I know listening is my weakest skill of the four, so I should work on it more often. But every time I listen to Japanese, whether that's a podcast or a lesson, within about five minutes I feel tired, to the point I want to stop and take a nap or something haha. Does anyone else feel this way? How do people overcome this?
by Stride101r
28 comments
Listen to lively voices. I find listening to anyone monotone can put me to sleep
Opposite, laughing wakes me up. I will fall asleep to more relaxing streams though with some soft talking in the background as white noise fairly often.
since immersion can be very similar to meditation (as you are attempting to focus energy on something you don’t fully understand your mind can have the tendency to wander.) I found myself falling asleep trying to immerse the same way I’d watch TV. (On the couch) Best ways to immerse are in front of a computer with upright posture and get the bulk of it done right after waking up.
quite the opposite actually. ive been surrounded by japanese speakers since i was young so listening is my strongest skill 💀
Probably brain overwhelm. Lighten your load or listen to ones with English mixed in.
Take a nap, let your brain process the information and grow the connections needed to make language processing easier.
It’s a stamina thing. Eventually, that which you don’t understand now, hopefully becomes something you can just hear once and understand later. And before you know it, you’re able to understand a whole ton without getting as tired as before.
Basically, just takes time.
As in literally sleepy? Sometimes yeah, but mostly, I’m mentally exhausted and want to stop listening. It gets easier over time though. I find myself least exhausted, these days.
Keep going, this is natural. English is not my first language and at first it was hard for me to even watch a full movie with no subtitles, for instance. Then I started working in an English-speaking company and at the end of the days I could feel my brain not braining properly by having to use English all day. Now, years later it feels very natural and I don’t feel tired anymore.
All of that to say that this is natural and it will improve with time. Keep going, be patient and kind to yourself. If you are tired, stop, take a rest. Then go back and try again.
just watch anime foo
Building a capability is tiring. It is a kind of stamina. The way to overcome it is the same way you build any other kind of stamina. That is, 1) do it steadily and continually; and 2) do more of it, little by little.
If 5 minutes is your limit right now, that’s ok. Do 5 minutes a day this week. But make sure you do it every day. Then do 7 minutes a day next week. Then 10, then 15, etc. In 6 months you’ll be flying.
Listen in a brightly lit room and earlier in the day. I have the same problem when I listened in a dark room before sleeping.
Learning any language is tiring. It’s trying to process a ton of information at once that is doesn’t actually understand. It helps to make sure the brain is well rested, but to answer the question, yes, I get sleepy when listening to Japanese.
Only way I’ve overcome it is try to do something energyless while listening, like a walk, or dishes, etc.. not always able to do at all times, but when I can, I do.
i feel something similar with reading japanese novels. but what helps with listening is listening to lively or interesting content like food shows or lets plays!
Yeah I get it. During my classes that were specifically focused on listening, I’d find myself fighting to stay awake sometimes. Fortunately didn’t happen to me but I know/heard of a few people nodding off entirely during the listening part of this summer’s JLPT. It’s tiring having to focus that much, and because it’s not as expressly ‘important’ to you (i.e. it’s not someone talking to you directly), your mind is a little more likely to drift.
I get tired when I read japanese for more than an hour or so, but fortunately my weeb phase has me accustomed to listening to the language. When I don’t want to active study I put on a couple of seiyuu videos and call it a day. It’s one of the most relaxing ways to passively study. If you’re focusing on actively understanding the entire thing word by word, then it will be entirely exhausting. I really only just became able to comfortably start doing this and I am somewhat around N2. It was the same with english when I started studying it. Then one day suddenly it gets easier and you won’t even notice it.
Idk how you’re listening to stuff or what you’re listening to, but like smaller talk shows and things like that tend to be a lot easier to understand and it doesn’t matter if you get only about 70% of what is being said as long as you’re able to pick out the words and understand things via context.
If you can schedule your listening practice for when you have the most energy, like in the morning or right after you’ve eaten, I find that helps. But, this is a stamina thing you’ll have to fight through. Over time you’ll be able to go longer and longer. This is basically an unavoidable hurdle for people learning a new language.
Nope. I listen to Japanese 6-10 hours a day.
I think that is normal to feel tired after putting a full focus on your studies. Your brain is overstimulated with new information, and so it needs that sleep to process it with logical way.
Think of newborns, they sleep a lot too because of how much they learn in a day (plus they are growing).
See your tiredness as a sign of trying your best with whatever challenge you had there 👍 (of course, idk, I recommend to choose material which wouldn’t immediatelly knock you out. Something which is not super above your level of understanding but still interesting and challenging at times. BUT also do you!)
Your brain is trying to make sense of the ambiguity of everything you are listening to. Over time, like a muscle, your ability to tolerate will grow as you understand more until everything feels way easier. But you need to keep going and making sure you eat a proper diet and get good rest.
I felt like that constantly when I got to Japan. The way you get over it is just pushing through.
While I agree that it’s natural (it took me hours and hours of listening daily to get to a point where it’s automatic) it’s probably being exacerbated by a mix of factors
In my listening pedagogy class I learned a few things about helping students with listening overall:
1) People have issues listening when they don’t know anything about pronunciation. Essentially, you’re trying to hear sounds that aren’t there, either because you’re imagining the voice that’s in your head while you read or because you’re imagining a strained, over pronounced voice given by a Japanese teacher or language exchange partner
If you learn some basic stuff about things like pitch accent, Japanese IPA* and allophones, and different kinds of vowel reduction, it might make your listening content sound clearer.
Don’t worry about memorizing everything— that’s what the listening is for. Just do a quick read about sound changes and try to notice them in your listening.
*Be aware though that some IPA in Japanese and in general are just outright lies though, the main benefit of this is just training yourself into knowing あ and ah are different sounds
2) If everything I just said above seems overwhelming, imagine what your brain feels when trying to listen to content you don’t understand 100%. That might be good for building vocabulary, especially if you’re doing something like sentence mining, but if your goal is trying to improve your listening specifically you should turn the difficulty down a bit— if you use content you understand 100%, your brain can devote 100% brainpower to understanding it more efficiently. Rewatching something you’ve already watched is your best bet for this, especially at lower levels.
The speed is something I have to get used to. I am learning slowly.
Not really for Japanese. I feel this way with French though, and I liked it the least out of the languages I’ve been learning so I dropped it completely.
I practice Italian too, at a way higher level than Japanese, but I find it less interesting than Japanese right now so I seem to get tired of it quicker at the moment.
Usually when I feel tired I stop and take a break and do something else. I think pushing through the exhausted feeling probably promotes a negative association with studying and doesn’t allow you to absorb the language as well.
What do I know though. I’m no linguistic scientist. Lol.
I listen to radios channels through an app, watch my favorite shows with the audio switched, try conversation apps that allow you to practice your listening and speaking at the same time. It’s definitely easier to listen when you are more engaged in the content. ☺️
Yes, it happens. You know how some people say your brain is like a muscle? Well, now, listening to stuff in another language is just pushing your brain to remember many words that aren’t familiar to it, understand why they’re said in certain order and what that combination of words could mean, with the added difficulty in japanese that you usually have to guess stuff by context. This, constantly, for an extended period of time. It’s hard as fuck to keep it up.
Eventually, the words will become more and more familiar, your brain will get the meaning of sentences without much effort, it will become better at the task and one day you’ll listen to an entire movie in japanese without issue.
What i can recommend is: Listen to stuff that really interest you, and have subtitles on in english. Ignore them for as long as you can, but when you start to feel really tired, you can just read the subtitles for a while until you feel you can start ignoring them again. It’s like a little rest in between.
You only feel tired precisely because it is your weakest skill. When I started reading native content right after I learned kana, I would already be tired after a few sentences. Often times I would also get a headache. This is because your brain has to really put in the work because a new language is hard, especially one like Japanese
OP, listen at your actual level. Your real actual level.