Hey all, I found this asked a couple times on the sub but not in a few years. I was wondering if listening to Japanese while focused on other tasks is worth the effort?
I'm specifically talk about things like work that require you to be fully engaged, not cleaning, driving, or exercising where the task is mostly subconscious.
I've been listening to Japanese podcasts while I work but I feel like it's at best a waste of time and at worst a detriment to my job. But small progress like that is hard to track and take note of.
Have any of you spent a significant amount of time listening to Japanese (non music) audio while working? If so, do you think it helped you at all or was wasted effort?
by YuushyaHinmeru
14 comments
There is a smaller benefit to content you don’t understand or can’t focus on, but it does help in a few ways. One, it does help reinforce things you can understand. Maybe you don’t pick up the whole sentence, but you hear 大佐 (たいさ) and it helps to reinforce that word so when you encounter another sentence later less effort goes in to that part of the sentence.
A second benefit is that it helps train your ability to parse language. Ever have someone say something and you need them to slow down or can’t quite figure out what the word was? Not the meaning but the actual word. Practicing being able to physically listen is helpful.
I wouldn’t count it towards time spent studying, but if you work better with background noise, it can’t hurt. If you enjoy music or other audio media more, there’s no need to force yourself to listen to Japanese podcasts. If you feel like it’s a detriment to your job though, then it might not be an effective way for you to interact with Japanese (yet? It might be an option in the future in a different situation).
Never seemed to useful to me.
I never tracked my progress while I was learning as I personally think that’s a waste of time….but as long as you understand the “just” of the conversation or whatever it is you’re listening to I say it’s ok….as long as you can also focus on work while you’re doing it of course lol…
I only recently started listening to youtube videos while working (Im a senior Software Developer so my jobs requires lots of concentration/thinking). I reached a level where I don’t really need to focus on what’s being said to understand what’s happening
Now, if you have no idea what they’re saying it just becomes background noise
If you aren’t paying attention to it you are not getting any benefit. If you have gaps in your work where you could be switching your attention to it for some minutes at a time then there is the benefit.
Without attention it’s about as useful as trying to subconsciously acquire a language during your sleep (aka not useful)
I have done countless thousands of hours of passive listening; it can help when you really throw a metric ton of hours as it. The trick is it cannot detract from anything else in your life in time or effort. It helps you acclimate (training your ear for it) to the language, you will not be learning from it. It does improve different aspects of your hearing. I split these into 3 categories.
* Hearing Fidelity – How much detail you can hear in voices. That is how clear you hear things such as being able to know boundaries between moras, pitch accents, regional accents, whether someone has a cold and how stuffy their nose is, personal speaking idiosyncrasies, detecting dental braces through different inflections in sound, and being able to hear the “hiragana” of a spoken word and transliterate it as such.
* Hearing Pattern Recognition – Ability to automatically parse known words, and unknown words as distinct units of sound with their own word boundaries.
* Hearing Comprehension – Informed by the former two. You can parse, hear, and know every word and grammar, but sometimes the comprehension just isn’t there because it takes time to get used to certain things.
Listening passively A TON can improve #1 mostly and then #2 as well to a much lesser extent. I think the dynamic changes when you reach a level where your passive listening is as good as your active listening was a long time ago, then passively listening is something you can learn from. Which is where I am at now. My passive listening right now is better than my active listening 10 months ago. Note: also like you I found it to be a useless but just did it anyway. I eventually noticed it did actually help when the the hours of passive listening became thousands.
Comprehensible input is 1 major element of immersion learning. Engaging input is the 2nd one. If the podcast contents don’t interest you, you won’t pay attention even if you understand the words, even less so if you don’t.
There’s not going to be a consensus because people’s brains are very different. I can’t even listen to music with English lyrics while working; it distracts my brain too much. And I can’t listen to English audiobooks while driving, because whenever the driving gets complicated, my brain blots out the audio so that I can focus on driving, and I completely lose track of the story (at least it goes that way and not losing track of the cars!).
But obviously tons of people can do those things. (And yes, English is my native language.)
For me I can’t believe it’s anything but a waste of time. Even when I have English content in the back like a Twitch stream, I tune it out because I’m focused on my work. It just becomes background noise and I don’t follow what’s happening at all. At most every few minutes I’ll tune in for a few seconds if there’s a sudden change in volume or something, then go back to work.
Sometimes I’ll run podcasts in the background but unless I pay attention to it, it just becomes noise.
Personally I’ve finished probably over a dozen multi year run podcasts in the last year or so and I’ll be honest… I don’t know what it did. I listened entirely during work or chores and my mind wanders very very easily so it’s basically the same as when doing concentrated work. I know I’ve paused and texted friends about fun facts I heard in the podcast. But I’m not really sure I can pinpoint what improved before and after sadly.
If you’re not specifically focusing on it, just as background noise, it’s very nominal in my experience. It has helped me appreciate things like cadence, pronunciation, occasionally catching a word or learning a word when my focus is weak on what I’m working on but it’s pretty rare. I’ve been listening to content for like 20 years at this point, and certainly haven’t gotten far at all.
It’s essential for me. But I would suggest that you find something, for example gaming, where many words and concepts are referred to over and over again.
I wear earphones most of the time in work, i just try and spend as much time as possible in contact with the language. I mostly listen to podcasts and while you’re mostly engaged in other tasks, hearing the language a lot isnt exactly going to do any harm. If you’re not engaged with what you’re listening to, you still get used to the flow of the language by just listening a lot. When im not completely occupied i hear words and phrases i know and it helps cement them.
Even if you only pick up a word here and there it’s better than nothing but only you can decide if the detriment to your job is worth that. You will get better over time and if you switch focus to and just pick up the sounds even without meaning it’s still practice of some sort.