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Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - PotbellyPig - 2015-11-16
I've made a thread about listening before but now I'm kinda in a quandary. As background info, my vocabulary and reading skills are fairly good (abt 37k words and over 50 light novels read). To practice listening, I went through some N1 practice books such as Kanzen Master and Soumatome. I am now using the NHK nightly news show, anime, and jdrama with Japanese subtitles (at least I try to have the subtitles). But in the order I have listed them, I am finding native material increasingly difficult. The NHK news isn't so bad as long as you leg up on the political vocabulary but anime and jdramas are hard for me with jdrama's being the hardest. The speech is fast and slurred in anime and jdrama with jdrama being the worst offender. I pick up a lot of things but not everything and have to resort to looking at the subtitles. Should I just keep at it with new material every day? I don't think going back to learning materials such as N1 stuff will help since native Japanese materials are at a much harder level due to the speed and slurring.
Thanks in advance for you help.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - SomeCallMeChris - 2015-11-16
Have you been through Erin's Challenge?
I often recommend it to beginners, but one of the nice things about the site is that for more advanced students (up to a point) there is still useful material. In particular, the 応用スキット and 見てみよう videos are quite nearly natural native speaking. They are certainly on roughly the same level as educational materials meant for native Japanese. Of course, they offer very little other than listening comprehension (and a little vocabulary building perhaps) but listening comprehension is precisely your concern. Of course you can read along, or listen without the subtitles. You may want to lower your monitor resolution since the videos don't scale and were made for a lower definition technology.
https://www.erin.ne.jp/jp/
Speaking of educational materials for native Japanese, have you been to NHK 高校講座? The written materials accompanying each 'class' vary in style and quality, and are not really the same as having subtitles. Still, you can read the materials before or after a lecture to identify words that you have trouble recognizing. If you're really patient, I suppose you would read them after a first watching and then watch again. I recommend watching topics that you have some interest in, but are not particularly knowledgeable about. At least for me, it's to tedious to watch things that I already studied in my own high school and college classes. For example, since I somehow never took earth science but enjoy the topic, that one has been great for me.
http://www.nhk.or.jp/kokokoza/
Also, since you enjoy reading fiction, if you don't already have it, I'd recommend 'Read Real Japanese Fiction'. You can read along with the book and rip the contents of the CD into mp3's for your favorite listening device, although how many times they are worth re-listening is up to individual taste for re-consuming material.
http://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese-Fiction-Contemporary/dp/1568365292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1447732786&sr=8-1&keywords=read+real+japanese
I do find it's useful to repeat some material for practice - not everything of course, but listening to material you already know helps train your ear to hear things correctly (like that contracted and slurred speech in anime and dorama), while new material gives you the challenge of interpreting material correctly the first time on the fly. The two kinds of listening exercise slightly different parts of the brain.
My own listening is far from perfect ... I can understand most slice-of-life or romantic comedy dorama and anime, and depending on the pacing and exact content, many swords & sorcery type fantasy anime, but a lot of other material I get quickly lost in. Just a few technical terms in a military setting like many mech anime have, or any police/legal/medical procedural dorama, and I can very quickly get lost. I may even know the terms to read many times (definitely not every time), but those 7-mora compounds are a little rough for me to catch and parse correctly on the fly.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - sholum - 2015-11-17
I've been noticing recently that, when I focus too much on what's being said, I do worse at listening than if I just sit back and listen. I know it's not very good advice, but that's about all I've got; listening isn't my strong suit either.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - Bokusenou - 2015-11-17
Playing podcasts & talk radio (tunein.com is great for this) in the background while I was doing other things really helped me get used to listening to Japanese. I agree with what sholum said, don't try to listen, don't strain your ears on every word. Just sit there and let the sound envelop you without thinking about understanding it. Assuming your vocab & grammar levels are fine, you'll eventually be able to keep up with the person's voice without trying.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - s0apgun - 2015-11-17
37k words? That's gotta be a typo. Did you mean 3,700 words?
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - z1bbo - 2015-11-17
(2015-11-17, 3:11 am)s0apgun Wrote: 37k words? That's gotta be a typo. Did you mean 3,700 words?
If he read 50 LNs and probably tons of other stuff then 37k is a pretty reasonable number! The more vocab you know the easier/faster it gets to pick up new words and due to the nature of kanji you can automatically read+understand thousands of rarer words, even if you have never seen them before.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - PotbellyPig - 2015-11-17
(2015-11-17, 3:11 am)s0apgun Wrote: 37k words? That's gotta be a typo. Did you mean 3,700 words?
It is 37,000 words. I've been adding words to anki at a clip of 33 words a day for a few years now. I took them from the books I read, and when I ran low, I would use a frequency list or words from some kanken books I went through. From now on. I'm only going to add words I have encountered in the wild.
SomeCallMeChris: Thanks for the info on Erin's Challenge. I'll take a look at it. I did look at it a while back when I think you mentioned it in another thread but never went through with it. I'll also try some repetition of the material which I have done on and off. I think I own that "Read Real Japanese Fiction Book" so I can try that too. I already read the non-fiction one so listening to that may not be helpful. But I didn't read the fiction one yet so it may be good.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - s0apgun - 2015-11-17
That's crazy! I would set the Anki aside and try and get as much listening in as possible. You should read manga because it has a lot of the slang that you normally wouldn't come across unless you're living in Japan. DrDunlap said watching almost all of one piece fixed his listening and speaking problems he had.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - PotbellyPig - 2015-11-17
(2015-11-17, 8:41 am)s0apgun Wrote: That's crazy! I would set the Anki aside and try and get as much listening in as possible. You should read manga because it has a lot of the slang that you normally wouldn't come across unless you're living in Japan. DrDunlap said watching almost all of one piece fixed his listening and speaking problems he had.
I am slowing down on adding new words finally as I'm only taking them from books and things I listen to. Before I was adding from a frequency list when I had no new words but I think at the number of words I'm at now. I shouldn't have to do that anymore. I don't know if its scientific but an average native knows around 45k words from what I remember reading but I think its probably more.
Anyway, I'm going to try some of the things SomeCallMeChris suggests with the listening. If anyone else has any further thoughts on the listening process and my issues with it, please let me know.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - RawrPk - 2015-11-17
I find my listening skills to be the worst of my Japanese abilities (though all the other factors aren't that much better in my case) but I was able to follow Erin's Challenge pretty well at my beginner stage. I really wanted to test myself so I watched the entire series raw, no subs of any kind!
Pretty much got the gist of the story but still to this day I have trouble with details. Especially names lol XD Then again, that could be just me since I am bad with names in English too.
I agree with SomeCallMeChris that you should just try to just sit back and listen for a bit. For example, there was a drama and though this is a small success, I was able to eventually learn the word 社長 in context. That and everyone in the drama said the word a million times to one of the main characters who seemed like the boss so I concluded it was at first boss, but then they had flashbacks of him starting up the company so I thought founder/CEO.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - SomeCallMeChris - 2015-11-17
(2015-11-17, 3:59 pm)RawrPk Wrote: I agree with SomeCallMeChris that you should just try to just sit back and listen for a bit.To give credit where credit is due, that one was sholum's comment.
I do agree though, that it's important to be a certain amount relaxed about your listening.
At the same time, you do want to be focused on what's happening, but not trying too hard to catch every little thing.
The reason for this, I think, is that if you spend any time at all mentally translating to English, or even working out a grammar point by mentally rephrasing in Japanese ... by the time you've finished that thought, two more sentences have been uttered. Maybe those two sentences are really simple and you understood them even while thinking about something else, but if they aren't, now you're just falling behind. Japanese is so context sensitive that falling behind is much worse than glossing over a tough phrase.
Having said all that... it probably isn't worth saying all that. Finding the right mental state to approach your listening with is something everyone has to work out for themselves. It's not easy to describe and it's pretty much impossible to give directions on how to do it.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - RawrPk - 2015-11-17
^ gomen. I had skimmed the replies and indeed didn't get credit to sholum.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - Stansfield123 - 2015-11-17
You should consider listening to radio. There tends to be a lot less slurred speech than in TV (radio people, at least the ones who went to school for it, are taught to pronounce things properly, and always speak into the microphone from an optimal distance, to ensure perfect listenability). I'm sure there are also some podcasts where they do a good job with audio and speech quality.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - tokyostyle - 2015-11-17
(2015-11-17, 2:32 pm)PotbellyPig Wrote: I don't know if its scientific but an average native knows around 45k words from what I remember reading but I think its probably more.
This is the figure reported by native research. It's roughly 45k for high school level and 50k for college educated. (Based on NTT research published here.)
I would guess at your level you are already above a significant portion of the population though. High school wasn't mandatory in Japan until recently and I would guess the high school students they used in this research were slightly biased towards the top-end. (Strictly because getting the lower end to show up for a research project would be problematic.
)
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - SomeCallMeChris - 2015-11-17
(2015-11-17, 9:52 pm)tokyostyle Wrote: This is the figure reported by native research. It's roughly 45k for high school level and 50k for college educated. (Based on NTT research published here.)
Wow. I'm honestly shocked. I always assumed that well-read adults knew roughly half of what was in the dictionary, in other words, roughly twice that many words. I don't have any idea really how many words I know in either English or Japanese (especially since I don't put everything into Anki).
This is actually really good news to me though... this relatively small number (compared to the whole language!) makes the whole thing feel so much more manageable.
(Actually I've had that feeling for quite awhile now, ever since I started to be able to get lost in a book and have events visualize clearly in my head much the same as reading in English, only, well, still with the occasional sentence that needs rereading or word that needs looking up. As compared to my early reading efforts that were more like decoding messages and too choppy to really get fully immersed in the story.)
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - s0apgun - 2015-11-17
I just want to say that I have significantly less words studied in Anki than OP but I also live in Japan. I listen to Japanese on a daily basis and use it (poorly) but it really takes a wide variety of situations to get used to listening. Luckily I get exposure to Japanese from a lot of age groups. Maybe it would be best to focus on listening to a wide variety of sources because it really does depend on who is talking! Everyone has a different way of talking. I've even had to struggle with a weird dialect where I live. That being said your Japanese is probably much better than mine with all those words under your belt so take what I say with a grain of salt lol.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - tetsueda - 2015-11-18
(2015-11-17, 10:57 pm)SomeCallMeChris Wrote:(2015-11-17, 9:52 pm)tokyostyle Wrote: This is the figure reported by native research. It's roughly 45k for high school level and 50k for college educated. (Based on NTT research published here.)
Wow. I'm honestly shocked. I always assumed that well-read adults knew roughly half of what was in the dictionary, in other words, roughly twice that many words. I don't have any idea really how many words I know in either English or Japanese (especially since I don't put everything into Anki).
Well, what does "knowing a word" even mean? Besides, there's not practical difference between knowing a word before hand and understanding what it means from context/its parts when you encounter it for the first time. And there's stuff like expressions and いちんち and the like.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - Kuroro - 2015-11-18
I don't know if anybody has already suggested this, but why don't you try watching the anime adaptations of the light novels you've read so far? You'll probably know all of the related vocabulary, grammar etc.
Another interesting approach could be a thematic one, for example watching two anime related to music in order of difficulty (K-on -> 四月は君の嘘)
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - tokyostyle - 2015-11-18
(2015-11-17, 10:57 pm)SomeCallMeChris Wrote: Wow. I'm honestly shocked. I always assumed that well-read adults knew roughly half of what was in the dictionary, in other words, roughly twice that many words.
三省堂国語辞典 is listed as having 82,000 entries. While I'm sure Japan has the concept of unabridged and specialist dictionaries it should still contain most all of the words in modern usage. In fact the 7th edition brags about all of the new words they added like スマートフォン and ツイッター.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - PotbellyPig - 2015-11-18
(2015-11-17, 8:08 pm)Stansfield123 Wrote: You should consider listening to radio. There tends to be a lot less slurred speech than in TV (radio people, at least the ones who went to school for it, are taught to pronounce things properly, and always speak into the microphone from an optimal distance, to ensure perfect listenability). I'm sure there are also some podcasts where they do a good job with audio and speech quality.
I've been trying to mix it up a bit. In terms of slurring and being unclear (fast), I find jdrama to be the worst with nhk news being the best. I'm purposefully trying to listen to material that is less clear because I want to be able to understand that media. I was listening to the NHK news for a while and found the skills acquired listening to it don't necessarily translate to understanding jdrama. I'm going to keep mixing it up though since I'm not very good with either as of yet.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - yukamina - 2015-11-19
Can I ask how long you've been learning Japanese and how much listening you've done in that time? It sounds like you've worked a lot on reading skills, but you only mentioned using some JLPT materials for listening practice until recently.
Listening comprehension takes a long time to build up. I get my listening mostly from watching anime, and I've learned a lot that way (especially slang and casual speech), but unknown vocab is always a barrier for me. If there are a lot of words I don't know, my brain just starts glazing over and I can't understand what's being said. If I know the words, it's easy to understand.
In your case, your vocab is high and you understand the written language well, so it seems your problem is that your brain and ears haven't trained enough to process Japanese speech well enough? It takes a long time, so just keep working at it.
I'd recommend finding some novels or stories that have audiobooks and read along at the same time as listening. That should help matching the written language to the speech, plus it's a lot of exposure. I find stuff like this more helpful than listening to radio programs or audio that I have very low comprehension with.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - PotbellyPig - 2015-11-19
(2015-11-19, 2:52 pm)yukamina Wrote: Can I ask how long you've been learning Japanese and how much listening you've done in that time? It sounds like you've worked a lot on reading skills, but you only mentioned using some JLPT materials for listening practice until recently.Thank you for the advice. Until relatively recently, I had concentrated all on reading which is why I am decent at it. So look at it as years of reading vs. months of listening. I can understand what you mean by choosing comprehensible content because sometimes with some news stories with a lot of political words, I can get lost. But generally, with my vocabulary, knowing the words isn't the issue. It's keeping up with the speech (decoding speed), as well as making it out when the speech is fast and slurred. So I hope that with time and practice it will come around.
Listening comprehension takes a long time to build up. I get my listening mostly from watching anime, and I've learned a lot that way (especially slang and casual speech), but unknown vocab is always a barrier for me. If there are a lot of words I don't know, my brain just starts glazing over and I can't understand what's being said. If I know the words, it's easy to understand.
In your case, your vocab is high and you understand the written language well, so it seems your problem is that your brain and ears haven't trained enough to process Japanese speech well enough? It takes a long time, so just keep working at it.
I'd recommend finding some novels or stories that have audiobooks and read along at the same time as listening. That should help matching the written language to the speech, plus it's a lot of exposure. I find stuff like this more helpful than listening to radio programs or audio that I have very low comprehension with.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - tokyostyle - 2015-11-19
(2015-11-19, 6:56 pm)PotbellyPig Wrote: So I hope that with time and practice it will come around.
It absolutely will but it will NOT be linear. If you could somehow graph your listening comprehension it will be relatively flat and then a huge jump and that pattern will repeat over-and-over. So don't discouraged expecting incremental progress because that is unrealistic.
(Disclaimer: Your vocabulary is roughly double mine but I have no problem listening to the Japanese news passively and picking up on stories that interest me. The only thing I've done that you haven't is to put the news on every night for several years now.)
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - PotbellyPig - 2015-11-19
(2015-11-19, 9:53 pm)tokyostyle Wrote:(2015-11-19, 6:56 pm)PotbellyPig Wrote: So I hope that with time and practice it will come around.
It absolutely will but it will NOT be linear. If you could somehow graph your listening comprehension it will be relatively flat and then a huge jump and that pattern will repeat over-and-over. So don't discouraged expecting incremental progress because that is unrealistic.
(Disclaimer: Your vocabulary is roughly double mine but I have no problem listening to the Japanese news passively and picking up on stories that interest me. The only thing I've done that you haven't is to put the news on every night for several years now.)
I think you hit the nail on the head. I was expecting linear progress like that occurred when learning to read. It looks like it's going to take a long time to get to the point where I am satisfied. Like you said, you've been listening to the news for several years now while I watched maybe 30 or so half hour news programs only.
RE: Am I doing the most appropriate things to improve listening ability? - sholum - 2015-11-19
An attempt at giving some tips and information; hopefully more useful than the vague thing I said before, but more on material instead of 'technique', if you could call it that.
I just watched this video:
And understood almost all of it (there were a few words I had to pick up from the onscreen text). I showed a video of this series to my tutor and she said that it seemed like it might be around N2 level, mostly from the speed and the simple vocabulary and phrases used for the narration; the scientists and professionals they interview can be a little bit harder though, since they tend to use more specialized vocabulary; the young kids speak like young kids, some of the older kids mumble, and the young adults are probably the most clear (this series is aimed at young people, after all); you get all sorts of speech in here.
This level of understanding is up from just a few months ago (based on my perceived 'first watch' understanding of the earlier videos of this series), and definitely better than the start of the year, when I decided I needed to work on listening more.
As a vague metric (that's not terribly useful for this), I've only studied 10k words in Anki, but I might be able to claim up to 11k from things I've read, and maybe a few more that are relatively obvious (like 回復薬 and 傷薬, which are common in video games and don't really require a dictionary if you already know 回復, 傷, and both readings for 薬).
Personally, I found the visual cues of this series (onscreen text, graphs, images, etc) to be really helpful for latching on to the words I already knew, as well as helping me figure out ones I didn't (like 速筋 and 遅筋).
I've also been watching a lot of let's plays on the 兄者弟者 channel; the fact that it's different videos with very similar content (especially the videos of FPS games that Otojya plays) means that I don't get bored watching them like I would if it were the same video over and over. I'm sure it's not as efficient as repeating the same recording repeatedly until you get it, but it's certainly more fun. For a recommendation of a non-FPS gameplay video, I quite enjoyed watching Otojya's playthrough of 夜廻; I don't normally go for horror games, but this one wasn't really terrifying (well, not while watching); not to say it wasn't a bit unnerving, just not to the level of most horror games (my heart rate went up slightly while watching these videos, but the monsters being avoided quickly become less threatening through familiarity, even though they're all one-hit killers).
(links to the first video, in case anyone wants to watch it. I'd like to see this game get localized, since the Vita has so few (decent) titles... It wasn't bad gameplay-wise, just 'meh'. Unfortunately, that means it probably won't be going anywhere outside Japan...)
Now that I have a better answer for the original question: yes, keep at it (nearly) everyday with the native material, but make sure it's comprehensible; in your case, rather than from the words and grammar, comprehension will come from voice patterns and spoken phrases you've heard before. It's important that you find something you can stand to watch for an hour per day (or so; I just watch things as they come out). You don't have to love it (though that's preferable), but if it's a horrible chore, you won't get as much out of it. I'm fairly sure it will feel like a chore for everybody at first (for anyone else reading this comment), but after you start getting used to it, you can start to enjoy it more.
Having said all that, I'm still not that good at listening (that'd be an awfully quick transformation from a couple days ago, lol), but these things aren't intimidating anymore, and I understand them just fine. Compared to pure listening, I think watching these kinds of videos where there's usually only one person talking at a time helps a lot, since you get context and clean audio. Then, after getting used to that, videos with multiple people talking over each other are a little easier (better if it's still on the same kind of topic).