So I’ve been studying with anki since about June and am now up to about 500 learned. I try not to go too hard on daily study because I know burnout can be a real problem for me if I grind for hours a day and still only see marginal returns in my comprehension. However, I have recently also added in wanikani to help me hammer home the specific writing/typing aspect of Japanese as well. Then for grammar I’ve used Japanese ammo with misa’s beginner n5/n4. I feel like I want to be able to set my next goal to be able to watch an anime, probably one I already know at least a bit with no subs. But the thing is as I am now visiting Japan for the first time I’ve realized my listening SUCKS. To elaborate while I have comparatively no problems talking at least the bare basics in Japanese, I have found that understanding a response even if also relatively basic I seem to have very little to no comprehension. What are some good resources and techniques to fill in this gap in my study? Right now the easiest stuff I can find due to previous study would maybe be Japanese ammo with misa n5/n4 listening. But even that I seem to have very little comprehension so idk if that’s normal or if there is something even more basic.
Thank you in advance for any advice!
4 comments
You’re not missing anything but practice. N5/N4 and 500 learned cards (I guess you mean words?) surely isn’t sufficient for most of the material made for natives.
To put in a prospective: with wk you learn 6k of total words, you are still missing a lot.
What just helps is hearing the words over and over again to train the recognition. The 6k decks all have that + a sentence with the word, so does wk but it does not “enforce” it for you to read and misses the voicelines for the sentences.
I am using a tts service to create native sounding examples of vocab I’m learning.
I have about 1k of words down and watching a meitantei conan fansub. I slowly start to pick up some words like “oh yes, I know that one for tired!” and “oh, yes, I had 有名(yuumei) yesterday in my reviews” and start make some sense of the intro and outro lyrics.
You could try some graded readers which also have recordings, but it might be still too hard for you. Most recommend Satori but it was waaaay too hard for me when I last tried it.
While boring and horribly formatted, the beginners short stories in Japanese from Lingo Mastery come on audible with the free pdf and the stories read by a native Japanese speaker. You can probably go for the trial, giving you a credit for the first one, then a second one when you try to cancel it, get a second credit for the other one (and then cancel it anyway, just use the credit first. It’s what I did)
Why are you not using a textbook? With 6 months of study you could have finished Genki already, and gotten a lot of reading/listening experience through it.
To put it in perspective, an average Japanese native knows around 50k words and grammar, which goes way beyond N1, as well as a lot of slang, dialects, idioms and so on.
From my experience, I had terrible comprehension before reaching 4-5k words (even with the dictionary) and became relatively comfortable reading simple things while still looking up a lot of words at 10-15k. Listening is even harder because you have to not only know the words, but to be able to keep up with the pace.
It takes time and practice. Usually years of it. So don’t expect too much of yourself after 6 months. For some easy listening practice, try [Comprehensible Japanese](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPdNX2arS9Mb1iiA0xHkxj3KVwssHQxYP) – starting with the very basic and working up from there.
As you are a ‘cheap ass bastard’ (as am I), [here are a few free resources](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/s5mtva/comment/ht1lo0x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I found useful.