Listening Comprehension Struggles

Japanese
#1

Hello,

I am having an interesting experience with listening. I’ve noticed that when reading, it’s generally pretty easy (as long as it’s not too far beyond my level, of course), but listening is much harder.

When I listen to a song or a short story in Japanese, I can hear everything just fine but it feels like I’m just recognizing the individual sounds instead of actually comprehending them as words, if that makes any sense.

Just as a simple example, if I heard the sentence 「鳥は空に飛ぶ。」I would hear “to-ri-wa-so-ra-ni-to-bu” but not “the bird flies in the sky.” At worst it just sounds like kana, and at best I have to pause and take a few seconds to translate it to English, which becomes a struggle with longer sentences.

Also, I can understand it if I read along with the audio but then I’m just reading instead of actually processing the audio. If I was reading and listening in English, I’d be able to process both at the same time.

Is there something specific I need to be doing when listening in order to boost comprehension, or is the solution just simply more listening?

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#2

One thing that I’ve heard is really helpful is watching Japanese shows etc. with Japanese subtitles. With listening comprehension what you’re really aiming to do is to train your brain to automatically recognize the word clumps. See the words visually can help your brain do that even if you don’t recognize all the kanji etc.

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#3

I highly recommend what @Munchakoopas said. Watching Japanese shows (ones you are actually interested in) with Japanese subtitles will really help.

The visual element of the subtitles really helps tie the sound to the word in your mind.

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#4

I have the same problem as you, and I have also tried to explain it that way. Listening has been my weakness whenever I studied a new language, but for English I could at least tell the words apart. However I listen to Japanese songs, and my brain just shortcuts and I understand absolutely nothing.

So what I do now is (might be a stupid approach). I read the lyrics while listening to a song. Then I close the lyrics and try to recall what they were while the song is still on. Of course it is harder with songs than with spoken patterns, but as I have quite a few Japanese songs I like, this spikes my interest and I hope that this will trick my brain. So far I have made a few steps forward.

Regarding learning, for BunPro I listen to the audio BEFORE I reveal the sentence and look at it. I notice that I can understand the easiest sentences just fine, then at intermediate it gets a bit more complicated and as soon as I don’t understand one word right away, my brain shortcuts again. I then try to repeat the sentence out loud, to figure out where my problem was before I listen to it again. If it gets too bad, I reveal the sentence, and let the audio play along with it, trying to make my brain forcefully understand it. Of course this slows me down a lot, but I have never done that before and despite being at N2 grammar level many years ago, my Japanese absolutely sucked and I couldn’t understand anything unless I read it. So this time I want to go slow, go from the start and include the listening exercise. I cannot tell you if this will help me on the long run, but the “at least I tried” meme applies here.

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#5

Things just take time for some people. I don’t think there is enough science on language learning and why some people can pick up and hear new of unfamiliar languages better than others. I certainly struggle even after years of study and thousands of hours of listening.

I wish I had a breakthrough one size fits all solution for you, but what I can say is that intentional listening is definitely more beneficial than passive listening. I spent a lot of time doing passive listening, and while it is beneficial for understanding the flow and sound of Japanese, without intention to your listening Japanese remains as an familiar sound that has no meaning or incomplete meaning. That I know is a very frustrating thing. Vocabulary is I think a massive proponent in Japanese since there are so many words and so many combined words that we don’t use in English. Things like 発車 and 入学 that get lost in dialogues if you’re not familiar with that specific vocab.

But best thing I can advise is just to keep at it, there will be progress even if you can’t always notice it. If you keep having aha moments and recognize stuff you’ve learned recently in listening, you’re on the right track.

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#6

I’ve found my listening comprehension benefits from me not being overly reliant on translating everything I hear. From your example: try to actively visualize 鳥、空 etc. instead of searching for english words. This habit should make it easier for you to, with time, think in Japanese.

When I’m in “Swedish mode”, I think in Swedish, when I’m in “English mode” I think in English. And when I’m immersing in Japanese I’m actively trying to create and stay in this “Japanese mode”.
To do this with Japanese is not as easy as my first two languages (much harder actually), since I’m not fluent in Japanese yet, but it’s an ongoing process that’s improving with the hours I’m putting into it.

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#7

The thing that really helps is talking to Japanese people. Bet you have heard that plenty. Try to make some friends.

I listened to Anime and drama for years. What a girl does in one hour per day for 3 months will put 7 years of passive/semi-active listening to shame.

Keeping to conversations of words you know. Asking to say the sentence again and maybe if get lucky if they speak some English so you can get an instant translation for the sentence, making sense of what you’re hearing. You’re simply not used to it.

While shows with subtitles are a second choice, there is nothing better than your brain having to do all the work to make sense of the sounds you’re hearing.

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#8

To add another element, I think sentences in any languages can be seen as two kind of elements :

  • The “fillers”, the “set phrases”, the “common phrases” : “There is a”, “As far as I know”
  • The “contextual”, “meaningful” words : “Bird”, “Fly”.

If you learn only vocabulary in a vacuum, you get very good at recognizing the meaningful words but since those are drown inside a lot of “fillers”, it feels like everything is gibberish.

Contrarily, if you immerse a lot, you might get very good at recognizing those fillers, but having no clue what was the topic of the sentence.

Let me get you an example :
“今日はこんな感じで終わろうかな” https://youtu.be/AiBz-TZbPk4?si=jOIu_Qz3v6BIHj9X&t=688

This is 90% filler so things like “今日は”, ”こんなかんじで”, by listening at them again and again, you’ll just process them as an “unit” and not really like “words” anymore.

Now, when you listen something like

“本当に尊敬する。”, https://youtu.be/AiBz-TZbPk4?si=BLC_0_MMvke4iZXa&t=469
the 本当に and する should not even be processed, you hear them, you now the emotion is not “Truly”, but 本当に. You also now that it ends with する, giving you a very good sense that what comes before was a suru verb since it had not particle. So now you have a bit more “brain power” to interpret the “尊敬”、そんけい. You know where it starts, you know where it ends, so you know そんけい is the word. So now, you can use think about “what is the word ?”

So you see, when you give your example “鳥は空に飛ぶ”, the problem is that it’s a very meaning-heavy sentence. Every single word give some very crucial aspect and it’s difficult to know where something might or might not start. So I think even though it’s a very “simple sentence”, it might also be difficult to hear about it, because ever word chains very fast, and your brain has no time or no clue to really see what starts or ends where.

So in my opinion, the fix is as simple as just continuing listening, so your “elementary bricks” of understanding will become longer and longer. For example, in the podcast I linked, she says a lot at the end : 聞いてくれてありがとう. At first, I might had to think “Ah yes, きいて is て form of きく, くれて or くれる, so I guess it’s the grammar point て+くれる, with ありがとう at the end”. Nowadays, I just hear "きいてくれてありがとう” as one big block. And since I don’t need any “processing power” to decypher this, my brain is more “ready” for new things more complex, like “meaningful standalone terms”

Hope it makes a bit of sense

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#9

I don’t understand this paragraph. What girl are you talking about, and what does she do in that hour?

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#10

@FubuMiOkaKoro I think you mentioned your first language is Swedish. It’s sort of a slang in English used online a lot. The “girl” referring to is the person who is speaking. Sometimes the gender doesn’t actually need to match the speaker’s. It’s usually emphasizing that the action that “the girl” is doing is a bit ridiculous/strange methods but somehow achieved something notable. I don’t really fully understand the usage either, but what they are saying is:

“I listened to anime and and drama in Japanese for a long time. Doing that for one hour a day for 3 months was somehow way more productive than 7 years of actually doing listening practice as a study method.” The idea here is that the speaker is trying to express that it’s kind of hilarious that somehow their obsession with Japanese media was better than actual studying.

I think. Slang is weird.

1 Like
#11

@Munchakoopas
Yeah, might be.
But reading through their entire comment again now maybe they meant they made friends with a girl and spoke for an hour a day about their daily routine? Like a diary, but in dialogue? And they missed to put a couple of words in their sentence to make it make sense, maybe?

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#12

I’m… I’m not sure. Maybe we should wait for them to respond. :frowning_face_with_open_mouth:

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#13

Reasonable.

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#14

"The thing that really helps is talking to Japanese people. Bet you have heard that plenty. Try to make some friends.

I listened to anime and drama for years. What a girl does in one hour per day for 3 months will put 7 years of passive/semi-active listening to shame."

These two paragraphs are connected, but misses the context of the girl being Japanese and someone I talked to.

We just talked about everyday stuff. But the thing is that in the first month it was nearly impossible to hold any kind of conversation, formulating proper sentences without thinking and being able to make out what she was saying. But then things started to click, conversations were becoming more natural and Japanese media (anime, drama) started to become things where I could listen and look at the picture and only read the subs when I was lost on what was being said or wanted confirmation.

From my experience it worked 10 times better to have a life without subs. Though brutally difficult at first.

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#15

That makes sense. Thank you for clarifying.

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#16

I have to agree to watch shows in Japanese with Japanese subs. Ive been doing it pretty consistently for about a month and now I can watch a drama with only pausing to look up words I dont know, or replaying sections with long sentences to make sure I understand whats being said.

That being said, I still struggle with no subtitles and IRL. But this is only 1 month. I think given a few more months and some more time spent talking to people IRL I will have improved a lot more. However, I am aware my experience may not match yours as I am actually living in Japan. And it can be daunting to watch anime or dramas in Japanese at first, but if you find one you really enjoy you will understand it a lot more even if the Japanese is a bit beyond your level.

I struggled for a while with finding shows I was interested in enough to struggle through but then I watched 君に届け (From me to you), then its Netflix adaptation, then its 2010 film adaptation. I highly recommend it as it is a slice of life, romcom, so the vocab is mostly daily stuff, and if you enjoy it enough the drama and movie adaptations give you some repetition without being boring (a lot of people recommend you watch episodes a couple times over for repetition, but lets be real thats very boring for most people). Now I am watching a drama called 春になったら (I think its official english name is When Spring Comes). I am enjoying it thoroughly. But mainly watch what you enjoy. I am not as interested in anime as most learners of Japanese I think, so I prefer watching dramas or slice of life/romcom anime. But if you enjoy shonen etc watch that, it may be a bit harder but if its what you enjoy then give it a shot

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#17
  • +1 to shows with Japanese subs

I also find it very helpful to listen to content I know well in my native tongue, but that has the Japanese dub or has been translated to Japanese (e.g audiobooks).

I find that because I know the context very well, my brain has pre-recorded (so to speak) concept groups it’s expecting. It then makes it easier to “pick out” those groups among the previously unconnected Japanese, because it’s the only ones that “fit”.

From there you start to get an idea of the general pattern of speech and sentence structure and you start to form a library of Japanese “memes” (the language construct lol)

It’s gotta be stuff you enjoy though, otherwise you’ll be too bored to pay attention

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#18

The only dedicated way I learn words right now is making i+1 sentences from anime I’m watching and then doing listening with them, every time I just guess the words so it’s not sticking in one moment, but I can do a lot of them in one hour.
Also, it makes my basics much stronger.

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#19

While there are definitely some great suggestions for how to make the most of your listening practice, and I’ll give you two more, the big picture answer is absolutely “more listening.”

It’s also critical, for long-term motivation maintenance, to allow yourself to comprehend only part of what you’re hearing and move on without stressing about everything you’re not getting. That doesn’t mean you should just listen to hours of spoken Japanese in the background. Like @Edo9 said, being intentional is critical.

I highly recommend listening to Japanese conversation podcasts directed towards language learners. In particular, Nihongo Con Teppei is my favorite, because each episode is about 5 minutes, focused on a single topic (so you learn clusters of related vocabulary), and he deliberately mixes slow, enunciated speech with fast, natural speech, so you can benefit from the clarity, but not wind up where you can only hear things if they’re spoken slowly and clearly.

Here’s a listening practice method I came up with that helped me. It’s a little like @Epyon ’s approach of “listen first”, and @Scyamntic ’s method of listening to material he already knows the meaning of from his native tongue. It’s a trade-off that does not emphasize learning to think in Japanese as much, but it’s faster and easier to comprehend content with grammar you don’t already know, and it can also teach you new vocabulary, including casual and slang stuff, faster than looking it up item by item in a dictionary.

Watch a Japanese movie or show with translated subtitles (for me that’s English), watching each scene three times.

First pass: subtitles off. In a relaxed manner, listen to the dialogue and see what patterns you’re picking up on — you don’t need to strain to comprehend, just get what you get and let the rest be sound patterns.

Second pass: subtitles on. As you read the subtitles, try to associate what you’re reading with the Japanese you’re hearing for the second time. You may find yourself thinking about how you would express the subtitled text in Japanese with the grammar and vocab you know, and you will definitely learn vocabulary, by process of elimination. You will probably find that there’s some grammar you don’t know yet being used — that’s fine, just accept that you won’t understand it all and move on. Rely on the fact that the hundreds of hours of listening you’ll be doing over the next several years as you continue to learn more and more grammar and vocabulary will pay off in time.

Third pass: subtitles off again. See if you can pick out structure you didn’t hear the first time. Then move on!

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#20

I love the extra detail here on how to leverage the most out of subtitles. Question, what is your opinion on… dual-wielding subtitles? There’s actually one website out there that offers subtitles in English and Japanese at the same time. You can even stack on romanji if you’d like.

I won’t link the website as I think it probably violates some copyright things and I don’t want to get Bunpro in trouble. That being said the turbo-nerd bootleg translations on underground websites tend to blow anything commercialized out of the water.

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