I stopped learning Japanese in a classroom about three years ago, with passing N4 being my biggest achievement. Since then, I’ve been occasionally doing my Anki reviews and trying to read and listen from time to time.
As a molecular biologist, I was thrilled to find a couple of great thematic podcasts: Researchat.fm and 研エンの仲. A game-changer for me, though, was Nihongo Con Teppei, which I could actually understand.
The problem with the first two podcasts, which are not designed for Japanese learners in any way, is that while I’ve started to pick up some nouns and phrases over time, I can almost never, for the life of me, grasp the meaning of entire sentences. I can tell they’re discussing a specific topic, but the overall gist almost always eludes me.
Does anyone have advice on how to improve comprehension? I feel like verbs are the trickiest part to understand…
I have this too, I think it is mostly just our vocab being too small still. If you know all the words but not all the grammer, you can guess/infer pretty well and by doing so learn by listening. But if you don’t know the words (even if you know the grammer) they might as well be saying “The blabla is blabla and blabla was blablaed”. I try to learn from a more structured source (book, app, website, etc) and then when I listen to things I can pick up more words that I then recognize. Which are then reinforced into me. Personally I make sure to practice Japanese before I watch an anime episode to get this process going, or at least make sure I don’t skip out on the more boring work. I do feel I improve slowly over time. Don’t think there is a special way to go or any shortcuts, you just need to keep studying as well as consume content.
Yes, I guess we must stay strong!