Hello, everybody.

I've been a lurker for some time now, but it's become increasingly obvious that I need to join fellow Japanese-learners for advice and good, ol' camaraderie. First, let me give you some background on myself.

My first exposure to actually attempting to learn Japanese took place in a couple of self-study classes in college. These classes had a native tutor, but that was about it. Looking back, I guess it was a good experience, but the textbook was terribly outdated and the tutor was a fellow university student with no previous teaching or tutoring experience. I learned a bit, but progress was really slow. At that point, I had no idea how to study a language at all, and I had never heard of SRS or anything else.

After college, I dropped Japanese for several years. I would still listen to Japanese music and watch anime and J-dramas, but I never really paid much attention to the language. Toward the end of last year, I decided I wanted to really get back into studying. I've always had a desire to be conversant in Japanese, but after my college experience with the language I started to believe it wasn't possible. After researching some of the methods such as using SRS, RTK, and so on, I thought, "Well, maybe I can do it after all." I started using Anki earlier this year, finding it to be quite effective, and I also picked up a couple of Japanese grammar dictionaries along with Genki I. I also started talking with people on Skype this year. This is really where my problem starts..

I have trouble figuring out what is being said. It's like my eyes glaze over and all I hear is an indistinguishable mix of sounds. What's worse is that I'm even missing inflections of verbs I do know (見る、食べる、会う、買う、etc) because I cannot seem to distinguish between what is an inflection of a verb and what is a new word I've yet to learn. I've tried listening to dramas, music, etc. without subtitles to train my ear, but I keep running into the same issue. Listening seems to be my biggest issue. Reading isn't so bad. The worse thing with that is unfamiliar grammar structures, which I'm slowly sorting out as studies progress. But the listening...I'm at a loss as to how to train it.

What's best? Continue talking with native speakers? Will listening proficiency get better as my vocabulary and knowledge of grammar structures increase? Do I have some sort of mental blockage (e.g., thinking I am going to have trouble listening before I even begin) I need to get over so I can effectively "hear"?

Many thanks in advance for any advice!

I have the same problem. Reading Japanese is easier than learning to understand it aurally.

The method I'm using to try to overcome this is to listen to the CD's that came with my textbooks and workbooks (listen to the CD while following the text in the book, then listen to the CD alone later and see if I can follow everything. If I miss something, I go back and listen to the CD again while once more reading along in the textbook. Lather, rinse repeat until I've got the CD passage down cold. Proceed through all the passages this way).

Another method, though impractical is "forced immersion". Recall how Billy Hayes in Midnight Express learned "real good Turkish" as he put it because he was thrown in a Turkish prison and had to learn to speak/understand Turkish in order to survive. But not practical for people on this forum.

john555, I am also doing just as you are. I find that my comprehension with the Genki CD is okay so far. I am using the optimized 2k/6k deck in Anki and some of those are incredibly difficult for me to understand. For instance: 彼は荷物をあみだなに上げた。　That sentence gave me so much trouble. I kept listening, re-listening, but the most I could make out from "あみだなに" was "あみだわ" which was, of course, incorrect. Another sentence was "素敵な色のセーターですね。” I could never "hear" 色の. The best I could make out from it was いどの, which was again incorrect.

heh, I recall the "real good Turkish" line.

My advice is to take some cheap lessons on italki with a professional teacher who is a native speaker. It looks like you can get 30 minute trial lessons for as low as $1.

I was in the exact situation as you about half a year ago.

The trick that worked for me is:
Create a separate deck with just the core sentence cards.
Nothing but audio on the front, the sentence and everything else on the back.

Play the audio and shadow the speaker. Do this until you can keep up with the speaker. Make sure you pronounce every sound.
Do this for as long as you can. I did it for a few hours a day for a week or so and it kind of just flipped a switch in my head.

I've done that every day since then and my listening is pretty okay now.

I hope this works for you.

So the late buonoparte and her surviving friend that now maintains that username have contributed a great deal on the subject of 'L-R' (listening-reading) learning methods. While I learned about these methods too late to use them to actually -learn- Japanese, borrowing from these methods was invaluable in helping me develop an 'ear' for Japanese.

The big thread is here,
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6840

A useful summary of highlights is here,
http://rawtoast.eurybia.feralhosting.com...ssages.htm

Personally, I first applied these methods on the Erin's Challenge website,
https://www.erin.ne.jp/

I've been through all the videos with dual subs / japanese only subs/ no subs. Well, except for the やってみよう videos ('let's do' or 'let's try' or something in the english version of the site). I don't see the value in listening to foreigners speaking Japanese badly, but the other videos are a gem collection of a learning resource.

After that I L-R'd the first two harry potter books, and did a lot of watching anime and dorama with Japanese subtitles. Not to say my listening is perfect by any means, but it's miles ahead of where it used to be.

Wait wait wait. Late buonoparte?

blackbrich Wrote:Wait wait wait. Late buonoparte?

The original buonoparte passed away some time ago and is dearly missed. A good friend of buonoparte now maintains that account, the website, and updates to the archives and threads established by the original buonoparte.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:

blackbrich Wrote:Wait wait wait. Late buonoparte?

The original buonoparte passed away some time ago and is dearly missed. A good friend of buonoparte now maintains that account, the website, and updates to the archives and threads established by the original buonoparte.

Sort of like the author V.C. Andrews? She died years ago, but books still came out under her name for long after she died (maybe even now, I don't know). If you look carefully there is a tiny registered trademark symbol next to her name.

But at least purchasers of the books know it's not by the same V.C. Andrews.

I don't think it's appropriate for a friend to keep using an account under the dead person's name, that's misleading.

Wow. This is news to me. Always enjoyed buonoparte's threads and useful knowledge.

Also if her friend didn't keep the thread updated, all of the links would eventually die and also the archives she built would become less and less relevant.

From my experience - listening in a controlled environment where you understand and can verify everything you hear works. For me it was subs2srs cards with audio and text on the front, but something like listening-reading or what john555 is doing would probably work just as well. I think watching stuff without subtitles isn't as effective as you might intuitively think - maybe if you were doing insanely vast amounts of it (see AJATT etc.) it would work fine, but I doubt it's very efficient. But at the very least I think Japanese subtitles would make it much more effective (and have seen studies to that effect).

Thanks for the replies!

@SomeCallMeChris: That thread looks like a good resource. So is the gist (if one can mash all of that information into a single sentence!) is that an effective method is reading in English while simultaneously listening in Japanese? That's interesting and worth a try if it could possibly help. Erin's Challenge is incredibly difficult for me. There are some segments I have listened to multiple times and still end up with nada. I'll give this a shot. Thanks for the link!

@Aikynaro: Yeah, verification is a big one. I've noticed in some of my Anki cards that I can magically "hear" what is being said after reading the sentence in Japanese. It's strange. It's like my brain isn't hearing the sound until I know that it's there and actively listen for that particular sound. For me, watching stuff without subtitles isn't worthwhile...at least not at my low level. All I can do is pick out bits and pieces of words I can hear, but the rest is simply noise, more or less. Even if I can understand individual words, the context is often lost because I can't understand the rest. Japanese subtitles could actually be helpful in this regard. I've yet to try a subs2srs deck yet. I have one for the anime Lucky Star so I might give it a try soon.

Dunno how well this works, but my plan in the next few days is to make some audio only vocab cards (front:audio word back:japanese & english text). My thinking is that practicing listening to individual words first makes more sense than whole sentences. Hopefully I can go through them at a few seconds per card to get used to comprehending with time pressure.. After I get a few weeks of vocab listening practice and hopefully my comprehension speed improves , I plan to try a block of audio only sentences and maybe subs2srs.