How to go from intermediate to advanced listening? (eg. variety shows)

14 comments

1. I’m in the same boat! Looking forward to the replies

2. >  have limited time to study so I’m hoping there is something more focused out there beyond “just watch a lot”

   Sorry but I really don’t think there is. Respectfully, comprehensible input is 1/10 on the difficulty scale, and N3 isn’t that high. Native content doesn’t care about your JLPT level, even up to N1. You need to intently listen to and study lots of content that challenges you for a long time to get good at listening.

   I recommend dropping the comprehensible input stuff and just watch what you enjoy. That clip you posted isn’t that advanced in language and you can totally work though it with a bit of effort. You’ll need to Google a lot, watch YouTube grammar explanations, read dictionary entries, ask questions in the daily thread or on language learning Discord servers like the EJLX … It might take you an hour or two or more but that’s okay. Then do it again, and again, and as long as you’re having fun, it’ll just get easier and easier and faster and faster.

3. So unfortunately, you’re not going to really see much beyond “listen more till it becomes comprehensible”, because that is the truth, to be honest.

   Now, you may be thinking, “how can I listen when it’s just incomprehensible gibberish?”, and that’s a valid question. Usually, when people dive into content like this, they dive into content that is just above their difficulty range, such that the most difficult thing is the thing that is the next level up. However, while comprehensible input is good for teaching you the language through natural means, it suffers from a lack of “realism”. The language used in comprehensible input is so far abstracted from normal spoken Japanese that while comprehensible input gives you a good edge, it still requires a lot of listening to native input in order to comprehend native input.

   Anyways, listening is a top down approach. You need to find the bit that you’re stuck on and go from there. Can’t hear certain sounds? you need to be on the lookout for said sounds. Once you can hear sounds, start listening out for words to see if they match what you’re listening to and make sense in context. When you can start to hear words, you will eventually be able to pick out sentences here and there and you’ll be able to search words up. Once you listen enough, you’ll be able to hear comprehensible sentences from which you’ll be able to build your understanding more through listening. A lot of variety TV shows have subtitles as well so you’d be able to match up the kanji of the word that you’re searching to the word that appears on the subtitle when searching words up. Once you listen enough, you’ll be able to learn solely through listening and develop your understanding.

   This technique is called extensive listening. Typically, extensive listening is done with material with which you have a high word coverage with or something that you have a decent understanding of, though, I’ve seen people do extensive listening with materials that they have little comprehension with and they turned out fine (mainly by understanding the comprehensible bits and building their understanding over time, though, it took quite long).

   Alternatively, if you have subtitles available (a lot of variety shows have subtitles but if you’re using plain youtube, you could use the subtitles of youtube videos (I would not recommend auto-generated subs)), you could enable them sometimes to peak at the words being said so that you retain the word in your short term memory and when you hear it again, you’ll be able to pick it out. From there, you can slowly pick out words and sentences and build your understanding.

   On the other hand, you have intensive listening, which is quite hard to do as a beginner and I would not recommend it unless you’re someone who either has the willpower to search a lot of things up and pause/rewind constantly, or you’re somebody with a high reading competence within the language. It consists of rewinding a lot of times and re-enabling subtitles so that you can map the readings of the words to their audio counterparts so that you can hear them in the wild through repeated exposure. This is what helped me while listening. Refold has a tutorial on how to do intensive listening over [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8857j-RwhA).

   Other than that, it really boils down to “do more listening.”

4. Hey op do you have any other YouTube channels or websites that air variety shows?

5. I think the secret is just you have to be comfortable watching some programs and not catching a lot of it and then over time it’ll get better as you practice. Maybe there’s a smart guy trick that saves you some trouble but I don’t know it.

6. I’ve been listening to drama CDs. They don’t speak as fast and are often clearer in terms of pronunciation. I pause when I catch and encounter words I don’t know to look them up. I’ve noticed my listening has improved a lot after doing this for a year

7. Use Netflix/Youtube with [Language Reactor](https://www.languagereactor.com). You “not catching a single word” could be due to both a lack of vocab and listening comprehension of native content. I’m sorry to tell you the only way to get there is by listening to that kind of content all the time. Some characters may also have their own little gimmicks (accents, dialects, weird contractions or made up terms, etc).

   I never once used graded content to learn Japanese….but of course that would spike the difficulty….however, I think it’s worth it as you get exposed to more vocab way faster. Stepping out of your comfort zone is how you learn. For example, for years I would only look at jsubbed videos because I would think my listening was really bad..and so I would be glued to the subs rather than just enjoying the show. At some point, I turned off subs and while my comprehension was not as good I realized I could still understand most of the show….and when I didn’t understand a scene, I would just rewind a couple of times….stepping out of your comfort zone is always crucial to learn any skill.

8. I’m sorry to say this but variety shows *are* intermediate listening. There’s no difficult vocab, there’s no complex conversations/topics, and people speak clearly and not too fast.

9. Best I can suggest is improving your vocab, since variety shows have a lot of umm… variety.

   If you don’t have a lot of time for dedicated study, try passive listening by listening to podcasts in the background while you do low-focus activities like chores, cooking, or driving.
   This will not only improve your listening comprehension, but it will also get you really comfortable with ambiguity and not getting the full picture all the time, since you might not always be able to rewind.
   This might sound counterintuitive, but being able to look past things you don’t understand in favor of things you do understand or kinda understand is very important for jumping into new material. Of course you’ll still be able to focus on this stuff when you do more focused listening or studying.

   This is pretty much the bulk of what I do currently and I felt that I was able to understand around 80-85% with <5k vocab and little grammar study past Genki I+II.

   If you wanna get started with podcasts, I highly recommend starting with [Nihongo con Teppei for beginners](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbsmSVzhiwvA8VNMAW_cuDqujRQULBjFd). It might be simpler than what your level is if you’re n3, but the goal here is just to get used to listening. Plus they’re short so you can squeeze in a couple episodes a day even if you’re relatively busy.
   I listened to about a thousand episodes before moving on to other podcasts (Currently listening to Miku Real Japanese Podcast). You don’t have to listen to that many before moving on, of course. Switch it up whenever you feel like teppei has gotten too easy or you want to listen to something else.

   With all that being said, podcasts for learners will still be much simpler that native media, but I think doing this will at least get your foot in the door.

10. You have to just put in the time listening. There’s no shortcut.

    I have no idea what my JLPT level is but I can understand the video you linked just fine with ~8-9 months of studying. Obviously there are words in there I don’t know but I can guess the meaning of most. Especially with hard subs its easy to follow along.

    To make listening to full speed content more enjoyable I used an extension called ASBPlayer. You can open the full transcript of the show in the side bar and so I would just read the entire episode before playing it. It’s SO much easier to hear things when you know what to expect. This reading phase is a good opportunity to look up words you don’t know and then it’ll be immediately reinforced as you’ll be hearing it used in context shortly 🙂

11. Grind podcasts like nihongo con teppei original and yuyu if you don’t want to dive straight to native content. In terms of JLPT they are mostly N3. Yuyu gets more tricky sometimes depending on the topic.
    I would say the video you linked is not that far off those podcasts.

12. Listen to Nihongo con teppei podcast on youtube. You will start feeling more confident in your listening skills in a matter of few minutes.

13. Audio only will accelerate your listening skills. More word density and complexity. Plus no images reduces mind drift.

    I don’t think the variety shows are the easiest to understand. Random topics, noisy audio, music in the background, busy visuals, etc.

    If you want to add some video sources, news might not be a bad place to start. Pick some segment like the weather to ease in. You can use closed-captions but I found them to be useful only during a short window of learning.

    Home shopping can be easy. And some dramas can be helpful but have very few words per minute so are not a fast-track. Audio-only is the best IMHO.

14. They are speaking soooo fast in the video you linked lol

    But the good news for me is that i can hear every single word but do not understand all of them – it is a vocabulary issue for me at this point I suppose.