I like your 3 divisions… passive listening, active listening and intensive listening (I think extensive was also used correctly, but I like short names) This it’s probably something official somewhere for linguists etc … but I like your classification…
Yeah I was going to add something along these lines, I agree completely. For me, all of my studying is active, my only distinction and understanding is this:
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Extensive: actively listen to something around my level where I don’t usually pause, I just keep listening and try to catch everything as it happens. If I don’t understand something, no biggie, I just keep going. Usually this happens with something that I like but that I’m not extremely into, so I don’t mind missing things. Sometimes I really like a podcast chapter and I’m invested and I just go back to relisten, turning it into a semi-intensive listening for a little.
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Intensive: actively listen to something very carefully, trying to understand everything or most that is said and looking up vocabulary I don’t know, and so on. I don’t really like intensive listening, so I don’t do it much, takes way too much effort sometimes.
That being said, I do look up vocabulary when I listen, just not as much as when I read. Perhaps a few words per podcast or so.
Summer 2022 Listening Challenge
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Status: Completed.
Shameless copy paste from the reading challenge
Ah!!!
that is what I meant to say!!
It sounds like omk3 does everything actively, as you do rikaiwisdom san!
I’m not good enough yet to do active listening much without always slipping down to intensive or getting frustrated. LOL!
Honestly I think that’s completely fine until you’re able to relax a little bit and catch more with less effort eventually. I personally think podcast have helped me a lot, though I understand that “learning” podcasts are not very engaging and can get somewhat boring. I like Teppei because he also thinks that and tries to spice things up a bit with different topics. When I first started listening to him I don’t remember understanding a lot of it, and now I do understand virtually everything, so something must have worked. I just kept listening to it over time, and it’s not like I have listened to hundreds of episodes either, I’m relatively just getting started with podcasts.
I would suggest perhaps picking one of these learning podcasts and just listen to an episode a day or something, without caring much about understanding it completely. Teppei’s are longer, close to 20 mins usually, but there are many others that are 5 or 10 mins, that could work.
I think it’s positive that as language learners we learn how to tolerate some degree of ambiguity, but ultimately just know that I really get you, I do get frustrated myself too occasionally . Just maybe not so much with listening, because I don’t treat it as harshly as I do reading, and I think that’s why it’s actually paying off. The difficulty not being much higher than what I can understand might be playing a big role, too.
More accurately, I try listening actively, but then inadvertently switch to passive (or totally indifferent) listening after a few minutes of concentration.
Thank you, I’ll have to try this!
I’ll go on a hunt for some longer listening material and give this a try, see if I fair any better.
Also agree with your second post about the listening styles! Perhaps practicing all three is the key to becoming Japanese masters
My friend who I read out loud with had been suggesting Teppei to me for a year! I’ve been resisting because I’m having to much fun fooling around with other random stuff. She studied with Teppei IRL for a time, too! Her accent is really nice, she knows a ton of vocabulary stretching games, and she always finds a way to express an idea, even if her Vocabulary is getting rusty (which is why I think she reads with me, to “keep it fresh”).
Now with you also saying it, I will probably start actually trying it more. --If I can find my way out of this Breath of the Wild rabbithole that I recently fell down.
Jun 30, Thu of Week 1 of Summer 2022
I listened to 野ギツネ just now. I read aloud too, so as not to make “active listening” a failure (and it’s not really intensive, yet).
Interestingly, 野ギツネ can be read with 野ギツネ; and only the latter is in JMdict (Jisho), while the former is pronounced in this chapter’s title.
- The sound change here is similar to 野良猫, btw.
Actually, I listened to Podbean’s podcast yesterday, while doing physical exercise, as well. It gave a different feel, for a different occasion, that I want to reach. (Unlike Anime, Youtube, VN, games, etc.) Needless to say, I don’t understand much, though I do catch some words and structures. I am doubtful to how much it will help with overall listening improvement…
I might uninstall (or just ignore and turn off notifications) for audiobook.jp Android app. It gives too many notifications. Also, I prefer podcasts to audiobooks right now.
Actually, I notice that I am ahead of Zakarius, the introducer of Hukumusume, and many other people here, by one day (because of my timezone). It might seem to be the case for a while, as I will probably always read in the morning (of GMT+7; though Japan is in GMT+9), when I am certain that I have some spare time (and have concentration power).
My challenge ends tomorrow, so I’ll do a proper wrap-up post then, but I wanted to post one last update.
I finished season one of La Casa de las Flores a few days ago! I’m definitely going to keep watching the show, though probably more sporadically when the challenge is over. There are some things I’m very confused about in season two already, but I believe the show is deliberately withholding information from the audience, haha, because there was a time skip between the seasons, and a lot happened during that time for the characters.
I also finished watching 夢プロレス-dream on the ring- #4, which spotlights 真中ひまり (I’m linking instead of embedding this one because, once again, there are some images/footage from 真中ひまり’s gravure work). ひまり loves saunas, so maybe if she isn’t able to become a TJPW wrestler, she’ll be able to find a place in DDT Pro Wrestling as part of The 37Kamiina faction .
I cheated slightly on Sunday. I ended up counting Forbidden Door (the All Elite Wrestling/New Japan Pro Wrestling crossover pay-per-view show) as my Japanese listening practice, despite the fact that I watched it with English commentary. But the ring introductions for all of the wrestlers were in English and then Japanese, and there were a few (English subtitled) Japanese promos in the video packages, plus occasional Japanese phrases yelled out by the wrestlers. And of course, the English-speaking crowd managed to yell out a very loud 風になれ! when the chorus of Minoru Suzuki’s entrance song hit.
It was pretty neat to see an event like that happen in America. I’m happy for the Japanese wrestlers that they were so popular and beloved with the American crowd, to the point where the crowd often cheered for the NJPW wrestlers instead of their AEW favorites. It was also really amusing to hear some of the clips from Japanese commentary when the video footage failed, like this one, where they have some fun with American accents (blood warning for when the footage comes back).
Regarding the matter of extensive/intensive listening, I’ve found that I’m effectively unable to do intensive listening. I can do intensive reading and then pair that with listening (which does help my listening comprehension), but intensive listening is basically impossible for me.
So my approach with listening is basically just to take it as it is. If it’s way above my level, that means I’ll likely gleam very little from it (like with wrestling commentary, I just catch a few words here and there and rarely understand full sentences). In this situation, I don’t even try to pay too much attention. I just let the sound exist in the background. I’ve found that I pick up more and more the more words I add to Anki from my reading.
If it’s moderately close to my level (like if I’m able to understand 80% with native language subtitles), then that tends to be enough for me to watch at normal speed without pausing and understand enough of it in order to roughly follow it and still enjoy the story without getting too frustrated.
If it’s at my level (like I’d say the Duolingo Spanish podcast is, where I can listen without a transcript and understand 90-95%), then I’m able to listen while walking, doing dishes, knitting, etc… It takes just enough brain focus that I have to pay pretty close attention to the words if I want to understand it, but I don’t have to give it my complete undivided attention if I want to have any hope of comprehending.
As far as I can tell, all of my big leaps in understanding with listening have primarily come from doing intensive reading (especially intensive reading paired with SRS). That’s where I pick up new vocab, new grammar, etc. It’s how I get used to unfamiliar sentence structure and get faster at taking in entire sentences.
However, what listening is great for is applying and testing the vocab/grammar that I have learned. Watching La Casa de las Flores hasn’t really taught me more words or grammar, but it has helped me get much, much better at processing Spanish at the speed it’s spoken at. I realized how much I’d improved when I heard my coworker helping someone in Spanish, and I was able to follow a large portion of the conversation.
I don’t think I’d have been able to do that if I hadn’t been listening to the Duolingo podcast and also watching La Casa de las Flores. Those things sort of primed my brain for being able to match the sounds to the words that I know and process the meaning before the conversation moves on. With just reading, I think you’d probably get there eventually, but listening really forces you to think faster.
So I guess instead of having three different approaches with extensive/intensive listening, I do purely extensive listening, and just get different things out of it depending on the difficulty of the material and my current level:
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Impossibly hard material — Low effort background passive immersion. Requires little effort, but I don’t get a whole lot out of it.
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Slightly too hard material — Requires very high level of focus (as well as native language subtitles) for mixed results, but is also probably the most rewarding, in terms of being able to watch and enjoy interesting content.
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Material that is at my level — Requires moderate focus, and is moderately rewarding. This is where I get the most out of it for the least amount of work.
Admittedly, with Japanese listening, most of what is available to me at my current level is either impossibly hard or slightly too hard. I’m much further along with Spanish. So the majority of my Japanese listening practice is either passive immersion, or intensive reading paired with listening reinforcement.
But, even so, I can still see myself slowly improving! A lot of it is just continuing to fill in the holes of my understanding with reading, then practicing/reinforcing what I do know with listening. I think as I continue to improve, active listening practice will become more and more useful. I’m not really worrying too much about it, at this point. I can focus on reading intensively, and then just let listening be purely about whatever I can do and still enjoy the experience, regardless of my level of comprehension.
Double-posting because I just watched a really interesting interview with TJPW wrestler Yuki Kamifuku (or Kamiyu as she typically goes by). The interview was produced for a Chinese program, and it’s half in English and half in Japanese. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
There are English subtitles for the whole thing, but I’m pretty sure they’re machine translated. It’s kind of neat, though, because they helped me understand what she was saying, while still requiring me to understand what was happening in the Japanese in order to fully comprehend haha. It was good listening practice for today .
I wish he was taking beginners still, because he would be an awesome conversational tutor.
Day IX: 野ギツネ
Listened to today’s folktale, about a fox doing what foxes do best… transform and cause mischief.
One thing I love is the grammar rule that when speech is in the middle of a sentence it is followed by と, I really like how it’s pronounced softly.
「ココン、ココン!」
。。。
≪と≫
Also realised that playing games and watching shows in Japanese (even if there is subtitles) counts as passive listening, so now that the challenge will be starting ‘officially’ tomorrow I’ll start listing any other Japanese listening adventures with some of those fun little boxes.
Hello! I’ll be joining the listening challenge with y’all~
Redglare’s home post
July | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
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Week 30 |
Aug | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
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Week 31 |
Plan:
- Do the exercises in SKM N2 Listening textbook. Already passed N2, but I left the N1 book at other place. Haven’t really been using this book, so why not durtle my way through it anyway. I guess this will count as intensive listening.
- Listen to Hiiki Biiki podcast. Extensive listening. Currently on episode 145.
Link to daily updates
July 01, 02, 03,
04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31.
Aug 03,
Jul 1, Fri of Week 1 of Summer 2022
七月ヘようこそ~
I listened to 子育て幽霊 just now. [1] This one is classified as 百物語, which I see resemblance to 百鬼夜行 (but not sure of the relevance); and the URL does say 怪談, so 間違いない. (Also, read-aloud.)
This one is also on YouTube.
And yeah, there are also translations in the website. And in the Japanese version, there are illustrations too.
Vocabularies:
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アメ – candy – At first I thought this one is rice because of 水アメ and can be poured.
- I wonder if 水アメ is popular during that time period, that アメをください is sufficient to know what she meant?
- Also, is that stuff even OK for 赤ん坊 ?
- 雨 – of course, rain . I noticed vocal differences from the earlier vocabulary later on, when I listened to the vocabulary’s recording on Yomichan; but not sure if I will be able to remember respective patterns in the end…
If I got as far as making my own 演説や作文, I would try reading them aloud too.
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- Probably the first time that recording goes beyond 10 minutes.
And that’s it! June is over, and so is this challenge for me. I managed to complete the rest of the month with a perfect score .
Jun | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
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Week 21 | ・ | ・ | ・ | ・ | |||
Week 22 | ・ | ・ | |||||
Week 23 | |||||||
Week 24 | |||||||
Week 25 |
= Japanese
= Japanese and Spanish
The listening I got done in Spanish:
I listened to… a bunch of episodes of the Duolingo Spanish podcast. I’m not exactly sure how many . Doing the math, probably nine?
I also watched 14 episodes of La Casa de las Flores (all of season one, and the first episode of season two), all with Spanish subtitles.
The listening I got done in Japanese:
I watched four episodes of 夢プロレス-dream on the ring-, listened to ten 童話 stories, and watched miscellaneous other things (Japanese wrestling shows, press conferences, and assorted other videos)
All in all, it was a very successful challenge! I made a lot more progress with Spanish than Japanese, but that’s understandable, considering the fact that I’m further along with that language.
I wasn’t exactly sure how much I’d get out of this, because I feel like my Japanese isn’t far enough along to benefit terribly much, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to take my Spanish to the next step, but I’m really glad I ended up going for it anyway. I’m especially glad that I took the leap and started watching La Casa de las Flores, which I wouldn’t have done without this challenge as an incentive!
I did actually see noticeable improvement in both my Japanese and Spanish listening, even though I didn’t even do this a full month.
I’ll probably be back at the end of the official challenge period to participate again during the off month . In the meantime, I’ll be doing the read every day challenge .
Good luck to everyone starting the challenge, and to everyone who started already!
I decided to listen to the opening of an audiobook I got off Audible, 殺人ライセンス and was honestly surprised by how easy it felt. I have my audible app sped up to 1.15x at the moment because 硝子の塔の殺人 is honestly a bit slow for my tastes (doing a read-along with it), and even without resetting the speed I had no trouble keeping up. It’s probably not going to be the most challenging book, given the summary:
高校生が遭遇したオンラインゲーム「殺人ライセンス」。ゲームと同様の事件が現実でも起こった。犠牲者の名前も同じであり、高校生のキュウは、同級生の父で探偵の男とともに、事件を調べはじめる
DeepL English for those who want it:
A high school student encountered the online game “License to Kill”. The same incident as in the game happened in real life. The names of the victims are also the same, and high school student Kyu, together with his classmate’s father, a detective, begin to investigate the case.
It was published in 2002. That kind of plot line was part a whole vibe in the early 2000s. I’m here for it.
I also relistened to a few chapters of 謎解きはディナーの後で and found it’s no longer at the upper edge of my listening abilities, so that was neat. I feel like I slack so much on listening after reaching a decent-ish level, so when I realize I’m still making progress I’m somewhat :surprised-pikachu:
Day X: 耳なし芳一 & 浦島太郎 (just imagine it’s a biwa)
Listened to two today, while sewing to see if it works any better while concentrating on something else. Both of these had fun videos I could put on, and neither had text so I couldn’t get distracted with that either, just focus on the listening while stabbing my fingers with a needle.
It feels easier, but I’m not sure if I’m actually learning more or if I just think I am I’ll have to do this a few times to see how it goes.
Also realised that reading the story afterward to find out what it was about has made my brain lazy with the listening. Since it knows that it’ll find out what the story was about after it hasn’t been bothering to listen properly. So I won’t be reading after and force brain to actually put some effort in, even if it does throw a mard on the floor because it wants to know what the story was about. If you want to know what the story was about brain then you’ve gotta put in more effort to listen.
Magic box for filling later (depending on what I decide to do):
Yakuza 6
Episode of Pokemon
It begins! I watched some of that Twitch speedrunning restream I mentioned with my coffee this morning – they were playing some Shovel Knight spinoff that I didn’t even know existed, and then I saw a bit of Satisfactory. Shovel Knight itself was a fun game anyway. I’m pretty… mixed to not-good on comprehending a lot of this, but I think the games/runs require a lot of vocab I’m not ready for, probably. Late last night I listened to another audiobook chunk and that went from understanding the gist pretty well to understanding the vast majority of it fully after having read it, so that’s nice. My listening ability is all over the place but that’s probably normal. There are just so many factors that go into whether something is easy or hard and they’re not always easy to identify.
If nothing else, I’m pretty sure I’ll listen to the next audiobook segment today so I can get started on reading it.
I decided to combine @omk3 's Netflix dub watching with an old suggestion from somewhere else about turning on audio descriptions* and started watching We Love Cats. It’s amazing. Highly recommend. I’m not sure how much I’m learning but I’m loving it. A man rapping about cats being translated into Japanese is just what I needed this week
*副音声 if your Netflix is in Japanese