One of the most common challenges for students of Japanese is when they lift their heads out of classroom-oriented materials and begin to engage with real-life Japanese language, whether that be through recorded materials like television dramas or having actual conversations in the wild.
The shock of discovering that the perfectly enunciated, studio-recorded audio tracks that came with your textbook sound nothing like actual speech can be overwhelming, making you feel frustrated and maybe a little stupid. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.
So what’s a Japanese-speaker-in-training to do? There’s no easy answer, but there are some simple steps you can take to dramatically improve your listening skills in short order.
Understanding Why Understanding Is Difficult
One reason is that particularly in the beginning, it’s challenging for your brain to wrap itself around new sounds. As babies, we are capable of hearing any number of phonemes (perceptually distinct units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another), but usually by the time we’re 12 months old, we learn to filter out those that we don’t commonly hear. We literally learn to ignore non-native sounds.
Other reasons include that in real speech, people don’t follow perfect grammar rules (so don’t assume を is going to help you find the direct object); we elide words so that we can say them faster and easier (“I don’t know” becomes “idunno”), we use slang and contractions, and so on.
This is the real world and to be conversant in Japanese, or any language, we need to learn how to deal with it.
Understand Your Objectives
There are two primary reasons for deliberately practicing your listening skills:
- To improve your conversation and pure comprehension skills (casual listening);
- To grow your vocabulary (intensive listening).
While it’s possible to work on both simultaneously, my recommendation is to focus on only one at a time during your purposeful practice sessions.
Finding Appropriate Listening Materials
Let’s begin by considering the situations in which you expect to be using Japanese. What are your interests? What topics would you like to discuss? What do you want to be able to do? Start by making a list of ten or so domains or topical areas where you’d like to be conversant. This will not only help you focus your learning efforts, but from a memory perspective, since these are areas you actually care about, your brain will naturally pay more attention and retention will be improved.
Once you have that list, you can use it to guide your search for relevant materials as described below. The only caveat I’d add is that general conversation usually broadens out beyond your focused interests (we all don’t love the same things, right?), so you should also include at least some materials like news, current events podcasts, Japanese variety shows (which are pretty wacky and entertaining anyway) and so on to round out your learning. Don’t only specialize.
Comprehensible Input FTW
As I will repeat endlessly, the key to rapid progress is using Comprehensible Input that is just a bit above your current level, “n+1” as Prof. Krashen puts it. Ideally, if you can listen to something and understand maybe 60-90% of it, that’s probably a good resource with which to start. This will be a moving target as you increase your skills – what was “n+1” just a few months ago might actually be “n-3” today.
Start With Transcripts
If at all possible, try to find materials that include native language transcripts (or subtitles). Using transcripts is not cheating. It’s the simplest way to make the incomprehensible comprehensible, thus useful. Ideally you’ll be able to find source materials that include written transcripts, but even if you cannot, there are ways you can create your own.
I use both MacWhisper and Saanaru to create my own transcripts. This former merely creates a transcription, the latter can create transcriptions with interlinear translations included so you can read both Japanese and English at the same time. The transcriptions for both, while not perfect, are generally very high quality and when the inevitable mistakes appear, just treat them like a little puzzle to solve (perhaps with the help of a tutor).
Another option is hiring a native speaker from a site like Fivver.com or other freelancing platforms. I haven’t tried this but I know folks who use this technique successfully, but honestly, the automated, AI-driven platforms are so cheap and prevalent now, that’s where I’d start.
Resources For Listening Practice
If at all possible, try to find authentic material made for native speakers (the exception being if you are a complete beginner – you’ll need to acquire some familiarity with Japanese first. Crawl, walk, run).
Try some of the following:
- Podcasts on personally interesting topics, made for native speakers, are one of my favorites. If you enter your keywords in Japanese, most podcatchers will serve you up some selections. Also, I’ve had good luck using https://www.spreaker.com/ to search;
- Netflix or your streaming service of choice. Japanese television shows and movies invariably have English subs available (your native-language transcript!) and most have the option to turn on Japanese subtitles as well. Plus you can use tools like LanguageReactor to supercharge your learning (more on that site later);
- YouTube also works well with LanguageReactor and has a wealth of content targeted to native speakers;
- Do you like TED Talks? Many of the best of those have both English and Japanese subtitles available, created by native speakers;
- Record conversations (with permission, of course) with your tutor, language exchange partners, Meetup groups, and so on and create your own transcripts;
- Music can be good, but be careful as lyrics don’t always reflect normal speech cadence/pronunciation;
- News broadcasts are good for broadening your vocabulary, but they tend to use very formal speech and often use extremely specialized vocabulary. Choose your topics wisely, e.g. weekend goings-on in Osaka might be more useful than the latest macroeconomic policy coming out of the Diet.
Putting It All Together
Overall I find the following process productive:
- Read through the English transcript first, so you already understand the gist of what you’ll be hearing;
- Listen to the audio while reading along in English multiple times;
- Listen to the audio while reading along in Japanese multiple times;
- Finally, listen to just the Japanese audio.
- Along the way, look for interesting vocabulary, expressions, phrases, collocations and highlight them. I would suggest limiting these to no more than 20-25 items for every ten minutes of audio so as not to overload yourself;
- Write those highlighted passages down in a dedicated notebook (physical or electronic, just use the same every time), Japanese on the left-hand page and English on the right-hand page. Alternatively, you could put them into an SRS like Anki if that’s your preference. This subset of the total content will be the portion you want to focus on during later reviews and ultimately start working into your output activities.
- Periodically go back and re-listen to resources that you’ve already processed in this way (spaced repetition!) and if there are additional words/phrases, highlight them and copy to your notebook.
I tweak the process slightly depending on what my objective is, as noted below.
Intensive Listening For Vocabulary Building
In this case, I am very deliberate about choosing what I listen to and extra-diligent about noting down the words, phrases and expressions I want to be able to work into my own output. I will often start by reading the Japanese and English transcripts side-by-side and highlighting in advance some of the content I’m really interested in learning.
Extensive Listening For Comprehension
In this case, I tend to start by listening once or twice without “pre-reading” or using any transcripts (in a sense, testing myself to see how much I already understand). I will then follow up as above to fill in the gaps in my understanding, and usually include some shadowing practice as well. Also, if you’re applying this to video sources like movies or anime, take advantage of the visual context to help you deduce the meaning of parts you don’t understand!
Action Steps
- Make sure your practice routine includes both ‘listening comprehension’ and ‘vocab building’;
- Find interesting, Comprehensible Input, preferably with transcripts/subtitles (create your own scripts if needed);
- Use the appropriate strategy above based on your objective, comprehension or vocab building.