理解 – How to Understand what you Hear in Japanese
Listening comprehension requires three things; being able to recognize sounds in words, words in sentences, and the overall meaning of a sentence.
Without being able to clearly distinguish individual sounds you won’t be able to understand either word you know or don’t know. Even if can understand every word in a sentence individually, if you can’t understand how the words fit together you won’t understand the sentence. Before understanding Japanese you will have already acquired several thousands of words but here are a few tips for making the process easier.
- Listen to a Variety of Voices
- Learn to Distinguish between individual Words
- How to Listen to Japanese?
INDEX
Listen to a Variety of Voices
Some people are easier to understand than others. Listening to a variety of speakers allows you to understand Japanese better. Hearing the same word by different people helps you to recognize the word better. That is because you can train yourself to understand the subtle differences in peoples speech. With time you will be able to understand how much a single sound can change and still be considered as one sound. Still, it is difficult in the beginning. But a few tips will make it easier.
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Syllables are the Core of Japanese Sounds
The core sounds in English are the consonants and vowels. For Japanese, it is the syllables of Hiragana and Katakana. The rhythm and intonation in Japanese are based on these syllables. So, by focusing on Japanese from the syllable level helps you to understand better.
Who are your Two Main Voices?
Find a couple people on YouTube or somewhere. While you should be listening to a variety of people, designate these people as your main voices. Meaning, they will be who your benchmark for measuring differences between how people speak. It does not matter who you choose. So, when watching their videos try to listen for different sounds and how they pronounce them. If you are using YouTube you can open up a transcript of the video for help. But know that the transcript will not be perfect all of the time.
Compare your base voices to other voices
After you listen to your main voices, try listening to other channels or audio then try to see if you can notice how other people pronounce things differently. In comparison to English there won’t be as much difference but the better you are at recognizing the same syllable in a variety of speakers the better your listening comprehension will be.
Don’t rely on Robotic Voices
It is OK to listen to Google Translate and other robots but this should not be your main voice for two different reasons. First, they are not perfect. Since the voices are auto-generated they do not accurately represent what the real language sounds like 100% of the time. Second, they are too perfect. In real speech, people will always have slight differences in how they say things where a robot will say it the same every time.
If you want to learn to Speak and Listen to Japanese better, check out some of my other posts.
Websites with Japanese audio
Finally, other than videos it is important to listen to specific words and phrases. This will train your ear to be comfortable with the different sounds. Here are a few places which has recordings of sounds spoken by various speakers.
Learn to Distinguish between Individual Words
After you get a good grasp of sounds in Japanese it is time to focus on words. There are two things that will help you with that.
- Learning the most frequent Japanese words
- Listening to Minimal Pairs
When you know common words it becomes easier to distinguish between the words you know and don’t know. Listening to minimal pairs helps you to distinguish even more how different sounds sound in different words.
Most frequent words
Text Coverage, this concept refers to the number of unique words in the text. In a text of 1,000 words, if you count every word ignoring duplicates and get 200 words, 200 words would be 100% text coverage. If distributed evenly then each of those 200 words would show up 5 times. Language is not distributed evenly. Listing our 200 words by the number of times they show up in the text, you will see that a few of the topmost frequent words will show up several times while the rest much less. If the most frequent word showed up 20 times, this word has 2% text coverage. If you understand 1,000 to 2,000 words in Japanese you will have 70% to 80% text coverage. Focus special attention on being able to recognize the top 1,000 to 2,000 words and it will be easier to distinguish between words you know and don’t know.
Listening to Minimal Pairs
Most Japanese sounds have close counterparts in English but are not exact. Getting used to Japanese sounds will help you hear words easier. Maybe the best way to hear differences between words is to listen to Minimal Pairs. Minimal Pairs are two or more words that are only different by one sound. Some examples are below:
買えた 書いた
変えた 帰った
If you listen to minimal pairs over and over eventually you will get better at hearing the difference between individual words.
How to Listen to Japanese?
It seems pretty basic. Just find content and listen to it right? Well yes, but there are different ways you can modify how you listen to improve different aspects of your listening ability.
- Listen to Japanese at Different Speeds
- Listen with and without the Text
- Listen to Japanese Music
- Write what you Think you Hear
- Don’t Ignore Intonation
Listen to Japanese at Different Speeds
Start with short two word phrases. you can find some at tatoeba.org. You can also make your own sentences by typing them in at translate.google.com. As you get better at listening to short phrases and sentences slowing increase the amount. Also when possible listen to Japanese at different speeds. Listening in reduced speed can help but when it is too slow by the end of the sentence we will have forgotten the words in the beginning. Listening at fast speed can help train to hear things faster but has little use if we can not understand anything. The majority of the time you will want to listen to the language at normal speed which helps to learn the normal rhythm of the language.
Listen with and without the Text
Transcripts of audio are a way of verifying what you are hearing. Sometimes you can listen several times and not catch what is being said. In these cases, a transcript can make it much easier. Use transcripts when available but try listening without them since it may become hard to know if you are understanding the audio or just understanding the text. Listen to the same text over and over with and without the transcript.
Listen to Japanese Music
Music is not the same as the spoken language but it can be more enjoyable to listen to repeatedly and easier to remember.
Write what you think you hear
Listen to some audio for a few seconds, it does not have to be a whole sentence, then stop the audio and write down what you think you heard. Go back listen to it again and repeat.
Don’t Ignore Intonation
Most of the words in Japanese can be understood without knowing the intonation since there are few words that are only differentiated by intonation, but from the beginning, if you try learning the intonation it will become easier to distinguish later on and easier to speak with proper intonation otherwise you will have some instances where you will mishear Japanese people and they will mishear you.
Improve your Japanese Intonation with YouTube
So, now you have some tips for learning how to improve your listening. If you are interested in learning Japanese I have reviewed what I consider the best resource for Japanese Grammar below:
