What do you guys use to practice listening?

Japanese Language Listening
#16

For listening, I recommend pure listening - so no video, no pictures, just sound.

There’s a podcast I quite enjoy called Hiiki Biiki. It’s just a guy and a girl discussing things they like: Nintendo, Star Wars, McDonald’s, Tokyo Disneyland. Really good practice and since there’s no plot or real direction to the conversation it doesn’t matter if you miss huge bits, they’ll eventually start talking about something you can pick up on.

My biggest general advice for listening practice is to make sure you relisten. Preferably several times. I’m often amazed how much things can get transformed from indecipherable gibberish to fairly comprehensible Japanese on a second listen.

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#17

I have the original show.

I watched the dub (based on the American version, it should be identical) like 15 years ago, but there are clearly some visual differences, too. For example the American version contained almost no references to Japan - I think I didn’t even know back then that it is a Japanese cartoon. In the original version though, there are Japanese writings there and there, and some small details, and some scenes which look distinctly Japanese.

Not sure why it was edited that heavily to make it as non-Japanese as possible, it is not 1941.

#18

Isn’t there a whole episode of Pokemon that didn’t make it for being too “Japanese”? I think it involves Misty entering a swimsuit competition and getting perved on by an old man.

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#19

I’ve been listening to Bilingual News this afternoon and it’s really great! American guy and Japanese girl first read then discuss recent news stories in English and Japanese. Honestly, the guy is a bit of a wing nut (kind of like JPod Peter with the leash off) but his wild ‘theories’ make for good entertainment.

I’ve been using it like this: first listen to Eng and Jp news stories (only about one minute long each) then skip back (they have a handy 30 sec rewind button) to listen to the Jp version multiple times, maybe check some of the vocab, and try to understand as much as possible. After that just casually listen to their discussion without stressing too much about missing some parts. Repeat with the next story (they have about 5 - 8 different stories over an hour plus podcast).

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#20

I like animelon - you can watch certain anime’s, and you can toggle different subtitles, including english, japanese, hiragana only, and romanji only. It shows both the subtitles and also the transcript on the side, and you can rewind by line, so it’s easy to go back and re-listen/read the previous sentence.

I usually watch with Japanese subtitles, then re-watch with English if I had a hard time, and then go back to Japanese subtitles only. My goal is to eventually turn off the subtitles all together, but I’m not that proficient at it yet (and haven’t been able to devote a large amount of time to it)…

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#21

uhh… minecraft… le… t’s plays… please dont tell anyone… but i actually kinda like this…

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#22

Thanks for the Udemy rec. They’re actually having a sale right now, so picked up N5 and N4 courses to give it go.

#23

Do they have Japanese let’s plays? Or do you watch English ones with Japanese subtitles?

#24

Um… yes… Japanese people play video games and talk and upload those videos to streaming sites. Did that seem like it would be unlikely to you?

#25

I didn’t mean to sound like I was insulting them by saying they never did let’s plays or anything. I was more saying that it never even crossed my mind. And when I’ve searched for Minecraft let’s plays they’ve never come up in the results for me, so again, it was something that never came to mind. I’m sorry if that came out wrong, but I’m generally curious at to what recommendations there are.

#26

Did you try searching for マインクラフト? Seems like there’s a lot from a quick glance.

#27

It’s called 実況プレイ（じっきょうプレイ） in Japanese if you want to search for them yourself. I’ve been using it pretty much from the start, off and on, to practice listening in an enjoyable way, since (depending on the game) it’s likely to be entertaining regardless of how much or little I can understand. In the beginning I would only understand stray words here and there, now I can at least mostly get the gist of what’s being talked about. It’s pretty nice how each time I watch I pick up something new :slight_smile:

I also wrote a wk-alike webapp in php to practice only the listening part of the core6k vocab and context sentences.

#28

BlockquoteIt’s called 実況プレイ（じっきょうプレイ） in Japanese if you want to search for them yourself. I’ve been using it pretty much from the start, off and on, to practice listening in an enjoyable way, since (depending on the game) it’s likely to be entertaining regardless of how much or little I can understand. In the beginning I would only understand stray words here and there, now I can at least mostly get the gist of what’s being talked about. It’s pretty nice how each time I watch I pick up something new :slight_smile:

Thank you! I’ll look some of them up now! Do you watch with or without subtitles? I think I need subtitles to start to learn the minecraft words in Japanese. I’m excited, though. Thank you for sharing! :smiley:

#29

It’s very uncommon for them to have subtitles (as in, I’ve only ever seen two that had them). They’re made with the assumption that the people watching will be Japanese after all :slight_smile:

However, when I started, I was excited to just understand one or two words per video, and just built from there :slight_smile:

#30

I highly recommend checking out Benjiro on YouTube. He’s a teacher on iTalki, but he actually has a series where he essentially purchases sessions with other iTalki teachers and they have a conversation for an hour using simple Japanese. There’s around 20 hours of listening content on his channel and it’s honestly the most approachable long form listening practice I’ve come across as a beginner myself.

I would also recommend checking out “NHK For School.” It’s meant for Japanese children, but it’s a great resource. It has a whole lot of videos on various topics separated by grade level.

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#31

This may seem like an odd recommendation, but for beginners I actually recommend watching popular Japanese TV dramas with subtitles. This is based purely on my own personal experience over the years. You may not understand many of the spoken words at all, but the episodes tend to be very entertaining (which is important) and you subtly learn the rhythms, patterns, and manner of speech for Japanese people, which is actually quite helpful beyond just understanding vocabulary.

This created a huge turning point for my ability to understand Japanese speech. After watching these (very entertaining) shows for a while, my ability to parse Japanese speech increased dramatically. To give an example, native Japanese speech used to be an incoherent jumble of sounds in spite of my studies. After spending time watching these shows, I suddenly started being able to understand the structure of spoken sentences, which means I could start picking out words and phrases, even if I didn’t understand what they actually meant.

I haven’t really tried watching anime so much. We do have some children’s anime movies, but I personally recommend drama series over anime because there is something about observing (semi-)real human interaction that aids in the learning process. Perhaps it’s some innate thing. For what it’s worth (and I may be dating myself), two of my favorite series were Hana Yori Dango and Gokusen. You should be able to find these and other good ones on YouTube these days.

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#32

Do you recommend English or Japanese subtitles? Or does that depend on your level?

#33

English subtitles. That way you can understand and follow along with the story. It may also help confirm whether you’re correctly understanding certain words that you hear.

#34

Never heard of that Benjiro thing. It’s good. Thanks for the recommendation!

#35

You may want to check out Supernative and FluentU.