So I was wondering if anyone could recommend some easy listening lessons for a beginner.

I'm practicing 3-4 hours everyday, I've done a third of RTK1, and half of Tae Kim and Genki. I'm doing reps with ANKI everyday, I'm reading graded readers. I guess my reading and reading comprehension improves, albeit slowly.

However I'm noticing that my listening and speaking skill lies far behind that.
Can anyone recommend good material to get into listening and slowly improve this rather crucial language skill?
I'm doing the white rabbit graded readers listening comprehensions. But apart from that I'm a little lost. And even easy anime are far beyond what I can comprehend.

It ususally sounds like: おれは、、、、、、、、、ません、、、、、、、、どこに、、、、、、、、すか？あの、、、、
、、、、、、、それは、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、すべて、、、、、、、、、、、、、、、だよ。

Can anyone relate? I'm not kidding!! >_<;

As for speaking: okay I need someone to talk to in person, I get it.
And that should of course also help with listening.

Thanks for your help...!

Speaking skill always lies far behind, unless you have a speaking approach from the begining, like Benny from FluentIn3Months.
Which isn't necessarily the best. That's the way to go if your goal is speaking with people. But to enjoy japanese books and TV, I would rather put enphasis on input. I prefer to wait until I have enough vocabulary to start speaking.

When it comes to listening, at the beginner stage, I suggest https://www.erin.ne.jp/jp/
It has short videos with japanese people speaking at real speed. Also there are some grammar explanations with real life examples. And you can choose to enable japanse or english subtitles.
After that something like sub2srs may be useful.

I can definitely relate, in the beginning just separating the individual sounds out was difficult for me. I found that after watching A LOT of anime/dramas, my listening overall got better. It's not the most helpful advice necessarily, but for just comprehension, that is what I would recommend. Focus more on the words you can understand, and write down/study those until you know them without thinking. Over time, you will hopefully have less that you aren't familiar with each sentence you hear, and so it gets a bit easier to comprehend.
Another thing I found somewhat useful, was trying to comprehend songs. I didn't focus as much on actually understanding the overall meaning (especially since sometimes the lyrics in songs don't make much sense to begin with), but instead I focused on trying to distinguish the individual words in the song, and wrote down those that I could figure out. Over time I got better at it, and it was also a great measuring stick to keep track of how far I had gone when I could suddenly understand most of a song that was gibberish 6 months ago. Overall, it was mostly time and constant exposure (preferably comprehensible, but slightly gibberish works in its own way), that made many things finally click in my mind.

As far as speaking, I can't comment on that as well on that since I still have issues with it, but you might be surprised at how far you can get with some simple phrases. You won't be writing eloquent speeches, but with the grammar from Genki I was generally able to get my point across. Talk to yourself in Japanese when you can if you aren't comfortable talking to others yet

To get better at listening, you have to listen to a LOT of stuff. Different kinds/genres is better, different speeds, too. Just listen whenever you can. Eventually, your brain will start to sort it out, but it takes time.

To get better at speaking, speak.

I never found any shortcuts for this kind of stuff. I did a ton of "studying native input," and I never had a magic moment when I could suddenly hold my own in a conversation. I had to have a lot of difficult and painful (for me) conversations where I groped for the right words/phrases to get better at it. The more I spoke, the better I got.

The analogy to a muscle is used a lot because it's really accurate. If you don't use it, you lose it, and if you didn't have it in the first place, you won't get it if you don't exercise it.

Maybe some people out there suddenly have some sort of epiphany, but I've never experienced that, nor have I seen it happen.

I was earlier than your stage when I started a lot of this stuff, so don't put it off. It will continue to be how you described it in your original post for a while, but through the quantity of this method, you will be able to pick out more and more words over time. What I do:

1) Watch Anime at breakfast (25 mins is a good time to spend eating breakfast, that why) and dramas at teatime (I'm British ), al WITHOUT ENGLISH SUBS. Watch anime on http://crunchyroll.com, older dramas on http://youtube.com and download newer dramas at http://doramax264.com/

2) Find loads of music I like on youtube and download audio from the videos using Freemake Video Converter (yes it's not entirely honest but since I'm limited to the ones with music videos, I have bought several albums after sampling music this way - but at this stage we want as much as possible as soon as possible) http://www.freemake.com/free_video_converter/

3) Convert the dramas into audio files using Free make Video converter (online videos) or Free Video to MP3 Converter (downloaded video files) http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd...verter.htm . Cut these files into 15 minute peices or smaller using Mp3 Direct Cut (or Audacity) http://mpesch3.de1.cc/mp3dc.html (you don't want to be listening to huge chunks of drama audio).

4) Wipe all English material from one iPod (or you could buy a cheap seperate player for this) and fill it completely up (mine is 8gb) with music, drama audio and random podcasts (should also be in 15 min chunks or less)

5) Listen to this iPod on constant shuffle whenever you can possibly wear headphones without making someone angry or endangering your life. Even when you think you need to concentrate too much, just listen to it more quietly and don't pay attention. When your not paying attention, it's just activating Japanese in your brain rather than testing comprehension. This is still valuable, because it simulates how you would feel in Japan; constantly surrounded but not always listening, which has a surprising effect of making you more receptive when you are listening. The shuffle will expertly guide you between bits of music, which are fun and motivating to listen to , and require no comprehension to enjoy, and chunks of speech which are mainly what's going to aid comprehension, but can get dull to listen to.

6) If you can, find transcripts for dramas at http://dramanote.com and extract vocab from there by copying and pasting the transcripts into text files and creating anki cards while reading through it using the yomichan add on for anki https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/934748696 There will be huge amounts of unknown words, so try to decide based on how useful the word is and how frequently it appears in the transcript whether to make a card from it.

7) Study the cards while listening to your iPod (you do everything in your life while listening to your ipod now). Once you've studied all the cards from one episode, break your shuffle and listen to the whole episode straight through to solidify the words aurally.

8) Rinse and repeat. (you'll find that after studying vocab from the dramas, you will instantly gain comprehension in all of what your listening to)

You shouldn't really be considering trying to bring up your speaking much yet if your listening is weak enough to be bothering you; you can't have a conversation if you can't understand what the other person is saying. When you are feeling a more confident with listening, then to improve speaking you just need to speak to people. You will bad at the speaking part but at least if you understand what's going on, you can choose to reply in the simplest way possible, whereas you can't control what the other person is going to say. In the mean time, just to get your tongue used to it and your mind used to producing phrases, there are a few things you should get used to doing:

1) Spend some time singing along to japanese songs loudly in your house. Trying to sound like the singer is something you'l do sort of naturally and so it will improve your pronounciation through mimicary.

2) Shadow the speech of characters in dramas (must be the same gender as you) and celebrities in interviews etc. When they say something repeat it. It's not about understanding or forming speech yourself it's pure copying. You're copying their prounciation, intonation, response noises etc. Even try a bit of the body language.

3) Read everything aloud. Especially if you read any manga, read it like an actor acting out all the characters and give them voices.

4) Talk to yourself in Japanese. Just the normal sort of stuff you'd talk to yourself about like "i need to get my bag. OMG I'm gonna be late!!", not some weird contrived conversation with your inner second personality, but perhaps more often than you'd usually do it.

5) Try to think a little in Japanese. Try stuff like describing your surroundings or planning what you're going to do this evening etc.

For audio close to your reading level, I would suggest using the text to understand the audio. Using a text you already studied, try listening repeatedly to the audio, or listening and reading at the same time. Once you do understand a short audiobook, come back and listen to the same one again every so often. This might seem like cheating but it helps a lot!

Recently I am using http://newsinslowjapanese.com
(also available as a podcast)

My approach is as follows:
In the morning, I read the text making sure I understand it all. Then I read while listening to the slow version of the audio. Then read and listen at normal speed. The main thing here is making sure I understand the article completely, including all vocabulary. This step generally just takes me 5-10 minutes.

Then, I just listen to the audio a few times throughout the day, both slow and fast versions. This is mainly a test to make sure I can understand and fully comprehend what is being said without having the text as a crutch.

I think this has been helping me a fair bit.

If you don't mind more Anki, subs2srs is still the best thing ever.

When you say 'easy anime' is beyond your level, what anime are you talking about specifically? Do you already know most of the words that they're saying and just can't catch it, or is vocabulary the actual problem? You can't listen for what you don't know, after all.

Also I forgot my main tip is that when you are watching dramas and anime, try to understand the story going on, not the dialogue. This stops you from stressing like a perfectionist over what you can't catch from the dialogue and begin to use your broken understanding of the dialogue as clues along with the tone of voice, facial expressions of characters, peoples reactions, their surroundings, and the general action going on, that will guide you towards understanding the plot. I find this easier to do with dramas than anime because they are a little more realistic and have actors which provides you with easily readable facial expressions. But don't think about any of this too hard. Since this method is all about quanitiy, you will come to naturally put together these clues in no time at all and you shouldn't try and make it into a conscious process;you don't want to think that hard while watching TV.

You will know by the end of the episode whether or not you were following the plot; if you followed (and the show was good) you will have laughed and you would have acted like you do when watching an English show and felt satisfied (as long as you didn't get hung up on what you couldn't catch). If you were just staring for long periods of time not knowing why people were reacting in certain ways and just not getting what there was to be excited about, you need to choose another show at a lower level (or that is decent). In terms of anime, slice of life will probably be easiest to understand. In terms of dramas, anything thats not a detective/law/military/medical drama should be fine. My recommendations are

Dramas:

Hana Yori Dango - hilarious high school romcom about a poor girl entering a school for rich kids only to have her life made hell by the group of 4 Bigwig's sons called F4, who run the school, because she stood up to them., its mostly drama and comedy until a little bit in and its so hilarious that it has no time for soppy romance, so don't be put off if your a guy. Why is it easy? Lots of visual comedy and melodramtic characters that always make it clear how they feel and whay's going on.

Face Maker - not comedic. A doctor has the tech to replace peoples faces with the faces of past patients, granting them a new life for the price of taking their face into his library for future ops. Why is it easy? Although there's a bit of a medical theme, most of the action goes on in the patients normal lives so the language isn't technical. The main reason is that the beginning is the same in most episodes so you get so many chances to hear the same stuff again and again.

Anime:

Nichijou: as the title suggest it's just daily life happenings. Except those daily life happenings are ridiculous and hilarious. For example, the principal of the school gets into a life and death bloody battle with a stag, one of the main characters being the only witness and she really freaks out. Why is it easy? Its very visual and hilarious. The characters speak in shortish bursts and the language is just daily life stuff.

Pokemon: Apart from pokemon and move names, nobody is saying anyyhing complex. You probably have an idea about what's going on; its not like the plot's even complex. If you watched it as a kid, watch those first old episodes. The familiarity will guide you.

(Sorry for randomly posting 3 times BTW) Also japanespod101 is quite helpful. I don't really want to buy their sruff, so I just snatched up all of the free lower intermediate audio lessons on their site and added them to my iPod too. I reccomend listening to them actively like when you watch your dramas and anime for the first time and then similarly adding them to your shuffle. They're a lot easier to understand than native input but they're not a replacement. You don't want to make yourself soft, but you might want to use them as training grounds in the morning before your real native listening starts. I quite like them. Also be aware that they aren't going to teach you Japanese, they're just a listening handicap.

I'll second japanesepod101 for a good source of easy to digest audio. If you're really having problems understanding Japanese, that's a good place to go for source material to listen to.

When I was re-starting my Japanese a few years back, I would listen to their podcasts all the time. (Driving, working out, making dinner, etc.) The English content is a bit high, but they explain everything and sound it out.

Also, Shadowing may be a good thing to look into, too.

On japanesepod101, if you buy one month's premium subscription, you can use the custom RSS feed to download whatever you want. I'm using the dialog tracks and PDFs, so there's no English in the audio.

http://mykikitori.com/ is also a good beginner listening site. This is actually a sorta companion listening site to Genki Vol 1. They have "Slow Speed" and "Natural Speed" versions of the audio. The slow just getting right down to the dialog while the natural containing some background noise (e.g. other conversations in the background in Lesson 1) to mimic a more realistic feel.

There are also audio quizzes to test your listening skills. Multiple choice. No transcriptions though. I don't have Genki but maybe these are dialogs from Genki?

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/lesson/english/lea...rview.html
This NHK Japanese lesson site reminds me of jpod101 except that the materials are free to download. The dialogs are short and focus on a couple of vocab/grammar points per lesson. There is a lot of English speaking like jpod but not to their extremes lol XD

Just looked at the news in slow Japanese website. I love the site and the whole approach with transcripts (I love a good transcript) and vocab and them the audio (after listening to so much native full speed conversations though, the slow speed is pretty painful for me). However, I hate the voice! Of all the annoying voices they could choose! Why?!

How could I have forgotten abut FluentU? I even made a topic here on the forums about it! lol

They cater to a range of levels: from beginners to advanced. You can check the topic out for more info.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=12516

Helena4 Wrote:Also I forgot my main tip is that when you are watching dramas and anime, try to understand the story going on, not the dialogue. This stops you from stressing like a perfectionist over what you can't catch from the dialogue and begin to use your broken understanding of the dialogue as clues along with the tone of voice, facial expressions of characters, peoples reactions, their surroundings, and the general action going on, that will guide you towards understanding the plot. I find this easier to do with dramas than anime because they are a little more realistic and have actors which provides you with easily readable facial expressions. But don't think about any of this too hard. Since this method is all about quanitiy, you will come to naturally put together these clues in no time at all and you shouldn't try and make it into a conscious process;you don't want to think that hard while watching TV.

I find this really useful advice. I do this for certain animes that are more slice of life (lately 名探偵コナン and となりの怪物くん), and it works well.

I like the idea of doing it for a long-running series, such as コナン or ナルト, as it gives you more of a chance to become accustomed to the way the characters speak, the forms of expression used by the writers, etc.

Also: rewatch. Rewatch, rewatch, rewatch. This is built in if you use subs2srs, obviously, but you should also rewatch entire shows if you're not using that. This is an especially handy trick if you're listening to a podcast or watching a show without any subtitles; you will comprehend much more on the second iteration than you did on the first.

If you can get over the feelings of awkwardness, I'd suggest shadowing. The stuff on Japanesepod101 is a good place to start.

First, shadow the passage without the text until you feel like you're not getting anything from it.

Then, switch to sentence by sentence, doing each sentence until it feels like you have it down, then moving to the next.

Afterwards, shadow the whole thing once or twice with the the transcript.

Then finally, listen to the passage without reading or saying anything. I guarantee you that if you've done it properly, you'll be able to understand it a hell of a lot better, or at least be able to identify the sounds.


But, the initial feeling of awkwardness is real, real rough. If you want to feel even dorkier, the 'inventor' suggests walking "quickly, purposefully, with good posture" while doing it. Which actually helps a not-insignificant amount, but will make you want to curl into a ball and die from shame.

Kinda a Conan thing. If it doesn't kill you, you'll be stronger for it. Pretty much immediately, too.

Yeah, there was a video floating around 4-5 years ago of a guy walking while Shadowing vigorously. I took one look at that and thought ムリムリムリムリムリ！！！！！

But if you can get over the momentary embarrassment of doing that, hell, you can do anything.

I am currently using Nayr's 5000 deck for listening.

I listen to each card then repeat it aloud from memory.

FeloniousMonk Wrote:If you can get over the feelings of awkwardness, I'd suggest shadowing. The stuff on Japanesepod101 is a good place to start.

First, shadow the passage without the text until you feel like you're not getting anything from it.

Then, switch to sentence by sentence, doing each sentence until it feels like you have it down, then moving to the next.

Afterwards, shadow the whole thing once or twice with the the transcript.

Then finally, listen to the passage without reading or saying anything. I guarantee you that if you've done it properly, you'll be able to understand it a hell of a lot better, or at least be able to identify the sounds.


But, the initial feeling of awkwardness is real, real rough. If you want to feel even dorkier, the 'inventor' suggests walking "quickly, purposefully, with good posture" while doing it. Which actually helps a not-insignificant amount, but will make you want to curl into a ball and die from shame.

Kinda a Conan thing. If it doesn't kill you, you'll be stronger for it. Pretty much immediately, too.

I love your step by step guide to shadowing. I've heard of the technique of course, but I always thought it was more of a "parrot" kind of thing. This will be something I look forward to incorporate.

Thanks to all you guys for the great replys,

I have found my answer for now:
JapanesePod101

When I listened to this podcast intially I really didn't like it. I thought there was way too much English, the constant advertising in the beginning and the end of each session turned me off and I found the native English speaker annoying especially when he started joking around and wouldn't stop.

However it was recommended by a guy from another source who seemed like he knew what he was talking about, (Emilio posted his site in the "adding grammar thread") so I decided to give it another chance.

And boy, I can only say that my first impression was quite wrong.
I'm getting a groove on with this!

This is great material, it has a very good pace, it's definitely not slow. Yes maybe they're wasting a little too much time with English and joking around in the beginning, but the way the material is presented makes a lot of sense to me.
It even comes with the new vocab embedded in the mp3 which I can directly enter the new vocab into Anki.
I'm in the midst of Beginner Season 1 now (There is also Newbie Seasons 1-5), and they're covering useful phrases and vocab that I didn't find it Tae Kim or Genki, great listening practice (fast dialogue first, then a little slower, then analyzed in detail), and they're even getting in quite some grammar.

Also the guy from that source mentioned that one great advantage about this was that it is a long running podcast and that it gets quite advanced lateron. I listened into one of the advanced lessons, and there was no more English at that point, which makes a lot of sense too.

Since I am a rather auditive learner, I'll probably focus on this for the next weeks, along with RTK and Anki reps.

Oh and yes, the advertising (please come visit us at Jpod101...) at _every_ single lesson is really annoying - what were they thinking? The english speaking guy however, is actually likeable, I've gotten somewhat used to his style. (yes sometimes I'd still like to jump into my ipod and kill him), but for the most part he's good.

If you can get past these minor annoyances I think there's a whole lot of value to be found here.

Has anyone used Jpod101 over an extended period of time?

Again thanks so much for the advice guys, (some of you recommended this one as well!)
It's reallyy appreciated.

maxwell777 Wrote:Thanks to all you guys for the great replys,

I have found my answer for now:
JapanesePod101

Thanks for posting this. I will add it to my list. I tried it for a while last year but was so focused on other things that I didn't really stick with it. Right now I'm planning to really focus on "language knowledge" in the first half of this year (i.e. vocab and grammar), and then focus more on listening and reading in the second half of the year. I'll keep it in mind for then.

I am trying out Japanesepod101 as well (just signed up yesterday in fact) after having tried it and hated it years ago.

I think the main lessons are not at all useful for me (but might be for others). But the dialog and review tracks... now these seem like they are exactly what I need. Even though they are very short, there are hundreds of them. I can put a handful of them on my phone and just listen throughout the day. Due to the shortness, even if I tune it out occasionally, I only have to perk up and start listening for a minute or two to get some benefit from it. I'm going to be trying this for the next month or so to see if I can get any measurable improvement in my listening.

Try the NHK's "News Web Easy" site, maybe. What's nice about it is you can watch the news story in regular speed, then listen to the report spoken slowly with a script (written in kanji, of course), which will help with your comprehension and memorization. Unfortunately, though, no translations, but I find the trick is to watch news stories that you're already aware of.

I also watch Japanese QVC regularly. I like it because, since they're always peddling something, you can put their comments in some context. I don't usually understand a whole lot, but every once in a while I pick up on new words and recognize sentence structures, so I think it's helping me a little.

As mentioned, JapanesePod101.com is a favorite of mine (Peter cracks me up), especially if you have access to the .PDFs. Again, reading along with the dialogue helps with both comprehension and memorization. I'd also suggest reading the translations before listening to the dialogue, at least at first. You tend to memorize things better if you already have an idea of what's actually being said. Also be sure to look into the line-by-line audio for each lesson (again, if you have access to it).

Finally, I'm also starting to take advantage of the Japanese Reader series of books. Each volume features a collection of short stories, written in kanji with furigana and a translation at the bottom; a straight reading with just the kanji; and finally an English summary of the story. What's more, you can download (for free) an audio track of each story featured in a given volume, read at both regular and slow speeds.

I'd also like to add that I think, as someone else said earlier, speaking aloud might help your listening comprehension. When I can, I read my Anki sentence reviews aloud to myself, usually five times each, and it seems to be gradually helping me. If nothing else, I think I recognize more complex sentence patterns better that I once did, but this could just be due to a combination of all of my efforts put together.

Oh, one more thing: if you can, try to download Japanese dubbed episodes of your favorite Western shows. There are a surprising amount of cartoons in particular out there on the web that you can do this with, and even if you're not into animation (I am, but your mileage may vary), cartoons are especially great because they're usually simple enough to understand in any language. But if you're already extremely familiar with a certain series, then complexity of the dialogue spoken shouldn't be too much of an issue, regardless.