So I’ve been rewatching anime that I’ve previously seen for input, and I’ve gotten to a point where I can recognize *enough* of every sentence to understand the general gist of what’s happening (2200 words into the Core 2k/6k Deck). The issue is that I’ve been watching only with subtitles thus far, because I was told it improves comprehension.
I’ve decided to start watching without them to improve my listening ability recently, and noticed a sharp decrease in understanding. Should I expect listening comprehension to improve if I keep doing it despite understanding far less then I would with subtitles? If not, what would be the best course of action?
5 comments
Are you watching with English subtitles or Japanese?
I’m not at a high enough level at Japanese to watch Japanese media without English subtitles, but I found that when I learnt French, even watching French media with French subtitles took my focus away from actually listening to the spoken language, and my listening comprehension suffered as a result. If you’re at a point where you’re mostly able to understand what you’re hearing, I would challenge you to try and watch without subtitles, and try to build your listening comprehension from there. If you find it too difficult, you could try watching an anime aimed at a younger audience that uses simpler language until you get your confidence up.
How much comprehension would you expect with 2200 words? It’s not meant to be a dig, but you should keep adding words, keep listening/reading, and think about it less.
Well honestly it doesn’t matter at the end of the day, I still recommend you watch with Japanese subs so you can add cards to a sentence mining deck and kill 2 birds with 1 stone: reading and listening.
Though once you’re around the 3k-3500 word count (I think that’s jlpt n3) you should be able to watch most shonen shows without sub though you’ll obviously still find tons of words you don’t know.
I did something very similar almost a year ago now (I think I was at a 3-4k cards at the time) and my listening skills have improved pretty significantly. IMHO, in order to get better at any specific language skill, you need to practice that skill — doing lots of reading will not improve your listening as much as doing more listening will.
Only watching with subtitles leads to you just reading the line without trying to hear the whole sentence (at least, that was my experience — I’ve always watched shows with subtitles, even in English, so I can’t stop myself from reading subtitles rather than listening to the audio). If you want, you can replay bits with subtitles enabled to see what words you were missing — you’ll find that you can’t recognise a whole load of words which you already know.
But I would suggest still doing some kind of sentence mining (I’ve reached the point where I can mine words from audio but it took a long time to be able to do it effectively, and I ended up basically not mining cards at all for a few months). You can either watch an episode or two a day with subtitles to get your mining in, or start reading (where you’ll have plenty of opportunities to mine sentences).
I’d say it’s normal for your reading ability to be higher than listening. The ability to hear a foreign language is a different skill that must be trained. This is why I myself can perfectly hear the Japanese with Japanese subs, but my comprehension drops when they’re off. The subs are a crutch I need to overcome.