Is there any good way to improve the listening? Besides Pimsleur.
I would do whatever is fun to you. I have Japanese on around me most times, usually music. Some people say passive listening does little to nothing, but as for me I think it been helping a lot! My favorite way to practice listening is to use songs (I hope it's not wrong myself, but it helped me a lot)
My way
Pick a song, I always pick AKB48 songs or Maeda Atsuko(her songs are slower and the grammar isn't crazy)
Get the lyrics
Read through the whole thing for unknown words, grammar --> anki
Listen to parts of the songs little by little until you hear it all
Than if you want you can shadow (my favorite part), just sing along with it, I usually have the lyrics in front of me when I sing.
Repeat with another song
Edit: I tried dramas at first, but my vocabulary was so low at the time so I felt horrible having like 3 unknown words per sentence. I'm going to retry dramas in maybe 2-3 months.
Last edited by Xanpakuto (2013 August 28, 6:50 am)
Savii wrote:
I'm throwing in a related question. My reading/writing is at a decent intermediate level, but when I listen to Japanese my comprehension is dramatically low, even if I've already read and understood the script beforehand (I hardly regognize they're the same words). I think the issues are speed, parsing of the sounds and the single-directional nature of audio. And I just suck at interpreting and reproducting foreign sounds in general, it's one of my weak points. Even subtitles/parallel doesn't seem to help much because it's all so fast and my brain needs time to think. The advice is to do anything you enjoy... but I don't enjoy only catching stock phrases and everything else flying right past me. それどころか。It frustrates me to no end regardless of the content. Any suggestions? I'd really like to remedy this, I'm convinced it's possible to break through it but I have no idea how.
Text + audio, and actively study both. Listen, then listen w/ text, then study the text. Listen again with the text a few times, and try and catch the words as they're being spoken. If needed, slow the audio down (e.g., using the 1/2x function on the iPhone's music and podcast player). Rinse and repeat, over and over again, for between six months to a year, and your listening will begin to improve.
I know you've been frustrated with this method, but your brain does adjust over time. If you run into a part you just can't fathom, ignore it and move on; you'll get it eventually. Just my two cents.
SomeCallMeChris
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From: Massachusetts USA
Registered: 2011-08-01
Posts: 787
Savii wrote:
It frustrates me
You may just be trying to bite off too much at once. If you have Genki with the CD, I'd try practicing with that audio. When your listening is really bad, you need to listen to really short, clearly spoken lines.
Although it's in buonaparte's resources, let me specifically endorse Erin's challenge https://www.erin.ne.jp/ once again.
In particular, there's lots of ways to approach the same audio. Usually I'm suggesting just reading along with the subtitles as the video rolls, but if you're having trouble with that kind of practice, you can go to the script or manga and play just one line at a time.
In the vocabulary building sections you can play just one word at a time, but not all the vocab build words are used in the lessons, and not all the words in the lessons are in vocab build.
Still, play pieces as small as you need to and read along until you can follow them. I've sat there just playing the same clip a dozen times when I'm mis-hearing a 'd' as an 'r' or vice versa or some other error, or just missing hearing an entire mora... and after a while, usually, it comes clear.
Also don't knock being able to hear stock phrases. I don't know if you checked out the 'polyglots vs polynots' video or thread at all, but there's an idea in there that having a good handle on commonly repeated phrases is very important. (Especially in Japanese I think... there's no time to process all the double-negative-conditional grammar of なければならない, you just recognize that it means 'must'.)
Would reading a story (with its audio) and then reading its transcript work? Or is there a better way? Also I still need to go through a lot of grammar and vocabulary as it is. Would it better to just stay with grammar and vocabulary and then go to listening? Or would it be best to continuously practice listening without good grammar/vocabulary?
Last edited by screamingfields (2013 August 29, 9:42 am)
screamingfields wrote:
Would reading a story (with its audio) and then reading its transcript work? Or is there a better way? Also I still need to go through a lot of grammar and vocabulary as it is. Would it better to just stay with grammar and vocabulary and then go to listening? Or would it be best to continuously practice listening without good grammar/vocabulary?
I would say it depends on the specific piece, and how well you understand it out of the box. The way I did it was to pick a couple stories w/ both audio and text, and study them thoroughly. I would add unknown vocab to Anki, and I would study unknown grammar. Once I felt I had a good grasp of the text itself, I would concentrate on the listening.
i concur with s0apgun that improving your grammar (and, I'll add, your vocab) will help your listening tremendously.
