Once you can hear some words sometimes, it's probably a matter of persistence; and I expect the familiar combined text/audio techniques (anything from Smart.fm sentences to subs2srs to audiobooks) would work quite well.

However, getting that first step is apparently harder than for an English-speaker learning almost any language. Do any of you know what techniques really work, when it all stubbornly remains as meaningless noise?

EDIT: I'm a native English-speaker and I want to help my friends. I have learned my lesson about giving advice only tested on English-speakers...

When I started learning japanese it was all nonsense, I even wondered how will I be able to understand this?
I think some basic steps are needed. Keep listening even if it doesn't make sense and listen to stuff you know, even if it's very small.

I think if one wants to boost there listening skills, they need to also focus on the written language. As it does make learning the language easier for anyone.

I remember there was a site that lists transcripts for new/translations/all the vocab/audio/video. I think it had all languages available(common ones)

Just need to look for it.

English being my native language, I don't really have any experience with it, but I can appreciate how difficult it must be, because its almost impossible to know how to spell something based on just hearing it. And different accents and types of speaking can greatly change the sound of words.
I imagine that shadowing could help greatly in the beginning. And afterwards, watching television with captions should probably be a great help. I don't know about elsewhere, but here in the US, almost all shows that I watch have closed captions for the hearing impaired.

I suspect part of the problem is because Japanese has very regular timing and limited combinations of sounds, it is difficult to grasp anything outside of that. (For this particular aspect, going from English to Japanese is very easy in comparison.)

Most of what you two are suggesting depends on having some listening ability already, however slight. The problem is how to go from "nothing" to "something". There may be something in "keep listening even if it doesn't make sense", but I wonder how long, or if you can tell whether it's working.

I'll write more later.

I'm a native English speaker, so I can't help you there. But give these techniques some thought.

With Japanese, I use music.
I take a song, get the kanji lyrics, and create furigana them. I listen to the song while reading the lyrics, then I listen for a while without them, until I have them memorized. What I try to do is distinguish the sounds as best as possible. Foreign languages generally sound like gibberish to the untrained ear. And with all spoken languages, generally, there are no breaks between words while they are spoken. For a language like Japanese, there is an interesting complication in its lack of spaces between the written words also.

Tv doesn't only rot your brain.
I find the more I listen to the language, the more accustomed my brain becomes to differentiating sounds. Another resource I have recently discovered can be found on the site: http://www.viki.com/. Some of the Japanese tv shows have subtitles in both English and Japanese. Translations are never exact of course, but to have the Japanese both spoken and written with an English approximation is great. I'm not sure how well viki will work for someone attempting to learn English, because the native English speaking content is severely lacking. This is due to copyright issue no doubt, but hopefully this two techniques can be a little helpful.

Watch American/English movies, TV shows, Youtube videos etc without subtitles in your native language. I did that, and it forced me to listen to what was being said. Message boards and chats are also great help in understanding the spoken language. Anyway, English is a difficult language to master. It's always evolving and there are quite many dialects and slang words.

It dawned on me that perhaps the "combined text/audio techniques" are broken by knowing some written English already. If the text is being subvocalised as "Katakana English", this may sabotage any attempt to connect it with the audio. In that case, it might work better to drop the text and listen only.

I wonder whether it's better to listen to a lot of different stuff, or the same thing repeatedly; and if the latter, how long or short it should be.

Your written English seems good and so is your vocabulary, you only need to listen more. I recommend TV shows like Lost or Supernatural if you haven't seen them. The dialogue is easy to understand and the vocabulary is limited and repeated. Drama series are also good if you don't like Sci Fi. But stay away from HBO series and comedies, until you get better. After 5 shows with over 200 episodes, I think your listening skills will improve dramatically.

Sorry people, I'm not talking about myself ;)

(It seems I was rather slow to realise what was happening here...)

bladethecoder Wrote:I suspect part of the problem is because Japanese has very regular timing and limited combinations of sounds, it is difficult to grasp anything outside of that. (For this particular aspect, going from English to Japanese is very easy in comparison.)

Most of what you two are suggesting depends on having some listening ability already, however slight. The problem is how to go from "nothing" to "something". There may be something in "keep listening even if it doesn't make sense", but I wonder how long, or if you can tell whether it's working.

I'll write more later.

I noticed that I could translate it to English flawlessly as times when I can comprehend it very well. Although there are still times when it seriously doesn't make sense to translate it. Not sure how I went from nothing to something. But it only came as I kept listening constantly

I was doing "French + RTK" with almost no Japanese at all (so not AJATT, heh). I had done most of RTK, and drilled single kana as "romaji -> writing" only. Then I went on Smart.fm and repeatedly clicked on "それはとってもいい話だ。" "私は絵を見るのが好きです。" and "そこに大きな円を描いて。" until I could hear them and connect them with the text. (I laugh when they appear in my Anki deck now.) I would say I had "something" within 10 minutes. Is that unusual for the English-to-Japanese direction? Once I had those three, I ran through another 20 or so, which worked much more quickly.

A little later, when the L-R thread came up, I got some longer Japanese text and audio and tried to synch them. It took about 3 hours of practice to keep my place semi-reliably, but I persisted because I could feel it was working.


I was probably being unclear about the "something" too . Perhaps "the ability to listen to a sentence and hear the words in it, with as much textual or graphical help as is necessary".

Free English audiobooks: http://librivox.org/

I believe there is a Japanese interface, but I'm not sure how good it is.

I imagine the text might be found at the Gutenberg project, since they're all in the public domain: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page