I've been studying Japanese for a long time now. My reading/writing level is finally at a respectable level, as long as I have my trusty rikaichan to rely on.
However my listening level, to put it bluntly, sucks.
Now, this doesn't surprise me a whole lot, because most of my study consists of SRS, writting emails in Japanese, and the occasional drama (with English subs).

I don't have any Japanese people here to talk to, and the few times I tried skype, it was a complete failure (neither of us could understand anything the other was trying to say, and we would end up just typing everything).

So I remembered when I was following the AJATT blog a long time ago (and maybe I'm mis-remembering here), he seemed to make a big deal about just consuming stuff in Japanese, even if you don't understand it. Sit down and watch Japanese tv, no English subtitles, stuff like that. I've heard this view repeated by several others.

Now, personally, I always thought that was complete hogwash. I just can't fathom how I could possibly learn anything from hearing a bunch of nonsense that I don't understand. Furthermore, most Japanese stuff would be totally boring to me if I can't understand whats going on.

But recently I started watching Dragon Ball Kai in Japanese. I was a fan back in the day, so I can understand the storyline even without understanding the words. So I have been watching it, hoping that this will magically increase my listening comprehension.
I feel like I'm understanding less than 25% of the dialogue. So far I am 30 episodes in, which is about 10 hours of straight up listening. Yea, I know thats a drop in the bucket. But so far, I have learned like... 2 or 3 words. And I don't feel like my listening has improved at all.
Now, Of course I'm planning to finish watching the whole series, and maybe even I could go back through and watch it again afterwards. But, I can't help but feel that I'm just wasting my time with this. Am I really going to get anything positive out of this?
Should I try a different approach?

I think it helps a lot. I prefer to listen to podcasts or radio. Stuff that is made to be listened to - so you are focusing on that, not flashing images or whatever. I know listening to the radio helped my French immensely, and it is certainly helping my Japanese listening ability (although I've been doing it for less time). In my opinion it's *most* effective when you know enough grammar, vocab etc that you could comprehend a transcript of it pretty well. [I.e. the problem is purely the listening part]

If you just don't know enough grammar or vocab then it is less effective. It's still important because you do get a much better 'feel' for the language, and get better listening ability in being able to pick out words (but have no idea what it means) but there's much less obvious progress. I don't think you would learn any vocab at all through osmosis. This is just my experience.

I did all 90 lessons of Pimsleur Japanese and when I first got a language partner, she told me my pronunciation was 'perfect'. (I take it with a grain of salt, of course.) She has never had any problems understanding anything I say in Japanese.

I also don't have any problems understanding words that I know, when spoken in Japanese. I attribute that to Pimsleur and having watched decades of anime with subtitles. Words I don't know are still hard, but I can usually repeat things back verbatim when I don't understand them. (That has caused some confusion, let me tell you. It apparently sounds like I understand and I'm confirming.)

I have learned a few words from anime/drama with subs, but I have never learned any words from raw Japanese without subs.

My advice is that if you want to learn to do something, start doing it. The only exception is vocabulary. You should study vocabulary.

Think back to when you were in elementary school. You learned basic words and speech from your parents, but you learned reading, writing, and advanced vocabulary from years of studying. As an adult, you have some advantages, but those basic things will still apply.

hmmm. Personally, the best way to improve listening skills is: 1, listen to a lot of jp,even if you don't understand it. 2, get transcripts that have audio, so you can incorporate sentences into your srs. 3. Increase your vocab via listening(passive vocab). How do you do this exactly? You need a source of audio+transcripts. I do remember doing a lot of decoding of transcripts. It did help a lot, but the most important thing that helped was: I kept listening day in and night out. Sometimes from morning till late night. Overtime the barrier of listening started to dissolve. Now it's a matter of increasing vocab of new things, until I reach that goal of fluency and then native-level fluency.

I have the same problem, but i'm going to stick to the advice from senior japanese learners. That is listening to a lot of japanese.

three22geo Wrote:I have the same problem, but i'm going to stick to the advice from senior japanese learners. That is listening to a lot of japanese.

And it's good advice, but not specific enough. You should be listening to Japanese that is on your level, or just slightly above it. Think i+1 for listening, instead of SRS'ing.

Or use Japanese Subtitles if you can read

I believe that listening to Japanese you don't understand will do very little to improve your Japanese ability, but listening to something you have a chance of understanding can help a lot.

I started listening to podcasts in november (everyday). My listening skills sucked terribly. Now I understand so much. It's amazing what listening to tokyo local everyday does to one person.

I'm now used to japanese spoken fast, spoken by women and just normal japanese. Can't wait to see how my japanese will be within one year.

First you have to figure out *why* you can't understand something you're listening to. Is it because your ability to recognise words you should know is bad or is it because you simply don't know like 80% of the words being said.

If it's the former, then just listen more and you'll be able to pick out more and more. If it's the latter, then sitting there listening to stuff you don't understand will be extremely inefficient. Sure, you can infer the meaning of new words *if* you know the other 95%, but if you don't, it'll just be a massive jumbled mess.

As Tefhel said, grab the transcript or subtitles for what you're trying to listen to and see if you can *read* it fluently (without rikaichan of course, because you won't have that when listening). If it's a sea of words you don't know or words you almost know but take ages to recall, then what you are trying to listen to is too hard. Find something easier. i+1 and all that (at least not i+37).

Zarxrax Wrote:Am I really going to get anything positive out of this?
Should I try a different approach?

Probably a little, but not much. I've been watching One Piece with subs but I don't think I learn much at all. I don't count it as study time though, but as leisure time, so learning anything in leisure time is a bonus.

To improve listening you could try:
dorama with Japanese subs (from d-addicts)
listening-reading (with text and audiobooks, Harry Potter etc)
podcasts

I really liked the smart.fm dictation because it highlights what you're not understanding in the sentence. If you can do a free trial on the new iknow it might be worth it.

Tefhel Wrote:It's still important because you do get a much better 'feel' for the language, and get better listening ability in being able to pick out words

I agree with this. I was listening to Japanese music for years before I started studying the language. At the very least it made me familiar with how Japanese sounds. If I heard something in another language I'd be able to tell when it was Japanese (without knowing very many words)..

Tefhel Wrote:I don't think you would learn any vocab at all through osmosis.

I've accidentally learned words from watching anime. One time I was thinking about someone, then thought, "うそつき." I was really surprised to have randomly thought something in Japanese, looked up the word, and found it meant what I was feeling. We probably understand more words than we realize..

Learning nihongo from shows makes you sound cool.

It depends on the person, but uncompromisable listening did not work for me. I've found I need to process the show a bit at my level. I listened to 1000s of hours of music and video and I picked up very little. You can definitely learn through listening (with an SRS or without), but you must make it comprehensible - note I didn't say it needed to be that way to begin with.

Since going the "make it understandable way" I've gone from 30% understanding of, say, anime to over 60% easily. I can even watch without subs and follow the story (sometimes without actually seeing the TV, only listening.) Here's a technique:

1) Get a Youtube video 1 minute in length of someone talking slowly in Japanese.
2) Preferably download, so you can slow it down even further in Windows Media Player, and go through it.
3) Stop after each sentence break and re-listen to that sentence 10 times.
4) Finish the video then go back and play it again.
5) Write out what you hear in Romanji or Kana, focusing on words you don't know (nouns and verbs, if you can't get anything).
6) Look up all words and put them on to a piece of paper.
7) Fold the paper in half to hide the words on it and play the video.
8) As you watch pause now and then and look at the paper. Write down any times that might help you in this.
9) Go over the video one more time for the day. Listen for the words you now understand or know. Put a tick on your piece of paper every time you understand a word.
10) Re-watch the video again the next day onwards until you have 50% of the total word amount ticked and 20+ extra words on your list.
11) Save to computer and add it to your review listening playlist.

This is, basically, similar to Subs2srs, but without it. After you're done, come back and tell us how it went. Was it better than just listening without comprehension? or a waste of time? What went wrong or right and how can you improve the technique to suit you?

Note that after you have done your 10x listening, you should probably just go back to normal speed, so you can hear it at real speed.

If you play a instrument you'd understand your mouth is an instrument. So what Cranks is saying you wont be Jimmy Page (or whoever you admire) with your mouth without listening.

What worked for me is: breaking down vocab,context that contains audio(I used smart.fm when it was freely available.I added a lot of anime vocab,basic vocab and increased my listening by associating it with kanji/context).

Somebody recommended 'Living Japanese' before, A DVD/book package and after using it for only a couple of weeks I would also recommend this book.
The DVD consists of short, natural conversations and the book has the transcripts.
It has helped me much more then trying to follow dramas and pod-casts and its pretty interesting.

london_lad Wrote:Somebody recommended 'Living Japanese' before, A DVD/book package and after using it for only a couple of weeks I would also recommend this book.
The DVD consists of short, natural conversations and the book has the transcripts.
It has helped me much more then trying to follow dramas and pod-casts and its pretty interesting.

I bought that a while back. At that point, I didn't understand -anything- that was being said, and I got nothing of it. It's probably time to dig it out and try again.

Lately, I've been listening to Japanese podcasts and radio... I understand very little, but it's still interesting... Especially Hideo Kojima's podcast. They have guests, a running radio drama plot, and they always sound like they're having fun.

wccrawford Wrote:

london_lad Wrote:Somebody recommended 'Living Japanese' before, A DVD/book package and after using it for only a couple of weeks I would also recommend this book.

I bought that a while back. At that point, I didn't understand -anything- that was being said, and I got nothing of it. It's probably time to dig it out and try again.

...there's a thread where we've just started working through this; you could join us :-)

Zarxrax Wrote:I feel like I'm understanding less than 25% of the dialogue. So far I am 30 episodes in, which is about 10 hours of straight up listening. Yea, I know thats a drop in the bucket. But so far, I have learned like... 2 or 3 words. And I don't feel like my listening has improved at all.

Watch the same episode again and again until you understand nearly everything they say.

I did this with just about every Japanese media I came across that I couldn't understand, I would watch/listen to it REPEATEDLY (sometimes up to 75 times or 100 times)

I also read a lot of Japanese at the same time too. Just kept the audio on.

Everything has to be done in Japanese. Visiting websites, novels, books, movies....anime...

Well, I found captions for a few episodes, so I read through one of them, and reading it, I could easily understand over 75% at a glance.

I think my problem is that my mind just doesnt process it all fast enough.
If I hear one word I can't understand, that kinda screws up the whole sentence (because I'm trying to figure out what I heard, so I miss the next words and cant keep up) and that leaves me thinking "theres a whole sentence I couldn't understand", wheras with reading, I would be thinking "theres just one word I dont understand".

I'm going to go through and study the sentences that I had trouble reading, and then try watching the episode again, and see how that works.

You should also read Japanese novels/ Japanese websites at the same time you're listening. That way your vocab improves and the words you won't understand will be less and less.

You need english subs. You need something to compare what you're hearing to. I've tried watching anime and drama without the help of English (and usually using Japanese subs). What it did tell me was "yeah I knew that" and not "Oh so that's how you say that". It was good for positive reinforcement but not much good for learning anything new. I pick up new words constantly and learn how to use words that I already know in context when I watch with eng. subs. Probably a bit over a year ago it still sounded like jibberish to me, but the more vocab you learn through usual means and the more you watch and listen, the easier it becomes.

Here's something I've done which is helpful. Open up the .srt files for both the Japanese and Eng. subtitles into their own respective tabs in Firefox (.srt files are text files afterall). Then watch the video either without subs or with the j-subs turned on (I'd suggest with them turned on). When you have trouble understanding something, pause it, then go to the browser and find where you are (it's all time marked) and use rikaichan to try and read it and figure out what it said. Still lost? Go to the english subs.

It's time consuming but it's the only way I've found that lets me examine every piece of dialogue while watching.

Well I haven't been focusing on speaking or listening myself, mostly reading comprehension, but before I started seriously learning Japanese I had already watched tons of anime and I don't remember understanding anything beyond declarations of love without subs. Only after I started doing vocab and sentences using the SrS did I start picking up on words and sentences in anime, just listening to something isn't going to help you at all, it only gives you positive reinforcement after you've already learned enough to understand what's being said in the first place. Also I'm surprised so many people focus on listening at all, to me my listening comprehension has been increasing almost as well as my reading, even though I haven't done anything special for it.