• AernaLingus [any]
    ·
    18 days ago

    Thank you for sharing additional resources! Those will definitely be helpful for getting more naturalistic speech, and obviously YouTube is a practically infinite source of input. Now that you mention it, I've actually seen Youglish used by Dr. Geoff Lindsey (he makes wonderful videos about English phonetics if that's your jam), but I never realized you could use it for other languages.

    Is it just me, or is there a crazy amount of VTubers in the Filmot results? Not that I'm complaining (quite the opposite), but that just seems improbable; it makes sense that there will be a general bias towards streamers, since they pump out hours upon hours of dialogue-heavy video, but I can't imagine Hololive and Nijisanji make up half the streamers on YouTube. Might just be that the default sort tends to weigh videos with more views.

    I did think about using the hiragana, but I figured I had to pick one or the other and just went with the kanji. It'd be nice if I could do a regex-type search to capture both examples (like what I did with my local search), but it's not a major hardship to have to do two separate searches and there's only a relatively small subset of words where both the kanji and the kana form are common.

    (also I love that in the three search results you showed me I was immediately presented with Ichiro my beloved, Kumiko my beloved (nice handle and profile pic btw), and Korone my beloved)

    • Kumikommunism [they/them]
      ·
      18 days ago

      Another Kumiko enjoyer, you say? Thank you.

      Show

      Yeah, I've seen Dr. Lindsey use it, too. Great channel. I used it for a long time when learning Japanese and it was very helpful for audio clips for studying.

      As to the VTubers, I think it's just that there are like 50 huge VTubers, who can all afford to stream almost every day, and they all yap so much that they are going to have a video that contains any even decently common word. I don't watch VTubers that much, but I like Marine and she alone probably puts out half the dictionary in like 10 minutes. They are perfect learning material though. (Except for that cursed loud background music that would be in every audio clip you saved).

      • AernaLingus [any]
        ·
        18 days ago

        Hibike is one of my all-time favorite shows--feels like Kyoto Animation created a show specifically for me, honestly. Somehow I have still yet to watch the two original movies and S3 (I know, I know!), so at this point I'll just wait for the all the S3 BDs to come out and watch them all in one fell swoop.

        Except for that cursed loud background music that would be in every audio clip you saved

        Ugh, the bane of my existence, even for English-language streams. It wouldn't be quite so bad if everyone had proper audio compression and ducking set up, but I'm constantly amazed at the shocking state of even veteran streamers' audio. If I'm watching a VOD where it's particularly bad I'll sometimes go as far as to use demucs (a machine-learning-powered tool for splitting music into stems) to isolate the vocals and mux that back into the video to preserve my sanity.

        • Kumikommunism [they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          18 days ago

          YES. I actually relate more to Kumiko more than any character ever. The show is strangely very important to me. It's my favorite piece of media. But it is definitely worth it to watch the rest in good quality. And I'm not sure where you are at with Japanese or still studying, but the novels are very good reading material!

          And I was worried about being thought of as too negative for the audio thing, but I'm so glad someone else relates lol. I actually did a ton of audio editing on clips I used for note cards for Japanese. I had a whole pipeline for AI noise reduction -> ReplayGain (which thankfully Anki supports). I hadn't heard of demucs, so I'll check it out. I used a few open sourced ones, but then I just turned to my pirated Adobe software.

          And it is crazy to me that streamers seem to not care about sound that much, but I do know that most people don't notice the same things as me, so I get it. The bigger ones all seem to use the same bass-boosted mic and either no compression, or so much compression I feel like I'm trapped in a box with them. My favorite streamer, Northernlion, has the worst audio and refuses everyone's cries for him to fix it, but he's funny enough to get away with it.