For this unofficial early start I’ve not kept up with every single day cause I hit a low point and needed a short break in general, but overall, keeping up a little bit most of the time. Progress is slow on the audiobook since I’m just reading the book for half an hour or so most nights, but I’m finally at the halfway point and understanding a relatively satisfying amount.
I’ve also recently started listening to the さくら通信 podcast I’ve seen recommended a lot online. This one is my furthest step into a true Japanese podcast for Japanese listeners. 4989 is kind of like that but at least with the caveat that she knows she has listeners learning the language and provides transcripts (though I don’t use them). And whether it’s the abundance of loanword use and familiar subjects (since it’s about living in the US) or just her speaking style, it was definitely a simpler one than this.
I had a few attempts at this in the past before I was ready with no progress, but I’m kinda sorta there? It can be annoyingly spotty, understand a lot and then miss a lot, but overall on the last few episodes I’ve tried I’ve understood just enough I think. Often the words I miss are the particularly crucial ones, annoyingly enough, but that’s also pretty natural since less common words carry more specific meaning and whatnot. It reminds me a lot of how I felt back when listening to Nihongo con Teppei and later his joint podcast with Noriko, which I’ve eventually outgrown, so I think I’m on the right track if I keep rolling with this.
Oh also! I’ve only had time to listen to a little, but if anyone is into videogames/speedrunning, there is a Twitch channel restreaming Games Done Quick with Japanese commentary! The difficulty of the language seems to depend on when you turn it on. Yesterday I was understanding a pretty tiny amount of the Crash 2 run, but checking it right now, Link’s Awakening seems easier.
Listened to today’s folktale from Fukushima Prefecture! About a fox and tanuki causing mischief for each other.
This one felt a bit easier, the sentences seem a little simpler. It also has two audio recordings, the first one was a bit difficult as there was music playing under the narration and it was hard to pick out the words, so I used the second one.
I bought the free month of YouTube premium, so I could listen to the videos without looking…
But darn it, I love Breath of the Wild a lot, and it has very much more written Japanese than spoken… so unless the narrator is reading the text out, I wasn’t getting much Japanese from Japanese Quest, and even then it helped to look. I took a lot of screen shots to look things up. Here are some BOTW notes. I spent waay too much time. But I’m really driven to being able to play the existing title in Japanese before the “Breath of the Wild 2” comes out (it’s already been delayed a few years). …
I tried to find some other streamers, but nobody was really reading the Japanese out loud or even making Japanese comments… mostly just playing the game through with stunts…
I did enjoy watching a Japanese girl play Genshin Impact (while I did the dishes), just to hear her excited comments. There was a lot of よしよしよしよokokokok which I liked, etc. And several 殺さないで which I wasn’t fully certain whether it meant “I can’t kill (the boss)” or “don’t kill me!” (I think the later).
And I mostly just posted here today, because I understood a surprising amount of the conversation by this guy Onomappu. I think he’s using simple vocabulary, and had been clear speech… and he’s funny
One more day before the official challenge begins … I was supposed to spend June getting used to listening and finding out how I would go about the challenge proper, but I’m only a little less lost than before. What I’m finding out is that it’s not easy for me to keep up with every day listening. While theoretically it can be done in the background while doing other stuff, if I actually want to understand a good amount of what I’m hearing, I need to be on constant alert. When however I have that kind of time and energy to devote to Japanese, I’ll choose reading every time. Not only do I enjoy it more, but I somehow feel that it’s better use of my time, even if my listening skills definitely need more work than my reading skills. (probably something to do with reading having been encouraged as a pastime since my early childhood? Not that anyone discouraged me from listening or anything…)
So in short, I’m still not sure whether I’ll be able to keep up with the challenge every day, nor do I know what I will be mainly listening to. I guess I’ll continue as best I can with the audiobook some days, watch a video or something (why do videos bore me so much??) on some others, and sometimes totally forget about listening. It’s still better than a month ago, so it’s all good.
I don’t know if you’re into anki or not but I mentioned to someone on the forum awhile ago (in this thread I think) that I trained my ears to pick up more using Subs2SRS flashcards. They’re best for series you’ve seen before, but barring that any simple series will do. I can’t link premade sets on the forums because legal reasons but they’re a Google away. There is also SuperNative which has a Listen+Recall feature that can also be used to train your ear although I don’t like it as much.
All this to say that maybe a way to make it a habit but a lower stress one is to start smaller? You know yourself best, so whatever you think would work for you, but I had to work up to listening to audiobooks and not having it be a wall of noise.
That’s absolutely true. The audiobook is usually going well for the first 5 minutes or so, then it becomes a wall of noise as you say. Part of it is my resistance to listening attentively to anything, but mostly it’s that my brain gets tired, I’m sure. I’ve tried the mini stories @Zakarius listens to, but while shorter, they feel somehow more difficult than my audiobook, maybe because by the time I’ve sort of understood the context the story is already over?
Anki then would be a perfectly reasonable solution. Too bad it feels too much like studying
It’s something to keep in mind though, as are Visual Novels and other things people have been suggesting.
For me it’s that if I want to gain deep understanding of something, I need to look up a lot of vocab, which is relatively easy to do in a book (stop reading and look it up one way or another), or I need to go over it once more, which is also super easy to do in a book, but with audio, it means stopping, rewinding, figuring out what was said, and all that messy stuff
But yeah, maybe I should also accept the challenge and work on this
I’m finding this a difficult aspect of this challenge too. Even though what I’m listening to are usually only about 1-6 mins long, it feels like a really long time, I have to keep telling myself not to do the washing up or whatever while listening, just concentrate on listening. But it’s really difficult to keep on track when after about the second sentence I get completely lost.
Also having a hard time judging any form of progress. Not expecting like super results after a week but I don’t really feel like I’ve learnt much of anything so far.
It’s definitely a lot harder. When reading きょう I know that きょう is きょう - but hearing it, it’s like am I sure it was きょう? Or was it ぎょう? Might have even been ひょう…
Could just be that the hurdle for even basic listening comprehension is a whole lot bigger than the reading one, still, it’s pretty demotivating.
Gonna try my best to keep listening everyday anyways, but I might try a few different approaches and see what works best.
クラゲんばって！! (Jellyfish ganbatte)
(I am disappointed that there is no jellyfish emoji for additional motivation)
I relate so much to everything you said!
Especially the part about not being sure what exact sound you heard. Just the other day I was watching something with a friend, and we had an argument about what name we heard being called. I heard a two-syllable name (which was the correct one according to the subtitles), she heard a three-syllable name. Funny thing is, not even the vowels matched. Even funnier thing, when we replayed it and I tried to listen for the three-syllable name, I heard it! A name that was never spoken. That was all in English, by the way.
It happens when reading, and apparently it happens when listening too. We don’t properly take in all the words, and certainly not all the letters (that’s how we miss typos). Our brains just fill in the gaps. Now with a foreign language, or even a name you’re unsure of, it’s very hard to fill those gaps as there’s not enough prior experience.
At least that’s my excuse. The doctors say my hearing is fine, so that’s not it!
My brain gets tired from listening too, and even if it’s just listening, I can’t do much of anything else concurrently. Those 童話 / 民話 are just at my limits, so I have to study and re-listen; and usually I don’t do well the first time.
I found out about <img class=emoji src="..."> just now, but it is hard to find images that also look good when very small. ↩︎
To be honest, I have way more success with listening when I am doing it alongside some mundane task like washing the dishes, or hanging up laundry, or walking, or going for a run or something. But I’m the same with English podcasts etc, love them, but if I was to sit down and just try to listen I will quickly find myself browsing the internet and not listening at all! Whereas i find that mundane tasks are just enough to occupy that bit of my brain that wants a distraction, meaning I can actually focus on audio much better. And that has the added perk of meaning that while I’m doing these things I can listen to some Japanese!
Might not work for everyone, but it might be worth a shot just to give in and do those dishes haha
Same here. I typically listen to audiobooks while going for a walk with the only side effect so far being that I sometimes associate random places with intense scenes Also keeping my expression neutral if I’m passing by people…
Well, some of you are discussing the difference between Extensive listening (where you’re not purposefully trying to listen, but it’s just “on”) and Intensive listening (where you are actively trying to at least parse every word if not understand).
I don’t get bored listening to the same thing over and over in extensive listening, because I’m not even really listening. I thought it was a waste of time, and BS when people said that one’s brain is doing things “behind the scenes”… but now I think there’s a nugget truth there, because my listening did improve. And my brain did interrupt me and say things like “what is the たしかに that I keep hearing them say?” Etc.
I don’t think anki-audio would work for extensive listening unless you can autoplay them for 30 minutes to an hour. Having such a sentence deck from a show that I’ve already watched world be so nice. Plus if I could also review certain words and phrases from the show, as well.
To me, an audio chapter of Harry Potter is like a song playing in the background. I can tune in when I want. I also have been getting more out of going back and reading a book or manga or watching a video again, months+ later. I get different things.
The key is finding what you like and listening to that. Just like with the Tadoku rule, if it doesn’t work for you, try something else.
Even if you still want to focus more on reading now, it’s still good because it will build your Vocabulary and prime your brain to recognize things in audio.
I used to only manage one or two Intensive listening sessions a week. It’s exhausting and time-consuming!
For what it’s worth, reading you all talking about these struggles with listening is somewhat comforting in how much I relate to them, heh. It always felt like adapting to listening was just easier for other people than me (obviously not to say that listening in a foreign language is ever easy, but let’s say relatively to reading and whatnot) – but either people have been keeping the hard struggles to themselves, or I’ve just found my people who are similarly more naturally inclined to reading, haha.
The nice flipside of that is, while I wouldn’t call myself too great at listening right now, I’ve seen big progress. And it usually felt like what I was doing was useless and I was gaining nothing so… I guess those feelings were wrong, if you ever need that comfort.
Hmm yeah I don’t know this might be over complicating things but I think for me it is useful to distinguish between passive and active extensive listening to make three categories:
what I would call ‘passive extensive listening’ - this is where there is Japanese on in the background but I am not giving it any real active attention. I will do this sometimes when I’m working or something, or as I’m going to sleep. It’s just like having music or the radio on, mainly just white noise that I will occasionally tune into. I’m not really expecting to get much from it and will only tend to do this with things like Japanese translations of books I’ve read in English, or Japanese dubs of films or to I’ve seen. Something I’m not going to ‘spoil’ by only getting a bit of. I do think it was pretty helpful early on in just getting comfy with the sound of Japanese though.
Active extensive listening - listening while walking etc. I’m giving what I’m listening to pretty full attention and (unless I’ve made a silly pick and am listening to something way above my level) can happily listen to podcasts or audiobooks and not feel like I’m missing much. Sure, there will be some unknown vocab or whatever (if there is too much unknown then I would probably drop it or maybe read along with the book if it’s an audiobook) and I generally won’t look up any words (though I occasionally have) but I’m aiming for decent comprehension. Content I’d use for this would be podcasts or easier audiobooks (having started from the place of listening to one beginner teppei episode multiple times before getting enough to move on to the next)
Intensive listening - listening, pausing when you don’t get something & looking up words etc, or something like the audio Anki cards @pocketcat has talked about. I haven’t really done this much as I am lazy and find it gets in the way of enjoying what I’m listening to/watching but I don’t doubt that it’s really beneficial if you have the patience for it. Closest I get to this would be something like the approach @pocketcat has also discussed, where you listen, then listen & read at same time, then listen again, though I’m not sure if that even quite would count as ‘intensive’
2022
legal reasons 
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