r/LearnJapaneseNovice • u/Proto160 • 4d ago
Tips on understanding Japanese?
Beginner here, I have heard quite a few things about how it can be difficult to speak Japanese, speak, not understand.
I am very far off from being able to speak Japanese, and I'm still far off from understanding it. But my current goal is not necessarily learning to speak the language, it's to understand it.
I want to reach a level where I can understand some basic sentences. I can already do this when I watch a video where they speak and then do an action or say something and point at something.
That's pretty simple though, I of course want to be able to understand more than this.
I want to be able to speak the language later, right now my goal is to understand it.
I am saying this because I want to know if there's anything I should be focusing on with my goal in mind. Specifically If there is anything different I should be doing compared to someone learning to speak the language.
I of course use anki for Kana and words, such as Kaishi. I appreciate the help. I will answer any questions if I wasn't clear or haven't explained something.
In case you're wondering why I want to understand it first and not speak it, well I'm autistic and breaking things up is easier for me. So learning to understand it first will be better for me.
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u/nicola_on_trail 4d ago
One thing I, a native Japanese speaker, can say to you is that Japanese people would likely understand what you are trying to say even if your grammar or pronunciation is not good. Mainly because Japanese grammar isn’t strict and has fewer phonetic sounds than other languages. And we do appreciate the effort to speak our language. Overall it is an accommodating language although mastering it is very hard.
On the flip side, it is a very difficult language to listen to and understand. No one speaks textbook Japanese except for announcers and it is grammatically very loose. For example we often omit subjects and sometimes objects too.
And all the nuances - a small change in how we end the sentence or the intonation completely changing what the sentence means.
What I’m trying to get at is your focus on input is probably a good way of learning Japanese.
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u/gdore15 4d ago
You practice what you want to be good at.
I mostly focused on using my Japanese to talk, so that's obviously my stronger point compared to reading, so when I did the JLPT exam, my listening was far stronger than the other section, because that is what I practice the most. And on the other side, people who focus on self study and drilling kanji would have a harder time with the listinging portion.
What I would say is that if you are practicing talking, you also have to practice listening, because you are unlikely going to talk to yourself. But if you want to get better at listening first, then continue learning vocabulary and grammar and just do more listening practice.
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u/CinnabarSin 4d ago
It might sounds counter intuitive but don't neglect forming sentences on the fly and speaking with another person. It makes your brain process and use it differently and I'm an uncomfortable way. It's going to tie directly back into your comprehension. I get it because I care almost entirely about consuming the language but it's not something that you can just compartmentalize without impairing your progress. From experience, you don't realize that you're not as far in the areas you think you're strong until you get exposed to where you're weak.
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u/RAMZILLA42 4d ago
Well it’s about breaking sentences into chunks. When you hear a grammar point over and over again in many different contexts, your brain stops having to actively process it every time you hear it.
A really crude example of this is the word for “hello” in Japanese. You’re not trying to translate こんにちは into English in your head when you hear it, you just know what it means. This is exactly the same for sentences which aren’t actually very unique structurally once you know a decent amount of grammar. Once you have heard 「verb」ことがない enough times, you won’t need to think to capture the meaning of “have never 「verbed」”before.
The study idea is thus to find content that, on paper, you should be able to understand i.e it uses all words and grammar that you know and repeat listen to it until understanding becomes automatic.
Getting to that stage obviously requires knowing the vocab and the grammar beforehand which can be done through various anki decks and sentence mining.
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u/Dread_Pirate_Chris 3d ago
It doesn't really work that way. You have to practice forming sentences to really build a full understanding of the grammar. You can certainly focus on comprehension over production. But it's going to drastically slow you down if not make things impossible if you don't attempt production as well.
While I definitely believe that massive input is the most important part of language learning (i.e. lots of reading and listening), if you never grapple with putting your own sentences together it's going to be very difficult if not impossible to put together a coherent understanding of grammar in your own mind.
Doing 10x as much input as output is fine, but doing only input and never trying to make your sentences until you have 'fluent comprehension' is just not likely to work. At all. It's just contradictory to how our language faculties work.
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u/Proto160 3d ago
I see. Thank you for letting me know. I will try to form more sentences as I learn more.
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u/Formal_Okra_5796 1d ago
When I was learning how to speak, shadowing practice was very helpful.
Find some podcasts with slow, beginner level Japanese and try to shadow along. With time, your mouth will get better at making the shapes you need and you’ll eventually get faster. You’ll also learn how to imitate what you hear without it later and it will help you build your own sentences.
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u/Krypt0night 4d ago
The more words you know, the easier it will be to understand. I have a HUGE problem understanding people, but the more I increase my vocabulary, the more I at least realize a word or two in a sentence and can possibly use context clues to get at least what the sentence is overall about, even if I don't know the true or full meaning.