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One part of AJATT is to listen to as much Japanese as possible be it music, TV, or anime. Basically, always listen to something even if it is white noise. I had a talk with someone over instant messenger about this. They were having the same problems I had when I started trying the whole 24 hours of Japanese audio. It hurt after a while. When I was starting I literally got headaches after listening to a couple of hours of Japanese because it wasn’t white noise yet. I was actively trying to listen and do other things.

One thing we can do with our native language is listen for hours without actually hearing what is being said. That is the goal with turning Japanese to white noise. However, it does come with some difficulties because at first we aren’t used to hearing it so it really messes with our brains when it is pure words. Music is fairly easy for our brain to process as white noise since it is rhythmic. Conversation and narration on the other hand is hard and coarse so we need to ease into it.

I can now listen to Japanese conversation with little to no problems keeping it as white noise with no ill effects. Here is some of what I did to do that.

Watch anime while doing other stuff – This sucked to some degree because I kept wanting to watch the anime, but it had an interesting side effect. I would tune in and out of the show allowing my brain to force the Japanese to white noise. Gradually over time this helped train my brain that it is okay to have Japanese as white noise.

Learning Japanese Podcasts – Podcasts like JapanesePod101 really helped too because they will speak both English and Japanese during the show so it is another way to help your brain make the transition to allowing Japanese be white noise. Key is you have to listen to the show as white noise.

Brute Force – At the end of the day the goal is hearing Japanese and putting it as white noise so another thing I did was short sessions of audio. I would launch a conversation rich J-Drama and minimize it while programming, and when the episode was over turn on some music. That way it gives bursts of conversation and speech, but not so much it would give me headaches.

LOTS of Active Listening – This kind of goes against the grain, but when trying to build a tolerance to something; you need A LOT of whatever it is. In this case we need to hear a LOT of Japanese. So the best way is to do so is to watch a lot of anime and j-drama to get used to hearing it more and more and more, and in context. Then use the above methods to let your brain know that is ok for it to be white noise while you aren’t paying attention.

These are things that worked for me. Hopefully if you are having trouble like I did this will help you or maybe parts of it will help you. If you have had a similar problem how were able to get past it?