Any tips for develping low level listening comprehenion?

Japanese
#5

If you have the money to spare, I would recommend finding a teacher for one-on-one conversations, online (e.g.on italki) or in person. They would be able to cater to your specific level, and would be able to slow down and explain things when necessary. Even if you feel like you’re not ready for conversation-level Japanese, finding a bilingual teacher who also speaks English/whichever language you are comfortable with would mean that you could start listening to actual spoken Japanese at your pace, with perhaps you answering in the other language to begin with to keep the conversation going. After all, I find that having an actual conversation is the best way to pick up all the nuances that are hard to learn from books or other written material.

I’ve done weekly conversation lessons for a few years now, and it’s done wonders for both my listening and speaking skills in Japanese.

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#6

I can’t recommend Glossika enough for listening/shadowing practice

#7

Grinding vocab has helped me a lot with listening as well.

Without a large corpus of words to be able to make sense of the majority of the sentence and provide adequate context to the words I don’t know, I wouldn’t be able to understand anything I listened to.

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#8

https://japanesetest4you.com/category/jlpt-n5/jlpt-n5-listening-test/

Try these!

#9

I just watched large amounts of cooking videos with japanese subtitles on youtube. Helps too that a lot of the vocabulary is the same between different recipes.

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#10

Nihongo con Teppei!
https://nihongoconteppei.com/page/44/

(Press “play” on the audio beneath #1, then try #2, etc.)

Don’t worry about understanding absolutely everything, but just keep going :slight_smile:
If you don’t like a particular one, no problem, just skip to the next one!

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#11

I, too, struggled mightily with this until I made the barrier ridiculously low. That’d be my main recommendation: find something so easy that you can understand it with all the aids at your disposal.

In my case, I was studying Tobira at that time, so I picked one sentence in the text, read it, understood it, then listened to audio for that one sentence. Many times. Spoke it out aloud. Many times. When I was comfortable with that first sentence, I moved to the next one. This was ridiculously slow, but immensely helpful!
Later, I did this one paragraph at the time. Later, I listened to Nigongo no Teppei and then I actually enjoyed picking out the things I could understand.

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#12

This might not be relevant advice, but for me personally I found that a lot of times I have to focus mentally on capturing the context of a conversation in Japanese. Sometimes I unintentionally fall into a trap that a lot of people do, which is trying to translate real time from Japanese into your native language. This is usually doomed for failure. When that happens I usually pause and reset my mental state. Sounds pretentious but it’s the best way I can put it.

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#13

I’ve been through this in several languages:

  • Watching things with subtitles is 100% beneficial. At first you only catch a word here and there, but as you keep going at it you get more and more out of it.

  • Improving your level of Japanese outside of listening comprehension, including reading a lot, will make it easier to understand spoken Japanese. A lot of our ability to understand the spoken language resides in being able to fill the blank and interpolate what’s being said. A native speaker will be able to understand the spoken language fairly effortlessly even if the audio quality is absolute trash (think about distorted and noisy radio communication for instance).

The more vocabulary you know, the more familiar you are with the grammar, the easier it becomes to understand the language even if you don’t manage to make out every single syllable of what’s being said.

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#14

I find it helpful to have auditive components to every learning activity I do, so even when studying grammar or kanji, I’d generally read out loud and try to use resources that provide native audio as a blueprint, so I listen and then speak just every bit of Japanese I come across. For example, I repeat all vocab readings on wanikani by saying it and I mimic all sentence recordings on bunpro while going through grammar reviews. Both listening and speaking give my brain more contact with the sound of the language and make it easier to pick out the nuances.

Another big thing in my journey was to realize, that I specifically need to learn some casual Japanese. I do so by bilingual manga, going through slice of life manga helps me get familiar with all the abbreviations of vocab and grammar that are naturally used in Japanese all the time. Again, I bring in auditive exposure by trying to speak all text bubbles (I have a text to speech engine to give me a rough blueprint, using xtranslate browser addon. Bilingual manga has OCR, so the text is markable as text).
I had enough contact with the language so that I can try to integrate more or less natural intonation for the dialogues. If that is out of reach, going through a slice of life anime with Japanese subtitles sentence by sentence would be a good alternative.

Otherwise, nihongo con teppei is helpful - in particular the dialogues with Noriko.

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#15

I like the easy Nihongo con Teppei podcast, and I also recently learned about https://marugotoweb.jp/en/ (we’re using the books in class, but I didn’t know about that site).
They have little videos where you can choose Japanese and/or English subtitles, and even turn off one speaker (for speaking practice). It’s N5 to N4 level, so super easy phrases/exchanges at the start and then later it’s basically a miniseries (we’re using the A2-2 book (Elementary 2) in class and the videos are kind of hilarious - at that stage they also have additional videos with interviews on the street and their non-Japanese reporter trying Japanese stuff)

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#16

This is a really important skill I think. When you’re just starting to listen you really have to put 100% of your energy into listening, or the words just become a blur.

@MiaB I would recommend listening to shows you already know the story of but in Japanese so that you can try to catch words that you anticipate are coming. Japanese Netflix has a ton of English dramas with Japanese dubbing. It’s a great confidence building tool because you’ll start to notice that you do actually know a lot of the words, you just can’t catch them when they’re in a brand new context.

@EbonyMidget Cooking youtube channels are great! Any recommendations? I really like the ones that explain everything they are doing.

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#17

I usually would just pick food that was guaranteed to have someone speaking japanese in the video, otherwise you get inundated with japanese subtitled videos of people speaking the language of the place the food comes from.

So for example I just searched “麻婆豆腐 作り方” and got this video

And the channel it comes from is full of other subtitled videos

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#18

@MiaB just going to say, really feel your pain too. Let’s try our best!

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#19

@MiaB , 粗品ですが、どうぞ… One of the things I do is reading the news. I mean, NHK has a good page which shows news in a simplified language: NEWS WEB EASY.

For each article, there are several options, one of which is listening to it (ニュースを聞く button).

So what I do is read the whole article without furigana (漢字の読み方を消す button) until I understand the article in full (including the words explained, which are underlined). Then I press the listening button and go again through the article. Finally, you can watch the accompanying video, when available.

All in all, you learn Japanese (reading and listening, acquiring new vocabulary on the way) and about day-to-day Japan.

頑張っていてね! 諦めないでください!

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#20

Perhaps this will be the least helpful and most patronising answer out there, but it is the one that holds true to me:

Study vocabulary. Most of the time you cannot hear the word because you do not know the word or your are not familiar enough with the collocations. I still have issues with extremely deep voices or people with unique accents, but primarily listening was always gated by my lagging vocabularly relevant skills.

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#21

Study it specifically or increase it

#22

I also feel your pain! It is almost upsetting how far behind my listening comprehension is to my reading, it feels like I must be doing something wrong. Even when I know most of the words in a sentence, sometimes I just sit there dumbfounded haha.
I’m also not at a high enough level yet for watching television shows or most non-graded content to be useful (I mean, I do it anyway, and I sometimes get some fun vocab like 靨 and 本当 from Mob Psycho) but even when I should be able to understand sentences, I just …can’t seem to get it.

Hopefully we can both figure it out (going to use all of the resources posted in this thread!) Thanks for posting this, I feel less weird. All of my friends are much [MUCH] better at listening than reading.

#23

I’m in the same low-level comprehension boat as well. I know that my problem is that I just need to do it more!

It’s already been mentioned, but listening/watching something I’m already familiar has personally helped me a lot. When I was starting to branch out into native content when studying German, I watched Let’s Plays for games that I had played before. Watching dubbed movies/shows I had already watched in English works, too.

#24

My favourite listening resource is a youtube channel called “comprehensible japanese”. She has loads of videos around 5-10 minutes long with illustrated stories about Japanese culture. It’s all divided from complete beginner to intermediate level and her voice is super nice to listen to. Always put a beginner video on while I eat my lunch at work.

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