One other thing cat didn’t mention: the audiobooks you buy from audiobook.jp are DRM-free, while those from any Audible store are not.
I mentioned in a previous post I wasn’t going to participate in the challenge this month, but I think I’ve changed my mind. The only goal I’m going to set is to listen to the second JP Harry Potter audiobook. It’s just under 15 hours long, so I should be able to take things a bit easier as I work my way through it. Since I’m still watching TV with @cat and @shablul and others, however, I’ll be noting it down here so I look like I’m making an effort, haha.
Day 2: Managed to re-listen to several of the videos this morning from yesterday’s playlist clocking in at 1 hour and 22 minutes.
Completed 13 episodes of Japanese with Shun this afternoon. 1 hour and 53 minutes.
Also listened to ふしぎ駄菓子・屋銭天堂 book 1 prologue/ chapter 1 (29.37) and chapter 2 (23.22) after dinner with a break between them.
Total for today: 4 hours and 7 minutes
Random thoughts:
I feel like a lot of this is still not easy enough for my level, possibly at +5 or above and although I could read it fine, I’m not picking it up listening in the same way but I don’t know how to make that more efficient. It’s something I do tend to struggle with and has been an ongoing struggle since day one.
A lot of the stuff I listen to has either felt super easy where I know it all, or felt like I know nothing even though I know all the words that’s being spoken. Getting time in for listening is all great, but if it’s not actually being absorbed then it’s not going to have as much of an impact as I want it to and in the long run will just make things more difficult as well as pushing me towards burn out, I feel. I do need to think more on this but since the days off will be my most interactive days with listening, I’m hoping not to burn out even though I’m trying to listen actively for a long time.
I think the most important thing for listening is to develop an expectation of what words or grammar construct are to come next, based on what came before in the sentence. You could describe this as getting a feeling for the language. Then listening will be reduced to verifying that expectation instead of getting the meaning from scratch.
Also to develop the ability to just ignore things in case of information overflow, without regret and long thinking about what it was.
Well the only thing that helps here is experience, which comes with time.
Yeah, totally understandable. I’ve been doing some listening exercises since I posted and I think my issue isn’t just that I’m not understanding but more I’m glossing over it unless I’m specifically asked to pick out info. Not quite sure how I get around that unless I go back to listening to the short stories and doing the comprehension questions afterwards, that could help a little at least.
You could self-quiz by checking in with yourself while listening and asking “what are they talking about right now?” and putting it into your own mental words in English. I’ve done that type of thing and it’s a great mental exercise to stay on track and train the muscle that listens for the big picture (this is called top down processing) versus the details (bottom up processing). Listening action has many little moving parts, so don’t get disheartened or pressure yourself to get them all under control or you really could burn out! Maybe identify little micro areas to improve such as listening for the main ideas of a hard text, really paying attention to how a specific vowel sounds, or trying to repeat things out loud?
I think other people have given better answers than this, but I will just chime in to say that I find listening a lot easier to do when there’s a visual component. Part of that is I have ADHD and will just start zoning out if I’m not stimulated enough (and not understanding everything is a quick road to that). But I think another part of it is that there’s also some visual cues that can make things easier to understand.
Anime is my default go-to, but I think there’s a lot of benefits to watching live action content to see what people are doing with their mouths when they are talking. This is most beneficial for me when it’s a vlog or other direct to camera type video, but even scripted TV helps.
I would also suggest getting ahead of even potential burnout if you suspect that you might be heading down that path. For me that looks like finding something that I want to do and it has the fun added bonus that it happens to be Japanese. But maybe you need to cut back on your study hours or maybe even take a short (or long) break. Digging out of burnout will take orders of magnitude longer than a break (or even just a less expeditious path) will. Trust me.
Could be tired. Although when trying to listen it’s seems like it’s not making sense in Japanese and I’m not translating in my head to English, I can answer questions on it and explain the gist of what’s going on. So I may be passive listening kind of how I do extensive reading. I also haven’t slept well last few days due to allergies so that could be having an effect on my understanding as well as the extra listening focus could be tiring me out more.
Definitely don’t want to burn out again (that was due to life stuff previously but had a massive impact on my Japanese studying and is partly why I haven’t picked up textbooks again since very early this year). I never thought about trying to pick out just the topic and some info on that or trying to pick out little parts instead of just listening and trying to understand as much as possible. I think I’ve been trying to approach it as I do listening in English and even then, I think I listen to more Japanese in one sitting than I can stand in English
I’ve been trying to do this which is why I went back to stuff I’ve listened to before as it has subtitles for when I get stuck and also tried again with ふしぎ駄菓子屋・銭天堂 staring from book one again as I know the rough story by now and the layout of each but even that I didn’t seem to be picking things out as I was reading while listening, just knew where I was because I know the story.
That could be it. It is kind of what happened when I went back to listening to the textbook stuff after completing it and suddenly I understood most if not all of what was said on the first listen.
This could also be a big part of my issue with it. I am autistic and possibly also have ADD (inattentive form) and when there is no visual action (not reading though) I get bored and zone out unless I force myself to focus which can quickly lead to burn out or exhaustion to the point I actually fall asleep while listening
Yeah, it took me 3 months off work from February and then another month of trying to build hours back up to even get back to a point where I could function on a day to day and even now normal life stuff can still be difficult, though Japanese, as much as it can be disheartening at times, is the one thing that has helped to pull me back and kept me going.
Maybe if I’m doing longer stints of listening and I’m finding it difficult, I should just go with the flow, let myself zone out when I do and just try to pick up what I can even if that means passively listening in part and have shorter stints of focused listening.
today i very luckily came across exactly what i was looking for – spongebob dubbed in korean. from a brief look at the nickolodean korea channel, it seems like most of it just highlights, but that’ll do. unfortunately, i reaaaaally don’t like how korean spongebob sounds, so i had a scrunched up face during a good 50% of my watching. that’s not the spongebob i know! some of the characters are especially hard to understand (ex. the officers) because of the exaggerated speaking or low pitches, so that’ll take some time to get used to. i think spongebob may be the key to me completing this challenge. i watched this highlight video all at once and enjoyed it overall.
That would mess me up in my L1, nevermind Japanese!
When I was first trying to improve my listening comprehension, I was listening to ぼっち・ざ・らじお episodes, which are probably about an hr long. I’d usually do it on walks and grocery store trips - so sometimes I’d be very focused, and other times in/out. I’m sure I missed plenty of stuff, but I got plenty of things out of it.
That was back when I was in “I can pick out some words, can’t get others, and have a vague idea of what’s going on” stage. The more I listened to those, slowly the more I understood. Now I could probably make sense of a lot of them, but it’s been like a year and a half?
I’m not really taking part in the challenge, but yesterday I binge listened to hour and a half drama CD 10 from 本好き.
It was nice, although I have to admit it made me want to see more of them even more.
There’s a drama CD for the spinoff series as well, but I guess it will take 6 months to get on Audible like the others…
I’m so jealous! I have spent some time before looking for the Japanese dub but could never find it anywhere online. You have inspired me to continue my search.
I did 1.5 hours today listening to an audiobook about Japanese “pop culture” throughout the ages. The chapter I listened to today was about ukiyo-e. One thing I found funny was that apparently it was very trendy for a while in the Edo period to carry around a portable calendar with you with ukiyo-e prints in them. One artist started making prints with (7)! colors and it was apparently the coolest thing ever. I just keep imaging some Edo man whipping out his portable calendar with colorful prints to show off and feeling very イケてる.
Maybe identify little micro areas to improve such as listening for the main ideas of a hard text, really paying attention to how a specific vowel sounds, or trying to repeat things out loud?
