z1bbo Wrote:I'm was having the same problem and what really helped me was practicing "pure" listening without any text/images . I usually listen to some podcast before sleeping for 10-30min every evening, eyes closed and 100% concentrated on comprehending the voices.

I also like podcasts for that reason. One strategy I use (besides repeat listening of something that sounds interesting) is to listen to a part of a podcast (e.g., a news story on NHKジャーナル) a few times, and then go and look up written news articles on the subject they're talking about. It's a way to study the words and concepts related to an interesting piece of concept without having to have a literal transcript all the time.

PotbellyPig Wrote:Well in my case, I know a lot of words. Going on 35k. But it's the speed and the way the words are put together (or slurred) that kill me.

There is no reason for you not to understand casual language with the volume of vocabulary like yours. I would suggest listening to the same thing several times with breaks of varying length in between. You are likely to find that the things that you missed on the first (or second, or third...) listening, you will be getting the next time. I'm not sure what the most optimal ratio of improvement/repeats is though - for news, when I'm not happy with my first go, I settled on repeats=2 as there is a lot of common vocabulary shared between different articles, broadcasts and the like.

Inny Jan Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:Well in my case, I know a lot of words. Going on 35k. But it's the speed and the way the words are put together (or slurred) that kill me.

There is no reason for you not to understand casual language with the volume of vocabulary like yours. I would suggest listening to the same thing several times with breaks of varying length in between. You are likely to find that the things that you missed on the first (or second, or third...) listening, you will be getting the next time. I'm not sure what the most optimal ratio of improvement/repeats is though - for news, when I'm not happy with my first go, I settled on repeats=2 as there is a lot of common vocabulary shared between different articles, broadcasts and the like.

Thanks. I do sometimes watch the same show twice in order to see if I can catch the words more quickly. If the show doesn't have subs like the news, all the more. As you said, the words aren't the problem, it's the processing speed and sometimes I miss stuff because of the speed of the conversation or slurring. I'm hoping that if I put the same effort into it like I did for reading, I will improve. I am at just the beginning of the listening effort if you compare how much time I put into words, grammar and reading. It's just frustrating since I thought because I had such a head start in the other areas, listening would come quicker. I will try some podcasts as others suggested but for a while I will stick to the nightly news and an anime/drama for a while and see how it goes. If I do it every day, I hope I will see improvement. Nothing is as annoying as having to rewind over some statement because you missed a good portion of it on the first go.

I watched a few hundred hours of TV with no subtitles (I stuck paper over the bottom of the screen nice and thick initially because I only had subbed stuff online to watch), and listened to a few thousand hours of podcasts. That about did it.

Tzadeck Wrote:

vonPeterhof Wrote:I did say "normally"; probably should have made it clearer that by that I meant "when speaking the local dialect". Devoicing of "u" and "i" between voiceless consonants and word-finally isn't a feature of Kansai dialects. You've probably heard people saying です and ます in a way that almost sounds like "desuu" and "masuu", or 来て with the pitch accent on the "ki" (that's where it was originally in the Tokyo dialect as well, but it shifted to the "te" due to devoicing). Sure, many Osakans do devoice these vowels to varying extents when speaking standard Japanese, while many others don't bother. At any rate, my point was that there's dialectal variation with respect to vowel devoicing and if some regions pronounce しつ as a fully-voiced "shitsu" then there might be those where it's "shts" for all I know.

Hmm, I see what you're saying. I don't really buy it though. I only notice what you're talking about with です and ます in women who are 40+. Plus, there are some vowels that seem to always be devoiced (like 'yorosh(i)ku').

It could be that there is less devoicing in Osaka. Then again, in reality it's quite hard to pinpoint whether someone is speaking dialect or standard since a lot of people speak in such a jumbled mix of the two.

Well, it's no wonder they're devoicing the i in よろしく, since this isn't even the correct Western Japanese form of that word. That would be よろしゅう

On a more serious note, yeah, you're right about the "jumbled mix". A degree of dialect levelling is to be expected in this day and age, and I doubt there are actually people in Kansai who are going out of their way to sound as non-standard as possible in normal conversation. People are exposed to standard Tokyo-accented Japanese on a near-daily basis, so it's no wonder that it rubs off on how they speak in daily life, probably without even realizing that, for instance, the interjection さあ isn't originally from Kansai-ben. In these circumstances it's often not easy to determine whose Kansai-ben is "pure" and whose isn't, so I guess it is more fair to say that devoicing occurs less frequently in Osaka than in Tokyo.

Okay, might as well write something on-topic for once I've definitely had this problem to some extent in Japanese and I'm having it in all other languages I'm learning on my own, without classes. Reading-based activities and exercises are more fun and less hassle for me, so my learning process tends to get skewed that way, with only some token effort towards getting audio exposure and hardly any effort towards getting conversational practice. And I can't really think of other solutions for the problem than getting lots of audio exposure and at least some regular conversational practice, preferably with native speakers. I remember that my switch from anime with j-subs to no subs happened not because I felt ready, but just because I couldn't find the j-subs for one particular series, while watching with English or Russian subs already felt too humiliating. I did start to miss more info than with j-subs, and looking up unfamiliar words got somewhat harder (it took me months to figure out how to transcribe the phrase 清き一票を, since its two components are hardly ever used outside of the phrase and there's just so many variables I might be mishearing - きようきっぴょう? きょうきっぴょ? きょうきいぴょう? ARGH!), but this wasn't the end of the world, so I decided to stick with it. Certain styles of speech do still trip me up from time to time, but for the most part I'd say I've breached the gap between audio and visual understanding, at least compared to other languages I'm studying. I can just imagine myself going to France and saying "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that; could you write it down for me please?" every time someone asked me something..

[Zgarbas]

Yeah, do not pronounce things in your head before getting a working idea of how japanese pronounciation should be. This is one of those time when semi-passive listening (subbed media) can help you a lot since you get a working idea of how things should sound. I also found audio readings of vocab and sentences to be of great help when I was starting out , and i think they are quite easy to find.
Imho podcasts and non-subbed stuff are too much hassle since there is only so much active listening to media that I don't understand that I can take. Subs worked well enough for me, but you might find it otherwise

yudantaiteki Wrote:This is also due to the way a lot of people learn the hiragana, by relating them to romaji without a good knowledge of how the syllables are actually pronounced. There's a tendency for people to think that if they learn "し = shi" they've mastered that. But actually the consonant there is not the same as the "sh" of English, and in the case of しつ both the "i" vowel and the "u" vowel are going to be clipped or elided. So it comes out sounding like "shts" where the "sh" is a sound that's not exactly the "sh" in English.

I saw this mentioned about 3 times on the forum lately, and had never noticed it before. Are shi and sh really that different? Obviously its interaction with other sounds is different, but in my head ship and shitsu have the same sh sound.

(I might be just hearing it wrong in English though)

Zgarbas Wrote:Yeah, do not pronounce things in your head before getting a working idea of how japanese pronounciation should be.

I know this isn't exactly what you were saying, but how can people do this? I pronounce every word in my head, and if I don't know a word I will look it up and double check pronunciation a lot. I don't understand how some people just do RTK and then attempt to "read" something by guessing the meanings.

[Zgarbas]

I do it with some words because checking every time can be time consuming, which is why I have some mispronounciations that have stuch with me (ryou and you, bou and gou were the worst). I also picked up a few mispronounciations from my pre-learning japanese days, when words like ryoukai were used so much in anime that they'd stick with me. It happens.

I also had *a lot* of English words that I mispronounced since I read and write way more than I speak, some of them quite common (unrequited, mead, width, hyperbole, flippant are recent examples). It happens. Languages are quirky, complicated, things, and there is no *one way* to learn them.

Zgarbas Wrote:Yeah, do not pronounce things in your head before getting a working idea of how japanese pronounciation should be. This is one of those time when semi-passive listening (subbed media) can help you a lot since you get a working idea of how things should sound. I also found audio readings of vocab and sentences to be of great help when I was starting out , and i think they are quite easy to find.
Imho podcasts and non-subbed stuff are too much hassle since there is only so much active listening to media that I don't understand that I can take. Subs worked well enough for me, but you might find it otherwise

yudantaiteki Wrote:This is also due to the way a lot of people learn the hiragana, by relating them to romaji without a good knowledge of how the syllables are actually pronounced. There's a tendency for people to think that if they learn "し = shi" they've mastered that. But actually the consonant there is not the same as the "sh" of English, and in the case of しつ both the "i" vowel and the "u" vowel are going to be clipped or elided. So it comes out sounding like "shts" where the "sh" is a sound that's not exactly the "sh" in English.

I saw this mentioned about 3 times on the forum lately, and had never noticed it before. Are shi and sh really that different? Obviously its interaction with other sounds is different, but in my head ship and shitsu have the same sh sound.

(I might be just hearing it wrong in English though)

The English one isn't heavily palatalized, the Japanese one is. If your familiar with the IPA, the English sound is ʃ and the Japanese sound is ɕ.

Danchan Wrote:I watched a few hundred hours of TV with no subtitles (I stuck paper over the bottom of the screen nice and thick initially because I only had subbed stuff online to watch), and listened to a few thousand hours of podcasts. That about did it.

That's what I thought it may take to get good at listening. I guess I have to see if I have the same determination to do it as I had with reading.

PotbellyPig Wrote:

Danchan Wrote:I watched a few hundred hours of TV with no subtitles (I stuck paper over the bottom of the screen nice and thick initially because I only had subbed stuff online to watch), and listened to a few thousand hours of podcasts. That about did it.

That's what I thought it may take to get good at listening. I guess I have to see if I have the same determination to do it as I had with reading.

I had a nice big bean bag and a bunch of fun shows to get through. Helps that my work commitments weren't so big at the time and I had a fluency goal that motivated me to go all out with input. My feeling is though that if you already have a pretty decent vocabulary then it won't necessarily take that long to train your ears to recognize pretty much everything. You just need some announcers you like to listen to on the radio, some good shows etc., and learn to be comfortable not understanding. Heck, I listen to Mandarin a lot and I barely understand a thing. But after doing that for months (lightly I started out a few years ago) it's very comfortable. Not necessarily directly useful in acquisition of new words, which I leave up to guided study, but it ensures that I won't get that gap occurring in the future.

Zgarbas Wrote:I do it with some words because checking every time can be time consuming, which is why I have some mispronounciations that have stuch with me (ryou and you, bou and gou were the worst). I also picked up a few mispronounciations from my pre-learning japanese days, when words like ryoukai were used so much in anime that they'd stick with me. It happens.

I also had *a lot* of English words that I mispronounced since I read and write way more than I speak, some of them quite common (unrequited, mead, width, hyperbole, flippant are recent examples). It happens. Languages are quirky, complicated, things, and there is no *one way* to learn them.

The "sh" sound in Japanese is somewhere between English "sh" and the German "ch" in "ich" (but not the one in "acht"). That's why there used to be some confusion between "sh" and "h" in traditional accents (note that Japanese "h" isn't exactly like English "h" either. Again, it's sorta closer to the consonant in "ich".)

poblequadrat Wrote:That's why there used to be some confusion between "sh" and "h" in traditional accents (note that Japanese "h" isn't exactly like English "h" either. Again, it's sorta closer to the consonant in "ich".)

Only when it's palatalized though - in ひ, ひゃ, ひゅ and ひょ. In ふ and its derivatives (ファ, フィ, etc.) it's a kinda-sorta f-ish sound, while everywhere else it's pretty much the same as the h of English (and German).

vonPeterhof Wrote:

poblequadrat Wrote:That's why there used to be some confusion between "sh" and "h" in traditional accents (note that Japanese "h" isn't exactly like English "h" either. Again, it's sorta closer to the consonant in "ich".)

Only when it's palatalized though - in ひ, ひゃ, ひゅ and ひょ. In ふ and its derivatives (ファ, フィ, etc.) it's a kinda-sorta f-ish sound, while everywhere else it's pretty much the same as the h of English (and German).

Oh, that's really interesting!

James736 Wrote:Lots of thoughtful replies, but... Am I the only one who thought this was meant to be a joke?

It was sarcasm, but misguided, because it's actually a good question.

You in fact can't work your way to listening comprehension (or fluency in general). Your best bet is finding something you love, and listening to it.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...understand

Here's a post I made back in 2010 on the matter in regards to my ability - http://forum.koohii.com/thread-3666.html

TL-DR: Take one drama episode that you like (say episode 1 of Hana Yori Dango). Use subs2srs to put it into Anki (each card will be 1 image, 1 subtitle line and 1 audio clip from that subtitle line). Figure out the entire episode line by line so you know or understand what each word means and what the entire sentence means in context. Put whatever notes you used to help figure that out in the "notes" section of Anki.

While you're during this, as you finish ~5 minutes of audio, rewatch the episode to that point without subtitles and notice how much you do or do not understand. Keep doing this till you're done. 

When you're done with that episode, rip the audio and put on your phone and listen to it constantly. Print out the subtitle file and read along if you want. Print out the Drama Note script for the episode if you can find it and read that as well. Keep doing doing as you move onto another episode (either same or different drama). 

What happens is you created a one hour foreign language listening tool that's comprised of material you completely comprehend. This comprehensive audio is native speakers talking at a native speed about native subjects. It takes time for you to create it, but each hour you create is a tool that you can listen to for hours on end to build your listening skills.

do you keep reviewing the sub2srs deck indefinitely? or just until you feel confortable with an episode? I asm because it sounds like a lot of work to review it once you reach a certain amount of material...

(2016-05-26, 9:15 pm)Seikou Wrote: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...understand

Has anyone been able to find the paper by Paul Sulzberger that Khatzumoto talks about in this article? The link in the article is dead and I haven't been able to find any published papers by Sulzberger, just a bunch of articles about the guy.

(2016-05-27, 2:58 am)cophnia61 Wrote: do you keep reviewing the sub2srs deck indefinitely? or just until you feel confortable with an episode? I asm because it sounds like a lot of work to review it once you reach a certain amount of material...

Like most things SRS, they go further and further away. You still want to review them since you may get more and more context by experiencing the story over and over again, so editing is in your favor.

I've been coming around to this kind of study lately.  The problem I'm trying to solve is that the cards naturally go out of chronological order loosing some context and the enjoyably of following a story.  I guess by definition you can either follow story order or see the difficult ones more often, but unfortunately not both ways simultaneously.  

Seems like you would want to set your starting ease rather high and supplement anki study with re-watching the episode periodically.

Listening comprehension is more than just understanding each word and all the grammar. You can fully understand all that and still not have full listening comprehension, because:

a. you don't have enough time to interpret what is being said
b. you don't have a good enough short term memory to remember the words at the start of a statement, by the time you hear the end of the statement. Basically, you forget how a sentence started, by the time you find out how it ends.

Think of it this way: would you be able to read a text, if, instead of having a book in front of you, all you have is a screen, with each word flashing in front of your eyes, one at a time, at the same speed a native would speak those words? I bet you couldn't. That's how much more difficult listening comprehension is, compared to reading comprehension.

The way fluent speakers get around this problem is that they don't just learn words: they learn collocations (definition from Google: In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation, as propounded by Michael Halliday, is the expression strong tea.).

So that's what you need to do, either by doing lots of drills (focused on collocations/sentences, not vocabulary), or lots of listening to comprehensible input. That will allow you to not have to remember each word a person is saying, as well as solve the puzzle of how they work together, as part of let's say a ten word sentence someone says (it's a scientifically proven fact that no one can do that...people who are really good at languages, because they have great short term memory, come close, but can't quite do ten), you just have to remember the 2-3 collocations. That's what allows people to communicate using spoken language. Without those collocations, speaking to each other in any kind of a complex way would be pretty much impossible. No one could think fast enough, and remember enough, to use and understand long spoken sentences.

I've been having a little bit of this issue lately. It's not hard to add a whole bunch of words in Anki, but the likelihood of understanding all that stuff when you hear it is a whole nother story.

I'll give you guys one example. A while ago I was reading some news on Zero Escape and the term 施設 pops up here and there. I read it a couple of times, most likely to the point I wouldn't have trouble reading and understanding it anymore. Then, I started reading Root Double in English, but paying attention to the dialogue and understand most words whenever possible. I know that at one point, they mentioned the word 施設... but my brain just didn't "register" that. It didn't trigger 施設 right away like it does when I read it.  After a little bit of thinking (a few seconds maybe, not much), it hit me that I already new しせつ and that it actually meant 施設. It was definitely an "eureka!" moment.

Now, whenever I hear 施設, I can understand it just fine. But before I heard it a couple of times like that, it felt very different. It still felt like a new word, because obviously my brain wasn't used to processing that kind of information upon hearing it. I had somewhat internalized the written form of the word and was able to read it. It wasn't the pronunciation of the word that was difficult to understand. But hearing the word clearly doesn't necessarily mean you can immediately link that sound to the meaning. In other words, I still had to think about it to understand it, which is the opposite of fluency. I had internalized the word, but only in written format.

I feel this a lot whenever I listen to podcasts - I can understand a lot of words, but the meaning just doesn't click. The fact that I usually fail to identify the main topic doesn't help much either. It's like a bunch of people saying "yeah", "I see", "you know", and the rest is just me failing to process the meaning of the words in real time (lol).

There are other things that can hinder listening, but in my case I feel that's the biggest hurdle - processing information that I'm not used to hearing. But I don't think there's any need to go out of your way to study collocations. Reading and listening already teach you whatever collocations you need to understand messages. Frankly, I think listening to the words you know, but can't quite process yet without thinking is all that really matters. As long as you hear that word in a sentence that makes sentence, it should be fine. Attempting to hear these words in sentences that make no sense whatsoever though... that's probably not as useful, because you won't be able to interpret the message naturally.

(2016-05-27, 8:50 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: I feel this a lot whenever I listen to podcasts - I can understand a lot of words, but the meaning just doesn't click. The fact that I usually fail to identify the main topic doesn't help much either. It's like a bunch of people saying "yeah", "I see", "you know", and the rest is just me failing to process the meaning of the words in real time (lol).

I have this a lot too.  It's usually when I fail to pay 110% attention or if there's too may words in a row that I have a shaky recall on.  I'm guessing this would happen a lot less if  I had a better grasp on more words and phrases.  Like if I spent time listening to easier stuff with less unknown words to the point that is was almost yawningly easy, it would afford me more time to process the more difficult words when they come around.  It's like I can feel my brain getting bogged down with half learnt words and upsetting the whole apple cart of understanding when I'm trying to play catchup.

My mental model is of a hard drive that can't quite keep up with the demands that are put on it and ends up with a buffer overrun error.  If it had a quick break every few miliseconds or whatever, it could totally keep up, but once the buffer is full, it can't go on.  I'm not 100% sure this is how hard drives even work, but that's what I think of when I can't keep up.  That and the I love Lucy episode where she gets a job in the chocolate factory.

(2016-05-27, 9:51 pm)yogert909 Wrote:

(2016-05-27, 8:50 pm)FlameseeK Wrote: I feel this a lot whenever I listen to podcasts - I can understand a lot of words, but the meaning just doesn't click. The fact that I usually fail to identify the main topic doesn't help much either. It's like a bunch of people saying "yeah", "I see", "you know", and the rest is just me failing to process the meaning of the words in real time (lol).

I have this a lot too.  It's usually when I fail to pay 110% attention or if there's too may words in a row that I have a shaky recall on.  I'm guessing this would happen a lot less if  I had a better grasp on more words and phrases.  Like if I spent time listening to easier stuff with less unknown words to the point that is was almost yawningly easy, it would afford me more time to process the more difficult words when they come around.  It's like I can feel my brain getting bogged down with half learnt words and upsetting the whole apple cart of understanding when I'm trying to play catchup.

My mental model is of a hard drive that can't quite keep up with the demands that are put on it and ends up with a buffer overrun error.  If it had a quick break every few miliseconds or whatever, it could totally keep up, but once the buffer is full, it can't go on.  I'm not 100% sure this is how hard drives even work, but that's what I think of when I can't keep up.  That and the I love Lucy episode where she gets a job in the chocolate factory.

その通り。

That being said, I think attention isn't as much of a factor as a lot of people think. Of course, we need to pay attention to follow things, since we're not 100% fluent. Even if you're fluent, you still need to pay some attention anyway. However, the main factor that determines how challenging a passage is is definitely not how much attention we're paying, but rather whether we've had enough input to the point we don't need to think about what's being said that much (or at all).

Hence, the whole i+1 thing Krashen talks about. Hearing the word 施設 in a complex sentence with a whole bunch of other new words only makes things harder. Understanding absolutely nothing means you're not learning, because we need to understand things in order to learn. If you send an N3-level student and someone who's never studied Japanese to Japan, it's pretty obvious who'll learn more, right? The one who's able to understand something.

One of the weirdest examples is numbers. They're one of the very first things you learn, but actually quite challenging to internalize to a point you can understand them without thinking. It's far easier to read them than it is to hear them and understand them without thinking. But sooner or later, it clicks. More often than not, I have to pause I still have to pause the audio when I hear numbers in Japanese. But I never did anything specific to internalize them when I was learning English (which isn't my mother tongue), I just pushed forward until I didn't have to think anymore. It's kind of like hiragana at first - it takes so long to read it without thinking, but it gets to a point where you just stop struggling (which doens't mean you've stopped improving per se). Even katakana, which is far harder to get used to, has actually become easier.

EDIT: It's kind of funny how this works. Today, I review the word 相互, which I learned this week. Right now, I'm reading this infodump section in Root Double (a sci-fi visual novel), which can be a little tricky to follow when more scientific terms than I now pop up. I noticed the word "mutual" in one of these sentences, but even after that I couldn't identify 相互. I couldn't remember 相互 either, because obviously it's easier to remember it when you actually read it in recognition reviews, but I knew I'd learned the word. I decided to look it up and it turns out they did use 相互 in that sentence, but I'd be entirely oblivious to that fact hadn't I gone out of my way to check it. Of course, it'll be easier to spot it next time I hear it, but I feel in situations like this, it's very easy to miss a lot of words you may have already seen in written language but not in oral speech... unless you actually go out of your way like I did.... or have a transcript in Japanese - which is why I'd like to start reading visual novels in Japanese once I'm done with Root Double. 字幕 definitely makes oral speech more comprehensible.