I don’t know if this counts for this thread, but I didn’t want to make a whole new thread for this one question.

I notice that I have a lot of trouble understanding exactly what is being said in most native material, even in cases where I know and recognise all or most of the words in the sentence.

I’d say it’s due to the flexible way in which you can order words in Japanese (which is a real double-edged sword). It sounds to my ear (or eyes, if I’m reading) like just a long string of random words, the longer the sentence, the worse it gets.

If I read a translation of it, I can then piece it together easily, but if I’m on my own, I have a lot of trouble working out what was said. Sometimes I’ll actually guess right, but the flexible word-ordering makes me second-guess myself constantly.

My question is, is there an exercise one can do to improve on this? That is, to better learn how to “predict” the seemingly random order of words, or at least mentally parse them better? Or is it just a matter of “it gets better with experience”?

I used to have it in Japanese, but ended up switching it back to English because it was a pain to use the settings menu like that.

On my phone, however, my Facebook app is in Japanese with no visible option to change it, probably because I downloaded it from iTunes Japan.

I also have a Twitter account that’s still set to Japanese, but I don’t really use it at all.

So I actually just watched an episode of AKBingo for the first time. I have to say I enjoyed it, though I really couldn’t understand much of what was being said, I managed to get the basic gist of what was going on at least. I reckon I could get interested in this idol business. X)

I do see how it could be a good listening aid, as the vocab used, though beyond me, seemed relatively simple and casual, such as one might hear in daily speech.

Missing, I wouldn’t mind getting your recommendations as to more stuff for a beginner to the idol scene!

@kanjiman: Yeah I was pretty lucky to find a restaurant here that’s actually staffed by native Japanese (some of whom can’t even speak English at all). There’s a real dearth of native Japanese people here and a lot of them eat at that place. Sadly there’s really almost zero young people here, so making local Japanese friends is almost impossible.

The downside is that every time I want to speak some Japanese, I have to also blow some quid on food. Sometimes I simply can’t spare the money, so I don’t often get to practise. What I’d really love is to work there. Hell, I’d work for free if it meant daily immersion, lol.

Maybe this has little to do with studying, but I wanted to share a small victory that made me feel good.

Today I went to my usual hangout to eat a little sashimi. If I’m lucky there will sometimes be Japanese customers that sit near me and I can, well, eavesdrop on their convos with the staff. Today was just such a day. Then the chef made a little small talk with me (in Japanese) and I decided to be daring and talk more than I usually would. Then the customer next to me got in the conversation and the three of us spoke Japanese for quite a while about a variety of topics (cars, food, work).

I spoke haltingly and there were some limits to what I could say or understand, though my pronunciation was, I’d say, very good. But it was the longest and most advanced conversation I ever had in Japanese and I was honestly surprised with how I did, considering it’s been years since I stopped actively studying. I felt like a million bucks.

It cemented my decision to try to go back to studying because for the first time I finally felt like fluency was something I could actually attain.

I read the SKU’s number-by-number, as one would a phone number (incidentally, I use those as practise too), whereas price tags I do indeed read as whole numbers, and include their respective decimals.

Work is one of those places where there’s really no chance to do any studying, but I’ve found ways to squeeze a little practise here and there. Aside from the aforementioned SKU’s, I often listen to Japanese podcasts/music as I work (though it is very much against the rules!) and I’ve developed a habit of scribbling kanji on any surface I can write on. :P

My method for practising numbers was reading SKU numbers at work to myself in Japanese and seeing if I could remember them as long as I could in English. I then did the same for prices on tags. This worked fairly well and I’d say I have a decent grasp on saying numbers from 1-9,999. Once it starts getting into the 10,000′s and above however, I fall apart like a wet newspaper. :P

I got a really charming talking calculator app from iTunes Japan that’s absolutely wonderful for practising numbers and simple math terms, but I still find large numbers difficult.