Zyaga Writing about whatever the hell I want, cuz it's the Interwebz!

Getting Rid of English Sites and Subs!

Part of immersing yourself in Japanese involves limiting your contact with your L1 (native language, which is English for me), and replacing it with Japanese contact. An instance of this would be visiting Japanese websites instead of English websites, reading JP books instead of ENG books, etc. We already covered video games earlier this past week. The next big time sucker is websites!

LeechBlock

Everyone does it, we all browse too many websites that waste our time, every single day. Think of sites like Reddit or Digg. They generally don’t provide us with much, other than a bit of entertainment. I’m not putting them down, since there is no difference between that kind of entertainment and all others (video games, shows, movies, etc). Rather, I’m saying if, and when, you’re going to chill out and relax, do it in Japanese. Find Japanese websites to replace the sites you currently visit. There may be no equivalent, that’s very possible, however I have a hard time believing that you can’t find some other Japanese website to waste time on.

The same goes for websites like Hulu. I’ve always been a big fan of Hulu, even though they eventually added in ads, etc. Free streaming TV shows? Hell yeah. Yet, I’ve recently decided that enough was enough. It wasn’t my lack of dedication to Japanese. It was simply that Hulu was too easy to get to. It was just as easy to get to as my Japanese media. That’s where LeechBlock (or any of the other plugins like it) steps in.

LeechBlock is a plugin for Firefox that allows you to block websites for a period of time or permanently. The only way to get those websites back is to go in and edit the blacklist. So, sure, you could easily go unblock the site when you wanted to, but it at least provides an extra step in between you and that website. The harder it becomes to get to those sites each time, the less you’ll want to do it, therefore the easier it is to resist and load up Japanese media instead.

Above is an another example of how I block tasks such as email for periods of time. Basically, the rule above says that I’m allowed to access those websites in the block list (What to Block tab) for 10 minutes every 4 hours. This way I trim down the time I spend constantly checking my email, etc. This allows me to focus quickly on email when it’s email time, but then to let go and not worry about my email during the blocked hours because I know I can’t get to it for awhile anyway.

Note: Here is a Chrome version called StayFocusd.

Disable Subs Automagically

Not everyone uses VLC, but… I do. Thus, I’m going to show you how to disable subs automatically, with the point of this being to make enabling subs one extra step. If subs automatically start playing, it takes an extra step just to turn them off! We definitely want it the other way around. Really, this applies to any media player, you just need to figure out how to do the same thing in whatever media player you use. There are basically 3 types (keeping it simple) of subs:

1. Subs that are separate files (such as an .srt file).
2. Subs that are built into the video file, but can be disabled.
3. Subs that are encoded into the video itself and cannot be disabled.

There is nothing you can really do about the 3rd type of sub, except for download a different version. However, we can disable the 1st and 2nd types of subs, in 5 easy steps.

1. Go to Tools -> Preferences
2. Click All down in the left hand corner
3. Click on Input / Codecs
4. Set both Subtitles track and Subtitles track ID to 0
5. Click Save and restart VLC

Next time you load a video that has subs built in, that would normally automatically be enabled, they will be disabled instead!