Yeah so I think it's time I changed the fact that I have to concede that I pretty much won't be able to understand what's being said every time I hear spoken Japanese.

I don't know any Japanese speakers, but I do have an iPod. Please tell me a good method to work with, or at least what you are/were doing yourself.

And if we can keep the abstract hints to a minimum please ("listen more" works for some people, not so much for me ).

Cheers!

http://www.japanesepod101.com

It doesn't get any better than that. When you've done enough of those to understand spoken Japanese, you can start listening to stuff like radio etc to hear more slang expressions etc.

I second Tobberoth, http://www.japanesepod101.com is the way to go.

Pick your appropriate level, and let the learning commence. Only thing I'd add is, sign up for the payed basic subscription and you'll get transcripts to all the dialogues and lessons. There are also discounts available.

iKnow. Shadowing. Scriptorium. Constant listening.

http://www.iknow.co.jp
http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/...study.html
http://www.d-addicts.com/ and/or http://www.ebay.com and/or Yesasia

I recommend series with Sasaki Kuranosuke. He speak ridiculously fast, IMO, and if you can keep up with him, you can keep up with anyone.

http://www.jdorama.com/artiste.1374.htm

Burn a hole in your rewind button.

I'm beginning to find that listening has more to do with vocabulary than anything. The more vocab I aquire the more the holes start to fill themselves. If you don't even know the words being spoken, how can you hope to comprehend them.

Here's a plan.

Take one episode of one series with Japanese script. Go through the script and try to make a list using iKnow of all the words you don't understand. iKnow will have a sentence with audio for many of the words you come across. If iKnow doesn't have a sentence with audio you can add it anyway, look elsewhere, or just skip the word. Use iKnow to practice the vocab list until you reach 100% for all items added.

Or you can just follow iKnow's lesson plans from start to finish.

As you study with iKnow, always say the words and sentences aloud - loudly (whispering or being silent will probably make things go a little slower from what I hear).

Use the sentences for scriptorium whenever you feel. If find that it helps strengthen the more difficult words.

There is an iKnow thread on this site with links to all the iKnow Japanese Audio. Use these, with your Mypod, for shadowing.

http://speaking-japanese.com/breaking/index.html

You can get the audio to some popular stories here. This guy's speaking is fast as well. The stories can be found throughout audiobooks thread, or in the book itself. The book has a mini dicitionary on the bottom of the page. Trying to shadow this is very fun.

I'm am a complete and total noob. I am not a professor, nor a specialist. I'm just filling you in on what seems to be working for me.

I'd ignore all these comments, pick your favorite show of all time in Japanese and listen to it continuously.

I'd probably agree with mentat here i know i hav'nt been doing the sentence/AJATT method for that long but i've had a ton of japanese playing for a long time now as often as i can and i'm noticing more and more that i can pick out things from whats being said, constant exposure via watching something in japanese or just listening seems to be the best way obviously aslong as it goes along with normal learning of vocab/grammer etc.

i'll put another vote in for http://www.iknow.co.jp ... this combined with Tae Kim's grammar guide makes for some very good understanding when watching just about any TV program...

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'd ignore all these comments, pick your favorite show of all time in Japanese and listen to it continuously.

Well obviously this guy knows what he's talking about. So tell me mentat_kgs, how has the method of listening to "your favorite show of all time" repeatedly "in Japanese" been working out for ya?

All the anime fans who love Japanese music has proven pretty well that simply listening to things you like over and over won't make you better at Japanese at all. Again, i+1 > all for effectiveness. Japanesepod101.com is very hard to beat in the i+1 department. i+1 is extremely important in the listening department since vocabulary is vital to understanding. You can listen to a Japanese show over and over a million times and learn nothing at all because you don't know the words in it. If you don't understand most of the words, you can't parse it, it just becomes a rumble of japanese sounds. Nothing to learn from that.

I't might be just me but i'm sure the OP is asking how to understand better whats being said not what words meen etc, e.g. "alot of Japanese talk fast how can i understand whats being said" (not quoted just an example)

and i think thats what mentat_kgs is refering to?

Please correct me if i'm wrong Virtua_Leaf

tibul Wrote:I't might be just me but i'm sure the OP is asking how to understand better whats being said not what words meen etc, e.g. "alot of Japanese talk fast how can i understand whats being said" (not quoted just an example)

and i think thats what mentat_kgs is refering to?

Please correct me if i'm wrong Virtua_Leaf

What do you mean? Just hearing Japanese sounds? That can be done in just a few hours listening to anything, it doesn't demand any effort at all. The hard part about hearing Japanese is being able to parse sentences really really fast, in spoken Japanese you don't have the time you have when reading. Like I said, it's impossible to parse sentences you don't understand enough to parse, you need i+1 material where you understand what is being spoken, you're just having a hard time parsing it fast enough to understand it all.

As an example, I speak nothing but Japanese with my girlfriend and I understand 100% of what she says no matter how fast she speaks. When I listen to Japanese news however, I understand very very little, even if they speak slower than my girlfriend. The reason being of course that the vocabulary is completely different. If I READ what was being spoken in the news, I would understand a lot better since I would have more time to parse every sentence.

oregum Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'd ignore all these comments, pick your favorite show of all time in Japanese and listen to it continuously.

Well obviously this guy knows what he's talking about. So tell me mentat_kgs, how has the method of listening to "your favorite show of all time" repeatedly "in Japanese" been working out for ya?

I'm going to second Mentat's advice. If you suck at listening, you need to do it more. See these threads:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid32630
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...1#pid32741

Then the user reineke in this thread talks about how he learned Italian and German exclusively from listening to it for massive hours. You don't have to take it to that extreme, but it does prove that listening helps:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/for...=5525&PN=1

Tobberoth Wrote:As an example, I speak nothing but Japanese with my girlfriend and I understand 100% of what she says no matter how fast she speaks. When I listen to Japanese news however, I understand very very little, even if they speak slower than my girlfriend. The reason being of course that the vocabulary is completely different. If I READ what was being spoken in the news, I would understand a lot better since I would have more time to parse every sentence.

So if thats the case then mentat's comment is very valid as the more you hear something the more you pick up so the better you get at it, if as you say you could understand it by reading it then it should be the same for listening just you need more practice listening to the news untill you become better at parsing what is being said, i cant see how learning more vocab would help if you could read exactly what the news said if it was wrote out seems more like an exposure thing to me.

tibul Wrote:

Tobberoth Wrote:As an example, I speak nothing but Japanese with my girlfriend and I understand 100% of what she says no matter how fast she speaks. When I listen to Japanese news however, I understand very very little, even if they speak slower than my girlfriend. The reason being of course that the vocabulary is completely different. If I READ what was being spoken in the news, I would understand a lot better since I would have more time to parse every sentence.

So if thats the case then mentat's comment is very valid as the more you hear something the more you pick up so the better you get at it, if as you say you could understand it by reading it then it should be the same for listening just you need more practice listening to the news untill you become better at parsing what is being said, i cant see how learning more vocab would help if you could read exactly what the news said if it was wrote out seems more like an exposure thing to me.

Yes. But I'm talking about people who would not understand the news when reading them. They don't understand the Japanese used in the audio, so they just listen to the sounds. That will certainly make you better at hearing Japanese sounds, but not better at parsing high-speed japanese. It will, like Alyks says, make you better at it, listening is always positive... but it won't be as time-effective as listening to i+1 stuff.

nest0r Wrote:Whew, everything's back to normal again.

Dictation SRSing! That's my #1 method, as mentioned repeatedly elsewhere.

Personally I'm not to fond of dictation since I find it to be a very different skill. Dictation is about remembering a sentence spoken so you can write it out. Listening however is the act of understanding a sentence as you hear it, you don't have to remember the wording or anything, just understand what was said.

I think it's positive to learning, but I doubt it helps much more than simply listening actively... and it certainly demands a lot more effort.

When I lived in Japan and people were speaking among themselves, I would only understand the combinations of words, patterns, expressions, and phrases that I was already familiar with.

From experience, I have come to believe that listening to spoken Japanese for hours on end will not teach you how to understand 'spoken Japanese'. I have listened to hundreds of hours of spoken Japanese (in Japan). All that it has done is reinforce the things I already knew.

Unless you are at a level where you can learn new grammar patterns and vocabulary, listening to Japanese does very little on its own.

How you do it is up to you. But, learn lots of vocab, learn lots of grammar, and you'll be amazed by how much you'll pick up. I hear the sentence method is effective. And as always, I support jpod101

[EDIT]
Also, I have yet to meet a beginner who has learned much of anything from listening to Japanese.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'd ignore all these comments, pick your favorite show of all time in Japanese and listen to it continuously.

This is the way children learn a language naturally. They watch the same darn Disney cartoon over and over and over and over and repeat what they hear when they play.

bodhisamaya Wrote:This is the way children learn a language naturally. They watch the same darn Disney cartoon over and over and over and over and repeat what they hear when they play.

I lived with a family that had 3 year old and she did in fact watch the same Disney cartoon over and over in Japanese. She however, was speaking levels above the average, 5 yearold level, I would guess.

Anyways, children can learn a language by watching, listening and imitating. But show me an adult that has done nothing but watch 100 hours and Japanese cartoons and learned how to speak. I have never met anyone who has learned Japanese this way.

Besides infants do nothing but listen for 2 years, then for 3 years they learn how to speak and nothing else. So by the time children are 5 they are basically fluent. An adult, on the other hand has so much on his/her mind. So many responsibilities... It is about efficiency - how much time does one need to put in before s/he can understand basic, intermediate, advanced speech patterns. Watching tvshows if affective, but it is not efficient.

kazelee Wrote:I'm beginning to find that listening has more to do with vocabulary than anything. The more vocab I aquire the more the holes start to fill themselves. If you don't even know the words being spoken, how can you hope to comprehend them.

My thoughts, exactly.

If you don't even know the words being spoken, drop the listening, for now.
Go read something, instead. There's no better way of improving your vocabulary.

When you do can read, do as mentat said.

Ok, thank you everyone for your advice.

Some of these ideas sound great but I just want to make sure I know exactly what they entail, and if they're definitely the right thing for me before committing myself to a paid subscription or anything.

For example, while http://www.japanesepod101.com is sounding great, I took the tour at the website and it shows some basic written sentences as part of the plan (or this plan used as an example). I have around, I dunno... about 5000 sentences+ in my SRS, have an OK grasp of grammar, so this type of thing wouldn't be much good to me.

So...

oregum Wrote:Pick your appropriate level, and let the learning commence.

I'm assuming I could change to an appropriate level. But, how do I know what level I am? I'm OK with reading but level 0 with listening... do I pick the lowest level and receive the appropriate listening drills but overly basic reading? Is the reading part/all 6 steps a necessity?

Also, what are the prices etc.? And could I get away with sticking to the free membership (I'm very stingy)?

http://www.iknow.co.jp is also sounding really interesting, but the site didn't really fill me in on what it is. Is it a site of set courses (if so, all the questions above apply)? Or is it a means for finding different audios etc? (always wanted to know how people were finding audio for there SRSs...). Something about lists?

kazelee Wrote:Take one episode of one series with Japanese script.

I'd like to try your plan. Do you know where I can find one of these scripts? Anything's good right now, has anyone got one they can throw me?

tibul Wrote:I't might be just me but i'm sure the OP is asking how to understand better whats being said not what words meen etc, e.g. "alot of Japanese talk fast how can i understand whats being said" (not quoted just an example)

Just everything really TBH. I want to comprehend spoken Japanese and am currently at level 0.

Listening/watching Japanese materials isn't really doing it for me. I'd listen to a podcast and I'd have to repeat periods of speech over and over before I could understand/ if I could understand. Then, I'd have to look up words and it would generally take forever.

Also, it didn't do much for the sense of progress, so I think a more structured plan, for me at least, would be better.

Thanks again everyone.

Go to Japanesepod101.com. Pick a beginners lesson at random and listen to the dialogue. Is it easy? Then go check an intermediate level.

Japanesepod101.com is free, you only pay if you want added features (which aren't needed). If you're affraid Japanesepod101.com might be to easy for you, don't. The upper intermediate is very challenging, harder than the listening part of JLPT2.

If you can understand the top level stuff at Japanesepod101.com, you can start listening to anything, it won't matter at that point. radio, tv, news, you name it.

nest0r Wrote:You can grab an Anki deck of iKnow sentences w/ pictures and audio sorted by difficulty over at ajatt.pseudosphere.net.... You'll have to log in.

Sweet. Thanks.

iSoron Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:I'm beginning to find that listening has more to do with vocabulary than anything. The more vocab I aquire the more the holes start to fill themselves. If you don't even know the words being spoken, how can you hope to comprehend them.

My thoughts, exactly.

If you don't even know the words being spoken, drop the listening, for now.
Go read something, instead. There's no better way of improving your vocabulary.

When you do can read, do as mentat said.

I don't think a person even has to be literate in their own language to learn to speak a new one. I learn new words just by the emotion the character displays on Japanese TV. I hear them over and over in similar circumstances on various shows. That approach might develop an understanding into the true meaning more clearly than if I had it translated into my own language through a dictionary.

kazelee Wrote:http://speaking-japanese.com/breaking/index.html

You can get the audio to some popular stories here.

Aren't those in rather a formal/literary style? (I have the book but it's been a little while since I last read any of it -- must have another go.) They're good, but I'm not sure I'd recommend them for beginning listening practice...

Quote:Trying to shadow this is very fun.

Can I ask you to give some more detail on what 'shadowing' actually involves? I tried googling and didn't really find a clear description of the method. (I did find one website that said that "walking outdoors as swiftly as possible" was a critical part of the method!) Do you read from a text and try to match the audio you're hearing, do you try to repeat from the audio alone (presumably a bit behind it), or what?

(I'm hoping to improve my pronunciation rather than listening skills; my accent's always been in the 'understandable but lousy' category and it would be nice to improve on that a bit.)

pm215 Wrote:Can I ask you to give some more detail on what 'shadowing' actually involves?

I don't think there is any set definition of what shadowing entails, but basically you are mimicing exactly what the speaker is saying to try and make your mouth move the same way he or she does. If you're brave enough, you can record your own voice, compare it to what the speaker is saying, and then try to correct your pronunciation from that point. Personally I've always been too scared to listen to my own voice, let alone listen to myself speak Japanese :o