LLearn Japanese

What’s a word that you 100% know, but ALWAYS struggle with when listening?

  • December 21, 2024

Mine is definitely 辻褄. For some reason whenever I hear it spoken, I just cannot understand it at all. I know the meaning and I don't have any trouble if it pops up while reading, but I somehow always have to rewind the video if it's used in speech 😂

by MAX7hd

11 comments

  2. 病院 vs 美容院

    I can never tell them apart from listening and can only get it from the context of the sentence. 

    I’ve tried drills with Japanese people where they say one randomly and I guess but I can’t get it right all of the time. 

    It’s the same with me saying it as well. 

  3. I started learning japanese just five months ago, so I’m very much a beginner. However, I can recognize a few words here and there when listening to something in japanese.
    Since I’m new to the language, it still isn’t “wired” in my brain, so I make associations to help me remember the meaning of some words. My first language is portuguese, so the word もっと sounds a lot like ‘muito’, which means “much,” “many,” “a lot,” or “very.” Because of that, whenever I heard もっと in anime and read the subtitles, I associated it with ‘muito’ because it kind of shares a similar concept with “more.”
    Now, I’m having trouble trying to disassociate it from ‘muito’ because, although they are somewhat similar, “more” is different from “much,” “many,” “a lot,” or “very.”

  4. Numbers unfortunately. If someone starts spouting out a string of numbers my brain goes numb

    Also when I hear the month 10月 my brain keeps wanting to translate it as June

  5. I have tons of words like that, much simpler than your example, like 住所. It’s because I’ve seen the words in kanji much more than I’ve heard them said, or written in kana. It’s a problem for learners of languages with less phonetic writing systems, who learn mostly by reading.

    I try to expose myself to the spoken forms more by occasionally converting the text to kana (like with [this site](https://www.lsx.jp/converter/kana/index.html)), or by using the text-to-speech function on my phone (“speak” on an iPhone). It’s a bit more work, both methods generate occasional mistakes, and the synthesized speech still sounds unnatural. But I find they help.

  8. Numbers, by far. Even at 3000 hours the moment someone starts reading numbers my brain goes blank and simply can’t process it

  11. よ まま?

    To me just sounds like the English 😅

    Not sure what the word is that’s like that though

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