A System for Japanese Listening Training Support with Watching Japanese Anime Scenes

As the widespread of Japanese entertainments and pop-cultures around the world, more and more people choose to learn Japanese as a foreign language (JFL). With the increasing of JFL learners, according to the survey of Japan Foundation, traditional materials are becoming inadequate for learners’ demands. For foreign language learning, the communication skills in listening and speaking would be more important and difficult at learning process, so are the JFL learners [1]. This research proposed a method using Japanese animation, which is called in the world, as a learning support material for training JFL learners’ Japanese listening skill. Anime has a huge amount of scenes in which the characters speak usually with the standard and clear pronunciations. These dialogue scenes could be useful examples of Japanese conversation for JFL learners to practice their speaking and listening. The proposed system classifies the dialogue scenes in Anime depending on the dialogues’ degrees of difficulty. We firstly subdivided the dialogue scenes from each Anime episode. The system analyzes Japanese words and expressions used in the Anime dialogues and compares those with the scripts of listening tests from the previous Japanese Language Proficiency Tests (JLPT), like TOEIC or TOEFL for English. The system uses the cosine similarity of Japanese words and expressions frequency to estimate the corresponding degree level for each Anime scene and provides the appropriate scenes to JFL learners for listening training. The experimental results showed that the proposed system worked successfully and improved the correct answer rate of JFL learners more than 10% in listening tests.