Listening practice with your current level?

I feel wanikani alone is not enough, I feel I’m not getting any listening practice or how to use kanji,vocabulary I learn here. I want to know how other doing for listening and speaking practice? specially something that match your current wanikani level/

7 Likes

Hello! This is all based on my personal experience, but hopefully it helps:

When I was in the earliest levels, I couldn’t really listen to much that didn’t sound like complete gibberish. Around level 3 or 4 I started listening to Japanese with Shun, because he speaks really slowly (like REALLY slowly) and he would occasionally use words that I had learned. He also provides definitions after an episode. I was able to pick up a few words that way while doing WaniKani, and when those words finally showed up, I had already been exposed to them!

After about level 8 or 9, feel free to go looking for more advanced beginner podcasts with more varied words. Bite Sized Japanese Podcast uses a lot of words that you learn in WaniKani, though Layla speaks faster than Shun. The only way to get used to that is just repeated exposure. It’ll be very frustrating at first, but trust me, it gets easier the more you do it.

These days, even though I’m still very early in WaniKani, I try to listen to Japanese on YouTube meant for native speakers (Let’s Plays, news broadcasts, stuff like that) and I’ll listen to podcasts aimed at N4 and N3 learners. Really, you just need to start and be okay with the fact that you will understand very little for a long time. But the longer you do it, the less that will be case.

9 Likes

For an absolute beginner, I can’t recommend Comprehensible Japanese on YouTube enough. The teaching style is similar to how you would teach a kid: she’ll show a picture of an apple and say これはリンゴです。With all the visuals she uses, it’s easy to make connections between pictures and words.

11 Likes

welcome to the community! i wish you success on your japanese learning journey!

3 Likes

^^ THIS
Comprehensible Japanese is really amazing, it’s helped with my listening so much! There’s also a website where you can track your progress through each lesson, but all the free videos are also available on youtube.

For easy/free speaking practice, I recommend Irodori. It’s free online course / textbook series by the Japan Foundation, the lessons are based on situations that you’d actually find yourself in in daily life. It doesn’t give feedback on your speaking, but it’s still good shadowing practice imo, especially for beginners.

Neither of these actually integrate with WaniKani, if that’s what you’re looking for, but I’ve noticed beginner resources have a lot of overlap in general so you should be fine

9 Likes

i would say you don’t really have to find something that matches your level. just find something you enjoy and that might have english subs (or whatever language you feel most comfortable with) and the listening comprehension follows.
also i always liked japanese tv, because they often put parts of what was said as text on the screen, so you have at least for part of what is said a visual clue regarding kanji.

4 Likes

That feeling is 100% correct!

My recommendation would be searching “Comprehensible Japanese Input” in YouTube. It’ll all be incomprehensible if you’re just starting.

4 Likes

Especially true given that WK is a primarily kanji focussed resource, and speaking and listening make no use of kanji at all :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Welcome to Wanikani~

Honestly my listening is more advanced than my wanikani or my kanji level in general because the bulk of my Japanese input is audio. I used to listen to voice actor radio with barely N5 level and although I didn’t understand much it did train my ears for natural spoken Japanese. Then I lived in Japan for a while and that helps a lot but that’s not exactly easily implementable tip haha.

Right now I mainly listen to Japanese vtubers. Seconding what @Stulti said, find something you’re interested in and start listening anyway. It can be to any topic you are interested in, i.e. if you like cooking start watching japanese recipe videos, travel vlogs, etc. Use subtitles in your own language first, and as you gain more Japanese reading ability you can switch to Japanese subtitles so that you’re killing two birds with one stone.

4 Likes