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How to learn to listen to Japanese quick? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Multilingual Lounge |  | |
| kenny1999 Newbie Hong KongRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4444 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes | Message 1 of 4 14 May 2012 at 4:27am | IP Logged | ||
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I want to learn Japanese mainly because I want to understand what people are saying in
the Japanese movies that have no English subtitles. I don't need to learn to write, read, or grammar. I just want to understand what they are saying without so much guessing. I don't need perfect and I think even for my first language, I am not perfect at it. In my situation, is there any quick way to learn to listen to Japanese? Or is it a must to start from the very basic thing? Thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerrubabbel Senior Member United States Joined 4389 days ago 232 posts - 287 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Mandarin | Message 2 of 4 14 May 2012 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||
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Well... my situation is similar to yours... and for a method to satisfy only speaking
and listening, The Pimsleur approach is all audio, has 90 lessons so far, that are a half hour each... but be it anime, movies, music or anything else, I dont think Pimsleur alone will give you the vocabulary you need to have a complete understanding of autentic material... (Im about half way through the pimsleur courses) If you do learn to read and write (which I strongly recommend you do because its another door open to acquire vocabulary ), first its not as hard as its made out to be, Yes it will require many hours of study... even the speaking will take many hours... you should start learning what is known as the Kana first... http://www.realkana.com/ is a great site to learn it... the Kana is broken up into two alphabets... an upper and lower case (kind of but not used in the same way) the two Kana alphabets are known as Hiragana and Katakana each have the same 46 letters, and expect to spend prolly a week studying them... I recommend learning Katakana first because its just as important, but used less than Hiragana... Katakana is typically used like a bold face for enphesis, or to mark forign loan words, usually English or Chinese derived... Hiragana is used more, and just as easy to learn, and in my opinion the most beautiful alphabet after you learn the Kana you should learn Kanji (chinese characters) the Japanese typically use about 2000, give or take... but dont let that intimidate you... they are pretty easy to learn and if you learn them using the correct stroke order, they are pretty easy to remember... you can use this site to look them up http://www.jisho.org/ I know you arent particularly interested in reading and writing, but I wasnt either when I started, but it really is a big help... If you want immediate material, this is basically a text book for download in pdf format, to get you started... just click where it says "student text" http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Japanese%20 FAST also, picking up dictionaries, phrase books, etc. isnt a bad idea... If you have any questions feel free to shoot me, or other members a message and sorry... I realize I wrote you a novel that should have been broken up into chapters, but its all well intentioned anyways, good luck with your japanese 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6259 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 4 17 May 2012 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm surprised you posted this in the Multilingual Lounge - in the Advice Center you'd
get a lot more responses. As for your question, this is something I've given a lot of thought to, too, because I want to learn enough Japanese to understand Go game commentary and the "Hikaru no Go" anime series, while I don't care about learning to read or write the language at this point. My philosophy is that you should think hard about what your goals are in a language and then eliminate everything that isn't necessary to get there - reaching your goals will give you a huge boost of motivation and once you can do *something* in the language, you will find yourself improving anyway while you're using the language. To minimize the chance of throwing in the towel, define a very specific goal, do everything to achieve that quickly, then use the boost to carry you towards your next goal, and so on. I would have to disagree with zerrubabbel and say that the kanji are definitely not necessary when your only goal is to understand Japanese movies. And you may not even need the kana - clearly you don't need the kana in order to understand spoken Japanese, but they might be necessary in order to use good study materials. My personal plan of action can be summarized as: * become familiar with the most basic Japanese grammar and expressions * take the scripts (subtitle files) of ca. 15 hours' worth of "Hikaru no Go", extract all words that occur more than once and learn them * watch these episodes as often as necessary in order to understand them * move on to other episodes of the same series until I can easily understand these as well The advantage of working with one series, rather than different movies, is that the vocabulary of each episode should be mostly the same, and I already know the content as well, so that I have the best possible foundation for understanding the conversation in each episode. Take this advice with a grain of salt, because I haven't actually learned Japanese yet, I just have my experience with a lot of other languages to draw on. Edited by Sprachprofi on 17 May 2012 at 8:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5170 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 4 of 4 17 May 2012 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||
Ok... just that? 8( If you can do that, then you can also understand Japanese spoken in any other setting. The Japanese used in movies is not different from the language spoken between native speakers, except it's even harder to understand because you aren't part of the action. So, "just understanding" a movie, is not a simple task. I think the only place you can really save time in a case like yours is by entirely foregoing any work on active skills. No writing, no speaking. However, I would guess that avoiding reading, and even kanji to some degree, is not going to be a time saver, on the contrary. If you can't read, then your only source of input is audio and you'd have to rely on a translation for comprehension and the likelihood you'd learn to understand a language from subtitles is very slim, particularly because subtitles tend to be inaccurate translations due to space and time limitations, not to mention that in Japanese, the first half of a sentence is often translated on the second frame and vice-versa... Moreover, to a certain degree, active use of the language is a catalyst for comprehension. We often understand because we guess or could see it coming. In simple situations, the idea that you'd understand something you can't say is credible enough, but in more complex language, a certain degree of prediction is necessary, such as if this structure is used, I expect that structure to end the second part of the sentence and the meaning in that part will be opposite to that of the first, etc. As for Sprachprofi's situation, the language she's trying to understand is slightly more limited because the shows revolve around the same topic. She has all the scripts and can start learning vocab in order of frequency or even tackle grammar based on what's most commonly used in the show. If I had to give a number... I'm not sure I'd be comfortable saying that you could understand in half the time. Maybe somewhere around 2/3s of the time? That would still mean a year of two, I'm guessing, if not more. Of course, the notion of "understanding without much guessing" is extremely vague. Sprachprofi has a more precise goal of actually understanding the language, she's got the scripts and she knows what she's doing... but it's still a pretty big task. And one last thing -- don't forget that we are humans. Motivation will be hard to maintain over a long period of time if you only work passively without any interaction with anyone or if, in Sprachprofi's situation, you only talk about a single topic. Edited by Arekkusu on 17 May 2012 at 9:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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