Hear, hear. Just because everything can be a sentence source, that doesn’t mean everything should. Pick what can be picked easily (usually that means Internet…copy-paste baby). The rest of the time, be a bum; be lazy; be passive. Just listen. Just glance. Just read. Just enjoy.

Thanks, きのこ, for the healthiest advice on all of AJATT! 😀

Personally I’d just watch the anime for fun and get my vocabs elsewhere, but that’s just me.

No one is talking about anime! I specifically said “I can understand people who worry about translated things like scanlations and fansubs.” I also said “Publishing companies aren’t losing customers when people outside Japan pirate BOOKS,” since obviously very few people outside Japan know enough Japanese to enjoy a novel. You were the one making the ridiculous proposition that pirated novels would have a serious effect on the variety of Japanese literature if ebooks were more common in Japan, and that is what I was responding to. Are you capable of understand that even though English is a very widely spoken language and English books are pirated prolifically, this has not had a negative effect on the variety and amount of literature produced, and therefore there is no reason to expect problems if this were to happen with a more narrowly spoken language like Japanese?

Anime is a very different case, because there are multiple reasons sales are declining. The biggest is probably just the economy. As far as US sales go, the issue is that people are no longer willing to wait a year or two or three for a new show to be licensed and dubbed. The companies with slow and bad distribution methods are at fault, not the fansubs (many of which are produced and downloaded by fans in countries that rarely get any official anime releases, thus not having an effect on sales).

This isn’t the place to argue about this, but I’ll just quickly note that anime industry sales are down heavily in the U.S., which contrary to what you say is a huge market for Japan. The problem is so bad that the Japanese government even requested the U.S. government take action (animeanime.jp/biz/archives/2007/10/post_228.html).

What? That makes absolutely no sense. Do you really believe what you’re implying? Even if ALL Japanese books were pirated and freely available for anyone to download, that still wouldn’t affect the variety and amount of printed materials. Japanese people love books and manga, and there is always going to be a market for printed books. Ebooks can’t truly replace them.

It’s always funny when people try to imply that anyone outside of Japan is having any effect on the television/anime/book/manga industry by downloading pirated material. It really doesn’t matter at all what we do; sales depend on a Japanese consumer base. Japanese is not at all an international language, so there is basically no demand for untranslated materials outside the country. People in Japan have little incentive to pirate books/manga because they are cheap and they don’t have to pay shipping. Publishing companies aren’t losing customers when people outside Japan pirate books, because that was never the targeted market in the first place. It’s ludicrous to think that a fan outside Japan can have any effect on the Japanese economy by downloading a book.

I can understand people who worry about translated things like scanlations and fansubs, but untranslated novels? Seriously?

(Also note that the variety of printed materials available in English has not decreased in the slightest, even though English e-books are heavily pirated. No matter how much material in any language is pirated, people will still buy things that are worth buying.)

…must finish RTK! I’ll get to 1000 in the next day or two…

Most of the pirated Japanese books I’ve found are not in text/e-book format. They’re all just jpg files of scanned pages. Also, I haven’t found any kind of central repository where you can easily find whatever you’re looking for. I have downloaded a lot of books, but they all come from small communities that are interested in a particular subject, or individuals who scan the book themselves and put it on their blog. It’s mostly overseas fans and a few of their Japanese friends who are doing this. Most Japanese people would rather just buy the book.

Overall though, pirated Japanese text-based media is not nearly as easy to find as video files, especially real literature that’s actually worth reading. The vast majority of the novels that I’ve found are either light novels or BL novels, probably because those have way more foreign fans than the latest literary masterpiece. Raw manga is more abundant, but even then sometimes they’re harder to find than scanlations.

I still haven’t spent any money on Japanese material though, because luckily my local library has a lot of books in Japanese, donated by a Japanese company that has a factory in the area. The only downside is that they’re mostly from the 60s-80s. Even so, it’s great, because I can take a book and keep it as long as I like (they don’t have them cataloged electronically, it’s basically an honor system.) I’ve never seen anyone else, Japanese or not, getting any books from that section.

OK, don’t search for specific sentances and don’t do boring stuff. That’s pretty simple.

Another thing you can do, if you have a convenient screenshot utility, is just take screenshots of bits of comics. On the question side, you can blank out any furigana and even do a sylized cloze deletion. This takes about two seconds, with no typing and no mistakes, and results in more interesting cards.

What can I say. I have some good books with some good sentences. Check out the kodansha series.

Adding say, 15 good quality sentences might take me 20-30 minutes or so, but they are worth it.