What has helped your listening comprehension?

29 comments

1. I used to have your issue where I would forget what I’m listening to or reading by the end of the sentence. The only solution I found is to simply listen and read more. I’m not talking a few hours, I’m talking about a few hundred more hours. It takes time.

   Although, another thing I sometimes do is active listening. I’ll do scriptorium, shadowing, and stuff like listening to a podcast normally then listening while reading the script and marking any unknown words which I then put into Anki.

2. Put thousands of hours into listening

3. Idk if you’ve reached this point yet? But at some point you’ll start be able to just understand the Japanese itself instead of having to translate everything in your head into English, if that makes sense. Gradual process, but it takes thousands of hours of listening to get there. Having to translate will slow you down which might be what’s causing you to forget things mid sentence, maybe.

4. It gets easier with time.

   Shadowing is simply an upgraded version of listening. I highly recommend it. There’s little reason to simply listen when you could shadow.

   General language knowledge, vocabulary, reading, all of it also helps out.

5. Japanese is spoken fast. Like really, really fast. I think I saw somewhere that it is the no. 1 fastest-spoken-language. So be gentle on yourself! Yes, it takes A LOT of time, but we have to be patient. You can do it 💪

6. NativShark, but that may not be a good value proposition for you since it’s a full course with not insignificant price. It has good parts, it has bad parts, but among the good ones are that their flashcards and example sentences in lessons are spoken at natural speed (and generally naturally worded).

   But my problem was different, before NS, I just couldn’t follow the fast speech when actually in Japan.

7. Transcribing. Pick an audio source you like (preferably one with a transcript), then try to reproduce the transcript as accurately as you can. I usually do several passes through the audio: the first pass for the main ideas, then subsequent passes to refine the details (I try to write each sentence in its entirety in one pass). I can’t say this method works for everyone, since it takes a lot of effort, but it has helped my listening skills tremendously for English, German and Japanese.

8. Listening

9. Like everyone says: more listening. I think the thing that helps the most though (while also a bit boring) is re-listen to things you know as well. That seems to work for me when training my ear.

10. Listening

11. I would say listen more, and listen without seeing the text, just listen, preferably in a situation where you can listen easily but also passive listening etc. works.

    Also reading longer sentences will help as well. After reading novels I got accustomed to those longer sentences so I don’t have as hard a time listening to the long sentences.

12. The “correct” answer for improving listening, which is simply to listen more, has already been given by other learners, so I’d like to offer a slightly different perspective.

    Let’s say you take a practice JLPT listening test. You only get 80%. You then read the listening script. If you can quickly read through it without a dictionary and completely understand the meaning, thinking to yourself, “Oh, these Japanese sentence were that simple?” then you might need to buy better headphones. Or, you could try shadowing, etc., etc…. The point is, you would need to form a hypothesis and test it yourself.

    Now, consider the possibility that you read the listening script very quickly without dictionary, and still don’t understand it. In that case, the problem isn’t your headphones. Being able to make this distinction is extremely important. Instead, the problem is that you can’t instantly grasp the sentence patterns. Theoretically, it’s also possible you encountered unknown vocabulary, but I think that’s far less likely. It’s safe to assume the inability to instantly process sentence patterns is the overwhelming cause. Or, it could be that your retention is insufficient, or your short-term memory capacity is too small, and so on.

    So, what should your study method be then? In that specific situation, one can come up with a hypothesis that the most efficient way to improve your listening ***comprehension*** may not be to listen more, but it might be to engage in extensive reading.

    If you were to add up all the sentences in a textbook, how much would that be in terms of a paperback? Of course, an exact calculation is impossible. But anyone can imagine it’s probably only about 20 pages, right? It’s impossible to acquire a foreign language with that little input. Therefore, you can form the hypothesis that the biggest bottleneck in foreign language learning is a lack of sufficient input.

    So, what is the most efficient way to dramatically increase your input? If you’re not a child and you can read, the answer is undoubtedly extensive reading. It wouldn’t be surprising if it were ten times more efficient than extensive listening, would it?

13. Shadowing for sure helps this, I recently started Pimsleur and an having fun!

14. Listen more. You’re really not spending as much time as you think. It was 1,200 hours plus lots more passive listening before I started to feel somewhat in control. And it took double that to really start tracking things properly with 3-4 people with a quick witted banter conversation.

    There is no “trick” or tips with listening. It requires a fuck tons of time because it’s by far the hardest skill to build of the 4 skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking).

15. Just keep going, you’ll get there! If you can, I highly recommend listening to the same episode several times at least over a week or so. It will help the sentence structures sink into your brain so it becomes more automatic for your brain to make sense of similar patterns when you encounter them. On some apps you can also slow the speed down slightly. I found that helpful when it was still taking my brain half a beat to recognise a word.

16. Audio flash cards are the “secret weapon”. You can instantly, over and over, keep replaying very short audio clips, while training your brain to parse all the sounds. In all my time studying, I’ve never found anything as unbelievably effective as audio flash cards.

    My favorite way to do it is to use Subs2SRS with Anki to create my won flash card decks our to tv shows (or videos, or whatever) that I like. But, of course, there are pre-made decks for anki that work perfectly well, especially to start. Ones like the Core 6K will give you a lot to chew on.

    If you do these cards—and hold yourself to listening over and over until you can parse each-and-every-sound as you go—your listening comprehension will skyrocket. For me, it was inside of a week I went from not understanding a goddamn word people were saying to me, to being able to hear the language like, well, a language. That doesn’t mean I magically understood every word that was being said to me, but rather that I started to be able to hear that there *were* individual words, and I could begin to “feel” the structure. It took a huge cognitive load off my mind while.

    Seriously, give it a try. And if you need help setting up subs2srs feel free to PM me.

17. All I know is that watching a show, series or film is much more effective then just listening to something like a podcast. Because there is just many more context clues that help you along.
    I’m also a very visual person

18. Listening

19. 1. Here are some movie clips for improving listening skills in a flash-card format

    [https://supernative.tv/ja/](https://supernative.tv/ja/)

    2. Audio sections of textbooks and JLPT sections can be helpful exercises. Only use the audio at first until you get as much as you can. The idea is to listen until you get 100% comprehension, which might require looking at the written text (and looking up grammar/vocab). This will help with you to remember the entire content of a sentence too. This is boring but the biggest accelerator to learning (the sentences target specific grammar and vocabulary so have extra value)

    3. Shadowing can help with speaking easily and general hearing. Sorting out pronunciation and intonation helped my listening skills and made Japanese sound “slower.” I don’t have great comprehension when shadowing because I am so focused on the act of repeating correctly. Overall, a helpful skill but indirectly for your goals IMHO. This book has free audio and is the best pronunciation guide I know. You don’t need to buy the book but it is fast and easy, so I highly recommend it.

    [https://ask-books.com/book-details/?slug=9784866396835](https://ask-books.com/book-details/?slug=9784866396835)

    4. The problem with movies and TV shows is that the word density is low. And most of the information is given away in visuals, so your mind is not working hard. Audio-only generally has higher word density and more advanced sentences. So you can accelerate your learning.

    Stay away from any audio that is “computer generated.”

20. I create my own listening only Anki cards from immersion content. So the front of the card only has an audio file, and the back has the JP sentence and translation.

    You can use tools like immersionkit.com to start building your deck from vocab that you already know but have trouble picking it out when listening

21. Aside from just listening a lot to about everything, if you use Anki, one thing I did for a time that helped was audio cards (actually, it’s the only way I used Anki)

    The front was only an audio excerpt taken from various sources (often anime but also movies, videos, etc.) and nothing else, and the back had the word(s) I didn’t know when I first encountered them along with their meaning.

    I’d also watch content without subtitles at all. I know there are benefits to watching with Japanese subtitles but personally I feel like they prevented me from fully focusing on and understanding from the speech alone. I’d always try to catch words I didn’t understand by ear, even if it meant replaying the same part multiple times, and used subtitles only as a last resort

    Audiobooks are also nice, but same thing I’d just listen to the audio and follow the story rather than reading along

22. “Do more listening”- while technically correct, is missing a HUGE component of ACTUALLY listening to Japanese.

    The key, really, is so simple yet super hard to do- you have to understand what’s actually being talked about, i.e. the subject of whatever you’re listening to.

    One of the major differences between Japanese and English is in context levels- English a very low-context language (i.e. you keep about the subject over and over, and using various pronouns throughout), while Japanese is a VERY high context language- once the subject is understood, it actually gets dropped almost immediately.

    Oh, I should mention the other major killer of Japanese: formality levels are a major PAIN. While this does exist in English, Japanese takes it much further, and the more formal the language, the longer the words.

23. Standing in solidarity with you. I’ve customized flash cards with audio up the gazoo. But when combined into longer sentences that include a comma, I struggle. I primarily listen to Genki audio, Shun, and N5 listening practice (YouTube), but I find myself just memorizing the sentences. And so when I approach them again at a later date, I understand. But I wonder to what degree am I just memory recalling the phrases or actually learning. If it is the former, then I question if I am wasting my time.

24. What you might use to visualize a given sentence:

    1) the tactile feeling of the sounds hitting your auditory nerve

    2) how you form the sentence as speech

    3) how you visualize the sentence as written text

    4) how you write the words as text

    Words simply don’t exist if not in some combination of the above (apart from in sign language)

    Practice each by

    1) listening 

    2) shadowing 

    3) reading

    4) transcription

    Difficulty and effectiveness are more or less in that order descending, but each has its own merits. 

    I quite like 音読, or learning to read passages aloud, which can be a mixture of all 4, depending on your approach.

    I put an emphasis on 2. If you’re going to learn the piano it’s hard to beat actually playing the piano. Language is the same, though it would be nicer if everything in language could be reduced to black and white keys on a keyboard. 

    Personally, I find bone conduction earphones helpful, because I have pronounced hearing loss and I can literally hear more clearly via bone conduction 

    In linguistics 0) in the above would be the thoughts you want to express. 1) and 2) are with you to some extent instinctively. 3) and 4) are technical extensions that aren’t present in all languages 

25. Ive just been consuming more content. I dont feel ready for podcasts, as visual clues up my listening comprehension. My only problem currently is im watching a longplay of a guy playing w dinosaurs, so my vocabs a lil funny

26. Not learning kanji.

27. The biggest improvement for me came from just learning more words, although this is bearing in mind that I had already been listening to a lot of Japanese for years before I started trying to learn it, so a lot of the common grammar structures had become intuitive already. The problem I was running into was that a single word I didn’t know would usually throw off the whole sentence for me as I stop listening properly.

28. You might watch a lot of shows with subtitles, but that does not help as much as you think if you’re still relying on reading them. As a next step, you should try rewatching shows with the subtitles turned off so you’re actively listening (or even better, turning on JP subtitles, which is not always an option). It helps as you’ll have a general sense of the dialogue and what’s going on already, having already watched it with subtitles.

    You might want to look into JLPT listening practice tests or other similar exercises (at the appropriate level for you), plenty of which are available for free on youtube. These might be more helpful for you vs. solely consuming podcasts as there are often questions and review of the material available, which you can then rewind and revisit if necessary. Start with the basics and keep advancing when your accuracy is high enough to warrant moving on.

29. Once I had basic for of grammar I just started listening to stuff. Currently I listen to otome audio CDs, and I watch a YouTuber I find funny (Kiyo). Seriously I just go with the flow and look up words that seem important for understanding the context, while not trying to translate everything. If you like games, I like to watch Youtubers play games I’ve already played in Japanese. I just watched a long play through of Undertale, and it was a very fun and educational experience.