I’ve been studying Japanese for awhile and realized recently that I could probably take the N1 and smash the grammar/vocab/reading section, but the listening is much more difficult.
I figured my skills would have a gap because I’m mostly a reader, although I did watch some anime and tv shows In Japanese (with and without subtitles). But for some reason, I fee like this gap is much bigger than I realized (, despite fully understanding what’s going on when I can follow a script).
I know I will just have to listen more to fix this. But does any one have any good tips/methods for my situation?
Also, for anyone who had a similar problem – how long did it take you to fix this issue?
7 comments
If you are really good at reading already then just sit down and watch an hour or two of anime/youtube every day for a couple months and you’ll be more or less good. It’s fast to catch up if you already know all the words.
On the condition that the topics covered are relatively similar, it’s surprisingly not that difficult.
I like reading mostly romance and horror prose. I don’t listen to those as much, but when I do, I tend to not get lost even if I’m only listening passively, since a lot of words and expressions carry over if those media cover similar themes. On the other hand, since the materials I read for fun don’t necessarily have much to do with news, listening to the news isn’t as smooth and I do actually need to be actively paying attention to not get lost.
Train your ears. Start with something simple and increase the difficulty bit by bit. [Learn Japanese with Noriko](https://m.youtube.com/c/LearnJapanesewithNoriko/videos) is an intermediate podcast that should be fairly easy for you to follow and could be a good starting point.
Could combine the two, with VNs that have voice acting in it. There’s also a bunch of youtube channels that do 朗読 for books.
Flash cards with audio portions, where you actually listen to the audio fully and try to comprehend before you look at the written portion.
Just talking with people is also a great way to practice listening.
If you’re really ambitious, you could even do practice dictation of a news broad cast to really hammer things in.
I am still in your exact position.. I only read and never listened to the spoken language due to preference for reading and time constraints. I got sucked into and found something that drew me into listening/watching and I quickly discovered how non-existant my ability to understand the spoken language was.
After a couple of weeks I became aloof with myself wondering why don’t I just try studying again and get my listening skills to match up. The first couple of months, I basically had zero progress. It sounded completely wordless to me, and plus the content I was engaging in the people were speaking very fast and slang heavy even by native standards–some even with speech impediments which probably compounded the issues. What helped bridge the gap was JP subtitles, at first I could not hear a word without subtitles and comprehension was 0%, but with subtitles it was 60-90%. I set out a study and immersion schedule and I naturally wanted to consume the content so it was 2-5 hours a day (still is). With the subtitles it eventually lead to me parsing out sounds clearly, but still no comprehension.. after maybe 200-300 hours (passive and active listening, passive includes on in the background but not focused on it) it seems, I woke up one day and I jumped from literally 0% to 15-30% overnight. Currently I’m probably in the 30%~ comprehension of any random topic at the fast end of native speed.
All this took maybe around 3-4 months to come to pass, I have identified my core weaknesses and working on it. Reading, writing (lots of writing lately, really enjoying it), and listening a lot are core parts of my active study, with loads of passive listening (JP live streams and JP discords where no one knows English is a great place to push you into learning fast). The improvements in overall language has been massive. I just need to drill home my weakest part which is vocabulary (and grammar, because I have no technical understanding of it, only intuitive based feelings of how things should be).
I failed the test in July last year after acing the grammar/vocab section because of the listening. The answer, as everyone else said, is to just listen to anime/youtube every day. I even watched some easier stuff like Black Clover just to keep my hours up. I tried to do 2-3 hours a day and got about 9500 minutes between September and November that fall, managed to bring my score up from a 35/27/24 to a 40/40/38 and passed in December.
N1 listening isn’t very hard. It’s typically a clear pronunciation at slower pace, so we can improve a lot in several months. Listening to a natural speech in my opinion is significantly harder. If you don’t trait it specifically, quite often it can take 1 or 2 years.