It doesn't bother us when we don't understand something in our NL because we always assume that it is not our fault. Whereas in our TL we assume that it is our fault, when most of the time it isn't our fault either.
Yeah. We know the technical explanation on how some magic system or legal explanation in an anime isn’t really something we (or me anyway) care about anyway.
I noticed two marked increases in my Japanese listening. The first was when I signed up for online small group classes which were all in Japanese. My in person class which I loved used lots of English and my listening was not on par with the other students. They were N3 or low intermediate classes. Being the slow one in the class and being embarrassed about it (some people seem to take it in stride and just ask the teacher to repeat etc - but not me.) I noticed a marked increase in my listening after about a month. You could say this got me to true classroom level listening whereas my previous listening was well God awful. The 2nd increase was after I moved to Japan for a year. Having all the Japanese around me added up over time. I was also studying my hardest (but at age 39 not really your ideal student so it was slow). Anyway, after a year almost on the dot it was like everyone was talking slower. After about 3 months in Japan I also turned off subtitles on anime. I don’t know how much this helped. It was hell at first but after a month or so it got a bit better although I think part of that was just getting used to understanding less. Anyway, I’d say in addition to the tips in the video also having conversations with natives especially where they can’t or won’t slow way down to your current level automatically like many italki tutors do and still expect you to keep up puts pressure on you to improve faster.
Perfect timing for this video for me. I'm trying to improve my listening but it definitely feels like without subtitles my comprehension goes out the window. It was helpful to hear Ben and Ethan point out that a lot of times, you just won't be able to make things out in your target language because of noise in the show other than dialogue. It help keeps me from listening to the same clip I can't understand that also has a lot of background noise, because I know that I'd only be able to understand similar situations in english from context and my experience.
This is a mistake I made early on, I basically didn't do active/intensive listening at all, because I was so used to just recognizing words after I had learned them I didn't think I had to do it. I would be a LOT better at listening now if I had done it from the get go, instead I had started doing it a lot later in the process, but I did get much, much better at listening after a few months-a year of doing it intensively. I don't look at the subtitles now unless I'm absolutely convinced I can't hear it and that I must be missing something I don't know yet. It really is its own skill, and the point about natives is a good point. Even in our native languages we can't hear everything but we know enough. I also found I made a lot of improvement at the start when I focused just on all the syllables and sounds instead of trying to also understand it at the same time. First I had to be able to actually hear the language clearly at full speed, then I could pause and take time to process what I just heard, then eventually you do it faster and faster.
Learning English taught me how subs aren't for me. It was so frustrating to turn them off. Fortunately I'm happy rewatching content so I could turn subs off the second time and focus till I could get more bang for my buck. Now I'm taking an all listening approach to my TL and by the 5th month I'm able to hear cards I've been studying on Anki.
I’ve just started but I try and do both. When I’m at work or mowing the lawn, it’ll be listening. If I’m watching it will be with subtitles. I try and listen to normal German speaking speed, to get adjusted to how it sounds. May e to early but I find it more interesting than slower speaking videos
In a very timely example of how we don't really hear everything and it doesn't matter, just as Ben started talking about that my neighbors set off a long string of firecrackers outside (it's Lunar New Year - 새해 복 많이 받으세요!) and although I could only hear about half of what Ben was saying, I understood it all.
I remember the times where I was dependent on english subtitles, after a while I felt comfortable and ditched them, obnoxious at the start after a year I went off subtitles, now I hate looking at them. I recommend people get the language reactor google extension, you can blur the subtitle and hover over the mouse to unblur it when you don't get something, basically a dictation practice.
There's a few things I've found have worked really well for reducing dependency on subtitles: 1) Doing some pure listening to slower and/or simpler content, whether this is content for children/adolescents or for adult second language learners. Don't even need to pay full attention to it, just listen while you stroll and let sentences or words slip into recognition as and when. 2) Watching everything with closed captions *and* audio descrpition. The latter forces you to get some practice understanding from audio alone, and it's usually pretty easy to understand because the visuals make the meaning abundantly clear. As lazy as this sounds I think when working on this problem people are going to want to do as little work as possible. Because understanding 90-odd percent with substitles makes us feel like we *should* be OK in this language without doing more work, so it's more frustrating developing listening skills in that context than for a complete beginner I think.
For tv and movies actually the problem is not you, but the audio it self, and the actor/actress they do mumble a lot of times, even a native english speakers now days are struggling to watch tv series or movie without subtitles 😂. There are plenty discussions about this lately. For my experience with english, i always use the subtitles when its available, even till now. And i have no trouble at all having a long, deep, heavy conversation with a native speakers. The more realistic benchmark would be vlog, lecture, news, tedtalk. Dont use tv series or movies as a benchmark, because even a native speakers having a trouble with it without subtitles. Just dont worry too much about it, just keep immersing and having fun and you'll get it.
I heard every word in this TH-cam video and I was playing it at 1.5X speed. It’s true some movies or shows some of the actors mumble or something and I might miss something but I think some of these studies exaggerate how often this is.
TH-cam thought I should listen to this video again so I’m commenting again. I think one part of developing better listening skills in your target language is just adjusting to not understanding everything. At first your brain tries to understand everything and it quickly gets overwhelmed and wants to just shut down and stop listening. Later it gets better at filtering out the parts you can’t understand and keeps listening or processing instead of shutting down. So even though your language ability maybe doesn’t get better per se just being able to listen and maintain focus for long periods of time will make a big difference.
Excellent! My case is the same as mentioned in the video! I would love for these videos to be on Spotify with their transcription. And if anyone knows English podcasts with transcriptions on Spotify, please let me know!
yea I can't understand a ton of movies in my native language. They mix the dialogue way too quiet compared to other sounds and a lot of the time the actors don't speak loud enough or clearly
its better to get used to understanding while listening. i knew the vocabs, phrases, nuances - what i thought i knew quickly fell apart once i had to rely on listening. these weren't audio practices, these were natural speakers i tried to understand. shadowing would probably be the way to go. speak at their pace while trying to "naturalize" your accent. maybe set up like an SRS where you know the context and phrases but go back to a scene in a video without subtitles and mimic the speaker's words and pitch.
The guy answering the question is really solid in his takes but his sentences are too long . And as a result, his utterances lose pitch at the end of his sentences. I suggest he speaks in relatively shorter sentences so that his utterances can be clearer. thanks
It doesn't bother us when we don't understand something in our NL because we always assume that it is not our fault. Whereas in our TL we assume that it is our fault, when most of the time it isn't our fault either.
Yeah. We know the technical explanation on how some magic system or legal explanation in an anime isn’t really something we (or me anyway) care about anyway.
I noticed two marked increases in my Japanese listening. The first was when I signed up for online small group classes which were all in Japanese. My in person class which I loved used lots of English and my listening was not on par with the other students. They were N3 or low intermediate classes. Being the slow one in the class and being embarrassed about it (some people seem to take it in stride and just ask the teacher to repeat etc - but not me.) I noticed a marked increase in my listening after about a month. You could say this got me to true classroom level listening whereas my previous listening was well God awful. The 2nd increase was after I moved to Japan for a year. Having all the Japanese around me added up over time. I was also studying my hardest (but at age 39 not really your ideal student so it was slow). Anyway, after a year almost on the dot it was like everyone was talking slower. After about 3 months in Japan I also turned off subtitles on anime. I don’t know how much this helped. It was hell at first but after a month or so it got a bit better although I think part of that was just getting used to understanding less.
Anyway, I’d say in addition to the tips in the video also having conversations with natives especially where they can’t or won’t slow way down to your current level automatically like many italki tutors do and still expect you to keep up puts pressure on you to improve faster.
Perfect timing for this video for me. I'm trying to improve my listening but it definitely feels like without subtitles my comprehension goes out the window. It was helpful to hear Ben and Ethan point out that a lot of times, you just won't be able to make things out in your target language because of noise in the show other than dialogue. It help keeps me from listening to the same clip I can't understand that also has a lot of background noise, because I know that I'd only be able to understand similar situations in english from context and my experience.
This is a mistake I made early on, I basically didn't do active/intensive listening at all, because I was so used to just recognizing words after I had learned them I didn't think I had to do it. I would be a LOT better at listening now if I had done it from the get go, instead I had started doing it a lot later in the process, but I did get much, much better at listening after a few months-a year of doing it intensively. I don't look at the subtitles now unless I'm absolutely convinced I can't hear it and that I must be missing something I don't know yet.
It really is its own skill, and the point about natives is a good point. Even in our native languages we can't hear everything but we know enough. I also found I made a lot of improvement at the start when I focused just on all the syllables and sounds instead of trying to also understand it at the same time. First I had to be able to actually hear the language clearly at full speed, then I could pause and take time to process what I just heard, then eventually you do it faster and faster.
Learning English taught me how subs aren't for me. It was so frustrating to turn them off. Fortunately I'm happy rewatching content so I could turn subs off the second time and focus till I could get more bang for my buck. Now I'm taking an all listening approach to my TL and by the 5th month I'm able to hear cards I've been studying on Anki.
I’ve just started but I try and do both. When I’m at work or mowing the lawn, it’ll be listening. If I’m watching it will be with subtitles. I try and listen to normal German speaking speed, to get adjusted to how it sounds. May e to early but I find it more interesting than slower speaking videos
In a very timely example of how we don't really hear everything and it doesn't matter, just as Ben started talking about that my neighbors set off a long string of firecrackers outside (it's Lunar New Year - 새해 복 많이 받으세요!) and although I could only hear about half of what Ben was saying, I understood it all.
I remember the times where I was dependent on english subtitles, after a while I felt comfortable and ditched them, obnoxious at the start after a year I went off subtitles, now I hate looking at them. I recommend people get the language reactor google extension, you can blur the subtitle and hover over the mouse to unblur it when you don't get something, basically a dictation practice.
There's a few things I've found have worked really well for reducing dependency on subtitles:
1) Doing some pure listening to slower and/or simpler content, whether this is content for children/adolescents or for adult second language learners. Don't even need to pay full attention to it, just listen while you stroll and let sentences or words slip into recognition as and when.
2) Watching everything with closed captions *and* audio descrpition. The latter forces you to get some practice understanding from audio alone, and it's usually pretty easy to understand because the visuals make the meaning abundantly clear.
As lazy as this sounds I think when working on this problem people are going to want to do as little work as possible. Because understanding 90-odd percent with substitles makes us feel like we *should* be OK in this language without doing more work, so it's more frustrating developing listening skills in that context than for a complete beginner I think.
I second all of that well except audio description cuz I have never tried that yet
For tv and movies actually the problem is not you, but the audio it self, and the actor/actress they do mumble a lot of times, even a native english speakers now days are struggling to watch tv series or movie without subtitles 😂. There are plenty discussions about this lately.
For my experience with english, i always use the subtitles when its available, even till now. And i have no trouble at all having a long, deep, heavy conversation with a native speakers. The more realistic benchmark would be vlog, lecture, news, tedtalk. Dont use tv series or movies as a benchmark, because even a native speakers having a trouble with it without subtitles. Just dont worry too much about it, just keep immersing and having fun and you'll get it.
I heard every word in this TH-cam video and I was playing it at 1.5X speed. It’s true some movies or shows some of the actors mumble or something and I might miss something but I think some of these studies exaggerate how often this is.
TH-cam thought I should listen to this video again so I’m commenting again. I think one part of developing better listening skills in your target language is just adjusting to not understanding everything. At first your brain tries to understand everything and it quickly gets overwhelmed and wants to just shut down and stop listening. Later it gets better at filtering out the parts you can’t understand and keeps listening or processing instead of shutting down. So even though your language ability maybe doesn’t get better per se just being able to listen and maintain focus for long periods of time will make a big difference.
Thanks for your advise
Excellent! My case is the same as mentioned in the video! I would love for these videos to be on Spotify with their transcription. And if anyone knows English podcasts with transcriptions on Spotify, please let me know!
Can't understand without subtitles? More like can't understand subtitles. _cries in Japanese student_
I am watching the video of "Can't understand without subtitles?" using subtitles xd
6:31 lmfao
yea I can't understand a ton of movies in my native language. They mix the dialogue way too quiet compared to other sounds and a lot of the time the actors don't speak loud enough or clearly
its better to get used to understanding while listening. i knew the vocabs, phrases, nuances - what i thought i knew quickly fell apart once i had to rely on listening. these weren't audio practices, these were natural speakers i tried to understand.
shadowing would probably be the way to go. speak at their pace while trying to "naturalize" your accent. maybe set up like an SRS where you know the context and phrases but go back to a scene in a video without subtitles and mimic the speaker's words and pitch.
The guy answering the question is really solid in his takes but his sentences are too long . And as a result, his utterances lose pitch at the end of his sentences. I suggest he speaks in relatively shorter sentences so that his utterances can be clearer. thanks
@gidmanone He's assuming you're native or near-native in english.
@@compositeur8455 I'm native. I was only pointing out that he loses pitch in the second part of his utterances.