Japanese people doing business in English often find listening to spoken English very difficult. This is often hard for those who have not listened to English since high school. They need to work so hard in the beginning. Often they need to ‘retrain’ their ears; how a native English speaker pronounces English words is different to their Japanese teachers did ten years ago.

Moreover, there are fundamental differences between the different rhythms of English and Japanese. Unlike in Japanese, English stress in a sentence falls much more heavily on the key content, which is normally new information.

For example.

‘I’m Helen, nice to meet you’

Obviously, ‘Helen’ and ‘meet’ are stressed. All the other words, ‘I’m', ‘to’ and ‘you’ are more obvious from the situation, so they unstressed. However, I often hear this mistake: my student stresses the ‘you’, rather than their own name. They are trying to show interest and be polite, but unfortunately the heavy stress on ‘you’ can sound scary! A rough rule is to stress first the verbs and then nouns that carry new information.

Let’s look at the stress in the reply:

‘I’m Asami, nice to meet you, too‘.

As the name is also important information, ‘Asami’ should be stressed. There is new information, ‘you too’. The rule is ’stress new information’.

Therefore, ‘Asami’ and ‘you too’ is said with more emphasis.

When you are listening to English it can sometimes just sound like noise. Very fast noise! It’s frustrating to hear and not understand. I face this problem every time I listen to Japanese. The important thing? Pay attention to the sounds that jump out at you. Look them up in a dictionary or ask the speaker to repeat.

What do you do with the sounds that jump out at you? Expect that these sounds are either words for verbs or key nouns, e.g., new information. This new information gives you a ‘way in’ to understanding a little more. You may not get 100% and you may not get 50%, but you will get a little more, every time you stop saying to yourself ‘I don’t understand’ and say instead ‘What was that sound?’.
and ‘I wonder what it means’.

Finally, I really recommend that you start to listen to English outside your work. Listen to movies, listen to radio, listen to podcasts, listen to music. Anything that gets you used to English conversation, vocabulary, rhythm and helps your brain to process sounds into meaning. I promise that English will start to sound like a language you understand and enjoy.