Inny Jan Wrote:adam_invers Wrote:I'm still a novice when it comes to learning Japanese, but the best way I've found to practice listening to Japanese is to just listen to as much Japanese as you can fit into your daily schedule.
Be it ripping the audio off of native Japanese media and putting it on an ipod or MP3 player and just listening to it, to listening to the language on TV, etc. Even throughout the night while you're sleeping have some Japanese audio on repeat, so the first thing you hear upon waking up is someone talking in Japanese.
When you're in the car burn some Japanese audio to a CD or record it to a tape and just have it play in the car. After two or three months of consistent and dedicated listening, you should actually find that you can follow the basic stream of dialogue that you're hearing fairly well. And with your advanced level in learning Japanese vocabulary already, you may even find that you can pick out words that are being spoken.
I've been listening to the Japanese language for about a month in a very consistent manner like I mentioned above, and I've found that I'm already able to pick up the nuances in the language (despite having absolutely zero vocab under my belt so I don't really understand what I'm hearing), when beforehand it just seemed like a stream of rapid, incomprehensible sounds.
It may not seem like it, but eventually you will be able to adapt to listening to the language, assuming that that was even an issue.
For listening to be effective, the content has to be comprehensible. If it's not then what is a white noise now, will remain white noise even after 3 months of constant listening.
While what you said is partly true, and that listening is best paired with learning vocab, grammar, etc, I can personally attest to the notion that what once sounded like white noise to me, after not even a month of consistent listening sounds a lot more distinguishable. And by that I mean my ability to listen to what I'm hearing has sophisticated to the point where my sense of hearing can pick out and distinguish between the different syllables that I'm hearing, and even though I don't understand most of what I'm hearing, I can actually pick out and can distinguish between words.
So say as I progress in my learning process and begin to learn a lot of vocabulary, I would more easily be able to pick out vocab words in what I'm hearing because my sense of hearing has already become accustomed to the language after a few hundred hours of listening, where as if I first started learning vocab and then got into listening, my sense of hearing would still have to go through that transitional period of listening and adapting to what is being heard over hundreds of hours of listening until it could pick up and recognize the vocabulary that I learned.
For example, phrases that I learned such as "daijoubu desu ka" don't sound like "djiboutidezzcod" anymore and don't blend with the rest of what would have sounded like a rapid stream of garbled sounds.
So now when I learn a word or words such as "Kore wa," "Sore wa," "Anata ga," and even the ending particles of sentences such as "desu," "dessho," "ne," "da yo," etc I can almost immediately recognize them through a series of different accents and voice ranges. As I learn new vocab I can pick the words out of the spoken language a lot more easily.
Contrary to what people may think, and even though I don't really advise doing it, I do believe it's possible to become an "expert" at listening to a language even when the meaning of what's being heard isn't understood.
But my previous post wasn't just to say "listen to the language and don't study vocab," it was more "listen to a lot of the language and you can understand it better." And from what I read in the OP, the person already has a great amount of vocab available in their mental filing cabinet, so as they listen to more Japanese and become accustomed to its many nuances, they'll probably be able to access those vocab words a lot more easily after listening to a lot of native speaking to the point of being able to distinguish what's being heard from the rest of what's being spoken.
Piece A, which is knowing a lot of vocabulary, would meet piece B, which is having listened to a lot of Japanese being spoken. That's more or less what I meant with my first post.
Edited: 2013-10-22, 2:43 am
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