CrunchyRoll Tip: Use Left Arrow to Jump Back 10 Seconds

As a lifelong オタク, I like to use アニメ for Japanese listening practice. My latest fixations are BTOOOM! (ブトゥーム) and the classic 百獣王ゴライオン(Hyakujuuou Go-Lion, "King of All Beasts Go-Lion"), which American fans of my age probably better remember by the name Voltron.

CrunchyRoll is a great, legal way to watch a ton of アニメ. And in most cases, we Japanese learners can turn off subtitles and watch shows with raw dialogue. CR just put up the full run of ゴライオン (albeit with hard-coded English subtitles, but that isn't the end of the world), and it's a fun blast from the past. It's also strange watching the show in the original Japanese, as the show was edited considerably for a young American audience. But more on that in a later post.

At any rate, I split my アニメ　watching between watching raws in CrunchyRoll, and watching Japanese-subtitled shows in VLC. VLC has this neat shortcut, ALT+Left Arrow, that will rewind a video by 10 seconds. It turns out that CR has this too, except the shortcut is just Left Arrow. This is highly useful for language learning, as it allows you to rewind and re-listen to a section of dialogue repeatedly.

There are a few other shortcuts defined in the CR Flash Player, but none quite as useful as this one for language learners. It would be nice to be able to toggle subtitles with a single key; this could be used in conjunction with Left Arrow to verify that I understood a Japanese sentence fully. (And it'd also be nice if CR obtained the 日本語字幕 for these shows as well. I know we'll never get that, but hey - a geek can dream.)