Dear folks,

taking the advice of IceCream f.e. I started listening more often, longer and more regularly to Japanese media of various types.
I'm listening to FNN (with transcripts), to easy podcasts available at Japanesepod101.com and to the graded reader series by the white rabbit press aimed at beginners, but virtually nothing happens! I cannot understand a word! Sometimes I need to slow down the audio that much that it sounds unnatural and even then getting the hang of what person say is extremely difficult for me.
I had learnt the basic grammar points from Tae Kim and I'm almost through with core2k (somewhere at 1900 right now), which makes me worry if Japanese was the right choice. Concerning the reviews in Anki I got satisfied with myself, as I had huge problems with remembering the readings (which was in a way solved by going through the pure groups section of the 2nd Heisig book and continuos listening).
The point is that I learn Japanese for a year and that the results are just so poor and disappointing I dunno what to try else (guys, I tried EVERYTHING. Slowing down audio, inserting silence, tried to learn stuff by heart - which appeared senseless after a time - listening to the Little Prince, shadowing etc.)
Another point is that I theoretically and practically would not be afraid to talk in japanese. The probability me starting to brabble just like that, like I do in English my L3, is quite likely.. I would not be ashamed to make mistakes, that's what I want to say. But I would be afraid that I couldn't get the answer, because it's just so blurry and fast.

Help me, please help!

wellllll... my advice wasn't to just listen. I specifically said that making anki srs cards will help your listening most! You need to pick a bunch of solid phrases and srs them for a couple of months, then you'll really start to notice a difference.

FNN etc are pretty advanced, i think something like a beginner drama or anime, with lots of well used phrases will get you a lot further / per effort invested than the news will to begin with.

Also, spend more time on one piece of listening than jumping around too much. A drama or anime is also good for this, not because you can watch the episodes twice (once in japanese, once with subs, and listen carefully to pick out the phrases you just SRSed)... but also because if you follow a series through 9 episodes or so, you'll find that the characters repeat many of the exact same lines again and again throughout the show.

Learning to hear the same line said by someone else takes longer again, but if you've listened to the same character say it a number of times in different situations, you have a head start.

You just haven't done it for long enough, it's okay.

My guess is that you hadn't heard much Japanese before starting studying it. In my case, I had been watching Japanese media with subs for years so getting used to it happened smoothly.

And yes, I agree with Ice cream..FNN is too hard and anime and drama are a better choice.

Your brain does need time to adjust to Japanese or any other language via neuroplasty of the brain. I also suggest transcripts so you can follow along, helping the encoding with both visual and acoustic encoding. Also, if you have some way to add meaning to the audio you're hearing, memories will interconnect helping you to understand everything better. Basically, that means you need context for the audio.

I agree with the other posters, you're aiming too high!

You could try the little conversations here. They're short and you can choose the difficulty so as you progress you can hear the same conversation but with more complex grammar and vocabulary. The beginner and intermediate versions have scripts as well so you can read along.

http://www.ajalt.org/rwj/

@Jettyke
well with me it was pretty the same. I had been always watching subbed animes with original japanese sound -- in fact this is the reason I originally started learning Japanese: such a beautiful sounding language!

@IceCream
Personally I like dramas like Ichi rittero no namida more than Nobody knows f.e. I find the latter extremely boring for some reason. Concerning animes, I'm not sure, as there is certainly used a lots of slang in the animes I like watching (slap-stick stuff like "The Legend of Koizumi" - prolly really advanced already), so anime is per se a bad choice at this point, too.

The disappointing point all about is just that I am exposed to Japanese, but understand basically nothing. Give me something written down and voila; that would work 100 times better. Reading some shoujo manga is quite amusing; I have to look up some words but all in all it's understandable, whereas spoken Japanese just cannot be understood ;(((

You say you're listening to all this news and educational stuff, but are you listening to anything fun?

If there's a show you like, whether it's anime or drama (though honestly, anime tends to work better for this), and there's a particular song you're attached to (and can listen to pretty frequently, not necessarily on endless repeat all day every day, but often), get the mp3 of it and try to find the lyrics, but don't actually read them yet. Just have them ready.
Listen to it a few times without the lyrics sheet, both in the background and seriously with headphones. See if you can pick out words you know. Next, read along with the song using the Japanese lyrics.

Oh, and don't slow down the audio! The point is to recognize the few words you can without help at first, and then more with the "transcript" (lyrics) later.

The next step after this would be to try watching a music program, like Music Station, where several artists perform over an hour, with lyrics at the bottom of the screen, with some short (~5 minute) interviews.

It might just be that your brain is tuning out, and you need to try something else! Maybe try a different source (voice) for your news?

Well, concerning music, I hate basically all the jpop, so no chance.
(And even if I liked it, I would only listen to melody. I don't care about the lyrics, regardless in which language, either german, russian or english lol.)

Concerning the factor 'fun': the anime 'Arakawa under the bridge' is really fun for me to watch frequently, but.. they play around with different dialects as far as I heard from a Japanese friend to create the funny atmosphere. Suppose that's ways too advanced for me. Also I do not know how to organise my day: I have my daily reviews in anki. I collect words on the internet and add them to my "Misc.anki" deck once a week, add every week about 2 pages RtK2 kanjis into my "Rtk2.anki" file and do core2k.anki as much as possible.. yet I have no idea what to do with the sentences. I mean, if I read them, the known cards, I plainly understand it. I also can read the sentence out aloud (because I know the readings in most cases, which wasn't the case a few months ago! to be more precise 2,8 months ago).

What I recognised is that writing Japanese appears easier than understanding spoken Japanese. I communicate via text with a japanese pen pal since a month or so and we get into real conversations about different topics and he says he understands what I write to 99.9% (I don't expect he's writing this because he wants/needs to be polite, but otherwise we could not ask and answer arguments/questions and give examples etc. = conversation)

pudding cat Wrote:http://www.ajalt.org/rwj/

Just to mention it, the advanced dialogues are a joke. I am nowhere near advanced but I could understand everything they wanted to say in those 7-10 dialogues I listened to using prediction or something, and I didn't catch maybe only one or two words in several dialogues. I think that those advanced dialogues are more like lower/middle intermediate actually.

"At the advanced, or “real world” level, conversations are presented only in their entirety, and are not separated."

Tori-kun Wrote:@IceCream
Personally I like dramas like Ichi rittero no namida more than Nobody knows f.e. I find the latter extremely boring for some reason. Concerning animes, I'm not sure, as there is certainly used a lots of slang in the animes I like watching (slap-stick stuff like "The Legend of Koizumi" - prolly really advanced already), so anime is per se a bad choice at this point, too.

well, i haven't watched "A litre of tears", but "Nobody Knows" is a film... a series is much better! And, like i said in one of my answers to you, don't force yourself to do something that someone has said is "easy", there's easy, helpful lines in pretty much anything you like. If you like something that's a little harder, you can still get a ton of helpful lines from it. (btw, i probably wouldn't rank the first drama i srsed as "B", more like "B/I").

What's the legend of koizumi about? About anime, it might be better to avoid anime with a whole heap of technical language to begin with, but if you can choose an anime where people are just normal people to some extent, you should be fine...

The most important thing is to find something that you like that has subtitles, preferably a series, and then pick lines from it to srs.

i also would much more recommend using an srs than slowing the program down. Try to repeat the line while reading it after you hear in the srs as accurately as you can (in fact, repeat it until you can say it accurately, then speed up your speech a little the next time you hear it in your srs). If you can't hear all the words, don't worry too much, just try to say it accurately. It WILL get easier in a few months.

EDIT: Focus on saying the sentence exactly as they said it, tone of voice, pronunciation, etc. Repeat the audio a couple of times for each card each time you hear it.

The card structure you should use is:
Front: Snapshot from the media + audio.
Back: transcript of audio.
You mark the card on whether you could understand / remember what the audio meant. You repeat the line and listen to it a couple of times every time you hear it, but don't mark the card on that. You can listen to the audio on the front a couple of times if you didn't catch what they said the first time, and mark accordingly.

>>>Concerning the factor 'fun': the anime 'Arakawa under the bridge' is really fun for me to watch frequently, but.. they play around with different dialects as far as I heard from a Japanese friend to create the funny atmosphere. Suppose that's ways too advanced for me.

not really, no! As long as you have a translation + can find the corresponding grammar, it's perfect. What you want to avoid is a lot of technical language to start with, but apart from that, everything else is fine!
(Unless, of course, you're particularly interested in a very specific subject area, in which case, technical language about that one exact area is also ok, as long as you don't stray from it to begin with.)

I attribute much of my recent progress to Japanesepod101 so I can tell you what I did that worked for me.

First establish which Grade and Season is somewhat comprehensible for you (it will probably be some Beginner series). Start at that level and do this for each lesson:

- Save the dialog in a separate folder for your mobile listening device, I also like to download lesson notes into a subfolder.
- Look at vocab and add everything you don't know or are unsure of to word bank (at the end of that season you'll export it to Anki)
- Listen to the dialog (or to the first instance of it in a normal lesson play-through if you prefer to do it all)
- If you're anything like me (and from your post your problems look exactly like mine from around 3-4 months ago) you understood some words, a couple of easy phrases but generally if somebody graded your comprehension of this text it would be extremely embarrassing. So now open the transcript for that lesson and go through the dialog again and again (both as a whole and sentence by sentence with backup from grammar pdf) till you have a firm grasp of whats going on. That doesn't necessarily mean perfectly understanding grammar and every little word or sound, we're just looking for easy but big progress in general comprehension.
- Add every vocab thats in the transcript but not in words for that lesson immediately to Anki
- Then if you like, listen to the rest of the lesson (their trivia contains some very simple Japanese thats easy to pick up on) or just mark checkbox as done (very important for both measuring progress and motivation) and consider this lesson learned.

After a whole season or even quicker (like after each lesson) export from word bank into Anki. Listen daily to those dialogs on your mobile device.

After a while everything that was incomprehensible will become clear and easy, you'll pick more words (when you simultaneously review them in Anki) and conversation pace will seem "slower".

One note is that for Lower Intermediate Grade the order in which the Seasons should be listened to is 5-4-3-2-1. Season 5 is the latest (complete) one and has more structured approach + easier to obtain Dialog tracks (no need to cut lesson mp3s).

Thanks for the long advice, IceCream (Just btw, do you have a prepared 'Nobody Knows' srs anki deck file? Otherwise I would srs the whole thing like you know.. mad)!
For Arakawa I could find the raw, the english subtitles as .ass - but no japanese ones (therefore it's difficult concerning the point 'grammar', right?)
"The legend of koizumi" is that:

(pretty upfucked, right? ehem.)

A litre of tears is a series, but full of medical terms (I don't mind).
Just deleted the slowed down audio files I trust you guys. I was just wondering why I'm the only loser not being able to prcoess the sentences they formulate, in regardless which media (okay, not stuff like "xyz ha xyz desu." <- that's too easy)

thurd Wrote:- If you're anything like me (and from your post your problems look exactly like mine from around 3-4 months ago) you understood some words, a couple of easy phrases but generally if somebody graded your comprehension of this text it would be extremely embarrassing.

I thought I'm alone.
thurd, perhaps I would be more wise to finish off my core2k project and in between, before starting the next journey with the following core6k deck, injecting some dorama srs.

jettyke Wrote:

pudding cat Wrote:http://www.ajalt.org/rwj/

Just to mention it, the advanced dialogues are a joke. I am nowhere near advanced but I could understand everything they wanted to say in those 7-10 dialogues I listened to using prediction or something, and I didn't catch maybe only one or two words in several dialogues. I think that those advanced dialogues are more like lower/middle intermediate actually.

"At the advanced, or “real world” level, conversations are presented only in their entirety, and are not separated."

They're just arbritrary level names going from easy to less easy.

Tori-kun Wrote:Thanks for the long advice, IceCream (Just btw, do you have a prepared 'Nobody Knows' srs anki deck file? Otherwise I would srs the whole thing like you know.. mad)!
For Arakawa I could find the raw, the english subtitles as .ass - but no japanese ones (therefore it's difficult concerning the point 'grammar', right?)
"The legend of koizumi" is that:

(pretty upfucked, right? ehem.)

A litre of tears is a series, but full of medical terms (I don't mind).
Just deleted the slowed down audio files I trust you guys. I was just wondering why I'm the only loser not being able to prcoess the sentences they formulate, in regardless which media (okay, not stuff like "xyz ha xyz desu." <- that's too easy)

no, i don't... the only prepared anki deck i had was the one i linked you to before, with the different dramas and stuff.

ummm... yeah, i can understand why you feel like listening is difficult if you're listening to stuff like "the legend of koizumi" lol.
They're not using standard Tokyo speech, no. But i think if you picked carefully, you could pick from this show as well. It just means you have to connect the dots a little when you heard the same line in something with Tokyo speech. But once you have a bit of practise, it's not too difficult.

If there's subs for A litre of tears, go for that. It's not like you should be SRSing every line you come across anyway (just pick the ones you like / want to be able to say, etc.) and avoid those with lots of medical terminology. But any medical terminology will be fairly general in a drama anyway, and may come in useful for the rest of the show too.

Maybe i'll watch 1 Litre of Tears next too

Take it easy! All hope is not lost. Here's what I would do:

1) Find something easy that has Japanese subtitles or has a transcript. An audio book for kids might be a great start or things like Doramon.

2) Mine the video one time for vocabulary and make Anki cards. Just pick out all the nouns and verbs you hear or run through the transcript with Rikaichan.

3) Do your vocabulary for a week before listening (you can have the reading on the front as you only really need the meaning of the kanji right now).

4) During your week of reviewing Anki listen to the audio over and over and over. Don't worry about understanding, just hear the Japanese first. (You might want to do two or three audio clips about 20 minutes long or you'll get bored.)

5) After one week start going through the video, audio, etc. Look for the vocabulary you know and take your time making connections with the grammar. Even pull it apart and think about how it fits together (Noun, particle, adverb, verb, etc.)

After working over a piece of audio or video for so long you will understand it to some extent. You probably will have already started making a lot of connections during your week of Anki. Anyway, that's just how I would go about it.

By the way, FNN is way fast compared to normal news. They have to squeeze everything in to a short time frame, so by necessity it is super fast.

Also, consider what I am saying above. If you know of Khatz from AJATT he tells a story at one point about how he worked over Evangelion. He talks about how he spent days and days going through the sentences in the book, taking them apart, creating cards, rereading. This is pretty much how he got to understand the text. After doing all of that he said he could read through comfortably (if not perfectly). What you might conclude from this is what is needed is "vocabulary from real life", from what you want to learn from, and "lots of repetition in context". Just my two cents.

Link:
http://www.watchanimeon.com/doraemon-episode-1/ <--- Please buy the DVDs if you like it.

Tori-kun Wrote:

thurd Wrote:- If you're anything like me (and from your post your problems look exactly like mine from around 3-4 months ago) you understood some words, a couple of easy phrases but generally if somebody graded your comprehension of this text it would be extremely embarrassing.

I thought I'm alone.
thurd, perhaps I would be more wise to finish off my core2k project and in between, before starting the next journey with the following core6k deck, injecting some dorama srs.

I generally feel you've a bit small vocabulary to expect decent comprehension. In my case I was already past Core6k vocab when I started on JapanesePod101 and still it wasn't enough for Beginner series (average 4-5 new words each lesson). So by all means, increas your vocabulary first and do some drama SRS as a side project.

p.s.... just listened to part of the 1st episode of 1 litre of tears, and it sounds perfectly fine to pick from. Ignore when the doctor speaks at the beginning, and just pick from when normal people are speaking...

@thurd
thanks for that evaluation! I thought 2000 words are already a lot, but seemingly it's still nothing. Currently listening to the podcasts of "Miki" (Audioblog), which I find also difficult. As you wrote above, I'm pickung up single words/phrases, but I would not be able to copy the sentence by pronouncing it aloud (yet?).

@icecream
It's paradox, but i have no problems remembering medical/chemical terms It's even slightly more fun for me, but anyway. I find the sound is much more better than in 'Nobody knows' (bad quality?). Unfortunately I cannot find the RAW plus corresponding subtitles (japanese).

Edit:
Just my core2k deck. Quite unsure if I should do more reviews? Please comment! http://tanukijapanese.wordpress.com/2011...successes/

jettyke Wrote:

pudding cat Wrote:http://www.ajalt.org/rwj/

Just to mention it, the advanced dialogues are a joke. I am nowhere near advanced but I could understand everything they wanted to say in those 7-10 dialogues I listened to using prediction or something, and I didn't catch maybe only one or two words in several dialogues. I think that those advanced dialogues are more like lower/middle intermediate actually.

"At the advanced, or “real world” level, conversations are presented only in their entirety, and are not separated."

I thought the same.. seeing this thread I had a look... advanced just seems to put all the dialogues together and removes the transcript. It's certainly not advanced. I'm barely into working on N3 stuff and I can understand it fine, it's like beginner level slow, even on advanced.

With the transcript (intermediate) it's really easy to follow ('easy' compared to FNN news). I must say the sound is quite crappy and the animation is more irritating than helpful in my opinion. But all in all a nice website to practice every day conversations with, thanks a bunch.

For me it's harder to follow uninteresting but easy material than interesting material that is hard though.
For example I just can't watch Doraemon and pay attention, but I can pay attention to news like the earthquake program period.

you can find the subtitles off this page: http://www.d-addicts.com/forum/subtitles.php#Japanese
for episodes 1, 2, 3. You should also be able to torrent the raw files from here. The raw files are also available for episode 2+ from here: http://www.veoh.com/list/u/naitsirk23

If not, there's plenty of other dramas. Look at the list of which ones have J-Subs, and then check on that basis. Have you tried Zettai Kareshi? That one also is good for beginners. (search the above site for some raws, the torrents for that aren't good any more, i think).

There's tons of others too, just pick something from the list and start on it...

The focus at the start isn't necessarily on learning terms or words, but phrases and expressions and sentence patterns that you're going to hear a lot. But by all means pick a medical drama if that's what you're interested in.

p.s. cool, ty for the link to your new blog, i wondered what happened!
(i don't really know about your reviews, i let anki sort that out on it's own)

Like others told you, you're aiming too high for the first year, take it more slowly, it's no good if you're not enjoying it.

My advice would be to "get used to the language", and that doesn't mean doing 200 reviews a day with Anki, it means (for me) trying to read or listen to a lot of media you like to get used to grammatical structures.
Try to understand how they use the grammar, as you improve your basics, you'll start getting more and more words when listening, but again, you need time to get used to it.