squarezebra
Member
From: England
Registered: 2009-10-06
Posts: 124
So, you've long since done RTK, finished Core 6K, added a ton of your own vocabulary, can read light novels, can read newspapers .... etc etc etc.
You switch on to some Japanese TV, and you understand maybe, 10%, sometimes 20% of what they are saying. That feeling when you can follow the show because you understand enough bits and pieces, but all the finer details are completely lost on you....
OK, I mean fair enough (despite a lot of practice in the past watching JDrama with subs and listening to NHK Podcasts) I'm only 2 weeks in to watching 3~ hours of native material every day. But when you realize you're not getting it at all, its tempting to assume you started too early and don't have enough vocab ...
My question is, at what point did you start watching native TV, and how long did it take you to reach a point where you felt your reading and listening comprehension were more evenly matched?
Javizy
Member
From: England
Registered: 2007-02-16
Posts: 770
The 6000+ words you know probably make up the majority of what you hear on TV in percentage terms. I'd say it's way more than you need for a solid base for approaching a wide range of TV shows. Things like a lack of grammar or lack of knowledge of contractions, colloquialisms, common cultural references, dialects etc can make TV difficult, but if you can read proficiently, you've probably got most of these bases covered. It sounds like you just need to improve your listening comprehension, and the best way to do that is to persevere. Speaking with natives may help too, and you could try the listening section of an N2/N1 practice exam to get some idea of where you're at. There's really no other way to improve other than training your ears.
Crispy
Member
From: UK
Registered: 2012-05-08
Posts: 126
It definitely gets easier, news is still a problem sometimes but it took me about two years. There's no such thing as starting early, I learned just as much from TV and dubbed movies as I do books. Personally I'm more curious to look up a word I hear than a word I see. Just keep at it and you'll pick it up pretty fast, especially if you're doing 3 hours a day. I only did like 45 minutes (probably why it took 2 years).
I'm in roughly the same boat as you - increasing vocab, ability to speak haltingly, but most Japanese TV flies by at a mile a minute. Some things I'm doing that seem to help:
- Watching some simpler アニメ without subtitles. Among recent titles, 謎の彼女X and Tari Tari are great for basic listening practice. (And Tari Tari is just so damn 可愛い.)
- ドラマ with 日本語字幕. I'll watch the show w/ subs, repeating a segment over and over until I can distinctly hear the words as they're printed on the screen. I've been studying GTO really closely using this method. It seems to help a lot.
- Kodansha's "Read Real Japanese" books, which come w/ complete audio read at native speed. Maybe get the Fiction version, since you seem to have made great progress reading light novels?
- Just continue to listen to as much Japanese as I can, as often as I can. I spent the morning watching a game show and a dubbed episode of One Tree Hill. (That last was, honestly, a little weird.)
頑張ってろ!
Last edited by gaiaslastlaugh (2012 September 22, 3:31 pm)
Is it the actual vocab you're not getting, or is it that they're too fast/different sounding from the core decks that you find yourself unable to associate your vocab with the native material?
If it's the vocab then you'll just have to learn it as it goes.
If it's the speed/different sound...
Get some music with 歌詞付き and just follow the lyrics while they're singing. No need to actually understand yet. Focus first on catching every single phoneme they're using and associating it with something. Then study the lyrics till you understand them if you feel it necessary. Start with slow songs and gradually go for things that are complicated/more intricate.
Sub2srs!
Find dramas with exaggerated and/or not so fast-talking dialogue. 日本語の知らない日本人? Nodame? Whatever works, I'm sure there are people who are better at recommending dramas than I am 
.
Find fun movies where the dialogue is not important. Action movies are usually this, since you easily get the action even if you don't get any of the dialogue. Maybe use Japanese subs. Do focus on the dialogue, but if you don't get 50% of it you still enjoy what you're seeing and what you understand is a bonus (I recommend Robo Geisha. Everyone should see that movie).
Don't aim too high. 6k words is still not that much compared to a native. Look for shows/books that are aimed at kids/young adults first. It's better to watch a simple show and get 80% than to watch a complicated one and get 10%, imho.
As for the actual topic of this thread, there is no real answer to that since everyone is different. There are quite a few people here that started immersion since day 1 and have been doing ok, just as there are a few who after years of study still can't watch shows without subs.
rikishi
New member
From: saitama
Registered: 2005-12-12
Posts: 6
Lots of great feedback above. I'll just add a few thoughts as someone who only recently started to seriously watch Japanese TV and had similar dispiriting feelings. (And I say that as someone who has lived in Japan for some time and is surrounded by Japanese -- but hardly ever watches J TV.)
As Javizy said, vocab is only one part of the game -- the expressions, idioms, colloquialisms, etc. Not to mention that, as in any languages, some words can have several sense meanings.
1. Start with dramas, save variety shows for later
-- As in English, variety/comedy shows will have way too many idioms and puns, and be much more fast-paced.
2. Try watching with subtitles using VLC
-- Search the forum for info about getting access to Japanese dramas and subtitles. Use software like VLC where you can add/remove soft subtitles with a menu click. VLC also allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to "go back 10 seconds" (invaluable!), as well as allow you to slow down the video (audio will still be legible).
3. Start with English (or your own language, if not English) subs, then try Japanese subtitles
-- As I live here in Japan, I can use the TV's closed captioning system to display Japanese subs, which can be very helpful (and very irritating for Japanese spouses 
). But even if you don't live in Japan, there are lots of shows out there with Japanese subtitle .srt files. Japanese subs would also help reinforce your Kanji recognition.
4. An alternative to Japanese subtitles
-- Check out "dramanote" website (http://www.dramanote.com/), a lot of the newer dramas will have much of the dialogue transcribed there.
Check out this Tofugu post which was very helpful for getting me started:
http://www.tofugu.com/2011/06/10/studyi … ma-how-to/
On listening in general, when I was studying for the old 2-kyuu way back when, I listened to a lot of Enka music, and a lot of Japanese podcasts. Listening to podcasts while commuting or in the car would help with your comprehension.
squarezebra
Member
From: England
Registered: 2009-10-06
Posts: 124
Thanks for the input guys. I’ve done and tried a lot of these different things in the past. I could never get subs2srs working on my pc, and the download size of raw drama was too big given the crappy d/l limit with my service provider. Although you can never have too much vocab, I don’t really think that’s my problem. I finished Core6 a long time ago, and my current deck has over 4000 items in it. It’s just one thing reading 10,000 words, and something else being able to extract it from an audio source.
I’ve tried a lot of different methods in the past, but there’s got to be a point at which you need to take away the crutches and try to support yourself with what’s inside your head. I don’t like the idea of still using subtitles to enjoy drama/shows in a years time. I figured if I just go for it, and watch 3 hours a day of stuff without subs, without pausing to check what I heard, without adding every new word I hear…. that eventually it might all fall into place naturally.
I was just interested in YOUR experiences of making the jump to raw TV.
rikishi wrote:
Lots of great feedback above. I'll just add a few thoughts as someone who only recently started to seriously watch Japanese TV and had similar dispiriting feelings. (And I say that as someone who has lived in Japan for some time and is surrounded by Japanese -- but hardly ever watches J TV.)
As Javizy said, vocab is only one part of the game -- the expressions, idioms, colloquialisms, etc. Not to mention that, as in any languages, some words can have several sense meanings.
1. Start with dramas, save variety shows for later
-- As in English, variety/comedy shows will have way too many idioms and puns, and be much more fast-paced.
well i dont' think that matters. if you like variety shwos but you can't stand drama then go for it. like isaid before there's mad text on the screen and even if you limit yourself to only looking up wrods on the screen you'll eventually learn 90% of the words used (or around there) (you just keep watching the show, and look up/add the wrods, rinse and repeat and eventually you'l get to 90 something percent. that's because as you listen, you get more used to japanese and eventually you'll say they talk slow or they talk at normal speed or why did i think that speak fast. Also, you'll most likely look up the common words first since they're used the most and they'll keep repeating since they're common and then that'll enable to learn more wrods that may not be common and then that'll eventually allow you to use monolingual dictionaries etce tc etc. That's what happened to me and i succeeded at it because I watched shows I like). Sometimes J-dramas don't come with japanese subs while almost all talk/variety shows have substantial text on the screen.
squarezebra wrote:
I figured if I just go for it, and watch 3 hours a day of stuff without subs, without pausing to check what I heard, without adding every new word I hear…. that eventually it might all fall into place naturally.
I was just interested in YOUR experiences of making the jump to raw TV.
so in the "I figure" part you believe that or you used to think that? I would say look up words and add into your SRS as you watch... obviously find a good balance and not pause every 5 seconds (which kills the enjoyment/decreases listening time) or wasting time listening to a part over and over and over to try to catch what they say to look it up. If you don't look up anything I don't see how you'll get to complete comprehension and also there's a thing called a noise filter plus you need to be somewhat active instead of doing a billion hours of passive.
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?p … 73#p134573 <- noise filter
Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2012 September 24, 9:13 am)
For me it ended up being a heck of a lot more words through SRSing. I kept expecting TV to just come into focus after watching a ton of it everyday, but I realized that whenever I couldn't understand something it was almost always that there was at least one word I didn't know or didn't know well.
And just for reference, I just broke through 10,000 cards and still when I watch something like Ikebukuro West Gate Park and get to places where it's just jibberish, more often than not it's because they are using words I'm not familiar enough with than just speaking fast.
Last edited by jeffbb (2012 September 24, 9:26 am)
I think it helps to look at reading, listening, and speaking as three separate competencies. They're all related, obviously, but having great reading skills doesn't translate into excellent listening skills, and neither translates into having Japanese drop effortlessly out of your mouth. They all activate different pathways in the brain, and all have to be practiced in their own right.
Yes, I may be bullshitting slightly here. But this theory has kept me from going insane, so I embrace it out of sheer Jamesian pragmatism.
rikishi wrote:
oh, is there a 5 second rewind? sometimes 10 seconds is too long!
Yep! ALT+Left Arrow is 10 seconds, SHIFT+Left Arrow is 5 seconds. Again, thanks for this - it makes learning from VLC so much more enjoyable.
rich_f
Member
From: north carolina
Registered: 2007-07-12
Posts: 1708
@gaiaslastlaugh: I agree with your theory, bull or no. I'll even add a 4th skill, writing, which is slightly different from speaking, just because it feels slightly different to me.
TV is a useful tool, but it just takes gobs of watching it to get the hang of it. At least it did for me. (Like 2-3 years of it.) It may have gone faster if I had SRSed a lot of stuff, but it may not have, considering how rich the NHK news is with vocab you will *never* use... outside of an NHK newscast.
This summer, all I heard was いとうとう this and いとうとう that (I'm pretty sure it was something like that)... I finally figured out they were talking about Ozawa switching parties (the 党 for party is in there somewhere, as is one for moving, and one for different.) I realized I didn't care, because I'll never need the word... which I have yet to actually find in a dictionary. *Really* annoying sometimes... I suppose like some American journalists who love to dump a "Gate" on anything, NHK attacks you with Kango.
