I had posted a thread or two in the past about how I should approach listening practice. I'm already decent at reading light novels (probably read abt. 30 books) with a vocabulary at around 22k. I decided upon finding Japanese subs for an anime or drama and then going by the following routine:

1. Listen to a section and if I don't understand everything, listen a second time. After that, if I still don't get it, look at the subtitles.
2. Listen to the whole show a second time straight through with minimal interruptions.

I've done this for about 15 anime episodes and a handful of drama episodes. Does this seem like a good method for getting better at listening? I remember someone posted that he learned how to listen adequately by going through all the One Piece episodes (must of been a few hundred though).

I like to do one episode a day. Problem is finding Japanese subs that match correctly so I don't have to do a lot of adjusting. I will try English subs and see how that works but I think Japanese subs are preferable.

I've found watching stuff with Japanese subs a great way to improve my reading. I could never hear softening わs at the end of a sentence before, or explanatory んs, and now I can usually catch those.
I'm also hoping it helps improve my reading speed too - I know years of watching stuff with English subs made me really fast at scanning the sentence and then going back to looking at the picture.
I haven't really started testing myself with this yet, so I can't really offer feedback on your system. I'm still just re-enjoying my favorite anime and movies with Japanese subs on all the time (but I'm at a very different stage than you and am also doing this to help solidify kanji readings and improve my vocabulary). In a little while, I intent to go through episodes speaking along with the characters, and replaying sections until my pronunciation perfectly matches the seiyu's. So if you want, I think you can take the same resources you've already got and use this for pronunciation practice.

So in my experience, just listening and reading the subs concurrently has been eye-opening for me so far (I think I'm about 10 episodes and 5 movies in). If you feel you aren't being engaged with that then I would definitely do your current procedure, it sounds pretty solid. Sorry I can't help much, just wanted to give positive feedback on using Japanese subs. Have fun!

don't watch the whole episode again. it's a waste of time unless your japanese level is REALLY low even then you don't have to make yourself watch something you just watched in its entirety to improve.

what I do is I focus on watching anything and everything that i want to watch that happanes to be inajapense as opposed to i should watch this because it's in japanese and there's japnese subs. so sometimes i have to resort to asking japanese people what it is the person said whether its'a a jdrama or a talk/variety shows (with the link to the video etc). I spam these questions on lang-8 and people do answer. if they don't then clearly i have to correct and give back and have people notice me. sometimes i'm really glad i asked it becaause the word that i learned was worth learning or it made the question marks in my head turn into japanese.
I

It sounds reasonable, if you can stand the repetition. I don't really rewatch anything anymore. I went back to subs2srs for a while, but got bored out of my skull listening to the same thing over and over. I was depressed that I had gobs and gobs of Japanese content at my fingertips, but was watching the same handful of shows over and over again.

Currently, I more or less do what howtosavealif3 does, but I usually make sure I have Japanese subtitles at the ready. If there's a part I didn't understand purely from listening, I'll read the J-subs, and repeat the scene a few times until I can hear what's printed on the subs. If I find unknown vocab, I bookmark, study, and SRS it. I do an entire episode like this, and then I move on to the next episode. I've noticed that this works particularly well with long-running dramas, in which a lot of the same subjects and manners of speaking tend to repeat from episode to episode. After watching about 13 weeks of episodes, for example, I feel like I'm used to hearing and understanding the 甲州弁 conversations in 花子とアン.

Beyond this, I also listen to podcasts, and I do tend to listen to those a couple of times, if they're short podcasts such as ねえねえ聞いて or 杏のAnytime Andante. I also watch some anime for which I don't have subtitles, and just do my best to make out everything on the first run. So long as I'm grokking over 80% or 90% of it, I stick with it.

I guess what I'm saying is, do whatever you enjoy and keeps you motivated, but don't think you HAVE to listen to the same things over and over. You can also expose yourself to a constant stream of new content, and still get repeated exposure to words and patterns.

PotbellyPig Wrote:1. Listen to a section and if I don't understand everything, listen a second time. After that, if I still don't get it, look at the subtitles.

I'm not really at the point in my language learning that my advice should be trusted, so take my advice with a grain of salt. But having said that, I've been reading a lot of research lately that suggests keeping things challenging results in faster learning. So, if your goal is to learn as much as possible in the least amount of time, it might make sense to just watch once, and move on to the next show. That is, unless you're not able to follow along very well, then looking things up and re-watching probably would be worthwhile.

I don't have much experience with listening practice, but what I've read on it suggests that you shouldn't force yourself to listen to long passages repeatedly, unless it went completely over your head; it seems that listening to multiple passages with frequently repeated topics or speech patterns (as is the case when watching anime), does a better job at training you to listen, instead of memorize.

As I said though, I'm not very far into this; about the only thing I can fully (or almost fully) understand is learner material, like the Jpod101 stuff.

If you do any smaller passages (like news segments), maybe try reading the transcript before listening, so that you have an idea of what to listen for.

If you can smoothly read, then honestly, I'd just run the Japanese subs and watch shows with them on. Try to pay attention to the sound and not just the writing, of course, but it will sink in very quickly. If you really enjoy a series that you've watched -with- Japanese subtitles then you can rewatch it without and reinforce pure audio input. After watching a few dozen series (which would be some hundreds of episodes...) then try again without subs and you'll probably understand quite a lot.
Just reading along to subtitles is how I brought my listening level up to the point that I passed JLPT N1 Listening section (although I didn't pass the test; before that I would've said I was stronger in reading than listening... I guess my listening skills surpassed my reading skills in the process!)
I can watch pretty much any romance/romantic comedy/slice of life and understand everything, and many fantasy based Anime as well are easy for me. I still need help from Japanese subtitles or frequent pause/dictionary lookups for scifi/military/crime shows with all their technical vocabulary.

Thanks for the replies. When I listen to the episodes a second time, I literally listen to them. I rip out the audio from the video and put it on my iphone. No need to view it again if I just saw the show.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:If you can smoothly read, then honestly, I'd just run the Japanese subs and watch shows with them on. Try to pay attention to the sound and not just the writing, of course, but it will sink in very quickly. If you really enjoy a series that you've watched -with- Japanese subtitles then you can rewatch it without and reinforce pure audio input. After watching a few dozen series (which would be some hundreds of episodes...) then try again without subs and you'll probably understand quite a lot.
Just reading along to subtitles is how I brought my listening level up to the point that I passed JLPT N1 Listening section (although I didn't pass the test; before that I would've said I was stronger in reading than listening... I guess my listening skills surpassed my reading skills in the process!)
I can watch pretty much any romance/romantic comedy/slice of life and understand everything, and many fantasy based Anime as well are easy for me. I still need help from Japanese subtitles or frequent pause/dictionary lookups for scifi/military/crime shows with all their technical vocabulary.

I'll have to queue up some shows. It's hard to find shows both with Japanese subtitles AND that you are interested in :>. I've only gone through about 20 shows/episodes so far. I'm hoping by the time I get to 100, I'll be improved a lot.

If you do go through anime to help improve your Japanese comprehension, you can't really go wrong in terms of length by choosing One Piece and Detective Conan. That's about 1500 or 1600 episodes of anime just with those two.

However, if you're only doing 1 episode a day or so, it would probably take 20 years to complete them.

From my experience though, consistent and large consumption of Japanese audio is a good way to go. If you have an MP3 Player and a CD Player, you can basically just rip audio from a show, put it on your MP3/burn it to a CD, so that way when you aren't busy you can pretty much listen to audio whenever you want. It'd be ready for when you're mobile and when you're at home.

Seems like you're almost making it tedious for yourself on purpose. Probably the reason why your listening comprehension has fallen behind your reading skills.

I think you should just watch with English or Japanese subs (whichever works for you, or whichever is available), and strive for quantity instead of "quality".

Or, at least, watch with subs first and only then, later on, if you feel like watching it again, watch it without. That is something I do find myself doing a lot, though mostly with comedy, not dramas, and usually not by design. I just happen to come across the same clips more than once, over time, and the second time I don't bother looking for the subbed version because I know I can follow along without it.

Thanks for the advice. What's really killing me now is when the anime characters talk really fast for effect or put on an accent (like in a yakuza type voice).

PotbellyPig Wrote:Thanks for the advice. What's really killing me now is when the anime characters talk really fast for effect or put on an accent (like in a yakuza type voice).

Sounds like your average male actor in a Japanese TV drama. :-p

And hey, if you want a REAL test of your Japanese comprehension skills...http://www.crunchyroll.com/teekyu