Japanese TV on Youtube

Those of us fortunate to live in Japan have ready access to the entertaining, infuriating  and informative medium which is Japanese TV. Think about it - free listening practice 24 hours a day, and the frequent use of subtitles means that viewers can get written confirmation of what they just listened to (some of those inaka interviewees would be incomprehensible without it...)  and may even pick up the odd kanji or two.

But no need for students of Japanese who don't live here to cry into their miso soup. You have the internet. You have Youtube.

I posted a one-off clip the other day of a US chap chatting in the J-go and since then I have been carrying out an exhaustive exploration of the wealth of Japanese  language video on Youtube (once I finished checking out all the obligatory Chinese youth lip-synching, cat-attacks-infant and stupid offer-speculation-but-no-proof conspiracy videos)

There are two ways two get started. Method One - from the Youtube home page click Video and then look for the Language menu on the lower left hand side of the screen. Click "Japanese" and you will be treated to the latest range of anime, sports, news and scantily clad idol videos posted by the Youtube  otaku army.

Method  Two is  more  coldly calculating -  use the search term function.  I turned up a bunch of videos using the following search terms:

日本語
ドラマ
ニュース
日本語弁論大会
島田紳助

The absolute golden find was however the series 日本語で暮らそう (Nihongo de kurasou) which is a 24 part NHK series of 20 minutes long episodes aimed at  intermediate learners of  Japanese.  Someone has kindly uploaded all 24 episodes so help yourself.

A third, subsidiary method is to note the name of the user who posted the particular video you fancy and see what else they have posted. I found a number of hardcore J-video posters and by subscribing to their feeds I get a steady supply of their latest offerings. Here are just a few examples:

DoctrWagnerJR
JECJimmy
lucidpink

Happy Youtube-ing!

Comments

[red mask]

Didn't youtube just go through a massive purge of Japanese shows for legal reasons?
Couple of the links you gave come up very dead.

:(

[Will Jasprizza]

Thanks for the heads up - I have fixed the links. And yeah, big time purge - http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/entertainment/news/20061020p2a00m0et018000c.html

[Alex]

A Japanese media group has recently had 30,000 clips removed from Youtube, so as a study resource Youtube is waning. On top of that, Youtube video quality is shoddy and there is no hassle-free option of downloading the video to your hard drive. Google video, on the other hand, tends to have higher-quality videos, and its own external program to cache the movies on your own system, but the downside is the user-base is smaller, and so I only have 日本語で暮らそう episodes 1-5, 10, 16, and 21.

I recently made a post on my site related to this topic, and I feel that media organizations world-wide are missing out on a fat market, providing an internet resource of shows that you can buy for a small fee, like Apple's store offering $0.99 episodes. The demand is there, it's just not being satisfied.