Advice please: Slow JAPANESE progress vs GERMAN/CHINESE

Hello everyone! Big advice needed with Japanese please!
My first LingQ language (zero previous language knowledge) was German and with a ton of reading and some tv I got to the level where I can have meaningful conversation with native Germans - great feeling!
I also learned some Chinese - way less reading practice and I’m nowhere near fluent, but I can ask and answer basic questions with native Chinese people, and understand the gist of many sentences when listening to basic kids stories and can follow the story.
My problem is with Japanese - I’d say, and LingQ backs me up on this, that I’ve read about 10 times more Japanese than Chinese. But it’s still all jibberish to me! I can understand way less Japanese than Chinese despite putting in so much more time. I can’t phrase much in the way of sentences and understanding audio without a transcript is impossible for me. It feels like I haven’t really got anywhere at all despite how much extra time I’ve put in. What can you recommend to help get past this wall? I’m currently trying to do more listening practice to see if that helps (I admit I haven’t done as much) but I’d really like to hear other people’s advice and experiences. :slight_smile:

Have a good evening all!

  • Peter
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Hi, I don’t really know Japanese but I’ve been struggling with listening comprehension in Chinese for quite some time.
Here is a technique that helped me to improve.

Deliberate practice:
Import a 10 minute or so YouTube video with accurate human-made subtitles, or try one of the podcasts for learners shared by hellboy195.
It is important the timestamps are accurate so you can work in sentence mode. Now repeatedly play each segment (a-key) until you understand it, first while looking at the text, looking up words and using the translation function, later without looking. This might take 5-10 repetitions, or even more.
After finishing this video, let it sit for a while and try to (only) listen to the audio the next day, for example using the playlist; if you are happy with your comprehension - great, if not work on the critical passages again by repeatedly reading and listening. It’s probably best to put this video and the following ones on some kind of rotation, e.g. first daily then weekly revisits.
I understand that this is a rather intensive process, but in my experience language learning is actually hard work. Repetition is key.
At one point you might notice that you actually start to know this video by heart, you could use this to your advantage and try start speaking or writing. For example by trying to repeat it, making slight changes as you go, or try to summarize it in your own words - but this orthogonal to listing practice just a nice by-product.

(Credits: I adapted this technique from https://hiv.net/ 's “Ear2Memory”)

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Great suggestion, bamboozled. Thank you. :slight_smile: I’ll work in some more short but intense learning too with lots of repetition. I try lots of short stories with text and listen 3 times but never as intensely on just one, so I’ll definitely give that a go.

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Great suggestion, bamboozled. Thank you. :slight_smile: I’ll work in some more short but intense learning too with lots of repetition. I try lots of short stories with text and listen 3 times but never as intensely on just one, so I’ll definitely give that a go.

I think the advice from bamboozled is great.

Japanese can also just appear very strange. To make sense of the grammar, I would advise maybe checking some of the youtube videos by cure dolly. She explains grammar really well - not from a scholarly point of view, but from a more human point of view. i.e. “why is the grammar like this” rather than just explaining “this is how it works”.

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Well, that was something I never expected to see in a language learning guide…I took a look at the Ear2Memory pdf. There’s a drawing of an erect “you know what” partway through the guide. Fair warning to those with sensitivities. I’m not one, but what on earth are they thinking???

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The explanation is probably that the author, as medical doctor, is not afraid to use an example of basic human biology to illustrate natural variation among Homo sapiens and apply it to differences in aptitude in language learning.
It is probably intended to be an attention grabber.

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