Just as in the title, i can speak japanese but not so much understand when other people/natives speak it. All of the words go straight through my head and i cant keep up, even though i can speak and read fluently.
Im sorry if this is common sense but how do i fix this? It feels impossible and very fustrating.
11 comments
Practise, not sure what else to say. Start with listening comprehension for smaller, simpler sentences, and work your way up. If you can already read fluently you’ll probably catch up fast.
Reading and listening and speaking are separate skills. People usually get enough exposure to each that they stay roughly near each other but it’s totally possible to not practice listening at all and end up unable to do it.
How often do you get exposure to *just* spoken language (i.e, can’t rely on your reading)?
Try and get more practice with stuff that’s supposed to be easy to understand, then gradually move your way up to more challenging stuff. It might also help your comprehension by going through narratives you’re already familiar with, like a favourite anime, movie, or other stuff. I mean, go through it raw. you already said you could read fluently, so having Japanese subs would make most of your comprehension reading-based, going entirely against the point of the exercise.
My listening comprehension got a good start when I looked up tutorials regarding my hobbies aimed at novices as an example of stuff that’s supposed to be easy to understand. I still find candid, unscripted, natural conversations really hard to keep up with though, especially since they might not enunciate every little thing the way they would in something like anime, which I can more or less already understand perfectly. Moving away from anime (i.e., my comfort zone) and watching films instead, which would have less of that exaggerated enunciation and clear speech I rely so heavily on, has been a fair and manageable challenge. Watching v-tuber collaborations has also been a step in the right direction, since, if the group has any chemistry, it should just sound like a group of friends having fun.
Listen to more native Japanese.
Could you clarify what your level of spoken Japanese is?
No offense, I find it hard to believe that someone could speak “fluently” and, at the same time, struggle to even keep up with native conversations. So you can *produce* fluent Japanese but not passively *comprehend* fluent Japanese? That just doesn’t seem to follow.
(Being able to read well but struggling with listening is, of course, a much more common and very understandable phenomenon if you’re getting practice with the former but not the latter.)
Everyone is different in the way they process language, and therefore in how they learn.
In my case I can speak reasonably smoothly and talk about quite complex things for some time, but I find even basic Japanese conversation very difficult. This is unusual. So unusual that several comments in this thread don’t seem to believe it is possible, but it very much is. You may not have the same problems as I do, but I am just saying this partly to reassure you that you are not alone, but also as a marker for some of the other participants that they should be cautious about reading over their own experience to others.
For me the problem seems to be related to severe dyslexia and a defective working memory.
I am afraid I still have no good solution to it. As far as I can tell, no-one is trained in teaching it, because the assumption is that if you can produce reasonably well, you must have some passive ability too. Teachers tend to try to get me to talk, and find it very hard even to actually give me useful practice, let alone have any ideas how to train listening comprehension. It is underdeveloped as an area because most people don’t have the problem. If you can teach them to talk, they pick up listening.
That said, I am not as bad as I was. I can mostly understand what people say to me in shops. When I was in hospital, I could follow quite a bit of what nurses were telling me or asking me to do.
As far as I can tell I have improved very slowly through practice, but much more slowly than my speaking, reading or writing ability. That’s not very helpful, but does suggest that patience and practice will get you there. I am always reluctant to tell people to “practice” because exactly how you practice is an important component of that.
One thing I found that helped me overcome problems with dyslexia as a child/student is that if more skill in things not affected by it helped. Eg, not being able to write by hand quickly in an exam is a handicap, but if everything else is easy (because you worked hard to know the subject) that is then the only problem. For Japanese, building vocabulary and grammar will help even if you may have to become much better at them than average learners.
One thing I found that helped a little was having Japanese TV on in the background in my apartment when I was a student. Not that I could understand it, but the constant sound of spoken Japanese did seem to help my brain pick up some of the cadences of the language. I am not suggesting this as an immersive learning technique for vocabulary etc, but it does seem to help.
Maybe JPOP and other similar things might help too. I don’t know. But lots of Japanese TV shows have random people talking (mostly about food) and that’s the kind of thing that is most useful. Conversation. Dramas etc are less useful because they have less of it.
Even listening to the same canned things over and over again may help.
Ganbatte.
You can speak and read fluently but you can’t understand? This makes 0 sense to me.
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In order to speak well, you need to be able to understand well…
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However, you can understand well and not speak well (ie: this is my case, where my listening is better than my speaking).
edit: I read bentenmusume’s reply and agree with everything he/she wrote.
You might benefit from a language exchange partner so you can ask them to repeat something slower when you can’t keep up. You also get the extra body language and intonation to help you (if you do video call/in person).
Speaking from personal experience only but my listening improved significantly when I got diagnosed and medicated for adhd lol
What’s interesting to me is most L2 learners have the exact opposite problem, from what I’ve seen most people can understand almost everything when they reach a certain level, but get stuck when trying to speak it, in those cases is often due to lack of practice saying real things.
In your case I wonder how good is your pronunciation since getting used to the sounds is key to reproduce them, I’m sorry I don’t have any advice.