Why I don’t listen to enough Japanese
I have always considered the listening skill to be the easiest one to improve while self-studying. It does not require a professor and it is easy to find listening material on the internet. I also think that listening a lot, even without making special efforts to understand everything, is enough to progress. In this regard, listening should be easier than reading, which requires effort and concentration.
So the question is: why am I totally at a loss when it comes to understanding what I am listening to? The obvious answer is: because I don’t listen to enough Japanese on a daily basis. Then comes a new question: why not? why not listen to some Japanese every day? I can’t even answer “because I’m lazy” for the reason that listening does not require much effort.
After thinking a lot about it I came to the conclusion that
- I don’t know what to listen to, maybe because there is so much choice I don’t know what to pick or I start listening to a little of everything and persevere in nothing.
- I try to force myself to listen to material that does not interest me. It’s the same for reading. At the beginning, when I still thought that a novel would be too difficult, I forced myself to read easier material like magazines articles. But the fact it that I don’t enjoy reading magazines. I never read magazines in Fench. So how could I enjoy reading magazines in Japanese? I really made progress in reading when I struggled my way through my first novel in Japanese. It was a detective novel, a genre that I like very much. Of course, it was much more difficult than reading a magazine article but I didn’t have to force myself to go back to my book (compared to all the magazines left untouched) and I really wanted to know what would happen next. The conclusion is that when we pick a material, out taste should prevail upon the difficulty level (I mean, be reasonable). Why I haven’t applied this principle to listening, I still don’t understand. But it is never too late, and I will start now.
- I am too lazy to search for an audio when I have time to listen to Japanese. Let’s say it’s time to cook, I know that I will have between 30 minutes and one hour before me when my brain will be available to listen to some Japanese (cutting vegetables does not require all my concentration). So I should start a podcast and there we go. The problem is, that I don’t have a favourite podcast and looking for it will take too much time so I just give up. Having material close at hand should resolve this problem.
What I have to do
Obviously, I have to select material I want to listen to and make it easily accessible. After a week or two, I will see what works (ie what I listened to a lot) and suppress what doesn’t work from my list. Here, I hear myself make an objection: Shouldn’t I listen to as many different formats as possible in order to get used to a lot of speaking contexts: narration, dialogue, radio, anime, and so on. But if I do so, we come back to our problem number 1 and 2: too much material to listen to and contents that I don’t like. And anyway, listening to just one type of material is better than what I am doing now, which is almost nothing. Wanting to do too much, often equals to do nothing. So even if listening to a lot of different things would be optimal, let’s begin with a reasonable range of things that I like.
In my case, what I want to listen to are audiobooks and if possible, from novels. I don’t mind buying 2 or 3 audiobooks that I really like and want to listen to, even if a lot of material can be obtained for free. As I said before, I tend to be discouraged when facing tonnes of contents that don’t interest me. Let’s go for a small amount of carefully chosen audiobooks. And of course, they will have to be accessible from my phone, so that I can listen to them anywhere.
The advantage of audiobooks is that there is nothing else than a narrator talking in Japanese. I have a lot of audio tracks from textbooks which all start with 1 minute of jingle and unnecessary explanations about how you should listen to the text and repeat or answer the questions. It really is irritated. Sometimes, I say to myself that I should take a textbook CD (for example, a JLPT N2 CD) and edit the tracks to keep only the text. But I haven’t taken the time to do it yet…
So what I am going to do is:
- Find an audiobook I want to listen to and put it on my phone.
- Have a look at the podcasts that I can find and, if I find one or two that seem interesting, follow them.
It’s not much, but it won’t take too much time and it’s a good start.
Conclusion
Those were very personal thoughts but I think it can apply to other Japanese learners, too (or any language learner). I will come backs with a list of things that I listen to, there may be interesting titles in it!
About
I’m learning Japanese, Korean and Chinese to read mystery novels and play video games in these languages.
Learning languages has always been one of my favourite hobbies, but I’m not a social person, I don’t like to meet new people and make friends, this is just not me. I keep hearing that languages are meant for communication, that we have to actively use them, talk with natives, etc. and for a long time, I thought it was weird to learn languages just to read books, with zero interest in communication.
Now I don’t really care what people think, and this blog helped me a lot to stop doubting myself and just do what I enjoy doing.
Yeah having a good audio book is good. I am only listening to the audio from the text book. I am the beginning so it’s hard to find a good one, because lot of audio books are too hard for me…
There is a very good series of short stories that all come with a CD. It’s called Japanese Graded Reader and exist in many levels. Even someone who has just begun Japanese can enjoy the first stories. I listened to the CD a lot (until I almost knew the stories by heart!) and it helped me considerably to get used to grammar pattern I had learned in my textbook. Also, I love those booklets because they are very cute!
Ah thanks! I will check it out!