, was something I watched over and over for… maybe 6 months? It was Konosuba. I had 20 episodes to go through, excluding OVAs, which I only viewed once or twice each. That makes for 180 days/20 episode = 9 viewings per episode, assuming I only rewatched one episode per day. (That wasn’t always the case though…:stuck_out_tongue:) All in all, I’m pretty confident that I stayed under 20 viewings per episode, and as my calculations have just showed, I don’t think I ever went past 10. By the time I decided to move on to another anime, I have to say… I was pretty tired. I mean, I still enjoyed the episodes when I watched them, but I finally felt like I had enough. I could visualise what happened almost scene by scene, and I knew exactly what was going to happen next before it happened. (The same thing happened after I had watched Avatar: The Last Airbender a few times though, so perhaps I just have a really good memory for stories I like.) At the time, I was still… intermediate, I guess? I was halfway through my first textbook, and my knowledge was probably somewhere between N4 and N3. The end result was this: I had very good listening skills after all that, because I even fell asleep with episodes playing in my ears, and I could easily catch all the syllables when I started the Tobira textbook afterwards. However… I definitely didn’t reach 100% comprehension, and I don’t think I caught more than 40% of the words that were said in any given episode. Granted, I didn’t really have Japanese subtitles until the end, but see, even then, I didn’t have to time to figure out what was being said unless I paused the video. It was too hard to read everything in time, especially because at the time, I knew tons of kanji (thanks, Chinese), but not how to say them in context in Japanese. I only started reaching 60% comprehension towards the end because I had been studying Japanese with other resources and looking up a few words.

What I’m trying to say with that long story is this: I don’t think repeating it for 60 days, once a day, is going to be very effective or very fun. I have nothing against rewatching: I’m a serial offender, as you can clearly tell, and I’ve seen entire seasons of most of my favourite anime at least twice, if not four or five times. Also, I think that How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift? is a really good rewatch candidate, because it’s fun and bursting with energy. In fact, right now, I intend to rewatch it again soon: I feel it would be good workout motivation! :grin: However, the problem is that even with subtitles, unless you’re taking the time to pause and study the video as new words come up, and make at least a slight effort to remember them, your comprehension levels aren’t going to increase much. The result is going to be that as the 60 days wear on, you’re not only going to be enjoying the episode less and less because it’s not new anymore, but you’re also going to become more and more frustrated (if you get serious about such things, I mean) about the fact that you’re not understanding much more. Because of the speed of speech in anime, some lines literally can’t be broken down aurally unless you stop the video and learn all the words before listening again. Your brain won’t be able to parse the words fast enough because they’re not familiar, and it’ll just sound like a jumbled mess.

What I suggest you try is to lengthen (if possible) your ‘no sub’ and ‘Japanese sub’ days into vocabulary and grammar study sessions. Pause the video when you can and look up what’s being said. If you want to ‘no sub’ while having a ‘cheat sheet’ in the background for lookups if you can’t catch what’s being said at all, then you have two options:

  1. Use a site/player that allows you to turn subtitles on and off, and turn them on when necessary
  2. (This is what I do.) Go see if the anime has been transcribed with screenshots on Anicobin or some other site. For example, you can search「ンベル何キロ持てる?1話 感想 アニコビン/anicobin」and see what comes up. There’s typically at least one site (Anicobin being the best I’ve found so far) that contains screenshots with the dialogue transcribed. You can get up to 95% of everything that’s been said on some anime. Not quite as good as subtitles, but close enough. The bonus is this: you can copy and paste the words directly into a dictionary and look through examples and definitions. I know some subtitle sites and software allow you to use a built-in dictionary, but they’re rarely as good as dictionaries that offer examples.

The point of this approach is that every time you rewatch afterwards, your brain will be looking out for – and will often catch – the words you’ve just learnt. You can achieve 60% comprehension – or even 80-100% comprehension – much, much faster this way. Sure, it makes watching an episode more time-consuming: I think I spent 1h per 20-min episode on Shield Hero over summer, when I was aiming to learn absolutely every word. However, just for some perspective: that was maybe my fifth viewing of the series, and I only looked things up for… 2-3 of those five viewings? I was already deciphering about 80-90% of the words said per episode at that point. I know that you’re probably a bit less advanced now than I was then, but my point is this: with serious study, or at least a few look-ups and attentive transcription reading across 5-10 viewings, at least 80% comprehension should be attainable. 60 viewings is way too many, and you’ll probably get sick of the series by viewing number 20. You’ll have a lot more fun with intensive study and fewer viewings. Plus, believe me: when you’re able to watch without subtitles and understand almost everything, you’ll feel soooo happy. Getting to that point in fewer viewings is much more efficient and far more rewarding.

All that said, whatever you choose, I’m happy that you’re fired up, and impressed by your commitment. 頑張って!

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Day two is done. I watched it twice again :sweat_smile: Both times with Japanese subtitles. The first time completely uninterrupted (so it took roughly twenty minutes), the second time I pauzed here and there for some stuff that I just really couldn’t figure out anymore what was being said. (I still remembered the rough context of the scenes, but some sentences were a mystery).

I’ve also decided to make a 30 second / day vocab & grammar breakdown to work my way through the episode slowly. I picked 30 seconds because it wouldn’t take that much time, and it would mean I had something ongoing / fun to do throughout most of the experiment. I might still wait a few days before I start kicking items into Kitsun (because my goal was 20 words / day), or I might just start adding all new vocab from those 30 second “mini study sessions” instead. I’m going to sleep a night on which direction I would prefer :smile_cat:


@Jonapedia, first of all, thanks for the thorough and well-thought-out reply, as always! :smile_cat:

While I agree with your general premise that this isn’t going to be the most efficient way (and also not the most fun way) to go about things, there are a few reasons I have chosen to attempt this still :

  • The first for me is that listening is BY FAR my weakest subject. When I’m watching anime I always have Japanese subtitles on, this does allow me to catch a lot more of what’s going on than when I am watching without subtitles. I have in the past tried to watch an episode of an anime repeatedly without subs, and my comprehension could be described as 5 - 10% at best. After carefully checking the subtitles afterwards, many things I considered I had understood were wrong, I had missed a particle, misunderstood something that tied in to the previous sentence, misheard a word, …
  • Secondly, I want to see what it would be like if I memorized (in the context of this episode) 438 sentences, in order, in context and knowing every word / pronunciation. I have studied thousands of context sentences through SRS before, but I have to admit that I can’t recall way too many of them when encountering a word / grammar point in the wild. I think I might have a better time when knowing an episode front-to-back word-for-word. Will this be the case? Only one way to find out :stuck_out_tongue:

Just listening without any active learning was never the intention behind this experiment. I fully agree with you on this. While at first my intention was to just start kicking in 20 words / day into an SRS (starting on day 10) and try and let the grammar sort itself out organically, I have already drifted of this path after several days. As you can read in the beginning of my post, I have started doing 30-second dig-downs into vocab and grammar already, to make a cheat sheet as you so nicely call it :smile_cat:

This site sounds great! Will look into this when I get home :smile_cat: Was planning on just working from a subtitle file, but screenshots would be an amazing help. Thanks for the tip!

Oooooh, that sounds like a great idea for some targeted studying ^^ I’m going to steal it for some studies outside of this experiment :smile_cat:

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Just a caveat I forgot to add: this site typically only has stuff for anime that were released after 2013. I think ダンベル is on it because I did do a search for the transcription, but it’s been a while, so I’m not completely certain if I found it.

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On the Netflix page they have a few free sample videos before you buy a subscription. They have the first episode as a free sample.

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Another day another dollar watch through. This time without subtitles. I felt like I could pick up more of what was actually being said than I normally can. Whether this is due to knowing what’s being said already, or multiple exposures is hard to say. I still couldn’t pick up quite a lot and there were many moments where I noticed that I “got the gist” because I knew what was being said without completely understanding what was ACTUALLY said. Still, interesting results as always. :smile_cat:

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It’s time folks.
Listened- 3 times
English subs -2 times
Japanese subs- 3 times
No subs - 2 times

First I’ll do a quick sentence mining. I’ll grab all the sentences with that precious +1 word that I don’t know. I’ll anki all those . This will take some time.

Then later on I plan on translating everything just because. There’s obviously some words I don’t need to know like Pyrokinesis etc etc but I do want to know, you know?

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Completely abandoned the songs.
There’s already an opening song and ending song on the anime. I’ll study those.

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Oh how めんどくさい
I can’t take screenshots of videos
Kind of wish we owned a computer

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what kind of phone are you using? On both iphone and android ircc, if you press the volume and lock button at the same, it should take a screenshot

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Screenshots of videos in the Netflix app actually show up as black screens.
They’re clever tricksters.


For example

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Oh yeah, Amazon does that sometimes too. Screw people trying to get reference images :roll_eyes:

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I get a note on the screen that says the action is not permitted. All is okay! If I back out of the web page it will show the words with a black screen. Then I can take a screenshot.

A little annoying but that’s fine.

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I quite enjoy your user name

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Oh this is a great idea! I might try this in the future.

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Day four : Life was really intense for a bit. I managed to watch the episode again (english subtitles) but I had to watch it while cooking / eating. My attention wasn’t as focused as I would have wanted it to be, but I could follow along with the story due to the familiarity of the episode throughout. I will probably give it an extra watch through on day six to make up for this. Did not manage to do my 30 seconds of drill down either, so will do a minute drill down on day six.

Day five : I managed to pick up a few more words here and there but all-in-all i wouldn’t describe my comprehension as more clear than the last time. Still, I feel like it’s getting slightly easier to keep up with the dialogue.

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So, I figured I wouldn’t mind giving this a try…

I picked something with EN subs (no JP subs unfortunately), and watched through it to understand what was going on. After watching it the second time, I found it was mostly as unintelligible as the first time.
So for my third watch I am going second by second, sentence by sentence. I find that repeating the sentence a few times (or a lot of times if I struggle), definitely helps. I recognize more words and I’ve already learned a handful of new words that I was able to discern and could look up (but without JP subs the more complex sentences are currently beyond lookup capability). I’m staying with the first minute and a half of it for today - it takes a lot of time this way. But I think it has potential (or I simply need to pick something easier).
Rewatching will likely become more smooth once I get through this initial dissection of it.

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I’m noticing there is a little bit of difference between the official translation chosen for the video vs the goodle translation.

これにはさすがの母親も動揺した

google translate :This really upset my mother

netflix: that’s when my mom finally started to worry.

My translation: this of course upset my mom

I’m pretty lazy and they are basically the same. A little different. Interesting right?

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I watch in sets of 5 minutes. I can’t sit down and watch 20 minutes of anything.

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This sounds interesting! I probably won’t do it for a while since I’m still just starting out with Japanese, but this is a cool idea. Where are you all getting the episodes with Japanese subtitles and without any subtitles? If it’s on Netflix that makes it easier, but I’d probably end up going with something Netflix doesn’t have.

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