I’ve been trying to improve my listening skills over the past couple days but have been having issues figuring out a good way to improve it. What kind of practicing techniques are unusually recommended when trying get better at hearing?
I watched some videos from “Comprehensible Japanese” and noticed I don’t have much of an issue there, but when I branch out into N3 content via videos, podcasts, or even my JLPT/Kanzen and Tobira audio portions the speed and my ability to figure out what is happening drops to almost zero.
I noticed a few things stopping me when I try to focus. If I miss a word, hear numbers, or didn’t catch a phrase the entire rest of the sentence becomes a blur. If I miss what happens, I wait for a break and try to continue with the content and see if I can continue. Closing my eyes helps a little bit since sometimes I can picture in my head what’s being said, but it’s dependent on if I understand what’s going on.
My biggest issue seems to be that I get easily distracted when listening (hence why I try to close my eyes). I’ll try to really pay attention and then see a car drive by outside the window and totally miss what just was said. However even if I close my eyes, lay down, and really pay attention I’ll occasionally get a random thought in English that takes away my attention. I noticed if I listen along while I have a transcript available it becomes easier, but then I’m just filling in the blanks with the words I’m reading.
So any advice for learners who were able to improve listening comprehension?
5 comments
Sounds like you’re focusing too much on the things you don’t understand rather than the things you do understand. You don’t need to understand every word. Listen for keywords instead. Ignore things you don’t understand.
I had this issue around the N3 level. What helped me was putting on a simple anime (I chose the Fruits Basket remake) with absolutely no subtitles. I made a rule that I was not allowed to pause or rewind. My goal was to just watch the whole episode and see how much I understood. Not being able to pause and not being able to physically see the things I couldn’t understand via subtitles removed the pressure to understand everything. Once I stopped trying to understand every single word, it became a lot easier to focus on the parts I did understand. Once I did that, I found that I could actually follow what was happening in the story pretty easily.
I agree, your bound to get destracted or miss something. Just tune back in when you realise and keep going. If you really want to know what you missed, rewind a little.
I like to listen to free Japanese podcasts of spotify and youtube, just type in 日本語, have a listen to a few until you find some you like. You’ll find a lot for learners, but you can also find native Japanese podcasts on whatever topic you like. If you keep finding Chinese stuff because you’re searching with just kanji, I like to add の or は to the search because they are common character.
That and anime. I really enjoyed Shirokuma cafe, it’s cute, funny and not to complicated.
Also, music. You can listen to it over and over, and really focus on the words. If you miss something the first time around, you might catch it next time. And as your language abilities grow you can go back to a song you haven’t listened to in a while and realise how much you now understand.
I like artists like Ado and Yoasabi. There are losts of famous Japanese singers with youtube channels.
Or you could look up FIRST TAKE on youtube to discover Japanese singers that are popular. You’ll end up in a rabbit hole if you haven’t already.
Listening comprehension is what I practiced most. I’ll try to sum up my lessons learned:
* Developing good listening skills takes long. It requires lots of active practice and making an effort, this is something to get used to. You can’t improve it in a few days. What I did most of the time was sentence mining from anime and dorama (250-300 episodes, ~15k flashcards) and I listened to easier things in parallel sometimes. I’m still not perfectly fluent (depends on the material or subject).
* You need to practice listening. This might sound obvious, but the focus of many Japanese learners (and guides for learning Japanese) usually is on the writing systems / kanji. This is not wrong, but to put it bluntly: It does not improve your listening skills – at least not directly. We can argue that it contributes indirectly (i.e. you learn words and stuff from written material), but listening is an entirely different world that requires practice on its own. There were posts on this sub of people passing N2 or N1 but could barely understand spoken material, e.g. [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/z2jlvs/how_to_efficiently_study_listening/).
* Active listening by far beats passive listening. I’d even go as far as to saying that passive listening to whatever did not help me to improve. Some people say that you should do passive listening to maximize exposure. Maybe this worked for them, but I really can’t confirm this. You might want to read [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/xgyvih/how_do_you_immerse_yourself_in_japanese_in_a_way/).
* Comprehensible input is important. If you don’t understand a given material, you either need to break it down into easier chunks or choose something easier.
* Slowing down playback helps a lot, also pausing after something was said (while paying close attention). Language reactor can do this for you on Netflix and YouTube.
* Headphones boost listening comprehension
* Try to tolerate not understanding some parts of your material, the big picture is more important than small details. This was a tough one for me: As soon as I didn’t understand a word, I immediately switched to I-don’t-get-it-and-am-stupid mode, which is not helpful.
* My most important tool was Anki for repeating individual sentences a few times. If you use it however, make sure to delete sentences in favor of new ones. Repeating the old content too often did not help understanding new stuff. Deleting content is just as important as adding new things to your srs. Again, very difficult for me to get used to this thought, but I can’t stress the importance of this enough.
* If you do flashcards, use full sentences with audio, not isolated words.
wtf is N3 podcast ?
Personally, when I’m having a coffee break when WFH I put my phone on the table (horizontally), fire up the YouTube app, and watch Japanese news with the speed set to x.75. Hint: the “Live” ones are not actually live and you can vary the speeds.
I don’t understand everything but over time I notice certain words so I look them up in a Romaji pocket dictionary and slowly get used to them. It’s not fast learning, but who cares? I’m having fun.
So I just relax and passively let the words and phrases wash over my mind and, slowly at first, more and more of them start to stick. Keisatsu ni yorimasu to! 🙂