After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

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lingohot
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby lingohot » Thu Jul 28, 2022 5:45 pm

Le Baron wrote:
STT44 wrote:Most people don't have a listening problem. They have a reading problem. Read a massive amount for a year and I can guarantee you'll understand everything you hear.

Clearly you won't. This is assuming there is no disconnect between listening and reading. There are many people who can read very well, yet have poor listening skills. You have to do both and they still don't just match perfectly.


I would even go so far and say that listening is the hardest skill (or maybe the second hardest after speaking). Its difficulty is often underestimated. It takes a long time and lots of listening practice to develop a very good listening comprehension.
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CDR
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby CDR » Sun Jul 31, 2022 3:01 am

When I was a beginner, I never understood advice like "you're probably trying too hard" when it came to listening. I could not comprehend what it means to "try less hard" when listening to a foreign language.

Now that I can listen to and understand a lot of Portuguese, this is what I would try to explain to my past beginner self:

Listening got easier because of automaticity, not because I no longer "try hard". After drilling audio over and over again, or hearing the same word over and over in a TV show, my brain can now understand that word in many contexts, without the need for me to think about it.

Based on this experience, I feel that advice I received from people as a beginner were misattributing the process of building automaticity to a particular listening technique. As people advance in their listening skills, they need to think less and less about what they are hearing because it is becoming automatic. However, I am going to foolishly speculate that some people interpret this as if they were trying too hard to understand in the beginning, and they are only making progress now because they are focusing on "the flow" or "the sentence", or something poetic like "I now let the sounds wash over my mind."

It has been my experience that the only reason why I can focus on 'the flow' or 'the sentence' is because I already, without thought, can understand all (or a vast majority) of the words in the spoken sentence. This is the case in Portuguese.

My Japanese, on the other hand, is still weak. It is not possible for me to focus on sentences/flow/let the words wash over me because I do not have the automaticity built up in listening. I can focus on these kinds of things only if the sentence spoken is basic, with words that are well practised (both the pronunciation of the word, and the meaning). I have about the same number of known words that the op had in Japanese when they posted (they said they knew around 1,000 words).

I can fool myself that my theory is true with my current Japanese experience. Because I know so few words, new words stand out. A few weeks ago, I first studied "誕生日" (birthday). It was only 1 week later did I start hearing it in a podcast I had already listened to many times. Once I heard it there a few times there, I started hearing it more and more elsewhere. Now, a lot of the time, I understand the spoken word without having to think about it. The point of this is not to talk about how the mind overfocuses on new information, but to emphasize the importance of recall, which builds towards automatic knowledge.

All of that to say, I agree with Le Baron and lingohot. The real way to make gains in listening, is to listen.

Back to my terrible opinions: when you are a beginner it doesn't need to be native level material, and I don't think it needs to be natural either. You can drill, you can use audio flashcards, you can use a transcript along with audio. The list goes on.
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