Have you had your hearing checked?
I sometimes get one, or rather I do it myself.
Hearing tests in Japan are almost meaningless in terms of language comprehension.
Of course, there is no harm in having it done, but the scope of checking in a normal hearing test is too narrow, and you can almost certainly pass it.
In fact, people who get caught in a physical examination test are deaf to a level close to being able to get a disability certificate.
In the Japanese speaking world, mild or moderate hearing loss is often not caught, so it is recommended to have a thorough hearing test on a regular basis if possible.
Here are some types of hearing tests.
Two types of hearing tests
- Pure tone test
- speech sound test
The pure tone test is a test that we usually do in our health checkups.
In addition to this, there is a separate test called the word hearing test, which is very important for listening to words.
Pure Tone Test
The pure tone test is a test that we usually do during medical checkups, where we press a button while we hear a beeping sound.
This beeping sound is made up of only one frequency.
- 125Hz
- 250Hz
- 500Hz
- 1000Hz
- 2000Hz
- 4000Hz
- 8000Hz
The frequency changes the pitch of the sound.
The lower the number, the lower the sound and the higher the number, the higher the sound.
In Japan, it is not common to examine frequencies from 125Hz to 8000Hz in a routine physical examination.
We usually end up examining 1000Hz and 4000Hz.
As we get older, it becomes more difficult to hear high frequency sounds.
As we grow older, it becomes more difficult to hear high frequency sounds.
This pure tone test can tell you how high a frequency you are having difficulty hearing.
In most cases, the test is not that detailed, so it is not possible to determine whether or not you have difficulty hearing high pitched sounds.
I think this is a very disappointing point.
In the worst case scenario, the hearing test is OK if you can ask and answer questions with the examiner! In the worst case scenario, the hearing test is OK if you can answer questions to the examiner!
Please try to figure out how high and how difficult it is for you to hear.
Speech Sound Test
This is a test to see how well you can hear the words.
In Japan, Japanese words are played randomly, and the test is to write down the sounds that you hear.
What it means is that 20 syllables such as "a" and "ni" are randomly played in order and after a certain period of time.
The test is to write down the letters that you hear.
The results are evaluated separately for vowel recognition rate and consonant recognition rate.
In some cases, people with hearing loss not only hear muffled sounds, but also distorted sounds.
This makes it difficult to understand what they are saying, even if they can hear the sound.
For example, they may not be able to distinguish between "Katou-san" and "Satou-san".
For this reason, vowels and consonants are assessed separately in a test to see how well they can recognize words.
This test is mainly performed to check how well the person is able to recognize words after the hearing aid fitting has been adjusted.
There are many elderly people who can hear sounds but do not know what they are saying, and because they do not know what they are saying, the TV is turned up louder.
Words contain many different frequencies
The reason why there are two types of hearing tests is that the pure tone test is used to find out how high the sound is that you are having trouble hearing, not how you are actually hearing.
In the world we live in now, pure sound is only used for time signals.
The words we speak, the sounds of the natural world, and the sounds on TV contain many different frequencies.
Even the single letter "A" contains many frequencies.
This is the frequency response I get when I say "A".
You can see that it contains many different components, right?
In other words, even if you check only a certain frequency, you will not be able to recognize it as a word.
Of course, if you have trouble hearing the high frequency sounds, it will be harder to hear the consonants in the word, so you will hear more mistakes, etc.
The word discrimination test is a way to confirm that you can hear the words.
If you have never had a word valence test, I highly recommend you try it.
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