Does reading and listening to the same material at the same time help improve listening?

7 comments

1. Use whatever methods you like and feel most comfortable doing! I think reading and listening to its audiobook is great, but if you want to improve more in the listening, it would be better to just listen without reading as you are gonna be focusing only on what’s said. And in my opinion listening is overall harder than reading in Japanese, so it would be easier to just focus on the book and harder to pay attention to the audio. So it depends on if you want to focus on building your listening skill, your reading skill, or both.

2. Unless you can get over the hurdle of overreliance on whatever skill is stronger, I would say it won’t necessarily help if you’re trying to do both at the same time, the entire time. In other words, you really do need to work on what needs to be worked on rather than using a crutch to compensate for it.

   One thing that I’ve found works really well for me is to read a story with a given theme, and then listen to something similar but not the same thing. If I read a horror short story and then listen to a different horror story with similar elements, vocabulary can (and usually does) carry over without it being the exact same story, so I’m neither just reading along, nor relying on my prior knowledge of the material to help me along. My understanding then comes from actually being able to keep up with the story being told.

3. I feel like personally it was somewhat helpful, but ultimately I really had to go full turkey to acticely improve listening. however I found what it’s really helpful for is pronunciation in the way it kindve, engrains it into your head. I was shamefully sloppy w long and short vowels, double consonants etc before I started listening while reading; that cured me of it pretty quickly.

   w that said, reading while listening also expands your vocab, which is v helpful for listening too. but I think on the whole I made much quicker gains once I started cold turkey listening, even if all the listening while reading was a necessary foundation

4. It depends. This sort of thing varies person-to-person.

   I tried to listen and read along to Harry Potter in Japanese and couldn’t keep up, so that didn’t work out.

   Listening by itself though didn’t work for me either. I could know the words and it would still just sound like gibberish. If I had English subtitles on I could sometimes pick out and understand the Japanese… but that wasn’t really helping anything.

   Getting my hands on Japanese subs was what really fixed it. And even then I couldn’t just read and listen at the same time.

   I had to go line-by-line. Replaying the line until I could hear every word I was reading, then a few times more to make sure I could still hear them WITHOUT reading.

   Then I worked on listening without looking at the subs, but I still set Language Reactor to pause after every line so I could try and comprehend what I heard. I’d then look to see what I was hearing wrong or if there were any new words.

   … sometimes I hide the Japanese subs butt that’s more hassle than just not looking at them.

   Now I don’t even need subtitles for everything. I mostly just use them to aide in vocab gathering.

   ….. though let me tell you, because I watch a lot of dubbed American shows, it can be a REAL PAIN IN THE ASS to not have matching subs.

   So like, there’s what I was watching yesterday

   「1551年、織田家の当主、信秀が (???) しました」

   And what *I* heard was しきよ or しくよ…. and like I knew it was “death” but 死 didn’t get me any closer. So then I was typing in all sorts of things しきよす、しくよす、しっきよ、しっきよう、しっき、しっくよ、しっくよう、しっく……

   It’s 死去（しきょ）

   Sometimes what I hear is even further from what it actually is.

   Yesterday (same show) I also totally misheard a line. I heard (and I’m just gonna romaji this because it’s gibberish anyway) “Arai iru saki wo koji” It was too big for me to sus out what section of the sentence it was supposed to be (worse it seemed all of the original sentence was covered so this was just extra.)

   In desperation I said it into Google Translate, trying my best to copy the way the narrator said it.

   It’s 「あらゆる策を講じ」「あらゆるさくを　こうじ」

   Sometimes I just can’t figure it out no matter what I do. T-T

5. For me it didn’t.

   I used to try to follow the dialogue in the manga along with the anime or whatever but I just relied too much on it.

   Reading didn’t help my listening much…..it definitely would help some but watching or listening without any subs helped me the most by far.

6. It works, but I feel that doing only listening would improve it faster. You kinda trade between convenience and learning speed. It’s much easier to have text or subs, so it’s good for passive improvements, you have fun and over time learn listening too. But at the same time because it’s easier, you have less obstacles from which you can learn.

7. If you have both the audiobook and the written book, I’d recommend doing a section with pure audio at first, maybe replay parts you didn’t catch and work at looking stuff up for a bit, and then do it again while looking at the text. That way you get the listening practice and the ability to check how you did and correct things.