Could life be better? I submit that it could not!! No, I know it could, but DANG…it’s pretty good right now. Why? Why, you ask? Because you can buy the entire script (yes, the actual text as spoken by each character, plus a little bit of scenario/stage direction for clarity) of Tiger & Dragon [plus the prequel] in book form! Woohoo! My local library had it, and I’ve been reading it today, and it is, what is the word — the bomb.
Anyway, it sounds like good fun for all you drama lovers out there. By the way, I think other TV dramas also have book-form scripts/screenplays. However, you should be careful to actually confirm the contents before you buy these, since I noticed that the book-forms of, at least, American dramas like Prison Break and 24 are more like novelizations (less strict on rendering character dialogue exactly as it was said in the show) than scripts.
I can’t believe it took me this long to find out about stuff like this…
By the way, the collective name for these is シナリオ本(ぼん） — “scenario books”.
[New information: w00t! You don’t have to buy the book! Many TV drama scripts are available online here. Here’s the Tiger & Dragon one! [all main episodes…no prequel in sight, though…]
Yes, I’d meant to post a comment about these scripts but I never got around to it. I bought the Tiger and Dragon script a while back as well as the script for the second season of Dr. Koto. They seem to be listed under シナリオ, at least the one for Dr. Koto was. I would assume that scripts are only available for series that have exact subtitles, although I don’t really know.
>They seem to be listed under シナリオ
Right! 😀 Thanks for that, I just added it.
>I would assume that scripts are only available for series that have exact subtitles
Good assumption. I don’t really know either way, but I wouldn’t be surprised…
Hey khatzumoto, since you are learning chinese… have you found anything similar for chinese dramas?
Khatzumoto-san,
How many example sentences of each new word/grammar should I put into my SRS?
I currently put at least 3-4, more if I feel like it, is this too little or too much?
I just do as much as I can of anything, until I get bored. That’s my pattern.
But sometimes, I add like 15 examples for 1 grammar word, will I hit the 10000 too soon without learning as much as I could have? I’m currently going at about 130 items in my SRS a day
Not at all. What you’re doing sounds perfect.
konnichiwa khatzumoto-sensei~
I found a website on the net a week or so ago. they have the scripts for several japanese dramas (including recent ones!) Here is the site:
dramanote.seesaa.net/
and their new site:
www.dramanote.com/
i can’t comment on the quality of the scripts though (i.e. how close they are to the spoken japanese), but I followed one while watching an episode of 電車男 and it was pretty close~! This could be a good resource for studying spoken Japanese dialogue and/or checking on those few words you missed while watching your favorite drama~!
是非チェックアウトしてね～
WOW! 凄いね、これ！That’s really cool! Now that I think about it…I get the feeling someone mentioned this in the past and I lost it in my rigid email management system. Thank you!
is there anything like that for アニメ？ though i suppose the 漫画 would usually suffice.
i haven’t been able to find anything on anime yet… but that won’t stop me from searching~!
khatzumoto-sensei~
i was wondering if you could recommend any resources (drama, books, anything in japanese ^^) that one could use to learn/mine 警護 and ビジネス日本語. I work at a japanese company in US, and I’d like to learn some of these expressions to 1. grow in japanese, 2. impress my japanese bosses/superiors, 3. be on the ‘fast(er) track’ to getting a project/relocation in japan. any recommendations would be most appreciated~
thanks and glad you enjoy the drama site~!
>警護
I take it you mean 敬語 :D. That one always comes up for me, too!
For my interviews, I looked up these
敬語
ビジネスメール
面接
ビジネスメール２
ビジネス文書
Generally, the first 4-5 hits should serve you well.
@ quendidil: 130 items per day! Man, I envy you. I’m lucky to get in 10 per day, and even then I’ve probably put in an hour on that. What am I doing wrong? I’m copying examples from text books. So I have to type in the sentences with kanji. Then in the answer field I type in the hiragana for the sentence. Then I type the example translation. Finally if there are notes to add I’ll do those.
Lately, as I improve, I only add hiragana for kanji I don’t know how to pronounce. Still, this takes some time to do. What should I do to speed up this process? Any ideas? I’ve been working at this for most of the summer and only have 880 or so example sentences in my SRS. Of course, I generally only have 30 – 60 minutes available a day to enter stuff into Mnemosyne.
Thanks for any help!
Jerry,
I used to do the same thing, typing hiragana was a KILLER. Now I use Anki and my SRS woes are gone forever. Auto-hiragana is awesome. It also supports importing from Mnemosyne, and quite frankly, I have never looked back to Mnemosyne once I tried Anki. The author constantly updates the programs (with feedback from users).
Get it from repose.cx/anki/
I guess this has become the official thread for the program:
forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=556&p=1
Thanks a ton for the link, mashuu83. That should speed up the sentence-mining process 😀
The online scripts for タイガー＆ドラゴン seem to have a lot of holes in them. Is that because there’s a lot of ad-libbing done on stage?
@shayd
he does — it’s part of what’s so cool about him…adds extra realism/character to the character.
Khatzu, since there’s a nice script site, what other TV shows would you recommend that are of the same caliber as タイガー＆ドラゴン ? The last list you gave centered around subtitles, but I’d be interested in good shows even if the subtitles are lacking.
By the way, do other shows display life in Japan like Tiger and Dragon did? Not that I’m an expert, but it seemed to give you a cross sectional look at areas fuch as: Theater, Love Hotels, Hostess Bars, Spas, Resorts, Formal dinners, restaurants, family meals, game shows, etc. Granted, no one ever seemed to take the train anywhere. Storyline aside, how realistic would you rate T&D?
@Charles
Nice timing, I was just writing an article about my favorite shows (regardless of subs), I’ll be putting it up soon.
T&D was very realistic (8/10? 9/10?), both in terms of dialogue and in terms of age cross-section — people really do talk like that. A lot of other shows are more “realistic” in terms of storyline or situation (girl works at company and falls in love), but have stiff, fake dialogue that’s delivered without life or feeling: it’s like the first draft of the script and they’re reading it word for word…
Tiger & Dragon was for me an excellent show.
I would agree that it is very different compared to your run-of-the-mill drama; story-wise, it’s highly original. And not only was the show itself funny and entertaining, but the cast were a highly memorable bunch too. (Plus I loved how the classical rakugo stories revealed in each episode could be weaved into the stories of the main characters themselves. In fact, for most of the episodes, the sudden coming in of the punchline always managed to surprise me.)
Glad to know that the dialogue’s realistic (‘colloquial’?) though! (Especially since I’ve ripped out the audio and printed the Japanese subtitles for all episodes of Tiger & Dragon, and am working my way through them now.) Looking forward to your next article, Khatzumoto!
Khatzumoto, one question: do yakuza members really speak the way Tora (and Ginjiro, and Ginjiro’s father) does, i.e. in that mumbled, lazy-jawed manner?
LoL! I don’t really know any yakuza personally, Wan-san! :). But…the way Ginjiro’s dad talks is far closer to REAL kansai-ben than the dumbed-down-for-Tokyo-people “何でやねん” version you usually see on TV.
Ginjiro talks more or less like a ヤンキー.
Ginjiro’s dad talks like a lot of men do in every country in the world — mumbled and slack-jawed; regardless of country, it always seems to be women that are the ones who speak clearly.
I’ve been going through the Tiger and Dragon scripts on Drama Note. It seems to me that much of the dialogue from the show had been left out, and/or converted into narration form instead. Could you please confirm this for me with the Shibahama episode, Khatzumoto? (Because if this is true, it would mean that I can’t rely fully on the website.)
Well, I’ve just got Tiger and Dragon from Amazon.co.jp, and I am looking forward to watching it…
Right now though I’m enjoying the Fuji TV series ‘Security Police’ (available at d-addicts). The dialogue is available at dramanote.com ( www.dramanote.com/?cid=27078 ). If anyone hasn’t been following this, I recommend it – it’s great fun 🙂
BTW – when you’ve got a moment Khatz, could you just give a *general* comment on the accuracy of the Japanese at dramanote – I assume it’s all good stuff, but I’d hate to enter hundreds of sentences from dramanote only to later discover that all the scripts there are typed by dsylexic 5 year olds.
I don’t really care whether the dialogue on dramanote is absolutely accurate with regard to having every single line of dialogue from a drama — I just want to know that I can enter it into my SRS with confidence that the Japanese itself is good and doesn’t contain grammar/vocab errors.
Thanks!
@Mark
DramaNote is totally OK.
Excellent website!
I’m using so much of what you wrote.
I tried to find the actual complete dialogue/transcript for Trick, either on dramanote or on amazon japan.. Of course, I can read only about 1200 kanji yet. I still have about three weeks of work to do with remembering the kanji… but with shipping times and all, I’d like to be ready and have all my material for when I’m done.. Do you know where I could find it?
Also,.. I know of one bittorrent site for japanese media: tokyo toshokan (www.tokyotosho.com/index.php), but I haven’t found more yet (that have any significant amount of real japanese stuff). Do you know any? Living in Canada, here you can’t really find much in videostores…
Thanks again for this great website!
Hi again!
I’d like to add a question to my previous post: does anybody know if the japanese subtitles for Star Trek the next generation season 3 or 4, dubbed in japanese, are an exact match to the japanese voice.. ?
Thanks again for the great website!
@Bob Smith
>does anybody know if the japanese subtitles for Star Trek the next generation season 3 or 4, dubbed in japanese, are an exact match to the japanese voice.. ?
I have not checked, but I can answer “no” with 99% certainty.
just ot let you know your link for dramanote is out of date. here is the new one.
dramanote.seesaa.net/
I like the site, and you are an inspiration. All the way, dude!
I have been living in kyoto for two years with my japanese wife, and have made slow progress in my japanese due to my own laziness. I needed the kick in the bu** that reading this site gave me, so thanks for blazing the trail…
guys..
need ur help..
where can download full japanese drama script ?
reason : I’m studying the language
thanks
The links to T&D script dont have the script anymore. I just purchased the chinese or cantonese(?? cant read the box) DVD box set for $30 and it has the japanese voice/subs on it and some other language as well. The video quality is a little worse than ther version I downloaded previously, but for $30 compared to the $170 on amazon its worth it
Hey, anyone know of a Chinese equivalent of that dramanote site? It’d be cool to find scripts of some of my favourite Taiwanese dramas…but I can’t seem to find any *fail* ^^;;
Thanks in advance!
updated link for T&D www.dramanote.com/?cid=32474 The site is a bit overwhelming at first, mainly because of all the ads, you eyes don’t know what they’re looking for. The link has the episodes from recent to oldest. i.e. the first episode you see is the last episode. Once you find it, it’s just pure text–no download link or anything.
Has anyone turned these into subs or know where to find Japanese subs for this show?
Help with dramanote.
I just want to ask if there is a Japanese language software I need to install to read that site? Because I keep getting these types of symbols on my page when I click into it.
�ʡ���ӥ塼������İ�����ḫ�������
It’s driving me nuts!! I am trying to get Voice and SP’s transcripts!! It’ll be great if someone can help. Thanks
やったー！！！！！！！！
「任侠ヘルパー」があるよ！！！！
Someone above asked where one can find anime scripts, so here’s a link:
neoending.web.fc2.com/
This site contains transcriptions for the first and last episodes of several anime, game, and special effects live action titles. Scripts from these kinds of shows don’t exactly have the most realistic or challenging material, but perhaps there are still many expressions found in everyday situations which can be picked up from these scripts.
updated link for タイガー＆ドラゴン scripts
www.dramanote.com/category/7359244-1.html
First: thank you khatzumoto. You’re my hero. 🙂
Second: For all of us who enjoyed the “お前の母ちゃん” line:
I’m not sure if someone already posted the link, but here’s the link for the subtitles for Tiger and Dragon:
www.d-addicts.com/forum/viewtopic_90451.htm
Depending on your version of the movie files, your subtitles might need editing (for timing), but you can put in a “delay” command (positive or negative delay) in the subtitle files (you can find the instructions in the files themselves, at the top). For linux, try: smplayer. It handles subtitles very well. In smplayer, you can fine tune the subtitle timing as well. Enjoy!
Could you give me a japanese scripted movie or a japanese movie script
project-modelino.com/movie-review.php?site_language=english&learn_language=japanese&movie=195
I thought someone posted this but now I not so sure if anyone did… So here it is… Enjoy ^_^
P.S. I use KM player and use the right subtitle button (increase subtitle delay to 17000ms after a certain area during the show to sync) Also for some unknown reason I cannot find out why the even number shows don’t show the subs.. O_O But the subs are still there none the less…
I have combed this website over and over and i am unable to find the scripts! I Dont know why i cant find them, can someone direct me to them?
Chiko