By listening to Japanese TV without watching it!!! O______O
Especially when the dramas are on. It’s almost like listening to a book on tape! You get all the dramatic piano music in the background, sound effects, etc., and you start to notice that since you can’t see what’s happening, you start to hang on to every single word that’s being said in order to figure out what’s going on. Effectively forcing you to paint a picture in your own head, even though you might only understand a few verbs, nouns and adjectives here and there.
I’m also having fun trying to figure out what products or services the commercials are advertising.
If you have a computer and internet access and you’re wondering where YOU can watch LIVE Japanese TV, I’ve found a GREAT website where someone (who goes by the name WilsonJJ?) has taken the time to stream live Japanese programming for everyone to enjoy! You can find it here:
You will see the channel being changed from time to time, so there is a chance you might really start to get into an episode of some J-drama and then have the last ten minutes cut off on you due to WilsonJJ changing the channel, but I think its great that different networks are shown. The channel isn’t just flipped on you at any random time thank goodness. There is a “TV guide” you can check out on the site so you can get an idea of when certain programs will be shown, or about when the channel will be changed. ナイス！
I’ve tried different methods for listening practice in the past. When I was first starting out a few years ago, I would just listen to random internet talk radio streams while washing dishes or something. At that time I could hardly make out any words. All I really heard was sentences being started and finished, and a whole bunch of “random” syllables in between. I knew something was being talked about, I just didn’t know what! I was more or less mindlessly listening to a bunch of gibberish. But in the back of my head, I knew eventually I would be able to make things out. I just had to suck it up, make and take the time to get listening practice in. Along the way, I found a post at All Japanese All The Time (AJATT), which basically suggested that I should get in 10,000 hours of listening practice in, in order to get good at listening. I had already been taking the time to practice listening before finding this post, but kind of wanted to know how much listening practice I needed in order to notice any improvement. 10,000 hours is a really long time and Katz (the author of AJATT) suggests all sorts of ways to get that time in. I’m not extreme enough to try every single one of his suggestions, but just to have that number 10,000 was good enough for me. I knew that if I even got in 25-30% of 10,000 hours, I should definitely notice an improvement.
To be honest, the craziest I’ve gotten with trying to get the time in was playing Japanese radio from my iPhone (I use an app called Hot Radio JP) while taking a shower or placing the phone under my pillow so it goes into my ears while I’m sleeping. I’ve tried other less-extreme methods in between, such as watching Japanese people’s live webcam streams on TwitCast (which is good for being exposed to and learning casual spoken Japanese, and maybe make some friends!) and also watching CrunchyRoll animes with paper taped to my screen to cover the subtitles.
I have no idea how many hours of listening practice I’ve put into my ears at this point. A rough guesstimate would probably be in the low hundreds (200? 300 maybe?). Nowhere near 10,000 I’m sure. It may be a combination of all the studying, listening and chatting in Japanese I’ve done so far, but I can proudly say that I can more or less make out where words begin and end when I hear spoken Japanese and passively listening to it. If I really try and focus on what I’m listening to, I can roughly get the gist of what’s going on.
For the past year or so, I’ve been randomly leaving the WilsonJJ J-TV stream on all night as I sleep, or I’ll put it on while I work. I’ve been pretty busy with work lately, so I’ve been having to switch from browser tab to browser tab while the Japanese TV is still playing in one of the background browser tabs. And so just a day or so ago, I’ve found myself multiple times completely frozen, staring blankly at some work-related webpage because I was listening to the audio from the J-TV and trying to imagining what was going on! Hey wait a second, did I just find a way to boost my listening practice methods?!
As I am typing this post now, I have the J-TV playing in the background. And I think I’m finding it way more interesting to “listen to” as opposed to listening to “radio” audio that is intended to only be listened to (and not watched).
Crazy, right?? Maybe this might be more fun for you as well!
You can thank me later. 