scooter1 Wrote:I found L1 subtitles (English) for L2 speech to be a complete waste of time unfortunately.

Yes I would absolutely agree with this.

How useful Japanese subtitles are for learning to hear (they are very, very useful for learning many other aspects of Japanese) I am not entirely certain.

As part of a with-and-without (Japanese) subtitles strategy they are certainly helpful, I would say.

@Splatted

My hat's off to you, that was very perceptive! It's true, I'm a walking contradiction: I'd like to keep it fun and keep it efficient and end up succeeding at none. I guess that it's because, with reading, at least in my case, that wasn't a contradiction at all! With reading, I remember coming up with stories for kanji ("Wow, imaginative memory is amazing!") and deciphering sentence by sentence of a novel ("Look, Dad, I'm reading Japanese!") and just chugging along without questioning why I'm even having fun along the way. To this day, if you ask me what's my motivation for learning this squiggly language, I'd have to say that either (a) I don't have a particular reason and haven't needed one so far, or (b) I have a reason that's so visceral that I don't even know what it is.

But now I'm coming to see that, for listening, I cannot really do without a reason. I wonder how many people feel this way, too. When I finally got my nose out of the books and decided, in all seriousness, to "get listening done," I'm guessing I had this expectation that it couldn't be all that hard... And boy was I wrong! (I'm reminded of that Terry Pratchett quote, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Sometimes there's light at the end of the tunnel, and it's a flamethrower!") I think I reasoned that, if listening isn't really the funfest that I thought it'd be, then that's ok, as long as I can find the right direction and just run for dear life until I get to where I can start having fun again. It just seems I haven't really come to terms with that proviso yet. And as you and Stansfield said, perhaps I should just ditch that proviso anyway. Thank you for the insight.


@CureDolly

I appreciate the writeup! Being a very by-the-book person, I find it hard to stop myself from drawing a line between letting go so much that learning anything is only an afterthought and and letting go a bit while also keeping a tally of what you're actually learning. If memory serves, I think it's Yudantaiteki (cool and relevant username!) who sometimes says that exposure by itself won't fix your grammar deficiencies, and that neglecting grammar might mean that you end up deluding yourself into thinking that you're understanding something when you're not, and I'm wondering how much of that might apply to this "aural" comprehension you put so much of your trust in. (And I'm sorry for the scare quotes, it just sounds so New Age-y to me!)


@Zarxrax

I only just skimmed it for now, but for a journal article, the language seems surprisingly crisp and understandable. (That's a translator's journal for you!) I look forward to reading it.

Heehee! I understand what you mean about "New Agey". I have used terms like "woo-woo" and "voodoo" for this kind of understanding because it feels a bit worryingly unquantifiable to me too. And when a come-to-life doll worries about "unquantifiable" you know we are really in the Twilight Zone.

However I do think that this is where listening comprehension differs from other areas. I am not saying it can't be done "by the book", but I don't think that is how listening comprehension naturally develops and one may have a lot of trouble doing it that way.

I don't at all advocate neglecting grammar. Quite the reverse. Could exposure fix grammatical problems? Enough of it very likely could. I have always maintained that grammar study is the quick-and-dirty way of acquiring language

But just because of that one should use it unless one is an organic-acquisition purist with unlimited time.

What I am suggesting is that for one's aural exposure (only), one should not attempt to keep a tally of what one is learning. this is not instead of grammar or more intensive watching/listening. It is a particular approach/exercise that you may want to try if you are having trouble acquiring a "Japanese ear".

This doesn't need to be more than a 20 minute episode every day, or whenever you can fit it in.

Of course you just may not like working that way. And if you don't I really do understand. I have mixed feelings myself as I really like progress I can see, but I am pretty sure at this stage, that for me at least, quantifiable methods are not going to be sufficient in the hearing department.

However, everyone learns differently and I'm not even human, so don't worry too much about what I say!

Other than suggesting what's been said, there's something else to consider...

Sometimes, you just can't make out what people say because they say it too fast, too soft, too imperfectly, or whatever.

Although I'm a native English speaker, I like to watch shows with captions because I can't always hear or make out what people say. If I watched a show without captions and watch it again with captions, I'm sure to find some words or lines that I missed. I might catch 98% of a show and miss 2% of it because I couldn't make out what they said though I would've known had what they said if they said it louder, clearer, etc. It just sounded like mumbling to me.

Also, think about songs. Words can slur together to sound like different words. You might not really know what that singer is singing about, but you sing along to what you think they're saying. Then you look up the lyrics and find out Taylor Swift wasn't singing about Starbucks.

I find that having the Japanese subs or captions reinforces my ability to hear the words they are saying, in the same way knowing the lyrics to a song "corrects" what I think I'm hearing. It also helps when the words are just inaudible for me for whatever reason.

Teresina-san no iutoori.

I have watched an English movie with Spanish subtitles (I very rarely watch English movies) and been glad of the subtitles. Even though my Spanish is appalling they helped me understand bits of the English dialog I couldn't catch. However if there had been no subtitles I would have followed the movie well enough with a few missed words and the odd sentence I couldn't make out. I probably wouldn't even have been very aware of missing them.

This is one reason why developing an "ear" isn't altogether a quantifiable exercise. It does involve getting to the point where you can get the gist even when you don't catch (or know) every word. One does this in one's first language all the time, often without particularly noticing it.

I'm quite the opposite, I'm confident in my listening but terrible at reading. My suggestion would be to watch anime/drama with Japanese subs. But instead of listening then reading, you would read the subs first then listen. At this point, you don't need to listen first to 'test' yourself whether you understand or not. You just need to associate sound with words. I wouldn't hear the same line multiple times, maybe once is even enough. Sort of depending on quantity. It's better to change the timing of the subs to come a second or half a second earlier. To make it easier to pause and read before they start to talk. Also I'm using Potplayer and you can use the mouse wheel to seek/jump. I stetted it to jump 3 seconds and it's making going back to hear a line a lot easier.

Keep in mind I did not use this method myself.

A lot of good advice here. In particular, I hope you're taking heed of suggestions to look at the L-R learning method. Learning purely by L-R is not for everyone, but a method that -can- be used that way has a ton of techniques that anyone can adapt to their own studies.

Two resources that haven't been mentioned yet,
Erin's Challenge : https://www.erin.ne.jp/
Learning with video skits with bi-lingual subtitles. Easily adapted to the L-R method. The 'grammar lessons' are weak, but the skits are fairly engaging (for what they are), and the language use is quite natural. The title character as the 'exchange student' speaks slowly but cleanly. Everyone else speaks naturally.

JoI teacher's blog: http://www.japonin.com/free-learning-too...-blog.html
Blogs with text posted to the website and audio posted to youtube. Short essays on various topics. They vary widely in how interesting they are and how close to natural speed they are spoken. They're all slower than natural and clearly enunciated, so they won't bring your listening comprehension to a high level but they are a good stepping stone if you haven't gotten far yet.
Of course this one is free material posted in the hopes that you will subscribe to the tutoring services. I never did, but I have heard good reports. Getting an online tutor isn't a bad idea if you want to spend the money. You could also get a language exchange partner and get some of the same benefits for free.

It's worth knowing that if you want to shift the timing of subs forward or backward, you can do it in VLC with the H (backward) and J (forward) keys (Hiku and Jump, presumably). My own preference is to have the subs coming in very slightly late rather than early, so I get a chance to hear first, and the subs are still onscreen when I have heard. But I watch subbed anime pretty fast except where the language is complex. To me it is a little annoying when you hear, catch part of it, want to check the subs and they're already gone.

Chris-san, I saw those Erin clips about two years ago when I was very new to Japanese and have wanted to see them again. Thank you so much for the link. I have looked for it several times without success (it didn't help that I forgot the name Erin [英国の名前は難しいね] and had the idea that the series was by NHK.

I used your two links for a little self-diagnosis. I found that in one of the Erin clips (to take an example) the girl says ここが図書室. I knew that was what she was saying without looking at the script because she was showing the library room to the exchange student. But honestly the words only vaguely sounded like ここが図書室 to me, even knowing that that was what they must be.

That is one side of the problem. One knows the words but doesn't follow the way they are said "in the wild". This is really where developing an "ear" is so important.

With the other link I watched a clip and found I could understand it (the speaker is deliberately slow and clear) except where I didn't know the words. If one is going to use these I would recommend not looking at the English translation, but looking at the vocab list at the bottom. Actually I knew all the vocab in the list except 東日本大震災 but didn't know a couple of other things, like 休業後. Japanese is so logical that 休業後 isn't really difficult to understand even if you haven't heard it before. But you have to be processing at a comfortable speed so that you are getting all the context quickly and fully with enough processing power left over for piecing together a word like that from a combination sound and context.

I think these two examples in miniature show some of the problem, and why practice is so important. It really isn't just a question of how much you know, or even entirely of how fast you can process it. You have to be processing so fast and with sufficiently low "cpu usage" that your mind can be working on other problems like "what is this new word likely to mean?"

Of course all this has to be happening so fast that you aren't even aware of all the parts of the process.

I would suggest that you can't actually (or at any rate I can't, but then I can't cook from a cookbook) do this by consciously enacting it all.

It is like typing. You practise and practise, and eventually your fingers know the key positions even though your conscious mind doesn't. I can't tell you where x is on the keyboard without looking, but my fingers know. Something similar has to happen here and by the same essential mechanism - constant practice.

I have the cd's that go with Japanese for Busy People so I'm going to try this: play the cd's and listen while reading along in the book. Do this a few times. Then listen again without looking at the text. I'll see how that goes.

It doesn't seem to matter how many teaching materials you use. When you get exposed to Japanese in a TV program like an anime or drama, it hits you like a ton of bricks. I'm getting a bit worn out. I've put in literally thousands of hours on vocabulary(at abt. 29k), grammar and reading (I've read abt 50 light novels). It seems like you have to put in at least an equal amount of effort into listening. I'm not sure I have it in me. I've gone through some N1 workbooks like the Kanzen Master listening N1 and the Unicom N1, but the speed and the unclearness (slurring?
) of the language in real life is overwhelming.

I understand your feeling. Kikitorijou really is a big castle to take. There is so much to it, especially if you approach it as a study project.

Here is a suggestion. You may or may not like it, but since you are wearing a bit thin with the more conventional approaches, you may want to try it.

The technique I talked about earlier in this thread (and in more detail on the Kawaii Japanese Language Learning blog) involves watching anime (or whatever else you want to watch, but something where the action and visuals strongly help with the spoken content is recommended).

Choose material you know you can mostly understand if you see it written (you can check this by watching it with Japanese subtitles).

Then just watch. Really you need to find something you enjoy, because this is a long job if you treat it as a job (no harm in doing that but you sound a bit "jobbed out"). Make this a part of your life. Don't worry about what you are understanding and don't get downhearted that you are hearing so little. If you can follow the story (and if you choose the right level, you can) you're fine. Just enjoy it. Because one learns to hear (this way at least) by "living" it, not by "practising" it.

Don't worry that you are taking a big drop from what you can understand in writing. Don't worry that your kikitori is SOOO 情けない (I'm talking about myself here. It is). And don't worry about how much of the story you are getting through language and how much through visual input. Just follow the story any way you can. Because you are watching what you love and there isn't any other language to watch in. Personally I don't take in any entertainment materials (games, video, books, songs etc) that aren't Japanese. You don't have to do that, of course, but for the time of watching there is only one language. There is nothing called "English" to fall back on. There is just you, the action of the anime and Language (=Japanese).

I have a feeling that it is important not to worry about progress here. I have a feeling it is important to relax and let go of the future. Find things you want to watch and enjoy them as best you can, like a small child.

Your brain has been programmed with a huge amount of knowledge of the Japanese language. Gradually it will learn to match up the funny noises it hears with the things it knows. It has a lot of barriers to overcome and it won't do it unless it has to. I say to my brain: "You'd better try to eat whatever you can of this because there's no other food in the house." (Actually I say it in my poor Japanese, because what other language is there?)

And she is gradually learning to digest.

It's a slow process, but I enjoy what I am watching. And it's not as if there were some other language I could watch things in.

Curedolly, I'll try what you stated but I'm a perfectionist. I'm the type that will go back over the dialog until I catch what is being stated. Picking out material where I "should" understand the words is not a problem since my vocabulary that I've gone through with anki is already at around 29k words. Unless, it's a real technical talk, I should be good with most anime and drama's vocabulary. I'm going to try to focus just on listening for a while and neglect the reading. But I'll probably just get frustrated and just start reading light novels again.

I am a perfectionist too. I hate not understanding every last thing.

Believe me it takes discipline not to go back over the dialog! One possible trick is to sit out of reach of the keyboard.

I prefer watching with subtitles where I am palpably "learning" as I go. But I have become aware that some kinds of learning (and some of the most important) aren't palpable.

I continue with this because I feel it is my 道 Way. For me it feels vitally important to learn to hear, so using the more immediately "educationally" satisfying methods to the exclusion of real listening is in fact (for me) self-indulgence.

I don't hate watching the way I recommend here. In fact I enjoy it once I can convince myself to do it, but it does take a little 我慢. With weak resolve I would (and sometimes do) gravitate to 日本語 subtitles only (and look up every single word, turn of phrase etc, sometimes even when I know them, just to learn more about them or to remind myself where else that kanji is used).

Of course the important thing is your dream. If listening isn't vitally important to you and it seems more of a struggle than is worthwhile for you (and it is a struggle), there is nothing in the world wrong with light novels!

PotbellyPig Wrote:Curedolly, I'll try what you stated but I'm a perfectionist. I'm the type that will go back over the dialog until I catch what is being stated.

This is exactly what subs2srs+morphman lets you do but in an optimized way. Rather than attacking it in the order it appears in the anime or drama you get chunks of n+i content which allows you to build up to the tougher phrases. Only perfectionists "get" subs2srs because the whole assumption is that you want to study bits of dialog until you get perfect comprehension.

Tokyostyle-san, I think this kind of "perfectionist" approach is - ah - perfect for learning the language. I haven't used the Subs2srs method, but I have done a lot of very close work on Japanese-subtitled anime. And indeed that has been the core of my approach to learning Japanese.

However, I think that for listening comprehension - getting to the point where you can hear something in Japanese once and understand it on the fly - is a different problem and requires a different approach.

PotbellyPig Wrote:It doesn't seem to matter how many teaching materials you use. When you get exposed to Japanese in a TV program like an anime or drama, it hits you like a ton of bricks. I'm getting a bit worn out. I've put in literally thousands of hours on vocabulary(at abt. 29k), grammar and reading (I've read abt 50 light novels). It seems like you have to put in at least an equal amount of effort into listening. I'm not sure I have it in me.

My feelings exactly. Seeing that everyone's been so kind and forthcoming with all this material, I decided that I'd better keep my feelings to myself, at least until I've tried everything that's been mentioned, but your experience resonates with me so much that I feel compelled to just put my thoughts on the table.

What I'm starting to think is that, while we may have a mountain of interesting or instructive materials to get good at listening, if we don't know what it is that we're doing, then this journey will take simply too long! Like PotbellyPig, I don't know if I have it in me to duplicate all the effort I made for reading in order to get good at listening. With German, I certainly didn't have to. And I'm thinking that it's because, generally speaking, we have no clear idea of what we're doing. And this is particularly true of beginners! (My boyfriend is a lifter and sometimes he complains about novice lifters who are only too eager to offer their advice, which creates this tension between "He's only trying to help!" and "He doesn't know what he's talking about!"). In a sense, we're just doing something and hoping for the best! But to extend the metaphor, if listening is a brick wall, then reading is one of those artificial climbing walls with grips for hands and feet. Perhaps we ought to sit down and think about how to make the brick wall easier to climb rather than just scraping our fingers against the bricks for lack of a better idea. Logically, I know I have no right to conclude this before I've tried all the ideas in this thread. Instinctively, though, I keep thinking that there must be a principle behind all these ideas. And once we've grasped what that principle is, we can unleash our creativity and make it fun in the millions of different ways that fun can be had.

What do you think? Is this too naive? Am I rationalizing laziness? Or is there merit to finding a method for listening much in the way that the ancients of this forum did for reading back in 2009? I'm not fully familiar with the etiquette of this forum yet, so I apologize if I'm being more provocative than I should. It's just that this discussion is so stimulating that I find it hard hold back!

ListenUp Wrote:Logically, I know I have no right to conclude this before I've tried all the ideas in this thread.

First realize that every suggestion in this thread is a variation on the same theme and then figure out which version of "listen to a lot of audio that you have a transcript for" is most appealing for you.

I don't think you are being provocative at all PotbellyPig-san. You are being rational and sensible. The ways we are suggesting are kind of brute-force methods because they are the only ones anyone seems to know and it may well be that they are the only ones that exist.

If there are better strategies, I am the first to want to know them, or help to develop them if it is possible. I am certainly not married to the way I am working on hearing now and I would love to find more effective strategies.

Right now I just don't know of any, and neither, it seems, does anyone else. It may be that as with typing there is no other way to train the "mucle memory" than practice, practice, practice (but much more of it, since it is a huge, multidimensional skill rather than a clear, limited one). But we should never close our minds to other possibilities if we can find them..

What I would say is that it could be easier (it is for me) if one stops being too goal-fixated. For example I am currently watching a number of anime shows (very much enjoying the 1990s Moomin serial at the mome). I can watch without subtitles and understand enough from visual and language cues combined to know what is going on and be drawn into the story.

Frankly, if I was looking at a metaphorical watch all the time and thinking "How much nearer did that session get me" I'd go mad.

Rather than that I live in the present. I loved that last episode. I am looking forward to the next one. This isn't about the future. That will come when it comes. It is about enjoying lovely things and growing up in 日本語.

This isn't just "practice" it is life, and it strikes me that if I don't enjoy the scenery as I go along, maybe I won't enjoy the scenery very much even when I do "arrive".

ListenUp Wrote:What do you think? Is this too naive? Am I rationalizing laziness? Or is there merit to finding a method for listening much in the way that the ancients of this forum did for reading back in 2009? I'm not fully familiar with the etiquette of this forum yet, so I apologize if I'm being more provocative than I should. It's just that this discussion is so stimulating that I find it hard hold back!

I think you will find that most of us on this forum are of the "try various things and see what works for you" school of thought. It doesn't matter how good a piece of advice or a learning technique *sounds* - if it frustrates you and burns you out on the language, you should try something else and see if it's a better fit.

The only thing I'll add is: it gets better But it gets better in steps. I can hear a lot more now than I could a year ago, thanks largely to repeated listening and iTalki lessons. And I've noticed recent breakthroughs while working through anime or dramas; even if I can't get everything, I can almost always follow the flow of the story.

I think what everyone has said here about listening time is spot on. Reading, writing, listening and speaking are all related yet separate skills. They each take approximately an equal amount of effort to improve.

EDIT: It appears that this post marks my 666th post on this forum. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I think what frustrates people with listening as opposed to the other skills (it still frustrates me too, and used to do so a lot more) is that while the other skills have seeable, measurable steps and progress (even by my haphazard methods), listening is much more of a "blind faith" process.

One thinks "I am putting in as much effort as I did on grammar and reading, but this time I can't even see anything moving". It is frustrating, but it seems to be the nature of the beast.

"This time you're fighting in the dark. Why don't you just give up?"

「絶対に諦めない！」

Sorry for the wall of text. I've been finding this thread pretty interesting so I can't help myself.

ListenUp Wrote:With reading, I remember coming up with stories for kanji ("Wow, imaginative memory is amazing!") and deciphering sentence by sentence of a novel ("Look, Dad, I'm reading Japanese!") and just chugging along without questioning why I'm even having fun along the way.

...

When I finally got my nose out of the books and decided, in all seriousness, to "get listening done," I'm guessing I had this expectation that it couldn't be all that hard... And boy was I wrong!

I feel exactly the same way. I regularly wonder why challenging listening material is nothing but frustrating when it can seem so natural to just dive in to challenging reading material. Perhaps it comes down to the fact that with reading you can always see exactly what's written and so it's just a puzzle for you to solve, but with audio material you have to learn to even be able to perceive what's been said. I know I find it very frustrating to try and decipher unclear writing so it's hardly surprising.

ListenUp Wrote:What I'm starting to think is that, while we may have a mountain of interesting or instructive materials to get good at listening, if we don't know what it is that we're doing, then this journey will take simply too long! Like PotbellyPig, I don't know if I have it in me to duplicate all the effort I made for reading in order to get good at listening. With German, I certainly didn't have to. And I'm thinking that it's because, generally speaking, we have no clear idea of what we're doing. And this is particularly true of beginners! (My boyfriend is a lifter and sometimes he complains about novice lifters who are only too eager to offer their advice, which creates this tension between "He's only trying to help!" and "He doesn't know what he's talking about!"). In a sense, we're just doing something and hoping for the best! But to extend the metaphor, if listening is a brick wall, then reading is one of those artificial climbing walls with grips for hands and feet. Perhaps we ought to sit down and think about how to make the brick wall easier to climb rather than just scraping our fingers against the bricks for lack of a better idea. Logically, I know I have no right to conclude this before I've tried all the ideas in this thread. Instinctively, though, I keep thinking that there must be a principle behind all these ideas. And once we've grasped what that principle is, we can unleash our creativity and make it fun in the millions of different ways that fun can be had.

I think this is a good attitude to have. We're all trying to help but it goes without saying that some of us have better intentions than advice, so do consider it, but also think for yourself and find what works for you. Like gaiaslastlaugh said, that's pretty much the only learning method this forum can agree on.

Tokyostyle made a good point though. There is a common theme amongst almost all the advice in this thread so maybe that's worth paying attention to. You may feel like we're all telling you to just keeping scrabbling at a brick wall but maybe you just have to accept that if you're going to do it it's going to be hard. To go back to the bodybuilding analogy there are people who spend ridiculous amounts of time and money researching how to get ripped quickly and easily but it never works because they never actually put any effort in to exercising. There are handholds on the listening comprehension wall, things like scripts, subtitles, episode summaries, subs2srs and translations, but it's still a hard climb.

Sorry if this comes off as very negative but I really don't intend it to be. I don't think you're rationalising laziness I just want to make it clear why my advice was geared towards making the learning process fun and less towards getting to the top as quickly and easily as possible. It's natural to be questioning if it's worth it because it's not easy and only you can decide if the payoff justifies the investment. I have to admit that Zorlee is probably one of the most successful learners on this forum but like you I'm not taking his advice because it requires more than I'm willing to commit to what is just a hobby.

I also wanted to ask you if there was any form of Japanese audio you enjoy as something other than a learning exercise? E.g. Do you enjoy watching anime with subs? You mentioned your doubts about how it served as a study method but I'm not clear on how you rated it's entertainment value. Perhaps if you don't already watch Japanese television for entertainment you should start by exploring whats available and see if you find anything that's actually worth watching. Since you can use Japanese subs you don't need to rely on what's been translated and you can think of it as reaping the rewards of what you've already learned instead of slacking off on audio study, or just use English subs and watch it like any other show.

CureDolly Wrote:Frankly, if I was looking at a metaphorical watch all the time and thinking "How much nearer did that session get me" I'd go mad.

Rather than that I live in the present. I loved that last episode. I am looking forward to the next one. This isn't about the future. That will come when it comes. It is about enjoying lovely things and growing up in 日本語.

This isn't just "practice" it is life, and it strikes me that if I don't enjoy the scenery as I go along, maybe I won't enjoy the scenery very much even when I do "arrive".

QFT

This pretty perfectly sums up how I feel.

P.s. On the subject of unqualified people giving advice I feel I should mention that from what you've posted I'm pretty sure you're reading abilities are significantly ahead of mine. I've never taken any tests but based on the sample questions I'm reasonably sure that both my listening and reading abilities are close to N1 level.

For those who are struggling with this I think there are two important things that have only been lightly touched on and are, I believe, a very big part of the problem. As it is a bit lengthy I will just cover the first one here.

Your mind has a very important mechanism that is working strongly against you in hearing Japanese

Let me try to explain it. When you hear a very different English accent you can (usually) understand it.

Take most Northern Irish accents. The standard greeting is "How're you doing". By most English accent standards it sounds something like:

High'r yi dee'un

At first it may throw you, but you quickly learn to adjust to it. You don't do this by thinking about each strange sound but by a process of automatically mapping the whole sound-shift pattern to what it "ought" to be. You still hear that it is a different accent, but you are internally "normalizing" it at the same time in order to understand it.

On a less extended level you also do this with things like slurred speech and individual pronunciation quirks. This automatic shifting is vital to your English listening comprehension.

The problem is that you can't easily turn it off. You are still doing it when you hear Japanese. As I mentioned before there is (to cite a single example out of very many) a tendency to hear the two morae あい as the English one-syllable diphthong ai (as in I, the first person pronoun).

I think this is the single largest barrier to listening comprehension. And a lot of the problem is rhythm (the あい/I problem is really mostly a rhythm one). Timing is absolutely vital to hearing language.

I have heard it mentioned here and elsewhere that European-language speakers have less trouble learning to hear other European languages than they do with Japanese. I believe this is because most European languages are syllable-timed (I know English is "stress-timed" but it they are closely related timings). Japanese is mora-timed. So, for example, while European (traditional) poetry sounds like "poetry" even if you don't know the language, Japanese poetry really doesn't until you have internalized the rhythm of the language.

When listening to Japanese, our minds are doing what they are programmed to do and re-mapping apparent "noise" sounds into what they have been taught to regard as "signal" sounds. And most specifically for us, apparent "noise" rhythms into what they have been taught to regard as "signal" rhythms.

For Japanese this is a disaster. We need to learn to hear what is actually being said, not what our brains are post-processing it into.

So I think accustoming ourselves to the actual sounds and rhythms of Japanese is one of the keys to listening comprehension. For some people this may happen naturally over time but I there are exercises that I think can help. They are production-based exercises, because what we hear and what is stored in our vocal "muscle-memory" are so closely linked.

One that has helped me a lot is [url="https://kawaiijapanese.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/the-rhythm-of-japanese-improve-your-speaking-and-hearing/]reciting the Amenbo no uta[/url]. I do this every day and it has helped me in a variety of ways.

The other that I am aware of is shadowing, which forces the mind to hear the actual sounds rather than the "normalized" version it wants to hear. Shadowing is a whole thing in itself, which you may or may not want to get into, but I have found a simplified method which, in conjunction with the Amenbo is really working well for me.

This post is already long, so I won't go into that now. My main aim was to pinpoint what I see as one of the main problems in understanding spoken Japanese. In my (limited) experience, coming to grips with this problem can make a big difference. It isn't a shortcut that eliminates the need for huge amounts of "practice" (or, as I prefer to see it "living life in Japanese"), but it does make that "practice" more effective.

CureDolly Wrote:The other that I am aware of is shadowing, which forces the mind to hear the actual sounds rather than the "normalized" version it wants to hear. Shadowing is a whole thing in itself, which you may or may not want to get into, but I have found a simplified method which, in conjunction with the Amenbo is really working well for me.

Just wondering why shadowing helps with what you stated. I have those 2 shadowing books. I used them for a while before my first episode of giving up on listening practice. I can get back into it. I was thinking of putting the audio into anki so I remember to do it on a regular basis.

I think slightly different things get called "shadowing".

The version I am using (a kind of invention of my own, though it is just a variation on others) involves speaking at exactly the same time as a native speaker, harmonizing one sentence at a time with her (she should be of the same gender as oneself).

Being a rather こだわり type I will harmonize the same sentence many times before moving on to the next, trying to get everything right, but paying especial attention to the mora-rhythm, making sure I am saying - and hearing - morae rather than syllables.

How this helps is that it

a: forces the brain to concentrate on what is really being enunciated

b: trains the vocal organs to do something as similar as possible

Remember that if we sub-vocalize while reading we are reproducing mentally what our vocal organs would do (they may even move slightly while we are doing it). We necessarily sub-vocalize in our own "accent", as it were. This is all part of a whole complex of ways in which the speech organs and the mind's conceptualization of articulate sound work together.

So I believe that hearing correctly and producing correctly are so closely linked that even if you had no intention of producing anything (I do, of course) it would be very advisable at least to learn to do so in exercises in order to hear properly.

CureDolly Wrote:I think slightly different things get called "shadowing".

The version I am using (a kind of invention of my own, though it is just a variation on others) involves speaking at exactly the same time as a native speaker, harmonizing one sentence at a time with her (she should be of the same gender as oneself).

Being a rather こだわり type I will harmonize the same sentence many times before moving on to the next, trying to get everything right, but paying especial attention to the mora-rhythm, making sure I am saying - and hearing - morae rather than syllables.

How this helps is that it

a: forces the brain to concentrate on what is really being enunciated

b: trains the vocal organs to do something as similar as possible

Remember that if we sub-vocalize while reading we are reproducing mentally what our vocal organs would do (they may even move slightly while we are doing it). We necessarily sub-vocalize in our own "accent", as it were. This is all part of a whole complex of ways in which the speech organs and the mind's conceptualization of articulate sound work together.

So I believe that hearing correctly and producing correctly are so closely linked that even if you had no intention of producing anything (I do, of course) it would be very advisable at least to learn to do so in exercises in order to hear properly.

I have to see if I can fit it back into my practice schedule eventually.

Right now, per day, I am:
1. watching 1 anime episode, and
2. trying to listen to few news broadcast stories

I try to have subs/transcripts for both. And I usually listen without looking at them at first until I get stuck. And when I get a chance I take a look at some unsubbed material like a variety show. I am putting reading hiatus for a bit since I concentrated on it so much the past 3 years and so little on listening.