~95% listening comprehension just watching anime as a hobby

14 comments

1. How about watching with Japanese subtitles?

2. How did you handle all the many prepositions that are based on the same words (e.g. tokoro, toiu or koto) but have different meanings and usually don‘t match one single preposition in western languages? Is your native language English or something that is more similar to Japanese?

   That‘s one of the hardest parts in listening comprehension for me. I understand nouns, verbs, adjectives and common phrases quite okay but the prepositions are still just noise most of the time.

   At the moment I‘m working through the three “A dictionary of basic/intermediate/advanced Japanese grammar” books and I‘m going through subtitles of movies I’ve seen to search for usage of these prepositions. That helps a lot and I make a lot of progress. But I wonder how hard it must be to get all that just by watching movies without subs.

3. What shows did you watch? Were they the most popular series i.e. Demon Slayer, Attack on Titan, etc. or stuff geared more towards kids (probably in the 7-12 year old range)?

4. I save your post lol. Ill try your method if i have time. Currently, i use the traditional way of learning japanese,

5. Dude literally went full baby mode

   >I just watched anime without subtitles, dictionaries, grammar study or reading books.

   So you did no outside studying at all? Did you have any prior knowledge of Japanese or did you go in literally like a baby would?

6. What was your japanese level before you started listening with no subtitles? Did you have some base level of vocabulary from studying Japanese before? I know maybe 2000 words and a smattering of grammar up into N3 so I’m wondering if I could try doing what you did, or if I may need to learn more basics first.

   Do you think you might have seen similar progress if you’d watched with Japanese subtitles? I imagine your listening comprehension might be a bit weaker, but you may have made some reading comprehension improvements.

   Thank you for sharing your experience! I’m in an awkward level in the languages I’m studying where if material is simpler I can comprehend enough to follow the main idea, but that’s lower than 95-98% comprehension often (maybe 80s%). And I know there’s a lot of evidence learning from context happens a lot and with ease when you can comprehend 98% of the material (down to 95% or 90% depending on some people’s tested tolerance for ambiguity in studies I’ve seen). But I don’t often see people who comprehend overall the main idea but not into the 90s% yet studying primarily from context and sharing how much they’re improving over time. So this is really cool to see. Congrats on your progress! It’s amazing to get good at comprehending what you want to understand in a language, I want to get to that place eventually.

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8. I don’t feel comfortable dropping studying grammar and kanji, but that could be a nice way to improve my listening skills. I’d like to try it but I’d be afraid to think I understand when I actually don’t. What is that “easy” first show that you mentioned ?

9. What was your actual watching process like? For example, would you rewind over and over again to try and understand information you missed? Rewatch entire episodes/seasons to reinforce what’d you’d heard once already? Or just straight up watch shows once straight through and then move on to the next?

   Edit: Also, any plans to learn to read? Even if you just want to watch anime there are often signs, kanji related wordplay, text messages, and other things shown on screen in the episodes that you’ll not be able to understand without being able to read.

10. A few questions:

    You explained in your other post on r/languagelearning that you did finish RRTK and did a portion of Genki and Anki before dropping it and immersing. This is not entirely starting from zero and seems misleading. How far did you get exactly?

    Also, in the other post and not here, you explained your testing method by selecting random sentences and judging yourself on how much of them you knew then comparing that to knowing almost 10,000 words. This doesn’t seem like a good measure. How exactly were the sentences selected and judged for accuracy? “Yeah I’m pretty sure of the general idea of these words” is a pretty inaccurate method. The estimated percentages of listening comprehension from shows is questionable as well. It all just seems like guessing.

    Lastly, you said you were able to hold a conversation on italki yet you said you are only semi-fluent in listening. How did you have this conversation then?

    Impressive if this is all true and you did go full baby mode but it just seems like there are quite a bit of things that need clarity for a better write-up.

11. Hello, I also like watching anime, especially Slice of Life. I have been trying to learn English in your way, but it is a little difficult way for me. I have some friends who are learning Japanese and trying to learn it in a similar way, but it seems difficult to learn for them as well. I am not good at learning while memorizing various things, so I am impressed with your story. My English level is probably A2, a native speaker told me. Would you mind making time for helping people and me who want to learn Japanese/English while interacting on a language exchange with me? My English is terrible, I apologize.

12. Great work, impressive result for only a year and 1,100 hours!

    I’m surprised by the contrast in reaction to this post compared to https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/v5z4tf/i_read_200_books_in_japanese/ a few days ago. Why is that?

    95% still leaves a lot of unknown information though right? Are you planning to keep on going with this method or adjusting anything?

13. This reads like “step 1, step 2, . . . profit!” but I’m willing to take your word for it.

    Now, just out of curiosity:

    What were the anime you watched? What order did you watch them in? How did you find fluctuations in difficulty? How well does your listening comprehension transfer to non-anime materials? How well does it transfer to conversational output?

14. If you didn’t look up any words or grammar in a dictionary, how did you ultimately figure out what something meant? For me, even if I hear the same word over and over again, I wouldn’t be able to guess what it meant until I physically looked it up. And even after that I tend to forget so I end up having to add it to my Ankis. Was wondering how you overcame this obstacle.

    Impressive feat, btw.