Challenge your listening skills

[NathaLire]

Several months ago I came across this Japanese youtube channel that completely killed me. It’s a channel by a guy (who calls himself ‘mentalist daigo’ as far as I see) who speaks so fast that I could literally not understand a thing he said.

Since then, I’ve made it my goal to someday be able to understand what the guy is talking about. After watching 2 seasons of Terrace House (it really does get more interesting as you watch more episodes) and listening to Hikibiki podcasts semi-regularly, I can finally kind of follow the topic and findings that he presents.

Here’s a recent video about character-types that tend to be popular. I haven’t watched many videos yet but it seems that he mostly talks about relationship stuff.

What do you think of this channel? Does he speak as fast as you expected? Were you able to understand anything?

(Actually I think the channel is pretty well-known, so if you have any recommended video of his please let me know )

[GinAA]

Wow! But I like his style. He is animated at times and you can tell by the way he changes the tone of his voice that he talking about something funny or quoting something. A lot of the Japanese videos I have watched, they are very monotone all the way through so it makes it very hard to stay interested.

[Leebo]

I couldn’t transcribe what he’s saying or anything like that as he’s talking, but I was able to follow all of the personality traits and his comments on them as he went through them. He has a few things he likes to say that tend to pad his sentences (such as というのはですね and ってことですね) and once you pick up on those you can basically ignore those parts because they don’t actually contain content necessary for comprehension. That’s not a critique, it’s just something you get used to with listening, what to focus on and what can be ignored.

[jneapan]

Wow, that’s some 早口 right there. Definitely gonna check out more videos, that’s a good challenge.

[Leunam]

I can parse many individual words, but what I miss is crucial for understanding the sentence.

It would be like understanding every word in the sentence, “The big red fox jumped over the lazy dog” except for the word “jumped.” Even if I understood 8/9 of the words (close to 90%), the sentence means nothing without the last 10%.

Basically I can recognize some words but don’t understand anything.

[Redglare]

Wow, he talks so fast that when you put the playback speed to 0.75 it almost sounds like “normal” Japanese speech. Just a bit slurred. A tiny bit

[totembe]

this applies to me as well. only difference is i understand 4/9 ish. this situation makes me frustrated.