“What on earth are you talking about?” You may ask.

“My ears work the same listening to English as they do Japanese… or any other language, don’t they?”

Well, yes. Certainly, you are hearing just as much, but are you listening to it in a way which is improving your language ability? 

Lend me your aforementioned ears for a moment and let’s explore how you can make the most of everyday listening.

Sounds different!

Perhaps you have heard it said that English is a stress-based language and Japanese isn’t. Or the infamous, “Japanese is flat” which is earnestly expressed by the same people who will glissando an “eeehhhhhhhhhhh” of surprise a moment later when hearing that you are not only able to eat sushi but do so willingly.

A mere moment of casual eavesdropping on a Japanese conversation (does it count as eavesdropping when you don’t understand the language?) will show you just how far from true this is. It will also reveal a lot more.

All well and good..

However, as you may already be thinking, hanging about and listening to other people’s conversations is generally considered bad form. Unfortunately for us eager language learners this is as true in Japan as it is in the rest of the world. So, how can you listen to all this invaluable information without being a social pariah? Well, it’s not so much how, but where.

Consider yourself

You want to be somewhere where you can become part of the furniture. An inconspicuous smudge in the background of the canvas of Japanese daily life. Childlike, seen but not heard. You get the idea. There are a few excellent starting points for this. 

There is a good chance if you are reading this that you came to Japan to teach English. If that happens to be in a Japanese school then there is also a good chance that you’ll be spending a fair bit of time in the staffroom. This is a gold mine for the ears. 

Any Japanese office environment is good. Probably the best shortcut to being surrounded by the language regularly and for an extended period of time. 

Failing this, you may enjoy going out for a meal or a drink of an evening. Again prime pickings.

Find a quiet stool at a bar. Or a corner of a cafe. Once the initial excitement of having a foreign customer has worn off, allow yourself to be forgotten about.

The stuff we are looking for here is background chatter between native speakers.

When people speak directly to you they will often tailor their mode of speech in an attempt to help you understand. Admittedly, often having the opposite effect and leading to further confusion. This means in general it will be less useful for you as a learning tool. That is unless your goal is to develop an air of patient condescension in your spoken Japanese, which, in the interests of your future friendships, I cannot recommend. 

So! You’ve found your spot at your desk/table/bar. Now what are we listening for?

Everyday actions have everyday sounds. 

Imagine hearing the word

“Hello”. 

Done it?

Now do it again but imagine it’s about to be followed up with

“… is anybody home?”

It changed a bit, right? Bit of a sing-song edge perhaps? Or an upward inflection? 

There are only a very few ways to voice “hello” in that particular circumstance which if deviated from will sound unusual or nonnative.

The same goes for Japanese.

Wrapping your ears around the everyday conversations of native speakers will give you invaluable insights into speech patterns, inflection, and pronunciation. This is particularly useful in the very early stages of learning. That is to say; you don’t need to know what all the individual words mean to be able to glean some sense of what is being said. Let them wash over you, allow yourself to tune into the rhythm and flow of each sentence. The back and forth rally from one speaker to the other. The timings and frequency of an active listener’s punctuations. 

You’ll soon find that inflection alone will allow you to know that someone has asked a question and another has answered it. You should also be able to discern the mood and attitude of the participants with a fair degree of accuracy. Even from a very early stage you might be surprised by how much you can understand from each interaction. 

With your ears tuned in and expectant, patterns will start to reveal themselves over time. There are only so many ways to answer a phone. Or start a morning meeting. Or leave the office. Or hail a waiter. Or order a beer. Or greet an old friend…

Each of these will have its own lilt or melody to it. You may not know exactly what all the words mean, but there is nothing stopping you from learning their tune.

Then at a later date, you may come across an example sentence in a textbook. You sound the words out and BAM. They slot right into a melody you already know. Not only that, you know the precise situation they are used in by real life Japanese people.

There has been a fair bit of academic stuff written about the connections between music and language acquisition. You don’t really need to know about it all to take advantage of this listening trick though. 

You can get as granular or as broad as you like with it. Listen for the jingle-like edge to a single phrase. Or go the other way and treat full types of conversations as songs. Either way, in time, you’ll notice snippets of language you’ve quietly been cataloguing will start jumping out at you as snatches of familiar melody in what might at first have appeared an impenetrable cacophony. 

Competing study methods.

There is often a kind of competitive edge to newcomers in Japan when it comes to Japanese ability. People will boast about how many kanji they studied each day, or how they are already halfway through their 5th textbook within the first few weeks. 

Listening is also very much a form of study. In many regards it is the best from, the most real, the most useful. It is how the Japanese themselves learned the language. No baby cracked open a textbook or downloaded a flashcard app. It can be reassuring to remember this when your companions are parading the reams of physical evidence of their knowledge gained about the place and you are wiped out from a day of listening with nothing on paper to show for it. 

Listening can also be tiring. 

It takes it out of you. I remember when I lived in the U.K., my French and Spanish friends would often say how exhausted they felt in the evening after a day of only English. I couldn’t fully empathise until after moving to Japan and experiencing it firsthand. Go easy on yourself. Don’t burn out, and enjoy taking the musicians’ approach to language learning.