Im doing N1 and noticed that listening is my weakness. It’s pretty straight forward to study reading and grammar to get better. But with listening its a bit more complicated to correct and learn the things you dont understand.
I mean with reading, if you dont understand a kanji, you look it up. With listening, its a whole lot more complicated to for instance pause a podcast, take up your phone, try to guess what word what said and find it in a dictionary or what? It totally disturbs the flow. So my way of practicing listening is mainly just listening, and whatever i dont understand, i just move on and keep listening. However im starting to think that this way i never learn the things i dont know. Basically my listening is lagging far behind my reading comprehension, since I basically dont understand anything that i havent already read and studied the kanji for…
So how do you guys practice listening? How to those people do who are better at listening than reading? to me that seems impossible
12 comments
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This is almost the same exact question I had tried to post but couldn’t since I’m a new user.
I’m really interested in improving my listening as well for N1. For me I have a hard time putting the sounds with the words/meanings they represent. I might know the word if I see it on paper but totally blank out when hearing it.
I’m not at your level but I just binge a fuck ton of podcasts while gaming and don’t worry about it
It is important to be aware of connected speech and some phonetics, in order to improve listening skills.
Listening to the language just for the sake of it is not very helpful, bc you need to be able to pick up the sounds you find difficult in order to improve the skill.
You might like to use the subtitles together with the video, but then you gotta identify the bits you cannot understand and check how the sound comes out – at first try to have speakers who articulate well such as a news broadcaster as an example.
Then keep in mind that irl ppl do not always articulate well and start picking up from there.
It takes time and effort but your skills shd improve.
Good luck and keep it up!
Just listen. This skill takes more time. Allot some time of active listening (that is, have subs hidden and check stuff you didn’t catch completely). The rest of the time listen to something easier and just chill and try identifying stuff and understanding without pausing. It gets better.
I consider myself lucky in a way because I can hear content (in my own level and a little higher ofc) and can piece together what I think a word means by connecting the onyomi of a radical I can recognize and the context it’s said in. I check later by looking at the transcript and I’m right most of the time, thankfully but I get tons of shit wrong too lol but it helps when I look at the transcript because I get the exposure to the words I couldn’t get.
Maybe try this? I think it can help you as well.
ETA: of course this only applies to recognizing words so it might not be all that useful if you have a great vocabulary but has trouble making out what they’re saying.
Assume there will be some things you won’t understand. Even if you have perfect comprehension, the environment might make it difficult to pick up everything. Try to make assumptions about what you’ve missed and roll with it.
The other method is to start below your level. If you’re N1, start at N3. Listen and listen a lot. Try using visual media, then break away to reading and listening, and finally only listening.
When listening I just sit there with my dictionary on my phone and type in any words I hear but don’t know the meaning too. In DeepL you can ‘save’ those words, so if the word was useful I save it and make an Anki card of it later
IMO mimicking/shadowing is very important if you want to pick up listening. There’s a lot of meta-data associated with speech that you don’t become aware of until you’ve tried making the same words. The obvious one is pitch accent. I don’t mean you have to memorize the pitch accent for every word you hear, but if you can be conscious of pitch accent and try to be able mimic it here and there then the muscle memory will help you pick out words in sentences when you are listening. Another thing I do sometimes is just forget about the meaning of what I’m listening and listen to how the person speaking is breathing. Sometimes breathing is filtered out of recordings, but otherwise you’ll hear a surprisingly large breaths and it gives quite a lot of information of the physics of how the person is speaking. It all works towards developing muscle memory that helps to listen.
As a person who has suffered from partial deafness for most of my life bone-conduction headphones have been a life saver for listening to Japanese. I honestly think they’d help if you don’t have a hearing impairment. Mostly people without hearing impairment don’t take this advice seriously but it might be worth looking into. Of course you can’t use headphones in the JLPT exam but they might help you study. I’ve passed N1 as well as J1+ in the Jetro Business Japanese test so I’m speaking from some experience. I know how hard it can be.
edit: Sorry, I missed the word “efficiently” in the OP. What I’m suggesting might not be efficient. It’s just how I like to do it.
Since you mentioned that you are studying for JLPT, here’s a [YouTube channel ](https://youtu.be/2LqzM8xChGc) that I used to practice my listening. It let’s you try some sample questions and provides explanation afterwards. Hopefully this helps. All the best!
Does someone know good native japanese streamers who talk quite slowly maybe?
I do this more for Korean than Japanese since I have a harder time with Korean, but I find a video subtitled in the language I’m studying, listen to it without the subtitles and try to transcribe it. I often have to go over the same section multiple times. And then I check the subtitles. Videos with transcripts are also nice.
I love using songs for this because the lyrics are easy to find and I love music, but songs have their own caveats. I also like podcasts or videos of things that interest me such as cooking or history.
Also, you don’t have to write it. You can try dictation instead if you’d rather not write/type out what you hear. Just use your phone/other device to record yourself saying the segment and compare that to the subtitles/transcripts.