What are you listening to today?

[Legato]

Since there’s more to Japanese than just reading or watching… now here’s a “listening” thread too! Let me shamelessly copy the intro from elsewhere:

I hope you all are having a great time listening. What are you listening to today?

[Legato]

I’m on a quest to get some Japanese subtitle-less audio input every day this year so I can finally improve my listening comprehension after shamefully neglecting it for years. My main problem is finding at least semi-interesting content on my level. Podcasts where people are talking about some random topic usually aren’t doing it for me, and anime and audio books are usually too hard. And unlike reading digitally, vocab is extremely annoying to look up while listening, what’s with having to pause and rewind all the time and having to manually type things into Jisho ( ) instead of just hovering over words.

So - I’m glad to have discovered the (now defunct, but luckily archived) “JLPT Stories” podcasts, and the last few days I’ve been listening to it, starting with the N5 section: https://web.archive.org/web/20210419025715/https://jlptstories.com/tag/n5/. There’s even a transcript that I can look at after trying my best without it first!

It made me realize that my problem is not just missing vocabulary; even in this relatively easy section where I know almost every word there are lots of parts where I have to stop and repeat just because it’s too fast for me and because I’m not picking up words immediately from the sound.

And yes, I’m reading (looking up every second word but somehow getting through) an L30 book, and yet my listening comprehension partly struggles with N5 content. Don’t be like me, kids! Don’t neglect your listening!

[暁のルナ]

Have you considered Satori Reader? Everything on there has audio, plus you can follow along with our check the text & easily look stuff up. You could do like: listen without text, then listen with text & look up words, then listen without text again

Otherwise if there’s anime you’ve already watched one or more times, using the audio from the episodes as listening practice might work, since you probably still have some memory of the dialogue or scenes

[eefara]

@Legato

And yes, I’m reading (looking up every second word but somehow getting through) an L30 book, and yet my listening comprehension partly struggles with N5 content. Don’t be like me, kids! Don’t neglect your listening!

I can vouch for this as well. Being able to read does not carry over to listening as much as you’d hope. :\

I’m on phone at the moment and don’t feel like typing up an essay of what’s worked for me so far, so once I’m at a computer hopefully I’ll remember and come back and type it up. Plus talk about what I’m listening to in general.

[Snappie]

@Legato

And yes, I’m reading (looking up every second word but somehow getting through) an L30 book, and yet my listening comprehension partly struggles with N5 content. Don’t be like me, kids! Don’t neglect your listening!

*starts sweating profusely*

I’m at exactly the same place. I figure I’ll try it when my vocabulary and grammar is a lot better. I really hated the listening part of learning Japanese when I did practice it in the past.

@eefara

I can vouch for this as well. Being able to read does not carry over to listening as much as you’d hope. :\

hmm.. I kinda assumed it does help a lot. Still think it does help to a some degree, being able to parse a sentence and/or predict the latter half of it should speed up the progress quite a bit. Having a larger pool of vocab helps too. Of course it still only gets you so far. None of these things give you a head start but it should speed the process up at least.

I still really dread starting listening again, I’ve been neglecting it for a year now in favor of reading! And I’m not even close to where I want to be with reading.

@Legato

Podcasts where people are talking about some random topic usually aren’t doing it for me,

Hmm. Yea that leaves you with slim pickings. I used to listen to a podcast from Nihongo Con Teppei when I still practiced listening. I think he has over a 1000 episodes spread over a couple of playlists on Spotify (assuming he’s still on there, haven’t checked in a year). You could check through the titles of the episodes and pick a couple that seem interesting to you and only listen to those. I know this isn’t a great solution, but again, you have slim pickings here.

Something else that kinda worked for me was watching anime I liked with Migaku. I’d turn off the subtitles, try and listen, then I’d rewind to the start of sentence if I didn’t get it. I’d then show subtitles if I needed it, and move on. Then the next day I would watch the same episode again but without pausing. This was exhausting but quite effective. I’m sure you can achieve the same with mpv player if you’re a bit tech savy. (Migaku is quite expensive)

The beginner phase is going to suck no matter how you do it just like it probably was with reading

[Legato]

@暁のルナ

Have you considered Satori Reader?

That is actually a fantastic idea, thanks! I last tried doing the “Listen completely first, then read” thing… 4 years ago or so and really wasn’t up to it at the time. Right now it might be perfect. I’m gonna try that once I’m done with the JLPT Stories N5 storyline.

@暁のルナ

Otherwise if there’s anime you’ve already watched one or more times, using the audio from the episodes as listening practice might work, since you probably still have some memory of the dialogue or scenes

Maybe I’ll try that at some point, but considering how averse I’m to rewatching things… not sure it’ll work.

@eefara

I’m on phone at the moment and don’t feel like typing up an essay of what’s worked for me so far, so once I’m at a computer hopefully I’ll remember and come back and type it up. Plus talk about what I’m listening to in general.

Looking forward to both!

@Snappie

Hmm. Yea that leaves you with slim pickings. I used to listen to a podcast from Nihongo Con Teppei when I still practiced listening. I think he has over a 1000 episodes spread over a couple of playlists on Spotify (assuming he’s still on there, haven’t checked in a year). You could check through the titles of the episodes and pick a couple that seem interesting to you and only listen to those. I know this isn’t a great solution, but again, you have slim pickings here.

Yeah, Nihongo Con Teppei was… fine, I guess. Maybe I’ll try him again. Thanks!

@Snappie

Something else that kinda worked for me was watching anime I liked with Migaku. I’d turn off the subtitles, try and listen, then I’d rewind to the start of sentence if I didn’t get it. I’d then show subtitles if I needed it, and move on. Then the next day I would watch the same episode again but without pausing. This was exhausting but quite effective. I’m sure you can achieve the same with mpv player if you’re a bit tech savy. (Migaku is quite expensive)

Yeah, I’ve tried something similar with https://animebook.github.io (needs a video file with subtitles) and with the Language Reactor Chrome Extension (needs a Netflix series with Japanese audio and subs). The hard part for me is getting appropriate content at my level for either

[暁のルナ]

@Legato

@暁のルナ

Otherwise if there’s anime you’ve already watched one or more times, using the audio from the episodes as listening practice might work, since you probably still have some memory of the dialogue or scenes

Maybe I’ll try that at some point, but considering how averse I’m to rewatching things… not sure it’ll work

I only do it with stuff I really like and mostly in the background. It’s a lot easier/less inertia than doing an actual rewatch, and since I’ve seen it already, I don’t really care if I just pause and switch to something else. No worries if it doesn’t work for you though.

[Snappie]

Maybe this is useful to you

Your Name Audiobook (JLPT N4/N5) | Learn Easy Japanese with Stories

It’s 君の名は as an audiobook, made for n4/n5 students

[Legato]

@Legato

@暁のルナ

Have you considered Satori Reader?

That is actually a fantastic idea, thanks! I last tried doing the “Listen completely first, then read” thing… 4 years ago or so and really wasn’t up to it at the time. Right now it might be perfect. I’m gonna try that once I’m done with the JLPT Stories N5 storyline.

And now I’ve been doing that for the last few days, and it’s been great.

I’m listening to Kiki-Mimi Radio (“harder” with sfx), going twice through each episode:

• The first time without stopping, rewinding or looking anything up - to get me an overview of the episode, to see what I can pick up without help, and also in the hopes that this will improve my ability to pick up lots of sentences without my brain freezing while focussing on a single thing I didn’t understand several seconds ago.
• And then again with repetitions when I don’t get something and lookups if I still cannot understand a word after multiple listening tries.

And then I top it off by going through the solidly underlined words to get their special explanations, which have been pretty interesting so far.

Thanks again for the suggestion, @暁のルナ!

[暁のルナ]

So glad it’s working out for you! I enjoyed that story as well