After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

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

Postby alaart » Mon Jun 08, 2020 9:57 am

Voytek wrote:
Saim wrote:You're also quite lucky that you're studying a language like Japanese which has a lot of native audiovisual media with accurate native subtitles


Could you kindly share with us some sources of this kind you're using, please? I base my input on reading and listening in Japanese only but audiovisual materials would be of some use and I'm sure you chose good quality ones. Thank you in advance! :)


Couple days ago I came across a Chrome plugin called Language Learning with Netflix , their websites lets you search for shows with audio and subtitle in a native language, also by country, and they have a similar tool for youtube where you can search for audio by language, and subtitle by language. Here is a screenshot I took last week.

I have not tried it much yet, but plan to do so. The big benefit I see now besides the search function: I can display Korean and Japanese right next to each other with the plugin. - that's helpful, much better than displaying English, where the word order is totally different.
The BIG downside for me: you can not click on the subtitle and copy the word easily for example to create flashcards. They have their build in flash card system, for a membership fee - but I'm not going to use it, so this is kind of a downer - still seems like a useful tool.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Jamiro » Mon Jun 08, 2020 10:50 am

Thank you, everybody! Really a lot of helpful tips and different approaches. I read everyone of it and made some notes. It goes to show there are many ways to learn a language and my conclusion I take from all your answers and from my experience is:

1) I will incorporate reading more. @Voytek: Thank you, I actually have bought the JA Audiobook long time ago, I will use this for a start
2) More vocab learning. Thanks @Saim and thank you @alaart for pointing out the fact that there are usually more ways of pronouncing a word in Japanese. Of course I know that but I never came to the conclusion that that also means 2-3x the amount of vocab learning :D It's a good point!
3) I will listen and watch more japanese media with subtitles and translation that I ENJOY!

(4) I haven't had a tandem partner for about half a year after mine left town - and no, he didn't leave because of my horrible Japanese, he assured me it was work-realted...hm... anyways, I think I will get back to oniline-tandem as soon as I gained enough confidence in 2-3 months.)

I found some other good ideas in your posts but for now I don't want to overdo it and will test them along the way.

alaart wrote:The BIG downside for me: you can not click on the subtitle and copy the word easily for example to create flashcards. They have their build in flash card system, for a membership fee - but I'm not going to use it, so this is kind of a downer - still seems like a useful tool.


Not sure if it helps but I am using a free firefox plugin called subadub, I saw they also have it for chrome. It adds an aditional subtitle layer on the netfilx player where you can easily copy the words from. Maybe you could use it in addition to your plugin?
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Flickserve » Mon Jun 08, 2020 4:14 pm

When I read your original post, I am not sure how your plan to solve things addresses the problem that you describe.

For example, how does reading more improve listening skills when you already know a word but don't understand it when it is spoken?
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Sayonaroo » Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:57 pm

Flickserve wrote:When I read your original post, I am not sure how your plan to solve things addresses the problem that you describe.

For example, how does reading more improve listening skills when you already know a word but don't understand it when it is spoken?


well by reading more the person will see the word being used over and over again in different contexts so they'll become more familiar with the word and increase their chances of understanding it when it is spoken. besides learning that specific word, the person will get a better handle on the grammar and whatnot. i'M TRying to do that for French right now. I'm going to go back and listen to the dubs of american tv shows after reading 10 books to see how much more I understand. It's obvious that just listening won't get be anywhere
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Flickserve » Tue Jun 09, 2020 1:55 am

Sayonaroo wrote:
Flickserve wrote:When I read your original post, I am not sure how your plan to solve things addresses the problem that you describe.

For example, how does reading more improve listening skills when you already know a word but don't understand it when it is spoken?


well by reading more the person will see the word being used over and over again in different contexts so they'll become more familiar with the word and increase their chances of understanding it when it is spoken. besides learning that specific word, the person will get a better handle on the grammar and whatnot. i'M TRying to do that for French right now. I'm going to go back and listen to the dubs of american tv shows after reading 10 books to see how much more I understand. It's obvious that just listening won't get be anywhere


Surely what he should he doing is listening to the same word in different contexts with other words that are known and being able to recall at speed what the word is. He doesn't do that by reading. He needs to practice recognition in listening and listening is being able to hear the sentence about once or twice (where all the words are known) at native speed and only after a very slight pause, be able to know the meaning.

Even though OP says he has mastered 1 000 words, how fast is his recall when hearing these words?

French has some similar words to other languages so you can probably pick up some clues. But from a European language to Japanese, these clues hardly exist.

The OP also writes in he has difficulty recognising a word when there are five or six other unknown words in the sentence. What's probably happening is that the input is simply too complicated to process quickly - the amount of mental effort is too large when there are many unknown words.

I am not saying that reading is not beneficial. Rather, it seems over emphasized as a solution. After all, it's usual that listening skills lag behind reading skills. Why not redress the balance by listening more with repetitive listening of the same sentence 50, 100 times (or whatever it takes). Then move on to the next one and so on. It's boring work but learning a language does have its tedious parts.
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Saim
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Saim » Tue Jun 09, 2020 12:11 pm

alaart wrote:I have not tried it much yet, but plan to do so. The big benefit I see now besides the search function: I can display Korean and Japanese right next to each other with the plugin. - that's helpful, much better than displaying English, where the word order is totally different.
The BIG downside for me: you can not click on the subtitle and copy the word easily for example to create flashcards. They have their build in flash card system, for a membership fee - but I'm not going to use it, so this is kind of a downer - still seems like a useful tool.


They do have a print function though, and its quite easy to copy-and-paste from the document it prints out. Although, yes, you do have to change windows...

Jamiro wrote:Thanks @Saim and thank you @alaart for pointing out the fact that there are usually more ways of pronouncing a word in Japanese. Of course I know that but I never came to the conclusion that that also means 2-3x the amount of vocab learning :D It's a good point!


Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but it's not that words are pronounced differently, but that there are more words for you to learn. 声(こꜜ​え)and 声(しょう)are not "the same word with different pronunciations", but different words with similar meanings.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby 白田龍 » Tue Jun 09, 2020 12:19 pm

Try going mass sub2SRS
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby munyag » Wed Jul 27, 2022 8:41 pm

Jamiro wrote:Thank you, everybody! Really a lot of helpful tips and different approaches. I read everyone of it and made some notes. It goes to show there are many ways to learn a language and my conclusion I take from all your answers and from my experience is:

1) I will incorporate reading more. @Voytek: Thank you, I actually have bought the JA Audiobook long time ago, I will use this for a start
2) More vocab learning. Thanks @Saim and thank you @alaart for pointing out the fact that there are usually more ways of pronouncing a word in Japanese. Of course I know that but I never came to the conclusion that that also means 2-3x the amount of vocab learning :D It's a good point!
3) I will listen and watch more japanese media with subtitles and translation that I ENJOY!

(4) I haven't had a tandem partner for about half a year after mine left town - and no, he didn't leave because of my horrible Japanese, he assured me it was work-realted...hm... anyways, I think I will get back to oniline-tandem as soon as I gained enough confidence in 2-3 months.)

I found some other good ideas in your posts but for now I don't want to overdo it and will test them along the way.

alaart wrote:The BIG downside for me: you can not click on the subtitle and copy the word easily for example to create flashcards. They have their build in flash card system, for a membership fee - but I'm not going to use it, so this is kind of a downer - still seems like a useful tool.


Not sure if it helps but I am using a free firefox plugin called subadub, I saw they also have it for chrome. It adds an aditional subtitle layer on the netfilx player where you can easily copy the words from. Maybe you could use it in addition to your plugin?


Hi Jamie I

Two years on how is your Japanese now?
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Herodotean
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Herodotean » Wed Jul 27, 2022 10:18 pm

Many of the people you're replying to haven't logged on to the forum in years; it's unlikely they'll see your questions.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Le Baron » Thu Jul 28, 2022 5:13 pm

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.
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