Let’s say I’m pretty comfortable with N5 grammar and vocabulary and *some* N4.
Should I be learning things through lots of listening material yet? Or should my primary focus be learning through textbooks/flash cards still?
I acknowledge this is probably a dumb question and that the answer is probably “do all of it.”
My understanding is that generally, studying gives you the fundamentals and concepts, whereas listening/speaking/reading gives a truly deeper understanding of the feeling and nuance in the language.
That said, isn’t there kind of a threshold of conceptual knowledge where once you know enough concepts and vocabulary, your listening material would be far more effective in teaching you?
Feel free to let me know if I’m overthinking this.
7 comments
Highly recommend listening to beginner level podcasts, there are plenty of N5-N4 ones out there with hours and hours of content. I personally can think of Japanese with Shun or Nihongo con Teppei off the top of my head
You could start listening to very basic material. Material meant for N5, a set amount of times daily. If you don’t start listening early on, it will be harder for you to catch up on listening skills later on….happens to a lot of us sadly.
Right after learning kana I jumped straight into reading and just vocab mining…course I also did grammar and kanji…but didnt do listening til about 1.5 years into it…..of course it was to be expected my listening ability would basically be non-existent…it did get better over time…but it’s still nowhere as good as my reading…Though I did start watching content without subs with difficulty a few months back
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save yourself a headache…start listening now 🙂
I’d say do it! Listening is how you take what you’ve learned about and actually acquire it as language ability. If you‘ve studied zero Japanese you probably wouldn’t get much from it, but I’d say you’re quite a bit past that point by now.
For me listening is nice because it’s easy to fit in once I’ve done all the vocab/grammar study my brain can handle for the day. It’s either entertainment (like watching anime I enjoy), or it’s something I can turn on while doing something else (like beginner podcasts).
Check out Japanese with Shun. He has a podcast series on YT as well as on podcast apps like Spotify.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUqu4MKiV5q83qPR7zI7w7ucLWerAT0R5
He primarily used N5 and some N4 level Japanese.
I can say that even if you get to a high level with reading, audio is a different skill and while it probably makes it a lot easier to comprehend the material, it would be ideal to at least start listening when you can. I understand 100% of the written content, but with different speakers I sometimes understand little to nothing until I get used to them – I can get 80%+ of an anime just by listening (without watching) in comparison. Real speech is messy – it takes hundreds of hours to internalize Japanese audio effortlessly – start now.
You should have started with a lot of listening materials first! Don’t listen to listening learning materials. Just go watch Japanese Youtube channels. In 2023, studying fundamental pedagogy is bs. It really is. Also don’t watch Japanese youtube channels that teach Japanese. Those are not good for learning Japanese at all. They are mostly in English and you learn very little in 15 mins, a literal waste of time. Find several talk-show type channels that you enjoy and keep watching them.
Do whatever motivates you and keeps you going, but at N5 your language abilities are literally around that of a child in kindergarten. I’m not trying to be mean, this is where you actually are.
If you can find content in that range you find compelling, go for it. Otherwise, I’d recommend that you start grinding kanji / vocab in Anki and load up the next textbook.