So for the first time as part of the homework, we were assigned some listening comprehension exercises. And despite my confidence that I had my Japanese greetings and telling time down, I had a very hard time completing it.
The first section was greetings. We were given a page of images in which one person was greeting (saying good-bye to, &c.) another, but with empty speech bubbles. A recording was played, and we had to match that speech to the appropriate image. For this one, I didn't so much have trouble understanding what was said, as guessing what was happening in each picture. There were 3 or 4 pictures that were just two people on a street waving to each other. It wasn't immediately clear if they were saying, 'hello', 'good-bye', 'how are you?', or what, so I had to listen through it 2 or 3 times and kept changing answers when a slightly better match would show up.
The second section involved listening to some people ask what time it was in other countries, and then writing down the time in English. The hardest part of this one for me is that in Japanese, the AM or PM (gozen or gogo) is said before the time, but I had to write it after the time. I don't know what this was such a challenge, but I would usually catch either the time or the AM/PM part, but not both.
The last section was copying down phone numbers. I didn't have too much trouble with this, even though the book decided to throw in some curve balls and have everyone's phone number have a different format. The example was ##-####. The first one was ###-####, followed by #-#### and ####-####. Is there no standard formatting system for phone numbers in Japan?! I'm guess the book's doing it just to challenge listening for separators (pronounced as no) better.
Practice will definitely be important for listening, but I feel like there's a certain threshold I need to reach before I can really start listening to Japanese often. At this point I'd only be able to pick up on people meeting each other for the first time, or saying what time it is so most conversations will still be beyond me. When I get to the point where I can start watching cartoons and understand a fair amount of what's going on, practice will get easier because I'll have more material available (instead of just book-related listening exercises).
On that note, anyone know any good Japanese children's shows? (Children's shows because they'll use simpler language).
The show is called Cheburashka. I'm sure the Japanese version won't be too hard to find.
ReplyDeleteI found one here: http://www.animecrave.com/index.php?page=multimedia/anime_fansubs/cheburashka_arere , but it has English subtitles and the site's full of ads and stuff, so you might try searching for yourself to find somewhere better.