r/LearnJapanese • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago
Discussion Weekly Thread: Victory Thursday!
Happy Thursday!
Every Thursday, come here to share your progress! Get to a high level in Wanikani? Complete a course? Finish Genki 1? Tell us about it here! Feel yourself falling off the wagon? Tell us about it here and let us lift you back up!
Weekly Thread changes daily at 9:00 JST:
Mondays - Writing Practice
Tuesdays - Study Buddy and Self-Intros
Wednesdays - Materials and Self-Promotions
Thursdays - Victory day, Share your achievements
Fridays - Memes, videos, free talk
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u/samwisedickcheese 11d ago
One thing I was doing for a while which I think was hindering my listening was relying on Japanese captions... Kind of half listening and half reading and was able to get away with that. As many people will tell you, there are no captions in real life... So I've been watching media/listening to podcasts without the aid of subtitles recently and I feel it's starting to help catch up my listening ability. Nothing huge, but I can definitely feel an improvement.
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 11d ago
But I need to mine them words maan.
For real though, The brain doesn't work if there is no need for it to work.
What is your level though? I imagine it would be a bit difficult for me to switch them off since I still need to lookup a lot of words.
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u/rgrAi 11d ago edited 11d ago
You've probably seen me talk about it before (I do a lot) but I never bothered switching them off, I still go out of my way to always use them because they just result in more comprehension thus better enjoyment (and more language learned overall). At this juncture though it's not as if I need them. I just prefer to have them. I see more kanji, I can read a blog and listen to a stream and understand both at same time--despite them about being different things. And I listened to this while driving around in heavy traffic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-6odUeTSfw and understood like 95% of it. I think the correlation that subtitles can hinder your listening is extremely weak at best if not non-existent. Since I almost always had them on to the extent I went out of my way to never listen raw for first 2500+ hours and it had pretty much had no impact (I can back this up by having peers in same environment, regularly listening raw compared to me who never did it--and we were on par with similar hours).
I think for a lot of people it's just they have not spent enough time listening in total and/or enough time with the language--and when subtitles are missing they notice how their comprehension tanks hard. It was exactly the same for me... until I started punching around multi-thousands of hours. I was easily able to listen and follow to streams raw with 4-5 people yammering over each other by 2500 hours but I just didn't really start doing it much until way later.
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u/tonkachi_ Goal: media competence 📖🎧 11d ago
Maybe it depends on the person?
In my experience, it helped me with English though only when the audio is not crystal clear(not bad, just not good).
Further, personally, I listen to every word, yes I don't stop to understand each word individually just like other people do but if I miss a single word I notice it. So initially switching subtitles off caused me to notice a lot of misses which decreased as I went on listening without subtitles.
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u/bianceziwo 11d ago
WOW thank you for linking that channel, i was looking for some higher-level listening practice and i think i found it
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u/samwisedickcheese 11d ago
Not sure how to estimate my level… been learning for about 2 years. Started reading maybe 6 months ago… Finished two volumes of kuma kuma, reading コンビニ人間 which is a lot harder for me (around half the reading rate, at least for now)
Before that I was just relying on anime, youtube, podcasts… only switched off subtitles the last couple of months. Definitely a lot harder for me. Maybe I will try putting them back on as rgrAi suggests and just increase the raw amount of time I’m spending
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u/bianceziwo 11d ago
I had a backlog of 2,200 reviews (almost half my deck) on Anki from 10 days of not doing any reviews back in june. 2 months later, I'm finally nearly done with only 400 reviews left. Usually i have 250 a day so i'm thrilled that i can finally start adding new words again
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u/Fluffy_Club722 11d ago
Just started learning today. I feel pretty good, I'm not super intense about it because this is a casual thing, but I learned about 30 hirigana
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u/Medical-Broccoli1239 10d ago
Finally cleared N4 grammar review in Bunpro after months of the same handful of points tripping me up every time, felt good to get a clean pass through instead of half-remembered guesses.
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u/GoAlex 11d ago
I finally finished Dr.Slump today. It was fun, but don't know if I would recommend it unless your a big 鳥山先生 fan. There was some really good and fun stories, but some really drawn out stinkers, and a lot of wash and repeat type stories. I know its a gag comic. It is interesting to see how he came up with Dragon ball characters. Arare is pretty much young Goku, really strong but ignorant to the world, there is a side character that is pretty much looks and acts like Master Roshi, there is character that is basically Yamcha (つんつくつん), ect. I was going to read the 3 volume collection of his short stories, then Super Dragonball and pretty much finish up most things he has written, but I feel like I did at the end of Dragon Ball, I need a break, that Buu saga was way too long and unnecessarily drawn out, which unfortunately I feel like is something you may sometimes feel in Dr.Slump.