When listening to spoken Japanese as a beginning immersion learner, what do you try to focus on to parse the meaning of sentences?
1. Concentrating on the meaning of individual words as they are spoken (this I find leads to total working memory overload).
2. Concentrating not on words, but on *phrases*
3. Not concentrating on anything; just relaxing and letting meaning come to you automatically?
Though this sounds trivial, I feel like there are many different ways you can focus on a sentence. I’m a native English speaker, and what I notice when I listen to things is that I don’t concentrate on anything until some piece of a sentence jumps out as important (almost always at the phrase level), and then and only then do I actually translate that portion to “mentalese”.
So TLDR: is there any research on what’s the best thing to focus on when listening? Do people have any advice?
2 comments
For me personally, 3. To me, immersion was a way to escape active study by picking stuff up while having fun watching something I’d want to anyways.
Personally for me, I focus on words I know or even learn but most of the time I don’t think and let the words come to me