Kougakushin

Had what I thought was a good idea the other day: use one of the online movie rental services to keep stocked up with fresh titles in Japanese. DVDs are expensive and things can be a bit hit and miss with Japanese films so I signed up for the free trial at LoveFilm.com. Not off to a good start though; the World Cinema->Japanese section seems to be 80% anime with most of the remainder being J-horror… the former is full of language you can’t use and the latter just isn’t for me (they tend to be a bit low on dialogue anyway). I spent a full 30 minutes trawling the pages and ended up with a pitiful 8 titles. LoveFilm sent me the only anime title on the list, Appleseed: Ex Machina. My brother had sent me the trailer to the original Appleseed film back in 2004 and it had looked good so I added this to the list. First disk gets lost in the post. Second one makes it, and I find out it’s only in English and German! Where’s the Japanese? How can this disk come with English and German but not Japanese? The worst thing is that the trial (and the cheapest rental package) only lets you have one disk at a time. I figured this would be fine as I rarely watch DVDs and watching the same one a couple of times at least would help with understanding the Japanese. But no, it looks like I have to upgrade or else I risk being stuck with a pointless (and poorly animated I might add) DVD. It goes in the post tomorrow. What I’m going to do is continue trawling through the mass of inappropriate titles to find some that will actually help with learning useful Japanese. As and when I find them I’ll post them on this blog so that hopefully others can save time and skip right to the good stuff! Unfortunately the message this time is, don’t trust LoveFilm’s categorisation.