(2016-01-28, 12:12 pm)cophnia61 Wrote: Snesgamer Wrote:At the same time though, I've noticed the indirect effect of my listening exercises on my reading has been tremendous and has been well outpacing my listening skill itself, even though I'm not directly working on my reading.
Could you kindly argue more about this? Could you please give us some examples? Do you think listening helps much with those words with kanji with more than one possible reading? Like 生物 where you don't know if the second kanji is butsu or motsu (this is just an example). Thank you in advance. I ask this because my dedication to listeing is less than zero and I wonder if listening would help me to make those readings stick better.
I don't know exactly what Snesgamer was thinking of, but I certainly agree with his sentiment.
One thing that helps, yes, is the readings, although not so much as in ぶつ vs. もつ because you can just look that up anyway. It's something like 生物 as せいぶつ vs. なまもの ... you can look up both readings, but it's easier to have the feel for the right reading if you've heard it many times. Of course なまもの in particular is pretty rare, but 入る - はいる vs. いる is perhaps the most common such example. There are probably only a couple dozen of these ambiguous words, but some of them are very common.
Of course in theory you can memorize the correct definitions and figure out the correct pronunciation in context, but for that to work you have to pick the correct pronunciation every time you read the word so that you reinforce the correct reading in your memory, or perhaps more importantly so that you -don't- start building up the -wrong- reading in your memory. This can involve a lot of revisiting the dictionary, searching for kana example sentences, or just asking native speakers for the correct reading. (Beware that many example sentences that provide furigana or mouseover readings are unreliable - those readings are machine generated and just give the more common reading, not the one that is correct in context.)
So you can do all that, or you can listen to some actual Japanese and build up a sense of what 'sounds right'.
Having heard the same sequence of words also helps when you start coming across unexpected spellings, 此処, 凡て, 五月蠅い and so on. Of course I always look stuff up that I haven't seen before, so it doesn't save me much even when my prediction was right.... although if my prediction was right then that's pretty much a done deal as far as learning that spelling of a word, I'll probably never need to look it up again and certainly won't need to drill it in Anki or anything.
Readings aside, something important to realize about listening practice is simply that everyone subvocalizes when they read. Natural Japanese is spoken -very- fast compared to beginner Japanese lessons, and natural Japanese is also much more nuanced in pronunciation than simply pronouncing a string of kana as if you were reading them off of a kana chart. Anyway, if you can 'hear' Japanese as it's actually spoken when you're reading, then your reading will be quicker and smoother.
A specific subset of that effect is common spoken expressions that you might come across in dialogue ... often these truncated idiomatic expressions are impossible to understand on first reading, difficult to look up in a dictionary, and still a little fuzzy if you find an en-jp example sentence pair.
On the other hand, if you've heard the expression a few times in context then when you read it, it's entirely clear what it means and what tone of voice the speaker would have when saying it.
「いや、そういわれても…」 and 「いそがないと」 are simple examples of such expressions, but there's an endless list of expressions in Japanese that are in principle ambiguous but in practice used in a certain way.
I've found its one of two things: either I'm not used to the way a certain string of words is spoken, or the sentence contains too many unknown words. Subtitles can help here, as can repeated listening. Some video players, such as OPlayer for iPad and Android, contain 10-second rewind, slowdown, and A/B Repeat functions that make it easy to listen to a specific phrase repeatedly at slower speed. 
