Japanese LR-Log

[hobom]

To make enough time for sufficient language study, I will try to keep this log as succint as possible:

For those who don't know what LR is:
Short for Listening-Reading, a method where you read a parallel text along to a recording of that text in your target language.
More information: http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_important_passages.htm

If you have never heard of this method, I strongly recommend going through this link. The author's writing style is a bit idiosyncratic, though appropirate, but the information there is extremely valuable and worht it.

In his original post on htlal, atamagaii wrote that using this method she was able to learn a language in two weeks, if I recall correctly.
Based on my experience with LR(two weeks Chinese, two weeks Spanish), atamagaii's hard core approach of just listening without memorizing only worked for Spanish, not Chinese. With a language like Chinese, I found that I was not able to decipher the meaning of individual words while I was listening, let alone remember that I had heard those words when the next instance of that word came along.

So this is why I have exprimented with the method a bit, and managed to learn a surprising amount of Chinese a while ago (however, my efforts were not very intensive, and thus likely not as successful as they could have been). Given my winter university break, I decided to use the next three weeks to study Japanese very intensively, my goal being to study for ca.12 hours a day. I have no prior knowledge. I hope that by laying out my approach and experiences other learners might give LR another try.

[hobom]

LR, my approach and my goals:

In this experiment, I will aim to achieve the following:

Right now, my priority is comprehension. I want to get to a level where I can comfortably consume interesting Japanese material, before I make an effort to speak and write.
Accordingly, I wont be working on my pronunciation.

My approach: As already mentioned, I have found that just listening and reading words is not enough for me to remember most words. I have found that an active memorization is necessary. Now, the genius principle of LR is that it allows you to consume huge amount of comprehensible input in a short period of time, so to be able to do both, I do the following:

Download a pop-up dictionary, in this case perapera, and add one word per new sentence to its wordlist.
Take parallel texts that meet the following requirements:
Sentence to Sentence alignment (not just on the paragraph level)
Texts that approximately have one or two unknown words per sentence
Translations should be close to the original, especially the sentence structure

Set the pace of the recording rather slow (usually something like 0.66 times the original speed, this can be increased later)
Now the difficult part is to memorize that one word while you are listening to that sentence and during the break before the next one. Maybe it's because of my crappy memory, but just repeating that word to me in my head is not sufficient, which is why I have to turn towards creating mental pictures and associations for that word. Those pictures don't have to be very creative, you just have to come up with them fast, practice helps a lot.
After two minutes or so, I repeat the words just added to the dictionary's wordlist once, and continue listening.

Bonus part: If at all possible, I would listen to music in the background, especially either instrumentals from films or game soundtracks. For most people, LR is very draining and exhausting, which makes it difficult to actually study the "required" 10-12 hours a day. Movie or game soundtracks are made to not be distracting but also motivating, additionally they make the text being read also more interesting.

[Evita]

Good luck, this sounds like a very ambitious project. But I'm a little confused. Unless I misunderstood something, you are a complete beginner in Japanese. Don't you have to learn the alphabets and kanji before you can start reading? And where will you find texts with only one or two unknown words per sentence if you don't know any words? Will you be L-Ring from textbooks?