I’d prefer to have an option to opt out auto-generated audio. There is a lot of already recorded grammar audio, it will be more than sufficient for at least an year of studying I guess 
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I personally loathe TTS for language learning. Even good TTS for general purpose is generally abysmal for language learning because it’s always flat, lacks intonation, and it’s always a bit off. If the idea is just to convey information that’s fine, but for prononciation practice it’s hard pass for me. I generally prefer no audio to TTS because in my experience those TTS samples are never vetted by native speaker to exclude the really weird/wrong ones (because why bother, it’s so quick and easy to just generate them on the fly!) so I don’t want to tune my hear to potentially broken or unnatural language.
A few years ago I was pretty active on the Duolingo forums and I spent quite a lot of time helping on the French-for-English-speakers category (I’m a native French speaker). It was very common for students to complain about weird or broken audio and while it was sometimes a skill issue on their part, I can vouch that quite often the audio was indeed broken, slurred or just plain unnatural due to weird intonation.
Now that was years ago, I can imagine that it’s improved since then and with the current AI boom I hope we’ll get native-level TTS in the not-so-far future, but we’re not there yet. I much prefer having a deck of 1,000 cards with high quality audio recordings than a 10k deck with TTS.
I realize that it’s not mutually exclusive, but I fear that going the TTS route is a slippery slope, it’s so much cheaper and faster than hiring natives to record the sentences.
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I hope this was even slightly useful.
That’s very useful! There’s so much conflicting advice floating around, including people in the never slow down audio camp, it’s nice to just hear that working your way up to full speed audio got you where you wanted to be. There’s a lot of good nuggets in your response, thank you so much. Even just dropping the name of the app you use is very appreciated. I definitely have some undiagnosed attention issues that have prevented me from making it more than 30 pages into a novel in 15 years and also why SRS is such a godsend (I’ve referred to it as “weaponizing my ADD” before), but maybe there’s some non fiction I can pull from. I’ll have to figure out how to wrangle myself for focused listening and not let my mind drift when I can’t understanding something, but I bet there’s a way. Maybe just volume is the answer.
In any case, I have to say I’m always impressed by the amount of passion that you have for helping people out and your level of detail in responses is so appreciated, dude. You really have a gift for taking in what people say and sharing your knowledge and experience with both clarity and abundance. The community here is definitely lucky to have you around, bro.
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Someone may have linked this already, but some people use this userscript to filter out the vocab from reviews completely.
So focused listening is good but I found it exceptionally frustrating at the very beginner level unless I was using this specific resource: Comprehensible Japanese - YouTube
Comprehensible Japanese is really good because you have some visual aid to help but no Kanji, unless you turn on subs. The pace is very manageable if your listening level is beginner-ish, too.
That said. Your listening doesn’t have to be 100% focused, 100% of the time. http://nihongoconteppei.com/ (also on Spotify, just be sure you’re grabbing the beginner podcast) is very very good for listening just, while driving, going for a walk, cleaning, or any other activity that doesn’t use very much of your language brain. Ideally, you let your attention waver in and out, and then replay each episode a couple times and let your brain catch the things it missed on the first or second attempt. This and the above resource in concert worked exceptionally well for taking my listening from “bad” to like. “not good but not entirely awful, either,” which is about the level where focused listening becomes more manageable and less demotivating. You mentioned you had put some beginner podcasts on repeat before without much success, which sounds like you may be pushing yourself to focus and getting frustrated rather than just, letting the language in and engaging with it a little bit at a time? Dunno, I just think a semi-passive approach, allowing your attention to flit in and out with accessible content while you involve your body in some other action - can help with this early stage.
Also, do you read out loud at all when you read? 'Cause I find that that also helps me with grabbing words I know from reading/reviews when I hear them for the first time.
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I am interested in the youtube channel, but the link doesn’t work. Can you please re link it when you have a minute so I can see the youtube channel.
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oh whoops! I don’t know how that extra character got in there - try it again, it works now.
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So … what does vrol mean? 
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Not a real word as far as I know, just a random assortment of letters I used to prove a point 
.
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Such a disappointment to find that out. I was so looking forwards to adding 1 word to my vocabulary dictionary there 
Extra deetailz
Just having a laugh lol
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I’m on level 20 on WK but found I could only recall Vocab if I saw the kanji.
So I started using Kaniwani and Bunpo to reinforce it as it giving me the english and forcing me to remember the word. I think it’s really helping my recall.
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I have nothing substantial to add, BUT I just had to chime in to say I’m thankful for this discussion. I’m totally in the “pretty good at reading, but listening sounds like a lot of hiragana”.
I do enjoy some podcasts that I think have been helping with listening, but I’m happy to get more ideas about how to attack that skill in a more targeted way.
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Ah, thank you for the suggestions! The podcast that I settled on was indeed Teppei… Love that guy! I really like the way he repeats variations of a phrase. I was putting 2 episodes on repeat back to back for like an hour a day, and that was good I think. It was just hard to get it into a habit… And once I hit a pair of episodes where I felt like I was still really struggling after a few days, I kind of dropped it.
I just took a peek at Comprehensible Japanese and that seems pretty neat, and suitably for total total beginners. Thanks for the suggestion, I will spend some focused time on that!
Oh yeah, I do read out loud, or when I don’t I mouth and mumble, but I don’t find that helps things stick in the way that hearing someone say it does. I know in English my ear is so used to certain rhythms and pitches and I don’t have that for Japanese so it feels kind of silly to try to say whole sentences out loud at this point too.
In any case, thanks for the suggestions!
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ooh, that’s way more than I repeat Nihongo Con Teppei episodes, haha - I listen to them three times at most, and if I don’t get it, I don’t care, I’m moving on anyway. at least for me, letting go of any sense of perfectionism is the only way I get anything done when reading/listening
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i really don t get why wanikani did add those kana words. They are important words, but you would have to not learn japanese to not know most of them already.
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this is the way
in fact
is sage advice
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sorry, just realizing this is off the actual topic 
Thisss is the way. When I listen to teppei I’m not usually doing anything else so I’ll add a playlist of 5or so at time. Throughout a single podcast I’ll rewind as many times as I need for words or phrases it feels like I should know but for whatever reason I can’t quite catch or remember, but usually not more than 4 15sec playbacks. When I do end up catching the missing part or suddenly remember the word it feels soooo good! But when I don’t, that’s okay too. I continue the podcast anyway and continue to the next. That’s what I love about teppei, theres just so many episodes I don’t feel pressured to use what there is “to the full extent” and understand 100%, because maybe listening comfortably without pressure is my full extent right now. Theres plenty more to listen to 
After I go through the all of beginners archives I plan to listen to them randomly on a shuffle for easy listening days to take a break from hopefully if all goes well the more difficult podcasts I’ll be doing
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I hate the kana-only vocabulary and wish they were optional. But to say that there are lots is not correct. At WK, I’m lvl 60 so I got ALL this new kana-only words dumped on my lessons and I think they are about 50 or so. More than 99% of the vocabulary in WK has kanji. If not using WK, how are you going to learn kanji? Without kanji, how are you going to read interesting stuff?
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For the kana-only that you already started there is no solution. But for any future you get in your lessons you can skip the lesson by using this script modification: [Userscript] WaniKani Lesson Filter - #309 by seanblue - API And Third-Party Apps - WaniKani Community
