Common Challenges Faced When Listening To Japanese and How To Overcome Them

Listening to Japanese is something you need to be doing right from the start and it is one of the best ways to improve your overall skills, but you will face many challenges along the way, which I will cover here.

Really all of these can be overcome by just practicing more and getting more experience with the language, they may be annoying problems, but they are all part of the learning process and you will overcome them with time.

Not Comprehending The Material You Are Listening To

One of the biggest challenges you will face is just not really understanding what you are listening to. I guess this is to be partly expected when you are learning a new language, but it does have its problems.  

You need to have some sort of comprehension, even if it just a little bit, otherwise you may as well listen to white noise.

Trying to make something comprehensible can be done in many ways but really you just need to look up words and generally find out what is going on in the material you are listening to. As you learn more and more and build up your vocabulary and grammar knowledge this does become easier, but it will be a slow process.

Ideally you want to be able to understand the bulk of what you are listening to, with a few patches that you are uncertain about, as then your brain mostly knows what is going on and the gaps can be easily filled.

Don’t worry about this too much, do make sure you have some sort of understanding of the content when listening.  

(You can read more about – How Can You Make Your Language Learning Input More Comprehensible?)

Listening To Material That Is Too Simple Is A Problem

If you have read the above point, you may think the answer is then to listen to a lot of simple stuff, where you understand every word.

This can be fine, and does have its place, but the issue is if you only ever listen to this kind of material you will never advance.

It can be good practice to listen to simple things, but you do need to push past this and hear some things you don’t quite understand. As I said above, you want a mix of both, you do need to hear some things you can understand, along with some you don’t. In this hazy grey zone you will learn, so don’t cheat yourself out of progress by keeping things too easy.  

The Speed Of The Speech Is An Issue

An issue you will very quickly notice is that Japanese people can speak quite fast. Is it actually faster than any other language …probably not, but it won’t feel like that.

Everything will just fly past you at 100mph and you will very quickly get lost. This is annoying, but totally normal and with practice you will find the language does “slow down” to a normal speed.

Part of the solution will just require you to listen to more, so your ears will adjust to the sounds and speed of Japanese and eventually you will find you can pick out a lot of the sounds a lot easier. However, if you also just get better at the language it will also help massively too.

The more words you know yourself, the easier you will find it is to hear them even when someone is speaking fast, so really the more you study, the easier you will find it to understand full speed speech.

Your Brain Can’t Process The Language Fast Enough

You are also going to find the whole processing of the language a real challenge. Really this just comes down to the fact that you are inexperienced with the language and you brain is not really used to having to use Japanese.

You are going to hear something and it will take a second to register what it means and this can also affect what I mentioned about the speed of the language. 

Really you just again need to listen to more and learn more, these are going to give your brain the experience and the practice it needs to start getting a little more comfortable with things. 

Over time you will hear a word and rather than having to process it manually, where you have to stop and think about what it means …it will be automatic. Think about when you hear English, you don’t think, you just understand. Even if you are not paying attention, you still understand.

If you keep up with your Japanese studies then this will happen when you hear Japanese, your brain will just process what it hears automatically and while it might take a while to get to this level, it will happen.

Zoning Out Is A Big Issue

I am not sure if this is a common issue, but it certainly happens to me …and that is zoning out. I will put on a Japanese video and within about 30 seconds I am thinking about anything and everything apart from the video I’m watching (all in English).

I feel like my brain is a bit scared of the work it needs to do to understand the language, so just gives up and start thinking about what might be for dinner instead.

This is annoying, but more importantly it means I am wasting my time. While a lot of listening happens subconsciously, you do need to actually pay attention to what you are hearing. 

The real challenge here is actually noticing this is happening, as you can easily sit there and waste a lot of time basically day dreaming instead of studying. If you start looking out for this, you will be better at realising it is happening and then actually start paying attention.

Quite often I just stop studying when I catch myself zoning out, my brain is clearly not in a position to be absorbing the language, so I don’t force it and I just come back to the video I want to watch when I am feeling like I can engage with it properly.

Doing Too Much Passive Listening Is A Problem

Another challenge you may face is doing too much passive listening. This is where you just have Japanese on in the background and you are not really paying much attention.

I am actually doing this right now as I have some Japanese music on and I am sort of half typing this, half singing along …but anyway, passive listening is fine, but too much is not ideal.

It is kind of similar to the point above about zoning out, although with passive listening you are kind of purposely not really paying attention.

You will find plenty of people who speak highly of passive listening, and I don’t doubt its power …but you do need to make sure you are doing plenty of active listening too.

You actually need to pay attention and engage with the language too, you can still do this in a passive way as such, where you just follow along, and this is actually the best way to do you listening practice. You are actually focusing enough for the language to enter your brain, but you are being passive enough to allow your subconscious to do most of the work, this will be far more productive.

Not Hearing Things Enough Will Cause You To Struggle

A large part of learning Japanese is going to involve hearing the same things over and over again. The more you can hear something, the more likely it is going to stick in your mind and if you are not hearing things enough, this will cause you to struggle.

This can be caused by just not listening to enough Japanese in general, but it can also be that you are not listening to a broad enough spectrum of things. Let’s say you watch a video about space travel and come across a lot of new space related vocabulary …if this is the only video you watched, you will struggle to remember any of these new words.

Ideally you need to be watching many videos on this topic and even repeating the same videos a few times to really make sure you get enough exposure to this type of vocabulary.

This is also where spaced repetition software like Anki comes into play as they allow you to be exposed to the words a lot more times than you would normally, which of course helps you retain the information in your brain.   

There Will Be Confusion Between Formal and Informal Versions Of Words 

The whole formal and informal side of Japanese can be a real struggle for learners as you almost need to learn the language twice.

You are going to find that you hear a phrase and you just have no idea what it means, only to look it to find out that you do know what it means …but not this version, you know the informal version (or the other way round)

Sometimes this isn’t too bad, there may just be an extra word or two to make it more formal, other times it really does seem like a totally different phrase that you need to learn from scratch.

This is just the nature of Japanese and all you can do is just keep studying and eventually you will start to recognise both versions and you will be kind of able to pair them together in your mind, it just takes to build up your experience. 

A Lack Of Context Can Make Japanese Confusing

You will also find it challenging to work out the context of what is going on, I know I really struggled with this early on.

You will quickly learn that Japanese can be vague with some things, they don’t really use plurals or gender and so they may say the exact same word to talk about something that would be totally different in English and this lack of specificity doesn’t feel right for us as learners

It will take you a while to feel comfortable with this fact, and even now I am often confused about exactly what is being talked about as I have not perfected understanding the context as a lot of this can be about what is not said, as well as what is.

This is also why it is easier to start by listening to videos, so you can kind of seeing what is going on and get added context from this. Listening to something like a podcast is something you need to work up to.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you can see the types of challenges you are going to face when listening to Japanese, and more importantly, you can see they are not that big of a deal.

Most of these issues are something we will all face, but they can all be easily overcome so long as you keep practicing.

Japanese is a tough language to learn, but really so long as you keep pushing yourself, you will see progress and if you find yourself experiencing anything I have talked about here, you will now know how to overcome it.

Just keep listening, you will get better and you will feel more comfortable with things, it just takes time. 

(You can read more about – How To Improve Your Japanese Listening Ability)