My listening is very weak in Japanese, and I feel I need to train my ear to pick out words in Japanese speech, rather than determining it all to be white noise!
I’m trying the obvious tasks of listening to anime, listening exercises etc but I wondered if there was an app with exercises all like this, where you have to fill in the words you hear in a short clip?
(This is from “umi” but only does this exercise occasionally.)
1/ Would a tool heavily focused on listening, but without gap-filling excercises, also be interesting for you?
I built an app when I was intensively learning Mandarin that allowed me listen to real-life podcasts sentence by sentence, while viewing a transcript. This means easy repeating sentences (as opposed to 10-second jumps around), or optionally just listening without stopping at all.
@twilliability The language reactor plugin does that for Netflix in Japanese. It’s good, but I was hoping for a more game-y app that could fill in the odd minutes on the train etc.
@elizabethtasker Oh, yes, I remember coming across that! I think I felt it was too clunky to be practical for me at the time. Do you find it useful for focused study?
2/
It was interesting because I co-created the transcripts myself, by first feeding the audio theough Google T2S (which gives you per-word timestamps), then cutting the stream into sentence-shaped units in a custom UI by clicking around in the text, and finally getting the transcription cleaned up by a freelancer from Upwork.
This let me access real-life content that was above my level. Doing the preparation myself meant I got deeply familiarized with the content.
3/ So, it's a long shot, but maybe it'd be possible to revive this approach for Japanese. Once the word-segmented transcript with precise timestamps is there, there's no limit to the exercise one can generate even programmatically.
The quizzes could even go straight into Anki as cards so no desicated app needs to be built.
@elizabethtasker yes listening is a part of what's proposed, you get some audio with nothing written and need to choose between 4 proposals (it's not manga style tho, more family restaurant style lol), you also get speaking / reading
@elizabethtasker I have a friend who is learning at n3/n4-ish, and has found listening tricky too, I was recommending some jpn language podcasts to him by jpn teachers. The good ones (IMO) speak at close to a natural speed, but subtly avoid trickier grammar and define unusual terms. e.g. Sayuri Is Saying https://sayurisaying.com is one, with a paid tier that I think has videos/transcripts. One of my faves is Japanese with Teppei and Noriko but that's more free-flowing conv https://teppeinorikojapanese.com
@elizabethtasker There are other good ones that I don't remember offhand (with vocab/transcripts by japanese teachers) but Noriko & Teppei's is something I actually enjoy listening to on a regular basis, they're both teachers and it's like you're listening to two friends catching up on what's been going on this week. They work with non-native speakers all the time & have a good model of what we might need a definition of to keep up with the conversation.
@elizabethtasker sorry for not answering the question you asked at all :) but they're such a great resource, I wish I'd had them. The main problem I've found when I sample these is that the ones aimed for more beginner students tend to slow down the speech a lot and I'm not a fan of that. It's so wildly different than the natural speech patterns that it makes the leap to more natural listening really difficult. Better to start with restricted vocab & grammar at natural speeds from the beginning.
@llPK Does it have this exercise? Or you just mean as a general app for language learning (I have tried many of the latter, but I'm on the hunt for this exercise.)
@elizabethtasker it’s a classic app (originally on the desktop) that’s mostly based on images (you don’t type in words, you select images or sentence fragments, or individual words). Some of the exercises include “fill in the blanks” sentences like the example you gave.