I generally like to go to sleep with something playing in Japanese. Not to try and learn from it in my sleep or anything, just having something on sometimes quiets my brain enough for me to sleep faster.
Generally, just due to ease of access, I put on a hololive Vtuber. And nearly 100% of the time I understand nothing.
Up to this point I’ve assumed a lot of things might be the issue. Accent. Lack of vocabulary. Not entirely focusing. Too fast of speaking. Maybe I just suck.
I understand TV shows, enough to get the gist if not everything…. maybe it’s because vtubers don’t have Japanese subtitles….
But a few nights ago I put on a Let’s Player who was playing through the Resident Evil 8 DLC and I understood quite a bit of it. So I thought “HEY! I’ve improved!”
So I put on Hololive and… nothing.
Tonight I went and put on the hololive video again, but decided to actually watch it for a minute. And I understood quite a bit.
And that’s when it dawned on me.
The Hololive videos are a lot of reactionary squeaks and squacks. Sound effects, screaming, and short exclamations. “yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!” “Look over here!” “Can we defeat it?” without the visual context some of the actual words (especially because they’re talking over each other) can get lost, or not make sense. It leaves too many gaps. Even in English I know sometimes I’ve tried to listen to a let’s player or something where it was all reactionary, and without the visual it just got irritating to listen to because there was too little context.
Meanwhile the Let’s Player the night before was kind of narrating along with the action. So I may hear Rose say “Who are you?” and then hear Rose say “I’m Rose”, before hearing Rose reply “What’s going on” and a few moments later the player say “There are 4 of Rose.” Without the visual it all made sense and the Japanese was easily understood.
What I’m saying is, if you’re trying to passive listen, and you’re having a really hard time…. kind of analyze what you’re listening to. Is it more a narrative? Is there enough context clues from the audio alone to tell what’s going on? Or is it all just reactionary and non sequiturs?
This also doesn’t mean that you CAN’T understand a hololive video from audio only. I’m just suggesting if you’re having trouble there, but not necessarily having trouble with other things that could be why.
As for me, I’m going to pick more topic-driven nighttime listening.