Learning to Listen in Japanese with Repetition
Listening is one of those skills that require several things to be working at once. You need to not only know the meaning of the words in the sentence but also understand how they combine in the sentence. Then, even if you understand all the words and sentence structure you need to be able to understand what the speaker is saying. Luckily, if you practice listening with time it will improve. Let’s take a look at how listening works and a method to improve it.
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How Listening Works
Sounds combine to form words and words form to combine sentences. We start learning a new language by listening to the sounds. This takes a lot more mental energy though than listening to words. Take a look at the example sentence below:
猫がネズミを捕まえた
The cat caught the mouse
If we consider one syllable or one Hiragana as one sound, we have 12 sounds in this sentence. However, if we consider 猫が, ネズミを and 捕まえた all as separate words then we have only three words. In the beginning, we are stuck listening to sounds since we lack practice recognizing where words start and end. That is probably the main reason listening is difficult.
It becomes easier to listen though as we learn to recognize more words when listening. What happens is when we hear a word we recognize we don’t need to spend the excess energy listening to that word one sound at a time. We recognize it as a single word instead.
After we learn enough words then we start listening to sentences. That makes things even easier to listen to. So, how do we go to listening to sounds to sentences? Basically, it takes lots and lots of repetition.
Method to Improve Listening
In order to improve your listening comprehension, you have to do a lot of listening. The method I would recommend is to listen to the same audio clip over and over. Here are the steps below:
1. Find Something to Listen to
If you can, try to find something that you enjoy. It can be from YouTube, Netflix, or anywhere. Just make sure that you have the option to rewind a few seconds. For example with Youtube, when listening to a video you can tap on the left direction key to go back 5 seconds.
2. Listen to a few seconds at a time
The next step is to start listening to the audio or video you picked a few seconds at a time. Start at the beginning and listen for 5 or 10 seconds then tap back. Do that over and over anywhere from 10 to 100 times.
The exact number of times will depend on how complex the sentence is and how well you feel you understand it. If it is more complex then it will take more listening to in order to feel like you understand it. However, don’t aim just to understand. Listen to it over and over until you feel like you can recite it or like you memorized it. Then move on to the next part of the audio clip. Continue that process until you get to the end.
3. Look up anything you don’t know
If you have words that you don’t know in the phrase you are listening to, look up those words. Make sure that you actually understand what is being said. What that will do is force you to focus less on the sounds and words and more on the meaning of what is being said.
What Happens when you Do this
After you do this you will start to notice a few things improve with your listening. First, it will become easier to differentiate between where words start and end. That is because you will get used to listening to the rhythm of sentences and that will help you to know how words are split up in a sentence.
Also, when you start getting better at listening the sentences will start to sound shorter. That is because you are listening less and less to the sounds and more to the words and meaning of the sentence.
