I think it's one of those things that really is going to vary a lot by level. For me as a beginner, the usefulness seems limited, as far as Japanese that is 'in the background' goes. At first there was a noticeable gain in familiarity with the sound of Japanese, that did result in it not seeming so fast any more. There's also the benefit of hearing words you know, which will reinforce them. However, today, I've listened to Japanese music, watched a few 実況プレイ videos, browsed the Japanese version of a site I commonly use, and think I can safely say...that I've learned absolutely nothing from it. I wonder if I might as well have done those things in English, really? I think there's a big difference between Japanese that is studied actively Vs. something you're just hearing or seeing passively. The latter can very easily just become 'noise', and I was interested to hear one of my friends say that she feels the amount of time she's spent listening to Japanese music has actually hurt her ability to focus on and understand Japanese, since she just ended up listening to it as music. I know what she means I guess - I have found surrounding myself with too much Japanese really just teaches me to tune Japanese out.

I think the main thing the Japanese I currently have around me is doing, is actually just keeping me on task and reminding me that I'm trying to learn Japanese, and that maybe it's time to add a few more kanji.

So, what do you guys think? Is it helpful, and in what ways, can it sometimes actually be harmful?

I don't believe in immersion in the 'immerse yourself in noise and meanings will materialize with enough exposure' sort of attitude, and I don't think there's any evidence for it helping.

Anything that you can sort-of-understand I think has value to listen to, and any audio that you've also read the words for should be helpful (though you may have to reread from time to time if it doesn't become clear.)

With songs its very easy to build misheard lyrics - even in listening to native language, I've had it happen and heard plenty of my friends talk about it happening - you mishear a lyric early on, and even after you learn the correct lyric, it just doesn't sound that way to you (eventually it'll probably clear up, after dozens of listens, if you're still listening that long.)

I'm not sure that's a problem in spoken language though, I think we process it differently. I haven't personally noticed misheard dialogue persisting when I rewatch shows with improved abilities.

An improved ability to 'tune out' the language because you listen to it as incomprehensible noise might contribute to it being hard to ignore native language subtitles. On the other hand, many people have started immersion before opening their first textbook, immersing in incomprehensible audio while they do RtK. They seem to get by just fine afterwards, so it can't be a big problem.

I have no idea how an immersive environment can be harmful. I don't think the music thing is a very good example on the part of your friend. When I listen to music, regardless of the language, I typically don't try to follow the lyrics. And for the whole using the website in Japanese thing, well there's always the idea that even though you aren't learning new words you're improving recognition speed and reinforcing the context of those words. Maybe more passively but it's something I'm sure.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:On the other hand, many people have started immersion before opening their first textbook, immersing in incomprehensible audio while they do RtK.

Yup, that would be me. I've done it from the start, though I know a bit more actual Japanese now...but still not enough that nearly all the Japanese I come across isn't noise. I think the only words I understood from the first 実況プレイ video were 鍵, 怖い, oh and スタート.

TheVinster Wrote:I have no idea how an immersive environment can be harmful. I don't think the music thing is a very good example on the part of your friend. When I listen to music, regardless of the language, I typically don't try to follow the lyrics.

Yeah, I think that's true for a lot of people and maybe really for her, though I'd say the way people listen to music varies. For me I always do focus on the lyrics, and find it irritating to listen to music with repetitive lyrics. For possibly a better example, I have found myself often tuning out written Japanese, especially if there's a lot of it - it took me quite a while to realise that some of the words on the website I use are actually ones I know or should have recognised, including embarrassingly some katakana ones like ホーム, データベース. If I hadn't been tuning it out among the mass of incomprehensible Japanese, having become under I guess the subconscious impression that 'Japanese = stuff I don't understand', I'd have seen that.


I agree, I shouldn't think it would really mess someone up, though they might get better at tuning the language out you'd expect that to fade with active study, and it should be more wholly beneficial at higher levels. That may possibly mean it's better to avoid sources of immersion that are really just noise to the person, though, and I wonder if that's something that could be considered more?
There's also I suppose the possibility of it in a way 'tricking' someone into thinking they're doing more than they are, when in actuality they're not really learning anything, or very little, from most of what they're doing. There may be little actual point in it sometimes, and potentially there's also an issue with frustration - for some people it could be motivating, for others discouraging, to be surrounded by incomprehensible stuff, especially if they're feeling an obligation to do things in Japanese that they'd normally have done in English. It may make them dislike the language and even mean it takes longer, and takes away from time they could otherwise have used actively studying.

There's no good reason to immerse yourself in incomprehensible input, but there's no strong reason -not- to do so. I think the motivation/frustration points that you just mentioned are what should be the deciding factor for any individual. If it motivates you, do it, if it frustrates you ... don't.

Later on, exposing yourself to semi-comprehensible input is an entirely different matter.

I wonder whether it helps listening or pronunciation even when you dont understand it.

corry Wrote:I wonder whether it helps listening or pronunciation even when you dont understand it.

I don't think so. One of the barriers to listening comprehension is distinguishing long vowels and short vowels, distinguishing the different consonant sounds that aren't quite as they are in English (or whatever your native language may be), picking out the sound of the っ, and so on. With enough context to identify borderline-comprehensible words correctly, or with a written guide to follow, you can tune your ear.

With a stream of incomprehensible sound... what can you achieve? You're getting used to hearing the sounds, sure, but not getting used to identifying them or distinguishing them.

It still seems like maybe you should be able to group the sounds into categories I mean you dont really need meaning to do that.

corry Wrote:I wonder whether it helps listening or pronunciation even when you dont understand it.

I think it depends on just how much you don't understand it. If, for instance, you can become familiar with the sounds, and general rhythm of the target language, while you aren't actively comprehending anything, you are at least building up a passive sense of identifying how the language generally sounds.

For an example, after spending years watching subtitled movies on the Australian TV station SBS, I have built up a mental sound bank in which I can differentiate between certain languages purely by hearing their cadence, patterns, stresses, sounds, etc. While they may not be comprehensible in any meaningful sense, compared to the average person who may hear Japanese, Korean, Thai, Mandarin; German, French, Russian, Swedish, etc. they usually fail to tell the difference between them, whereas it seems rather clear to my ears.

That is to say that I do not see any harm in immersing yourself within your target language, regardless of whether you can understand it or not, just as long as you allow it to truly flow into and out of you without getting too hung up on trying to understand it. That what the active study is for. Immersion would probably be better put as ambiance, as in something greater you are apart of which your body adapts to the sounds and flow of. Like traffic outside your window. Eventually it should start to feel normal to hear.

Anything comprehended while being within the environment is really just a sign that certain parts of your active involvement with the target language is starting to click together. Just don't try to focus too much on trying to catch all the sounds and breaking them apart inside your head. Immerse yourself as though it were water. Try to wrap yourself tightly up within it and you'll drown. Relax and spread yourself out willing to let it flow unto your limbs and you'll float.

corry Wrote:It still seems like maybe you should be able to group the sounds into categories I mean you dont really need meaning to do that.

You do need meaning to do that, actually. The phonemes in Japanese don't have the same boundaries as those in English. If you don't know what the word is that you're hearing, you don't know where to group the sound that you're hearing. It's just a sound, and you don't know if it's the same consonant as another sound that you just recently heard, or a different one.

つ and す are infamously hard to distinguish, for example (for English speakers; Russian speakers probably have this one easy). Hearing '好きな人と付き合うことはいいじゃない'　will give you an instant example of the difference if you know what the words are. If you don't, then it's just noises. With no knowledge of Japanese and coming from an English background, you're likely to instinctively box 'すき' and 'つき' as the same set of phonemes and think you heard 'suki' twice. Actually, with truly -no- knowledge of Japanese, you'll probably miss the devoiced vowel and think you heard 'ski' twice.

If it's sapping your motivation that much, whatever benefit your learning method has, it doesn't seem like it's going to work out extremely well in the long run. But if you don't want to drastically change your method, here are some quick ideas:

This is trivial, but you can change your native Japanese material to something that requires actual communication or interactions. For example, if someone is responding to you in real life, you just can't zone out and ignore them. If someone is replying to your post on a forum, blog etc, you'll never fail to notice it's in Japanese. It takes horrible personality to teach yourself to tune Japanese out when someone is talking to you. This idea may require a nonzero output ability, but regardless of your level, you should be able to find someone, something you can "take advantage of" for your Japanese somewhere.

Speakers of major languages like English and Japanese may not always be happy to communicate with you if your speaking/writing is very poor. So if you would like a real person for this purpose, it might be more successful if you do a formal study beforehand to an extent and show them you did your homework. It all depends on your current level and circumstances though.

Also, you can have interactions without actual people. For example, certain types of games like RPG naturally require interactions/simulated communication. The typical gameplay of visual novels, dating sims, and the like is exactly simulated human interactions. This is just a quick example I came up with off the top of my head, but there must be various kinds of material where you can have active interactions without speaking or writing.

Another thing you can do is only use Japanese material that draws you in. You use something that gets you, something you're really into, well, anything that keeps your attention longer. I'm sure you already heard this, and you may be thinking it's painfully obvious. I know it's not always easy to find such ideal material too. But it doesn't bode well if you can't pay any attention to the stuff you're using to the extent that you feel like it's teaching you to tune Japanese out. I mean, it sounds like you're literally torturing yourself...

I can't give concrete advice about how to find more interesting material, and no one knows what you might like because everyone is different. You yourself may not know what you might like either. So why don't you just throw lots of random stuff and see what sticks? If nothing sticks, you still payed attention to the material when searching for good stuff. You can't fail to achieve your goal with this strategy.

I think that listening to podcasts (without paying attention, and not understanding) was the thing that made my japanese improve quickly. That and obviously anki'ing every day, adding new words from articles/lyrics I read.

Having lived in Japan for years, I have to say, it's been far less helpful than I'd hoped.

As others have noted, a lot of what you don't understand gets disregarded as noise. Of course, as you progress, you start to fill in the blanks, and every exposure reinforces what you've learned. But it's far from magical. Nothing, unfortunately, seems to replace studying and consciously building vocabulary with reading and anki reps.

In terms of harmful, yes, I think there is an aspect to life in Japan that actually makes it harder to learn Japanese. (Granted, "life in Japan" and "immersion" are slightly different topics, but they're pretty closely related.) Living and working here is a pretty hectic lifestyle! I enjoy going on vacations to other countries, where I can just relax and read a book or watch a movie in Japanese. That's often more beneficial than talking to a colleague or a friend, in terms of actually learning something.

As long as it is comprehensible and you can learn from it, it's great.

Personally, I find 実況プレイ videos as the easiest medium, since they often repeat themselves and the guy making the video won't usualy make long irrelevant rants.

Also, reading: you can do that at your own pace, so you can't really zone out, and video games require you to pay attention.

I don't really find music to be least helpful because the pronunciation is often quite weird.

Furthermore, I prefer learning words from the mediums, which makes them more comprehensible later on.

That's my 2￥ at least..

magamo Wrote:Speakers of major languages like English and Japanese may not always be happy to communicate with you if your speaking/writing is very poor.

As a point of contrast, consider this well-meaning bit of advice from Mango Languages:

Quote:Talking to native speakers is an invaluable step toward improving your linguistic skills. But if those strangers look at you and start laughing, don't run away in tears! In Japan, laughing at someone is not always the sign of spite. The Japanese may grin, giggle, or even laugh when you talk to them most likely because they are delighted at your efforts to learn their language. So when you end up with giggling Japanese, join them in their happy mood!

Ah, giggling Japanese.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:

corry Wrote:It still seems like maybe you should be able to group the sounds into categories I mean you dont really need meaning to do that.

You do need meaning to do that, actually. The phonemes in Japanese don't have the same boundaries as those in English. If you don't know what the word is that you're hearing, you don't know where to group the sound that you're hearing. It's just a sound, and you don't know if it's the same consonant as another sound that you just recently heard, or a different one.

つ and す are infamously hard to distinguish, for example (for English speakers; Russian speakers probably have this one easy). Hearing '好きな人と付き合うことはいいじゃない'　will give you an instant example of the difference if you know what the words are. If you don't, then it's just noises. With no knowledge of Japanese and coming from an English background, you're likely to instinctively box 'すき' and 'つき' as the same set of phonemes and think you heard 'suki' twice. Actually, with truly -no- knowledge of Japanese, you'll probably miss the devoiced vowel and think you heard 'ski' twice.

Its true English will mess you up and make it hard but it you pay attention you can still hear the differences. Say you got an A with すき and B with つき then any one can ABX them apart with a little practice without knowing the meanings. Then its just a matter of re grouping the sounds into Japanese groups.

Aside from music, I only use comprehensible immersion. That means that everything on my I-pod I have already watched several times with subtitles, television I watch is stuff that I can figure out from context (i.e. I recently watched some of the World Baseball Classic and Paris-Nice cycling on Japanese sports stations streaming on-line, and was able to follow what was going on fine), the shows I watch without subs I'm already so familiar with that, even if I don't understand every little joke or observation, I know what's going on, etc.

This type of immersion helped me immensely (including the subtitled stuff, but of course not as much as re-listening without subtitles, or watching things I can follow live without subs, like sports and variety shows).

By the way, I've learned foreign languages before. In those cases too, immersion was by far the main tool. Not only that, I think it was essential. Without immersion, I doubt I would've ever learned any language as an adult.

Are variety shows actually easy to follow? I never got around to trying any so I dont even know what they are like. But I thought they would be a lot of talking without much context.

I haven't watched variety shows that much, but my impression is that there aren't reasons for particularly complicated or simplified language. There's often big and colorful subtitles of what they say (supposedly to put emphasis on jokes I guess?). Sometimes there's text on like, half the screen lol.

I've been meaning to check out ガキの使い, they have the famous 笑ってはいけない skits.

corry Wrote:Are variety shows actually easy to follow?

If you watch a lot of the same one, after a while yes. They have a lot of repeating segments (i.e. games guests participate in), and in general they're very predictably structured.

The easiest one I can think of is !Hello Morning (it was a gameshow / variety show on TV Tokyo). It's (in part) targeted at kids. They had a lot of cute girls, and everything from games to very basic comedy skits with a lot of obvious jokes. It's massively translated all over the Internet and it's an older show (that people can upload without too many copyright issues), so it's easy to get into for beginners.

corry Wrote:Its true English will mess you up and make it hard but it you pay attention you can still hear the differences. Say you got an A with すき and B with つき then any one can ABX them apart with a little practice without knowing the meanings. Then its just a matter of re grouping the sounds into Japanese groups.

No, you really can't. Without meaning you don't know what sound difference indicate that something is a different phoneme and what sound differences are just accent or mannerism. There are rolled r's and hard r's and "Rs" that sound like "L" to western ears. Without meaning, you'll probably group R sounds alone into four or five groups, or more depending on how close you're being. が can and usually is pronounced at least two different ways just by the same person never mind varying accents. If you're going to 'A' and 'B' すき and つき then you're going to also C, D, E, and F different ways of prouncing 'これ'. (Not that you would even know to take such logical units as sound groupings, making the whole proposition a non-starter.)

Without meaning, you have no idea how many boxes to put which sounds in. There's no way to know that THESE two sounds that seem totally different are actually the same phoneme while THOSE two sounds that seem only the tiniest bit different are actually different phonemes - unless you already know something about the language.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:No, you really can't. Without meaning you don't know what sound difference indicate that something is a different phoneme and what sound differences are just accent or mannerism.

Thank you for making me feel less defective. My experience is very much the same here.

bertoni Wrote:

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:No, you really can't. Without meaning you don't know what sound difference indicate that something is a different phoneme and what sound differences are just accent or mannerism.

Thank you for making me feel less defective. My experience is very much the same here.

Heh. No problem. I do form my opinion from reading a bunch of phonetics and linguistics pages some time back (from tangents in some giant pitch accent thread), it's not totally out of the blue, but I don't really have links handy (other than pointing to 'phonemes' in wikipedia which ... has some hints at the complexity of the listening problem but isn't really a good place to start, it's just an easy page to remember.)

OTOH, I have no evidence but my personal experience... but once you -do- have meaning I find that the hearing clicks into place pretty quickly. A little reading-listening practice goes a long way. Rewind is a wonderful thing too - I've found that if I have both the audio and the text in front of me, and it doesn't sound like what's written I can generally learn to hear it 'correctly' after repeating a clip a few times. It's a little strange to have what you (mis)heard as one consonant just a few minutes ago seem to become another consonant even though it's the exact same sounds being replayed...

I don't think this works with simply playing single words like the EDICT entry word clips, or, at least not for me. I need a string of context words to get my brain to process it as meaningful language and make an adjustment. And of course, even when not replaying a particular clip, any comprehensible listening is going to do this automatically, I believe; in the same way that our ear adjusts to a regional accent, I think it also adjusts to the sound of foreign language once comprehension begins and starts a self-reinforcing cycle of better ability to hear. Which is good, 'cause I'd much rather improve my listening by watching shows and only occasionally rewinding than by playing short clips over and over. :O

I'm also in the same position as you, Ampharos. But I think you might be speaking too soon.

Listening isn't really passive, it's a receptive skill. I can tell that the 40 or so subbed anime series I watched between August and December last year has given me a very subtle, but very real "confidence" about the language (how it sounds, how to emphasise, the general feel of it). All of that listening I'm sure has done something. I can only imagine it helping. However, it's necessary that you enjoy it, or at the very least you shouldn't mind it. When listening gets annoying, just stop.

Regarding myself as one member of this forum that probably still has the worst listening comprehension ever (it was really badass, believe it or not), the following might be of interest to you.
For your interest, I could not understand virtually any conversational simple Japanese. Just usual every day talk was ways too much, although I could read newspaper articles and novels having a greater understanding (know about 2500 kanji and 12k words).

I can't stress enough finding audio ressource that is really interesting to you. It must be appealing. You must want to replay a phrase up to 20 times to get it, so that you can look it up on the dictionary. Not only interesting, but also - that applies for me - it must be entertaining, funny, humorous.

I totally immerse myself in 太田光の「今週のコラム」 and コント of 東京03 (you can find all of them easily on YouTube). I automatically spent more time listening actively, desperate to understand the puns. Perhaps having finished a challenging novel might have contributed to my defect listening skills to slightly improve. Who knows, but I can certify: get something that gets you!