hi i'm alivia and today i want to give you five great beginner japanese podcasts to use
for listening comprehension and if you have any podcast recommendations of your own let
us know down in the comments so when you're learning a new language it's really important
to dedicate a lot of time to listening to the language listening comprehension is really a
skill that you're going to have to build up over a lot of time and by putting in a lot of practice
it's not going to happen overnight listening is also a key way to actually learn the language
think of when you were a baby you weren't studying out of textbooks or doing vocab flashcards
you simply had someone who was talking to you every day and over time you learned the language
and eventually you were able to speak it on your own but if you're like me and you don't have the
opportunity to be surrounded by people who speak japanese you're going to have to substitute that
using japanese media podcasts are a really great way to do this because you don't have to be
watching something in order to do it you can put on a podcast while you're driving to work while
you're doing chores it's something that you can put on in the background while you're doing other
things so it's a really great way to squeeze in listening comprehension in a really busy
day so today i'm going to give you five podcast recommendations that are good for beginners and
i'm going to order them in generally the order i recommend that you listen to them in but i think
it's really important to be listening to a variety of sources both in speed and in the difficulty
level so you don't have to literally only listen to one podcast before moving to the next
try to mix in some of the harder ones as well to get some practice in so the first podcast is the
konnichiwa podcast so this podcast is bilingual so the hosts talk in both japanese and english and
they switch between the two throughout the podcast two of the hosts are native japanese speakers and
the third one is an american who has been living in japan for many years i think this podcast is a
good starting place if the thought of listening to a full japanese podcast is too overwhelming
because having them switch back and forth between japanese and english means that even if you don't
understand what's being said in japanese you'll understand the context and know what the topic
is from the english parts they talk about a really wide range of interesting topics usually centering
around life in japan or current events and the episodes range from 20 to 30 minutes long podcast
number two is sakura tips and this podcast is definitely the easiest full japanese podcast on
this list because the speaker talks really slowly takes lots of pauses and there's a full japanese
transcript as well as english translations for every episode so you can read that transcript
either before you read during or after to figure out what's going on and find new words and the
reason i didn't list this as the first podcast is because i think it's really important to make sure
you have some exposure to natural japanese language that is spoken at a regular pace
first because i think if this podcast is your first time practicing listening comprehension
you might have an unrealistic idea of how this language sounds and what the pace and rhythm is
like and you might pick up some bad habits if you aren't able to recognize that the speaker
is talking in a very exaggerated and slow way so that beginners can understand so once you do have
an understanding of what regular speech sounds like this is a really good podcast if speed is
something that you're struggling with and you find most podcasts are talking too fast for you
and then you can also have those transcripts to help your understanding these podcasts are
also relatively short so you can listen to almost all of them in five minutes or less
podcast number three is japanese for beginners also known as nihongo con teppei and it took me
forever to realize that the "con" is spanish which means "with" so it means japanese with
teppei i assumed that the whole title was japanese and i just couldn't figure out what that word was
the host is japanese but he also speaks spanish so he usually ends the podcast with the hasta luego
but other than that the podcast is in japanese and he speaks at a fairly natural pace so it'll
be faster than the last podcast but the good thing about these is that they're all really short so
this is really good for your first full japanese regular paste podcast because it's going to be
hard to pay attention to something that you don't fully understand especially without visual cues so
it's great that they're nice and short he also has a second podcast by the same name that looks like
this but this one is specifically for intermediate learners and the one that you're looking for looks
like this podcast number three is a newer podcast called japanese with shun and the main feature
of this podcast is that he only uses grammar structures that are found in Genki 1 so he's
very cognizant of the type of sentences that he's saying he talks slower than japanese podcasts for
beginners but faster than sakura tips so while i think it's really important to be practicing
with people who are speaking at a regular pace this podcast is a really good bridge if you're
struggling to keep up and all of these episodes are 10 minutes or less but the last minute or so
is a vocabulary list so he'll repeat any difficult words or phrases that were used in the episode and
then say what they mean in english and now the final podcast is japanese with noriko and this is
definitely the hardest podcast on my list the host talks a little bit fast and doesn't oversimplify
her language sometimes she'll have guests come on so you can listen to their conversation and many
of our episodes also have japanese transcripts so you can go to her website and read along and find
any words that are new to you and the length of her episodes range a lot anywhere from 5
to 30 minutes so you can always find one that will work for you now remember when you first
start listening to podcasts you're not going to understand anything for a while podcasts are a
lot harder than watching tv or youtube because you don't have any visual cues to let you know
what's going on it's all audio but podcasts are a lot easier to squeeze into your day if you don't
have time to sit down and watch something so if you want to improve your japanese quickly i really
recommend trying to squeeze in podcasts wherever you can during your commute when you're working
out doing chores anything where you would normally be listening to music try putting on a japanese
podcast listening comprehension takes practice and time so if you're able to pick out even one
word you should be really proud of yourself now if you have any podcast recommendations of your
own let us know down in the comments and that is all i have for today and i'll see you soon