Hey guys was wondering what techniques you use to get better at listening. A scenario happened to me recently which made me realize that i suck at listening comprehension. I did two presentations. One in english where ppl asked questions in English and i heard everyone perfectly. In my other class, which is Japanese, i did a presentation and ppl asked questions but i couldn’t comprehend shit. it’s fustrating cause the questions were really simple too (i asked after) and I’m in a 300 lvl class. I mainly listen to あかね教室 on YouTube. I think she does like n3 lvl content. Any advice you guys could give me getting past this huge cliff in front of me would be greatly appreciated.
8 comments
Listening worked for me 👍
Find stuff that’s more difficult than what you currently can listen to and struggle through it. If its on something you are interested in or is easy to listen to it makes it easier. It’s hard though man, gotta tough it out.
Honestly, just inundate your ears with Japanese. Listen to learner podcasts whenever you’re doing menial things, watch tv programs everyday, listen to audio books or audio versions of graded readers, watch YouTube, talk with people, etc. Do things of various levels too. Stuff that is easy, stuff that is hard, etc.
If you’re looking to take the JLPT, you can get the nihongo soumatome listening comp books and use those. I think they have the audio tracks for free on Spotify.
Listen more, 3+ hours a day of active listening, read as much as possible so your comprehension is higher so you don’t whitenoise your listening, do passive immersion whenever you can. Cleaning? In the bath? Shopping? Walking? Podcasts (4989 american life is pretty easy and has transcripts so u can use yomichan to mine vocab if u come across any during passive listening)
If listening alone doesn’t yield any results, go to Netflix, and pick a Netflix Original Anime (not Castlevania or Cyberpunk). Those have matching Japanese subtitles.
I’d then pair that with Language Reactor, because you can set Language Reactor to pause after every line, and repeat lines with a single key press.
Go through and see if you can match what you’re hearing to what you’re reading. Make sure you can distinguish all the words, and even try listening to a line without looking at the subs before moving to the next line.
This is what fixed my listening problem.
Everything outside OUTPUTTING is b*lls*itt. Really.
The only way to excel at it is to start to speak. A lot. REALLY a lot. In the beginning you’ll sound dumb. It’ll take one month or so to not. But then, suddenly, you’ll be hearing like a pro. Just listening won’t do shit, trust me, specially because EVERYONE speaks slightly different. The Japanese you hear on YouTube is a thing, the one you hear at work is a whole different stuff, and at the school will go to the same way.
If you live in Japan, go out and speak. If you have 2 free hours daily, go to the parks and ask strangers for help, if you don’t need it, use the fact that you’re stranger and make up some story. Some will try to talk to you a bit further (yes, I did it already) and trust me, I made some friends that way. Another stuff you can do is to go to Japanese/foreigners parties. In Fukuoka, at Tenjin, those parties happens at least once a week. You just need to let the shyness at home and go out trying!
If you don’t leave, find a way to make some friends that are native and willing to talk at least 30 minutes daily. It’ll improve your listening A LOT.
Listening is composed of two parts: properly understanding what is being said and then retrieving the meaning of the sound you heard in your brain. You need to identify what you need to work on. Can you make out what is being said, or are you mishearing stuff? If you aren’t, then you’re probably not being fast enough in recognizing the words being spoken (assuming you know them).
Don’t watch Youtube channels that try to teach you Japanese. Just watch Japanese channels with topics you are interested to learn or keep up with. The quantity matters. The same goes for Japanese people who learn English. Watching Youtube channels that try to teach English is a bad way to learn English. First of all, it is not very efficient, second of all, their main purpose is to get views with the educational entertainment, not really to teach you English.
There are many Japanese channels that I think good to watch for the upper level Japanese learners and with some life maturity. I don’t really know what your level is. I highly recommend talkshow type channels where a multiple people talk to each other, but that’s too difficult, then watching anime with or without subtitle is fine.
Youtube has channels of all kinds of topics, so you won’t have a problem of finding Japanese Youtube who make videos about what you are interested in.
Maybe you can watch a product review channel that talks about some item you want to buy. I watch a lot of gadget review videos in English and Japanese. That may be something you can do?