Listening comprehension

7 comments

1. When you practice vocabulary, do you do so with audio? Do you read out loud? Do you listen to learning podcasts or other beginner audio sources a lot?

   Reading and listening are different skills so it’s not unusual for one to lag the other, especially if your learning is mostly on nonaudio sources.

2. YouTube comprehensible Japanese! It’s a great little channel. There’s no shame in watching the videos over and over to catch as much as you can either, good luck!

3. Comprehensible youtube channels

   Podcasts

   Watch tv

   [Umi](https://umiapp.co/)

4. I’d take some small (maybe 10 minutes) chunks of audio and listen to them over and over again.

   I’d also try listening to something that includes a transcript or something with native subtitles and then listen again without those subtitles. It’s okay to use a scaffold to get yourself into some harder content. Doing that in these smaller chunks will give you the the confidence and total listening volume to tackle some new content with more ease.

5. I don’t know if this helps, but for me the turning point is when I stop translating it to english in my head but just understand it intuitively.

   Translating takes up brain power and time, so it’s natural that you feel overwhelmed.

6. You’re at the place in your learning where everyone plateaus. When you get over this hump you’ll be soaring, just stick with it.

   Listening comprehension comes with just straight up listening and ACTIVELY trying to COMPREHEND what you’re listening to!

7. As someone who has a very high vocab and reading comprehension, but terrible audio listening skills – it is a mix of several different problems when you hear audio and I cannot exactly break it down well… but I will try.

   I do not advise “translating in your head” because that is not going to work well. Essentially any word that is not in your deep long term memory will be a “conscious word” which you have to actively think about – all of those words are not strong enough for audio comprehension and while 1 or maybe 2 of these in a sentence is the limit before your understanding falls to about 0. You get past this by using them and hearing them often – reading will not fix this, I can read quickly but it does not translate to audio ability. Trust me, I can breeze through light novel chapters, but I could not understand the audio book version like at all. It made me realize how strong I was with the Kanji, and without them my comprehension fell apart even if I knew the readings, I could not listen and parse them in my head. “You cannot listen in Kanji” I guess.

   Audio comprehension is built upon being able to understand the sounds of the language – this is basic, but I had a lot of issues just transcribing sounds in the beginning because I had very little Japanese audio input – so I could not write out the sentences for my beginning hours of actual listening comprehension. Even on half speed.

   Knowing all the vocab is important, if you miss the vocab you will have gaps in the sentence, but Japanese has a lot of homophones and I will sometimes misparse or mistake a word for another completely different word with the same reading.

   Speed. Even half speed will be too much for you for quite awhile if you go outside basic expressions and phrases. This is normal and gets fixed by sheer input.