A few posts ago I mentioned that I had a new project to target my deficient Japanese listening comprehension skills. I stated that I was going to watch one of my favorite movies one scene at a time, over and over again, in dubbed Japanese. I ended the post with the first line of the movie:

タイラー・ダーデンを知ってるか、何度も人に聞かれた。

If we decode the first few characters, タイラー・ダーデン, using the katakana chart we get “tairaa daaden”. Sound vaguely familiar? Here’s a sound file of the first line: “tairaa daaden o shitteru ka, nandomo hito ni kikareta”. Sound even more familiar?

Give Me The Answer Already!

That’s the Japanese pronunciation of “Tyler Durden”, one of the main characters of Fight Club! I first saw Fight Club at the movie theatre on my birthday many years ago. I’ve seen it many times since. I chose this movie to study for the following reasons:

1. It’s one of my favorite movies, so I am deeply familiar with it.
2. Most of the characters are men, so I don’t have to worry about picking up women’s Japanese. Japanese is a heavily gendered language, and a lot of male foreigners fall into the trap of emulating female friends and then sounding like girls when they speak Japanese.
3. I never get sick of this movie, so I can endure endless repetition. That’s something I wouldn’t be able to handle with a movie like Shrek.
4. The DVD is divided into 36 chapters. A two hour movie, divided by 36 chapters equals about 3-4 minutes per chapter. That’s very manageable.
5. It’s full of great lines!
6. I have a morbid curiosity to know how to say “blood parasites”, “compost heap” and “testicular cancer” in Japanese.
7. I happened to have the DVD sitting around in my apartment.

Watching a movie you love in a foreign language is a great way to study. You build your vocabulary, train your ears to natural-speed speaking and have fun at the same time. I don’t think I need to argue that quoting movies is one of everybody’s favorite past-times. When you start studying a movie in a foreign language, you will want to quote your favorite lines in that language - speaking practice!

Since the movie is familiar to you, you can usually guess at the meanings of the foreign words even if you’ve never encountered them before. If it gets too tough, you can always cheat and turn on subtitles. And since you love the movie, you will likely be motivated to see it through to the end! What a great feeling that will be to have watched an entire movie in a foreign language, with full comprehension!

So How Do You Do It?

I spent the last few days transcribing the first two chapters completely. To do that, I first ripped the audio from the DVD using a DVD audio ripping program. Then I used SoundForge to isolate parts of each chapter and slow them down to a speed where I could pick the sounds out. Finally I used a dictionary to determine what the words meant. The next step is learning all the vocabulary while listening to the chapters full-speed on repeat. Time to train the ears!

Back to the first sentence of the movie. If we translate the whole thing literally, we get something like “I’ve been asked many times by people, ‘Do you know Tyler Durden?’.” This isn’t too far off from the original, which goes “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.”

In fact, in studying the first two chapters of the movie, I’m surprised at how close the Japanese translation is to the original English. It’s almost word-for-word. The few places where it differs are interesting, but that discussion can wait until the next installment of Project Mayhem.

Stay tuned. Topics for the next installment:

1. Japanese has no vowels
2. How to say testicular cancer in Japanese

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