In a listening question you will not understand every word, and you do not need to. You need to catch the question word and the detail it points at.
This single skill is worth more than a hundred additional vocabulary items.
The set
| Word | Asks for | Typical answer |
|---|---|---|
| なに / なん | what | an object, a thing |
| どこ | where | a place |
| いつ | when | a time or day |
| だれ | who | a person |
| いくら | how much (money) | a price |
| いくつ | how many | a count |
| どう / どうやって | how | a method |
| どうして / なぜ | why | a reason (から) |
| どの / どれ / どちら | which | a choice between options |
Why it matters more in listening than reading
In reading you can look again. In listening the clip plays and is gone, so the question must be held in mind while you listen.
Which is why the best habit in the section is: read the question before the clip starts, identify the question word, and listen only for that. The exam gives you the question on screen first precisely because this is expected.
Match the word to the answer type
This is how you eliminate options quickly:
- If the question is いつ, every option that is not a time is wrong.
- If the question is どこ, ignore the prices.
- If the question is どうして, the answer is nearly always the clause ending in から or ので.
Sounds obvious on paper. Under a clock, with a clip half-understood, candidates routinely choose a word they definitely heard rather than a word that answers the question. The clip is full of things you heard.
The どの trap
どの questions ask you to choose between several similar things - which glove, which train, which form. The clip will mention all of them and eliminate all but one.
The elimination usually arrives late in the clip, and often as a negative: 黒いのは ありません, or その つぎの えきです. Keep listening to the end. Answering from the first item mentioned is the single most common error in the section.
Practise the skill on its own
Take any Japanese clip with a transcript. Before listening, write one question about it using a question word. Listen once. Answer. Only then read the transcript.
That is what the exam asks you to do, and almost no self-study routine practises it, because most people listen first and question afterwards.
The listening section covers the rest of the technique, and our free exam demo runs twelve listening items under exam rules - the question on screen first, the audio twice, then gone.