How do you know if you're getting better at listening or if you're just treading water? It feels like I'm not making any progress, and maybe I'm not. How can I find out?

Listen more.

It's impossible not to make any progress at all. Maybe you're just making slow progress.
Whenever you recognize a new word that you have recently learned, that should be a sign you're getting better. Or whenever you feel that you've become more familiar with some grammatical construction and feel like you understand it better. Whenever it takes less effort to make sense of a sentence.

I don't even recognize some words I learned a year ago, let alone new words I learn. I also don't understand what you mean by effort. Most sentences I don't understand, and the ones I do there isn't any effort involved. As soon as one ends another one starts, there's no time to put in any sort of effort.

It's quite easy to see whether you are progressing in listening or not.

Every day, over some longer time (let's say two months), listen to (and study) material that is equally sized and has a similar level of difficulty. Make sure that at the end of your listening session your understanding of that material is 100%.

You will know that you are progressing when after those two months, you are able to study/listen to more of such material than at the moment when you started.

Inny Jan Wrote:Every day, over some longer time (let's say two months), listen to (and study) material that is equally sized and has a similar level of difficulty. Make sure that at the end of your listening session your understanding of that material is 100%.

I think you should never aim for understanding 100% because you're always gonna waste your time trying to understand the last 5% rather than just listen to more stuff you understand 95% of.

Go and relisten to something you couldn't understand six months ago. If it's easier now you've made progress.

[RawToast]

I find music is quite good for judging listening improvement. When a song randomly plays that I haven't heard in a while I tend to 'spot' more words and sentence structures.

You could do the same thing with the audio from graded readers, audio books, anime, etc. Try listening to something above your level, make notes on how hard you found it, and then try again in a month or two. If you do this too frequently with the same content you will run the risk of simply remembering the lyrics/story, rather than judging your level.

If you want to know if you made progress, how about re-watching some anime you watched half a year ago? you'll be able to tell the difference.

can't really say if you get better on a day to day basis. it's like measuring your physical growth every day.

I'm also behind on my listening ability. I focused on reading for a long time. I think you just have to do things like using subs2srs to get used to listening. I've also have the N3, N2 and N1 Kanzen Master listening workbooks. They can also be helpful. I'm currently on the N1 one. It can be even harder than subs2srs since those are usually a sentence or two spoken at a time. The workbooks contain whole dialogs. I rarely get it on the first time listening. I have to repeat it several times. I think this is the crucial point. Once you understand a lot on the first listen, you have achieved your goal. I'm not at that point yet so I guess I'll keep going.

listening and talking are the most difficult things to improve on your own. reading/writing can be done in a room alone with a computer, but just listening to anime or whatever is not very efficient for building listening ability.
you need to have a conversation with a person. it really activates your listening skills because you have to pay attention, for your ability to respond, and so that your partner feels comfortable.
it's really hard in the beginning, and you may even be physically exhausted after the first few nights of that, but it's gonna be a long slog otherwise.

apirx Wrote:

Inny Jan Wrote:Every day, over some longer time (let's say two months), listen to (and study) material that is equally sized and has a similar level of difficulty. Make sure that at the end of your listening session your understanding of that material is 100%.

I think you should never aim for understanding 100% because you're always gonna waste your time trying to understand the last 5% rather than just listen to more stuff you understand 95% of.

Which is why you want to listen to audio for which you can get script. Listening to audio where you don't have the script makes things like two orders of magnitude harder, and although you can do that, it's not particularly efficient.

With script having 100% comprehension is not a problem.

dtcamero Wrote:listening and talking are the most difficult things to improve on your own. reading/writing can be done in a room alone with a computer, but just listening to anime or whatever is not very efficient for building listening ability.

I dunno- it worked for me! I would agree that, early on, you need something to capture your attention so radio and the like may not work very well in the early stages. (Although, I used to listen to podcasts while I worked out and that went fairly well.)

If you want to know how far you've come- relisten to something you listened to months or years ago. If you want to get better- listen more! It just takes a long time for a lot of people. It took me forever. 8|

Inny Jan Wrote:Which is why you want to listen to audio for which you can get script. Listening to audio where you don't have the script makes things like two orders of magnitude harder, and although you can do that, it's not particularly efficient.

With script having 100% comprehension is not a problem.

Watching something with subtitles is easy, that doesn't mean you'd understand anything without them though.

egoplant Wrote:

Inny Jan Wrote:Which is why you want to listen to audio for which you can get script. Listening to audio where you don't have the script makes things like two orders of magnitude harder, and although you can do that, it's not particularly efficient.

With script having 100% comprehension is not a problem.

Watching something with subtitles is easy, that doesn't mean you'd understand anything without them though.

Are you familiar with this page?
http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/The_Last_Wave

I would refer you to the third point from there:
"Listen again. You should be getting near to total understanding."

This is not "watching something with subtitles".

(Actually, I think that audio books are better study material (at least in terms of quantity) than "The Last Wave" but some people will want to work on improving their conversational skills for which "The Last Wave" is a good fit.)

Inny Jan Wrote:

egoplant Wrote:

Inny Jan Wrote:Which is why you want to listen to audio for which you can get script. Listening to audio where you don't have the script makes things like two orders of magnitude harder, and although you can do that, it's not particularly efficient.

With script having 100% comprehension is not a problem.

Watching something with subtitles is easy, that doesn't mean you'd understand anything without them though.

Are you familiar with this page?
http://rtkwiki.koohii.com/wiki/The_Last_Wave

I would refer you to the third point from there:
"Listen again. You should be getting near to total understanding."

This is not "watching something with subtitles".

(Actually, I think that audio books are better study material (at least in terms of quantity) than "The Last Wave" but some people will want to work on improving their conversational skills for which "The Last Wave" is a good fit.)

Thanks for the link but it looks like the mp3's are dead. I wonder if someone on this forum has them all downloaded and could reupload them somewhere.

I don't think audiobooks are very popular in Japan unfortunately.

@egoplant

Have you tried japanesepod101? I improved my listening significantly by using their podcasts. Unfortunately, for full access you need to pay 7$ though, but I really recommend this site. Their podcasts are seperated between lower, middle and upper beginner, intermediate and advanced seasons, and they always keep feeding you with just enough English translation to keep you going (supposed you've found a season fitting your level).

dtcamero Wrote:listening and talking are the most difficult things to improve on your own. reading/writing can be done in a room alone with a computer, but just listening to anime or whatever is not very efficient for building listening ability.

Why would listening not be enough to get better at listening?
When I came to Japan after 2,5 years of self-study back home, I could barely speak. It took me a while to string a sentence together, get the grammar sorted and the vocab activated, but I could get just fine what people around me said, and especially when they talked to me.
I've always been the type to learn by ear, that's why I'm struggling with my studies of Heisig now, after more than 3 years, but listening is my best skill by a huge margin, and I attribute that to watching a ton of anime and drama.

Subs or not, it doesn't matter IMHO at a certain level. This question is overrated. You will want subs first and might or might not abandon them or just ignore them later. They might come handy at some point, while they'll probably distract you if you could understand 95% anyways.

andikaze Wrote:Why would listening not be enough to get better at listening?

Because we're not really talking about listening. We're talking about developing the ability to comprehend spoken language in real time. "listening" is just shorthand for that.

The reason why listening to a wall of sound is not good enough to do that is the same reason why looking at a wall of text wouldn't be good enough to learn how to read.

You need to actually understand what you're looking at or listening to.