I was browsing the Natively website and was looking at books and videos. This made me (as a Japanese beginner) wonder, do the reading and watching levels equate here? Ie if you tend to be able to read level 20 books, are you in general able to watch level 20 shows/movies?
What are people’s experiences with this?
EDIT: I think people have misunderstood. The question is not about whether reading or listening is harder or easier or they are on the same spectrum of challenge, but about the MEASUREMENT system that Natively uses. If people in general are worse at listening (which is to be expected) then you expect this to reflect in Natively’s grading system because it is about relative skill. To put it precisely, you would expect the absolute listening ability required to watch a Level 10 show to lower than the absolute reading ability required to read a Level 10 book. My question is then, is this expectation reality? Moreover, as a result of this, if true, do we think the comparative skill drop when moving to the videos section is to such an extent that the average learner is the same “Natively level” (which would mean listening is worse than reading in absolute terms) in both reading and watching.
Another edit, because it wasn’t clear still:
Here’s an analogy which hopefully makes it obvious. Your grades at school tend to be tightly correlated across all subjects. So how you do in science and how you do in English tend to be similar. Moreover, your grade in say German and your grade in English may be the same, but clearly (assuming you are in an English speaking country) your English is better. So if you told me this person gets a B in English, they are likely to get around a B in German, despite the obvious disparity in absolute ability in the larger context. This is because they aren’t actually measuring the proficiency at the same level. I am essentially asking the same question but swap grades and subjects with natively levels books/videos.
It’s hard to compare this stuff, it’s not really an exact measurement. The easiest to compare would be reading books vs audiobooks- in those cases I would expect comfortable listening levels to be lower than comfortable reading levels.
Reading and listening are separate skills, so to my mind they’re not comparable. e.g. reading has the challenge of learning so many kanji and mapping them to words, while listening has the challenge of having to parse the input in real time. I’m sure there’s people who are confidently able to listen to high level stuff and can’t read easy stuff, or vice versa.
I dunno, it might depend on how you view the two activities? I don’t like not understanding things so I go through reading as slow as I need and look up all the words. It might take a little time, but I’m plenty comfortable well into the 30s on Natively reading. Doing that with listening is a lot more tedious so I rarely bother, but without subtitles I definitely still miss tons of words/lines. In that way, I feel like even the lower difficulty stuff in the 20s is in some ways above me. Maybe I can get through it understanding the point enough, but admittedly missing a lot frustrates me and I’d subjectively call practically all of it in some way above my level because I don’t like to not understand.
Maybe I’m also just bad at listening haha, but picking up words at full speed requires a really solid grasp of those words beyond the level where you can recognize, think for a second, then remember the way you can with reading. So in my experience, I don’t think they’re comparable at all.
But I do have to acknowledge I’m not doing the two the same way – if I forced myself to just read straight, not look things up, maybe even try to do it a little quickly, maybe they’d feel closer. Shrug.
Grammar and more common words could make use of listening experience more; while rarer vocabularies need having “seen” that vocabulary before and Kanji knowledge may help. There are also some degree of overlap – some vocab may be acquired well either by listening or reading.
But I am not sure I did well even for the first step of listening, while probably after that, both skills converge. Even relatively rare vocabularies can be seen repeated in say a year, so not necessarily not seen before.
So I find listening harder for now, but others may find differently.
Materials are also of different kinds, so not directly comparable. I think audiobooks are made from reading materials, not listening first, so probably harder than usual listening materials.
Given the nature of Natively’s grading system, I don’t think it even has the capacity to make this error. You will never be asked to grade a book against a video. Not even an anime vs the manga of the same series. Everyone grades books against books, and videos against videos, and since there are god knows how many gradings on Natively, it balances out.
I can see evidence of it working right now: the level 23 anime I’m watching is slightly easier than the level 24/25 books I’ve read. The level 30 anime I’m watching is slightly harder than the level 30 book I’m reading, which is expected since I’m able to stop an look up words while reading.
I don’t think I completely understand, are you asking if, for example, level 23 videos are the same difficulty as level 27 readings? If so, I can confidently say that’s not the case.
No no, I mean that level 23 videos are same difficulty for average person as level 23 reading is for them, even if they are technically worse at listening.
Maybe it’s because I’ve never used Natively, but I can’t understand what this thread is specifically asking about, even after reading the edit and discussion.
And maybe it’s the discussion about the “average” person. Is this like the “average” family that doesn’t actually exist because 2.2 children is impossible or whatever? Like, the “average” person (who doesn’t actually exist because they are just the average of everyone) might be exactly the same distance apart in reading and listening at all stages, but the experience for any given real person should be dependent solely on their study history.
I think it’s also important to remember that both Wanikani and Natively audiences are heavily skewed towards strong readers, so any differences in difficulty levels you might observe don’t necessarily transfer to anything else.
This isn’t really about anything being inflated though, more about whether one can map between one system and the other. Here’s an analogy which hopefully makes it obvious. Your grades at school tend to be tightly correlated across all subjects. So how you do in science and how you do in English tend to be similar. Moreover, your grade in say German and your grade in English may be the same, but clearly (assuming you are in an English speaking country) your English is better. So if you told me this person gets a B in English, they are likely to get around a B in German, despite the obvious disparity in absolute ability in the larger context. This is because they aren’t actually measuring the proficiency at the same level. I am essentially asking the same question but swap grades and subjects with natively levels and books/videos.
As I understand it the two sets of natively gradings are independent (it never asks you to grade book against movie), but when the system was initially seeded with audiovisual items they were given initial levels manually at points that seemed “about right” given the preexisting book level distribution, in the judgement of the people making those initial seeding decisions. So the two systems have probably not drifted too far apart.
Looking at for instance Ranma, the manga is L24 and the TV series is L26, so at least some of the “listening is harder than reading” effect seems to be reflected in the gradings.
Well, sure, but one of the ideas behind Natively (and indeed any other rating system) is that yes, you are at a unique point in your learning journey on multiple axes and so is everyone who graded a book for difficulty by comparing it with other books, but also that you’re probably not that much of an outlier, and so how other people averaged together felt about the difficulty of a manga or a movie is a much better guide than no guide at all.
That’s certainly true for me, I can read level ~24 manga fairly effortlessly (I can usually follow along without lookups even if I don’t understand 100% of the vocab) but I’m entirely incapable of following an anime at the same level. I just tried with a random episode of Dragon Ball (level 24 on Natively) and I only understand a small portion of the dialogue. In one minute of listening the only sentence I understood in full without guesswork was 早く来てください…
That being said, from my personal experience with other languages, high reading proficiency usually means that you can progress much faster when you decide to focus on listening. I’m pretty sure that if I focused on listening exercises for a month or so I could improve my understanding dramatically and bring it much closer to my reading ability. All that passive vocabulary and grammar knowledge helps tremendously, you’re definitely not starting from scratch.
No. I can read a a high level but I can not listen at that level.
Listen does not equal reading because of Kanji
Reading does not equal listening because… example, I just recently was listening to my friend say 起きていない。Because I was still in bed when I answered her skype. But I could not for the life of me understand till my friend wrote it. Listening requires a lot of real world context. My brain has to make a lot of assumptions for me to hear quickly that are really hard to get if you don’t practice inside of a full Japanese life.
TLDR no, they are related but must both be practiced separately to actually improve. It’s kind of like english and science, being able to read Shakespeare does not equate to learning Chemistry.
If you’re good at reading already, then it’s easy to train your listening by watching stuff with japanese subtitles, so that even if you do not understand it you quickly connect it to that sound
This is true to an extent, but it’s also easy to over-rely on subtitles and end up with a gap between subtitled listening ability and non-subtitled listening ability.
Similar to how watching anime with EN subtitles has limited use for practising JP listening, or reading with furigana has limited use for practising kanji.
I would imagine the best way to improve listening when your reading is already good would be to find podcasts that have transcripts available, and listen to the podcast maybe writing down what you understood then read the transcript then listen again and see what you understood the second time, but do this with gaps between. Eg over a 3 day period with each step on one particular day.
