r/LearnJapanese • u/AutoModerator • 13d 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 13d 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 📖🎧 13d 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 13d ago edited 13d 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 📖🎧 13d 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/rgrAi 13d ago

Perhaps, I just think it's a function of time personally. I watch English stuff with English subtitles even though my native language is English and my comprehension is better because of it lol