After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

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

Postby golyplot » Sat Jun 06, 2020 2:19 pm

Jamiro wrote:But whenever I go into practicing just speaking and listening without analyzing anything it's just as I said. Nothing sticks. Only after I learned about the conversation things get clearer and stick (at least a little longer). Sometimes I feel like I am missing the basis and have to get this fixed first so I have a better understanding of the spoken language.


I think your problem might be that you are trying too hard, as weird as that sounds. In my experience, listening comprehension is a mostly unconscious process. In fact, I've found that trying to consciously focus on what is being said actually impedes understanding! Just relax and don't worry about it. Even if it doesn't feel like you're actually making any progress, your brain is soaking it up subconsciously.

A little over a month ago, I started listening to the podcast Nihongo con Teppei (for beginners) in the background whenever I'm eating, cooking, doing household tasks, etc. and I think it's been pretty helpful. Even over the course of just a few weeks, I got noticeably better at understanding the episodes.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Dragon27 » Sat Jun 06, 2020 3:15 pm

Jamiro wrote:But whenever I go into practicing just speaking and listening without analyzing anything it's just as I said. Nothing sticks. Only after I learned about the conversation things get clearer and stick (at least a little longer). Sometimes I feel like I am missing the basis and have to get this fixed first so I have a better understanding of the spoken language.

But what is this fix? Another set of essential grammatical instructions, basic phrases, whatever? After you get that "fixed" and find out that you're still not able to immediately understand the spoken language, you will come to the conclusion that you still need to get something fixed. But no amount of fixes will be able to replace the necessary work that you need to do to develop the actual skill: listening exposure. Grammar and all that can be very helpful, for sure, I study grammar (to some extent) and phonology of the language in advance (and continue studying afterwards, whenever I feel the need). But all that are just tools to acquire the language more efficiently, they don't replace the actual process of language acquisition.
Real-life spoken language will always be difficult even with all the preparation in the world, you should expect that.

Hey, have you heard of Matt vs. Japan? He has a knack at explaining the theory behind language acquisition and he has a very good level of Japanese.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Voytek » Sun Jun 07, 2020 5:24 am

It seems to me you need to listen to Japanese reading the script at the same time and do it for some time (till you overcome your issue?). You could also slow down the audio. This tool might be the missing link in your learning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44vJpSitTL0&t

Or you could try youtube and Yomichan:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/yomichan/ogmnaimimemjmbakcfefmnahgdfhfami

Just watch videos with displayed subtitles and change the speed.

Or Voracious is a good tool for improving listening skills:
https://voracious.app/
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Flickserve » Sun Jun 07, 2020 12:25 pm

You clearly can learn another language because you have listed German and English as your languages.

I sense you are frustrated with understanding Japanese and not able to recognise words in other contexts? Is that right?

You didn't mention how much time you use trying to converse in Japanese. Is it only once a week? Is it twice a week?


Variation in input might be the issue. You can understand the sentence from one speaker but not another. Or you don't understand when it's a slightly different speed or perhaps one different word in the sentence.

You might want to take a limited number of sentences around a theme with overlapping vocabulary,these you have studied to your satisfaction - then give them to native speakers who say the sentence and you try to translate face to face. Of course, that means spending some money either in person or on line. One thing I would strongly suggest is to record their voice. If there is a sentence where you know the vocabulary but didn't understand the spoken sentence, then you know you have to practice repetitive listening. If it's a vocabulary problem, then it's going back and learning the vocabulary.

The other technique that would help is to transcribe sentences - it's painful and difficult. 5 minutes of dialogue might take a few days to transcribe. In essence, what is happening is you are repeating listening to a sentence a hundred times or more actively. If you have that same sentence from two or three native speaker sources, you will probably find some sort of semi automatic recall starting to occur when it is spoken to you at random.

It's the same with me with input. Presently, I have about 600 sentences of really native speech in Chinese. I put them in an anki deck and each card will repeat the audio somewhere around 15 times. I am trying to translate them into English. I am still adding sentences to the deck as it comes from a TV show for learners. Later, I will also try to do an English to Chinese translation. This would really make me familiar translating both ways.

When I put the sentences into anki, I have already heard the sentences many times over - I found some improvement in basic listening after two months of making Notes daily (processing about 30 different sentences a day).

One of the ways I want to further develop it is meetup with a language partner, they see the anki sentences, say the Chinese and then I have to repeat and translate into English.

Basically, the method is drilling a core set of sentences and phrases to form an internal library to have access to very quickly.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Saim » Sun Jun 07, 2020 6:34 pm

Jamiro wrote:@Saim: According to my japanese-pod101 vocab-list I have mastered around 2000 japanese words :D (listening and speaking) But I would say realistically maybe it's 1.000?


I think you need more words. I didn't understand much of anything in Urdu when I knew only around 1000/2000 words, and trying to engage with any media in the language was a chore. That's just the brutal reality if you're studying a language with a completely different lexical stock from the other languages you know.

I think the amount you've acquired so far is really brilliant, most speakers of European languages studying languages like Japanese probably give up way before that point. It's a really great start, now you can go deeper into native media and start picking up more and more words, which will be less and less common. But you still have to keep going to really get anywhere, if you'll pardon the redundant phrasing.

That isn't to say that you should only do explicit vocabulary memorisation. As far as I can tell almost everyone in our sphere that has succeeded at becoming proficient in very "different" languages has combined some sort of explicit vocabulary memorisation with lots of input. I'm not much of an expert on Sinospheric languages but my sense is that the best way to go about it is to engage with enough native input as you can reasonably stomach without burning out, and try and do some sort of explicit vocabulary training (preferably drawn from what you saw in native input) every day.

But from your post I think you would recommend to also put more time into reading/writing?


Not writing, I don't think that matters much. It might have some benefits when it comes to noticing gaps in your language knowledge but I think the amount of energy you need to put into it generally outweighs those benefits, and before you get to around B2~ the gaps are pretty much everywhere so it can be kind of demotivating to focus too much on them.

Reading, absolutely. If you completely avoid reading you're limiting the amount of input you can realistically expose yourself to. It's theoretically possible to learn without reading at all but I think in practice it will be quite difficult without spending a massive amount of time with tutors. Written input is also much easier to "make comprehensible" (looking up words, copying them to flaschards, etc.) than spoken input in intensive activities.

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, so that can be a good way to break into reading more "serious" texts. That's what I've been doing with Mandarin (and more recently Japanese) so far and it's working quite well.

Pretty much every proficient foreign speaker of Mandarin or Japanese I've ever heard the opinion of recommends not neglecting reading and getting exposed to characters. I'm only an advanced beginner in Mandarin and a dabbler in Japanese and yet I feel like learning characters and trying to read even a small amount of text every once and a while has greatly aided in my learning process.

My experience with Urdu also confirms this: for a while I had kind of an attitude against very Arabised/Persianised Urdu, thinking that it was pointless to learn quite literary words. Eventually I realised that a lot of the words I thought were literary were more widely used than I thought, and I only really started getting OK at speaking once I started using monolingual Urdu-Urdu dictionaries and reading more challenging texts. That isn't to say that I used all these uncommon words in actual conversations, but it became much easier to spend more time in the language once I had wide enough passive vocabulary to enjoy reading.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby tungemål » Sun Jun 07, 2020 9:50 pm

One would think japanese listening should be easy (simple pronunciation), but for me, too, listening comprehension is really hard. I haven't had a breakthrough yet. I wonder if a solution could be to learn to recognise larger chunks than single words.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby alaart » Mon Jun 08, 2020 12:23 am

Jamiro wrote:@Saim: According to my japanese-pod101 vocab-list I have mastered around 2000 japanese words :D (listening and speaking) But I would say realistically maybe it's 1.000? And it's again depending on the context if I recognize the word.


As for how many words you need, I agree with Saim - you probably need more for non European languages. I just recently (since around January) could start to watch Netflix on a more comfortable level - (I could watch it extremely slowly a year before). Anki claims I know around 7000 words.

I would say that the comprehension is "as good" as with Portuguese, where I maybe know around 2000 words. :lol:

So in Japanese you need more Vocabulary. Why?
-One factor is that there are always 2 roots, a Chinese one, and a Japanese one. So there are actually 2 words for everything - and sometimes more. In European languages like English and German, it is actually similar - we have a Latin based root and a German based root, so a lot of words are doubled.
-It doesn't stop there: There might be actually 2 words in Chinese already, because vocabulary is made from combining characters - and maybe more than one combination makes sense. Let's take the word simple / easy. In Chinese (traditional for better Character comparison) we have: 簡單, 單純, 簡易 (jiǎndān, dānchún, jiǎnyì) - so we have AB, BC, AD - combination. in Japanese those translate to: 簡単, 単純 (かんたん kantan, たんじゅん tanjun, and there seems to be 簡易 (たんい , tani) as well - but I never used it before. But we also have Japanese based words: 易しい (やさしい、yasashii) and of course シンプル (sinpuru) - so even more words with the same meaning.
-Than of course you have kunyomi and onyomi, so 2 pronounciations for every character, that can give us the words 世 (よ yo) and 世界 (せかい sekai) - both meaning "world" for example.


Now that I wrote this, I actually remember that I had the same feeling after 2000 words too. And felt like "man why can I not watch anything", but it is just how it is. Japanese is heavy on the vocabulary, and you need to learn a lot of words. So a good advice would probably be to focus on that. What you can do is have conversations. In Chinese right now I should know maybe around 4000 words (according to Anki). If I would watch TV now, I would not understand anything at all. But I can converse, so for daily life stuff the vocabulary is enough. I practiced conversing a lot, so it also didn't happen just over night. But just from the vocabulary point of view, it is something one can probably do with the amount of words (and even with less like 2000), you practice through conversation - and get new vocabularies through conversation etc.
There are other ways, but may it be with songs you like, or simple videos or with reading - and stuff recommended in the other comments, it all is expanding your vocabulary.

Now let me say that 2000 words is no small feat, and you have already passed a very difficult task in language learning. So don't give up and just continue, you will eventually get there.
Also you don't need to know all those words super effective, like get them right 100% of the time or so in a flashcard app. Because actually in videos, conversation etc - you will find them in context. And in context, your brain will puzzle it together somehow, even if you know the word only 10-20% of the time you review it. So your "2000 words, but effectively 1000" is still 2000 for video and listening comprehension.

頑張ってね!
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Voytek » Mon Jun 08, 2020 1:19 am

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

Postby Saim » Mon Jun 08, 2020 6:18 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! :)


Personally I’ve just been using Netflix (just started slogging through “Beastars”), which is pretty good about accurate native subtitles in general, but I think for most animes you should be able to find j-subs somewhere.
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Re: After years of studying I still cannot distinguish words in Japanese

Postby Voytek » Mon Jun 08, 2020 7:33 am

Saim wrote:
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! :)


Personally I’ve just been using Netflix (just started slogging through “Beastars”), which is pretty good about accurate native subtitles in general, but I think for most animes you should be able to find j-subs somewhere.


Thank you.

Do you use any special tool while watching on Netflix? I use Yomichan on YT but the problem is it's hard to find accurate subtitles I could benefit from using Yomichan.
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