Learning Japanese with Super Simple Nihongo

Often when I am trying to learn Japanese, I watch videos.

This is good and bad.

The good side is that I can often pick up new words and sentence structures, and it helps with my listening comprehension.

The bad side is that often the conversation is too advanced for me.

The main problem for me is that the conversations are too fast.

The speed issue is a little difficult to deal with, however, with YouTube I can at least press the pause button and use rewind.

Even with pause and rewind sometimes I still cannot tell exactly what words are being said.

So I was very glad to have discovered a Japanese language video series specifically aimed at young Japanese children called "Super Simple Nihongo".

As the name suggests it plays songs and stories that are spoken or sung in very basic Japanese language and grammar.

The content of the videos are generally spoken very clearly and slowly and often use a lot of repetition.  The speed and repetition are incredibly useful in picking up new words, or words that are easy to confuse in Japanese.

One extremely useful feature of the videos is that they are subtitled in English and Japanese.  All you have to do is click the YouTube close caption button and select which version of the subtitles you want to see.

Being able to switch to Japanese subtitles really helps, as being able to see and hear the original Japanese can really help to clear up confusion.

Super Simple Nihongo has a large collection of videos and they are well worth a watch.  Just be prepared to allocate a lot of time.

I recently listened to the Japanese version of "Hickory Dickory Dock" and it will leak into your brain very quickly.

Just for my own amusement I decided to translate the words:

ヒッコリー[hikkorii] = Hickory
ディッコリー[dikkorii] = Dickory
ドック[dokku] = Dock

ネズミ[nezumi] = mouse
蛇[hebi] = snake
リス[risu] = squirrel
猫[neko] = cat
サル[saru] = money
ゾウ[zou] = elephant

登る[noboru] = climb (up)

一[ichi] = one
二[ni] = two
三[san] = three
四[yo] = four
五[go] = five
六[roku] = six

時[ji] = o'clock/hour
だよ[dayo] = it is you know
えー[eeh] = erm/er
駆け下りる[kakeoriru] = climb down
チクタク[chikutaku] = tick tock

So should I ever need to burst in to nursery rhyme when in Japan, I can!

Thank you - Super Simple Nihongo!