Hi,
Recently i’ve been doing a lot of listenning practice as it feels like my weak spot. There are lots of words i can understand and read but fail to hear in real time spoken sentences.
Most of my listenning practice up until now has been japanese subtitled anime and while i think this has been a wonderfull tool up to now i’m starting to feel like i should start dropping subtitles for a bit to focus purely on the listening.
Now here’s my question, do you go ahead watch something and then go back through the written script to see what you did/didn’t understand or do you play the audio over multiple times until you understand more ? Maybe one should not even bother and keep going whether we understand or not ?
With subtitles i tend to stop search words i don’t get and even take the time to absorb the sentence if i’m struggling with it. Here it’s a bit more complicated !
Thank you for your help
2 comments
> Maybe one should not even bother and keep going whether we understand or not ?
That’s what I do, but I do not call it studying, it’s recreation. Listening will get better with time, anyway, the more words or grammar you know. And you will pick up some words even without looking them up, especially compounds where you know the parts; and then forget them again 😉
But actively looking things up, actively trying to hear what you know is there, will probably shorten the time in which you get better at it.
Listening practice is better if you have a task.
Think of watching anime as being in a room with random conversation. You’re eavesdropping, you don’t have the full story, you’re not participating or asking questions, so your brain just goes into “absorb mode.”
If you’re doing a level-appropriate exercise then your brain is working on solving a problem. “I need to know how to get to the post office?! Hot damn! I got this!”
As you get better, you can start listening more passively, but I’d still cultivate an active mindset
Edit: By “active mindset,” I mean you’re asking questions to yourself and trying to catch unknown words from context.
If two men are talking and worried about being late to the 会議, and the next scene has a bunch of business officials sitting in a conference room, we can assume 会議 is “meeting.”