You Can Learn Japanese by Just Listening

passive listening is the best thing you can do to learn Japanese now about a week ago I made this video which I'm sure you've already seen because that's probably why you're here but it's essentially just a really rough guide on how to do immersion learning and how to learn Japanese with an immersion method the whole premise of the video was just get Mass amounts of exposure and let your brain do the rest and you'll eventually get good at Japanese and for this video to make more sense I would highly recommend going and watching it if

you haven't already now one of the ways that I recommended getting a ton of exposure to Japanese for essentially free is by doing something called passive listening to put it simply passive listening is essentially just going about your day normally except you put an earbud in and listen to Japanese passively for as long as you can now if you've never heard of this idea it might sound crazy at first like what you're just listening to Japanese all day why would you do that why don't you go study in a textbook or something based on the

comments of my last video it seems like not a lot of people have actually been exposed to this idea so I just kind of wanted to take a deep dive looking into why passive immersion is so beneficial and give you guys some helpful advice on how to make the most out of your time doing it now to really understand why passive immersion is such a powerful tool we're going to have to look at the mechanism for which you're actually going to learn Japanese which is by getting Mass exposure to the language and building a deep

subconscious understanding of how it works now I basically explained all of this in my last video about how to actually do immersion learning so I'm not really going to go into every detail here but the goal is essentially just to overload your brain with so much language to the point where understanding just comes naturally to you but before we get into all of that let me tell a story real quick now imagine you're me from 5 years ago and you just quit dualingo because you're not fluent after 3 days and you're thinking how the hell

am I ever supposed to learn this language a few months past and you've completely forgotten about seriously trying to learn the language and instead you're just sitting in your room alone binging the newest episode of some trash isekai anime and watching abroad in Japan videos on YouTube thinking God I wish that was me soon after I discovered immersion learning and then that's when I realized oh my God I don't have to use a textbook I don't have to take a class I don't even have to study grammar all I have to do is just listen

to Japanese all day and I'll get good now when I first discovered immersion learning people talked as if the best way to immerse is just to sit in front of a screen attentively and watch content in Japanese for hours a day and that passive immersion was just a small bonus thing you could do to fill in the gaps in your time now I have what some people like to call Tik Tock brain so when I told myself yeah I can do that I can watch things in Japanese for hours a day every day how hard

can it be I didn't realize the extent of my crippling video game addiction so what did I do to solve this nothing I still have crippling video game addiction unable to force myself to sit there for hours on end every day consuming Japanese content i instead just embraced passive listening and turn to audio content for the vast majority of my immersion now when you're like me and you have a job that requires driving around in a car all day you can actually rack up a ton of listening hours because all you really have to do

is not listen to music and choose to listen to Japanese instead you can extrapolate this to any other part of your life where usually you'd listen to music or some other audio content but instead now you're just going to listen to Japanese this is basically basically exactly what I did I took a gap Year from college around the time I was getting into Japanese and for this entire year I essentially just listened to Japanese while driving around at my job every day and making flash cards to learn words when I was at home at first

I could literally understand nothing I went into this very blind and with the blind assumption that if I just keep listening to this and keep learning words I'm going to be able to understand it at some point now this wasn't really the most efficient way to go about things and honestly if I had more of a foundation in grammar and vocabulary then I probably would have gotten better a lot quicker but by doing this essentially just learned that grammar study is completely unnecessary if you don't want to do it also just to be clear when

I say you don't need to study grammar I mean that you don't need to go memorize all of the rules to it you still need to be aware that ta equals past tense or that the T form exists but you don't need to go learn every single rule that governs conjugations you can learn all of that stuff naturally just by picking it up and that's what I did now this doesn't mean that I don't recommend studying fundamental grammar because it will definitely give you a head start but this tells me that the most important thing

by far is just getting a ton of exposure to Japanese during this first year my comprehension basically went from zero to being able to understand the general rough meaning of most simple speech about everyday topics I kept doing this for a few years and progressively kept increasing the difficulty of the things I was listening to until eventually I noticed I was pretty much able to easily understand content made for native speakers that's basically the short version of How I Learned Japanese I wasn't entirely doing only passive listening but I would say it was probably around

80 to 90% of all of the time that I spent listening to Japanese KN okay so you're probably thinking okay cool I get it but are you actually going to tell us about how long it took what I should be listening to how many hours I should be putting in every day and hold on I'll get there just a second the main reason that I just spent all of this time rambling about this is because I really just want to emphasize how powerful something that is seemingly so simple and easy can actually be and how

effective it is to learn Japanese by just doing this simple trick I know it sounds funny learn Japanese using this one simple trick Japanese language teachers hate him but honestly it's true you don't need to sit there with your head in a textbook memorizing grammar you really just need to spend as much time as possible listening to Japanese while we're here I probably should mention the difference between passive listening and background listening passive listening which is what I'm advocating you do in this video is listening to content while you're doing other things but you're still

giving most of your attention to it and you're trying your best to understand the language coming into your ears background immersion on the other hand is when you're completely focused on something else but you still have listening material on in the background that you're not really paying attention to and sometimes you might pick up something small here and there that could be helpful but in reality it's not really that important so do it if you want don't do it if you want it's not really that big of a deal having attention on what you're listening

to is really important for this entire process to work effectively so if you end up zoning out everything then you're not really going to make much progress that being said sometimes you're not able to pay full attention and sometimes you accidentally zone out and lose track of what you were listening to and this is normal so you shouldn't really worry about it too much it happens to everybody you just want to get back on track when you notice this happening okay now that that's out of the way let's talk a little bit more about specifics

on what you should actually be doing to make the most out of your time doing this now I got a ton of comments on my last video asking what should I listen to what podcast do you recommend and I did put a spreadsheet in the description that someone in the community made that has like a hundred podcast on it and I'll link that again here but I do actually have some recommendations for what you should start out with now in the last video I made I talked a lot about comprehensible input and how comprehensibility is

really important because you need something to cling on to when you're listening something to make connections with the new information that you're getting this is why I actually recommend starting with materials that are made for Learners and for like my entire first year of doing immersion learning I was mostly listening to podcasts that were made for Learners and I made a ton of progress doing this now I do think there's a slight distinction between stuff that is still natural Japanese But ultimately made for Learners and things that are essentially just baby talk for lack of

a better word when I say learner materials I'm not talking about the stuff that sounds like they're talking to you as if you're a 4-year-old I'm talking more about the content that's made with the consideration that the people listening are language learners but without letting that be a detriment to the naturalness of the speech there are actually quite a few Japanese podcasts made by natives for Learners and if you spend even a second searching you're going to find a lot of them pretty easily by far the podcast that I listened to the most in the

beginning was this one called nongo K which is essentially just a middle-aged Japanese guy talking about random stuff for like 10 to 20 minutes and there are literally thousands of episodes that he's made to me this was a very good introduction to real Japanese that allowed me to build familiarity with everyday topics and to build a baseline of comprehension up without feeling like I was being talked to like a baby all while still being easy enough to actually grow my ability at a steady rate he also has a separate podcast which is specifically made for

beginners but I feel like it kind of falls into that category that I mentioned earlier where it's a little bit like you're being talked to as if you're a 4-year-old so I would only recommend it to you if you're completely brand new to Japanese and I wouldn't stick with it for too long one of the other podcasts that I really enjoyed and felt a significant amount of improvement by listening to was called yuyu's Japanese podcast it's very similar to the previous one that I just mentioned except I would rate the difficulty of it to be

just a little bit more advanced and there seems to be slightly more diversity in the topics that he discusses [Music] these are both great resources and they helped me a ton when I was building my comprehension to the point of understanding most daily conversation like I said earlier there are actually a lot of these types of podcasts so I'll put links to a bunch of them in the description and I encourage you to look around and find ones that you like at some point you're going to outgrow the stuff made for Learners and at that

point you're just going to want to start listening to stuff made for native speakers it doesn't really matter when you start doing this and honestly if you're starting to feel like learner materials are becoming easy then it's better just to jump into content made for natives than to keep waiting there's going to be a period of time where stuff made for Learners feels relatively easy but stuff made for natives still feels a little bit Out Of Reach and to break free from this stage you're just going to have to jump into native content and figure

it out it's kind of like a sink or swim type thing also so it's not a black and white thing where you should only be listening to one or the other honestly just listen to whatever you feel like listening to if you find it enjoyable then just listen to that and honestly that's going to be good enough okay so I got a lot of questions asking how you're supposed to actually build comprehension if you understand literally nothing like I've mentioned already you're only going to learn by listening when you understand a word or structure that

you wouldn't have understood by itself but by hearing it in context you're able to grasp the idea intuitively and by repeating this cycle for long enough your comprehension will steadily climb now because doing this process requires a baseline of comprehension a lot of people ask me how you're supposed to start from zero and just expect to understand at the very beginning of the process expecting to understand whole sentences or concepts is unrealistic because you don't know any vocabulary and you haven't gotten used to things like sentence structure particles this is why in the very beginning

rather than focusing on trying to understand Concepts you want to just focus on learning the most common words by some other means and I recommend donkey for this and while you're listening try to be able to pick out those words from within the speech when you're new to a language it's pretty difficult to actually listen to The Raw sounds and pick out Words which you might have already learned already but because you haven't spent much time with Native speech even hearing them is difficult and you're often going to completely Miss words that you already know

the meaning to building up the ability to recognize words that you know is essential so while you're still focused on learning basic vocabulary and grammar your listening should have a focus on doing that something I did a lot to overcome this beginner stage was listening to the same podcast episode many times each time understanding it slightly better than than the previous time that I listened to it this was helpful because I was able to build a high degree of familiarity with a single piece of content and push the peak of what I could understand to

hire in a more controlled environment now I've only really mentioned podcasts so far in this video but there's actually other stuff you can listen to and one of those is called condensed audio condensed audio is essentially just taking an anime or a TV show and shrinking it down to only the dialogue and then turning it into an audio file that you can listen to I'll put links in the description where you can find out how to do this or where to download ones that people have already made and uploaded now in the comments of my

last video there were a lot of people asking if Japanese music counts as passive immersion and asking what the benefits of listening to music are now I'm not going to straight up say that listening to music is useless because it's not and it's definitely better than listening to things in English but for the sake of building up your comprehension of spoken speech it's not really that useful music can be a really good motivator and if you look up the lyrics to songs then you can learn a lot of vocabulary from music but I wouldn't really

say that it's useful in the same way that listening to spoken speeches now I probably should address the elephant in the room how much should you actually be immersing every day to make significant progress now the answer is pretty vague but it's always going to be that the more you immerse the better you're going to get and the faster you're going to get there a lot of people who say do an immersion method advocate for the idea that you should just be listening 24/7 or at least as much as possible get like eight plus hours

a day in my experience this is kind of Overkill and while yeah it is really effective to listen for8 Plus hours a day you don't actually need to do that to feel significant progress if someone told you that they were watching TV shows or anime or YouTube for eight plus hours a day then you probably would think wow they're going to get good at Japanese really fast now the advantage that I think passive immersion and specifically podcasts have is that there is literally zero downtime in what you're listening to if you're watching anime for example

then you can assume that at least for a certain percentage of that show there's going to be a large portion of time where you're not listening to any dialogue and when you compound that over a long period of watching then it can actually have a pretty big effect on the results if you assume that about 40 or 50% of a show consists of bits without dialogue then by watching 4 hours you could probably assume that in reality the amount of language you're actually contacting is closer to 2 hours in the same way if you intently

listen to podcast for about 4 hours the total amount of language you're contacting would be considered about the same as watching s or eight hours of anime if you consider this then it's not really that difficult to imagine that if you were to listen to 3 four 5 hours of Japanese every day then it would actually compound into a a lot of time with the language and you would get pretty fast results this actually happened to me and I feel like because I primarily did passive immersion where there's no breaks and what you're listening to

I got the same results as people who are watching anime for like8 Plus hours a day even though I wasn't doing as much time as them now don't get me wrong you absolutely should be spending as much time as possible with Japanese if you're looking to get good results ultimately it's still a numbers game and you're trying to reach thousands of hours if you really want to get proficient in this language so the more the better at the very least I think you should be going for at least 2 hours of immersion a day and

ideally more if you can but I know not everyone has the time to do that so 2 hours I think you can probably get some pretty solid results without putting in too much time every day although at the end of the day learning a language is a huge time commitment so expecting to do it without putting in that time commitment is a little bit unrealistic now something you can do to keep yourself accountable if you'd like is tracking your immersion and this is personally something I've been doing for years at this point there's this website

that I use called toggle track which lets you set timers and automatically add those timers to running totals and then it gives you statistics that you can look at there's also an app version which I found to be super convenient and really easy to use so if you're someone who's into gamifying things then I would actually really recommend it there is a premium version and it might say that you're under a limited trial or you have limited features but really those limited features are just for people who are using it in big groups or as

a team and for individual use like we're using it for it's completely unnecessary so you don't have to pay for anything the last thing I want to touch on is tolerating ambiguity and I already mentioned this but at the beginning of the process you're not going to be able to understand anything and it's essential to keep pushing yourself forward in order to see results it might be hard to force yourself to listen to things that you can't understand very well for hours on end but building this meta skill of allowing yourself to be okay with

ambiguity is really crucial for Success you shouldn't expect yourself to instantly understand things and if you're going into it with the mindset that you're doing it wrong if you can't understand much then you're just setting yourself up for disappointment learning a language is something that takes multiple years of commitment even when you spend multiple hours a day doing it so rather than viewing it as a race it's important to treat it like a marathon and just trust that if you keep going you'll get there eventually I really hope this video helped you if there's one

thing that I want to leave at the end of this video it's that it doesn't really matter what you do so just chill out keep listening to the language and you'll get there eventually it's not such a serious thing so don't worry about it too much if you just keep going you're going to get there anyways thank you so much for the support on my last video and so many people left nice comments and I just want to say that I appreciate all of them and if you have anything you really want me to talk

about then leave it in the comments and I might make a video about it anyways that's about it see you guys later