I'm a little late to this, but I'll post my take on it anyway, someone might still find it useful...and it goes against the usual, common sense advice of "you just have to listen a lot, and eventually you'll get there". While that's true, there are things you can do to make it easier, other than "just listen a lot, even if you don't understand". Here's how:
Listening to native materials isn't just about knowing words and grammar. You can get by with that when reading (if you have really good short term memory...which people who are good at languages do...that's why they're good at it), because you're going at your own pace, so you have the time to process everything.
But, when listening to natives, they speak way too fast for that. And they don't do it by composing words into grammatically correct sentences, as they're speaking. They do it by memorizing hundreds of thousands of collocations (patterns of words commonly used together), and just repeating them without thinking. What you need, to understand them, is memorize the most common collocations. You don't need hundreds of thousands to understand most of everyday Japanese, but you do need thousands...good news is, it's thousands that use only a few hundred common words (which you presumably already know)...so, as long as you can figure out WHICH collocations to learn, it should be pretty easy.
A good start is the various sentence decks,especially Nayr's 5K...I did that deck, and, while I'm not good enough at Japanese to know for a fact that a collocation is high frequency, most of the ones used do strike me as very good (similarly, a lot of sentences in Core6K strike me as a lot less good for casual speaking). But, even with Nayr's deck, you have to be smart about it, and get rid of sentences that don't contain common collocations...it's not that hard to tell, to be honest: just ask yourself "is this something I would say to my friends, in English?". If it's not, just suspend it, because knowing how to say "That will lead to an imbalance of demand and supply." in Japanese isn't a priority if your goal is just general listening comprehension. Don't get me wrong, that is a VERY common collocation, but it's only common in economic journalism. Nowhere else. You won't hear your Japanese friends say that to you. EVER.
Also, decks made from popular, modern native media. Not sure which ones are best...perhaps it's a good idea to roll your own, or use Subs2SRS, if you're comfortable with it.
Also very helpful, participating in blogs and forums: the more casual, the better, because spoken, everyday language DOES NOT use the same collocations as literature and journalism. Casual blogs and forums (about popular culture, TV, music, NOT politics or academic subjects) do just that, helping you learn and practice high frequency collocations at your own pace. Manga can be good too, but only if it's the right kind of manga...in needs to be about everyday life in modern Japan, not scifi, fantasy or historical subjects. Yotsubato! is good, for instance...not as low level as you might think, either.
Watching something with subs (while paying special attention to any high frequency collocations you can identify...stuff you may have heard before, but weren't quite sure what it meant), and then later listening to the same thing a few times without subs, also very helpful.
Or just find stuff that achieves the same thing, on your own. Once you understand the concept of high frequency collocations, it's not that hard to figure out the specific methods that work for identifying and studying them.
P.S. Just to illustrate the importance of collocations: the example I picked, from Nayr's deck, is actually wrong (I didn't notice because I copy/pasted it). While technically correct, it's not the right collocation. The right collocation, in English, is "supply and demand", not "demand and supply". If you say "demand and supply", everyone knows right away that you're not a native speaker, even though it's 100% grammatically correct, and means exactly the same thing. That's why it's not enough to know the words...if you hear "supply and demand", and even the phrase "imbalance of supply and demand", that needs to be one item, in your mind, you don't have time to think and figure out what using the words "supply" and "demand", with an "and" between them, is supposed to refer to. And, the easiest way to be fluent, for natives and foreigners alike, is to make it not just a general phrase, where it's OK to order words differently, maybe use synonyms on occasion: the easiest way is to make it THAT EXACT phrase, every time. Never "demand and supply", or "supply and need", or "production and consumption", always EXACTLY "supply and demand". It's an unwritten, rarely articulated rule, but it IS a rule nonetheless, and you better know it if you want to be fluent.
Listening to native materials isn't just about knowing words and grammar. You can get by with that when reading (if you have really good short term memory...which people who are good at languages do...that's why they're good at it), because you're going at your own pace, so you have the time to process everything.
But, when listening to natives, they speak way too fast for that. And they don't do it by composing words into grammatically correct sentences, as they're speaking. They do it by memorizing hundreds of thousands of collocations (patterns of words commonly used together), and just repeating them without thinking. What you need, to understand them, is memorize the most common collocations. You don't need hundreds of thousands to understand most of everyday Japanese, but you do need thousands...good news is, it's thousands that use only a few hundred common words (which you presumably already know)...so, as long as you can figure out WHICH collocations to learn, it should be pretty easy.
A good start is the various sentence decks,especially Nayr's 5K...I did that deck, and, while I'm not good enough at Japanese to know for a fact that a collocation is high frequency, most of the ones used do strike me as very good (similarly, a lot of sentences in Core6K strike me as a lot less good for casual speaking). But, even with Nayr's deck, you have to be smart about it, and get rid of sentences that don't contain common collocations...it's not that hard to tell, to be honest: just ask yourself "is this something I would say to my friends, in English?". If it's not, just suspend it, because knowing how to say "That will lead to an imbalance of demand and supply." in Japanese isn't a priority if your goal is just general listening comprehension. Don't get me wrong, that is a VERY common collocation, but it's only common in economic journalism. Nowhere else. You won't hear your Japanese friends say that to you. EVER.
Also, decks made from popular, modern native media. Not sure which ones are best...perhaps it's a good idea to roll your own, or use Subs2SRS, if you're comfortable with it.
Also very helpful, participating in blogs and forums: the more casual, the better, because spoken, everyday language DOES NOT use the same collocations as literature and journalism. Casual blogs and forums (about popular culture, TV, music, NOT politics or academic subjects) do just that, helping you learn and practice high frequency collocations at your own pace. Manga can be good too, but only if it's the right kind of manga...in needs to be about everyday life in modern Japan, not scifi, fantasy or historical subjects. Yotsubato! is good, for instance...not as low level as you might think, either.
Watching something with subs (while paying special attention to any high frequency collocations you can identify...stuff you may have heard before, but weren't quite sure what it meant), and then later listening to the same thing a few times without subs, also very helpful.
Or just find stuff that achieves the same thing, on your own. Once you understand the concept of high frequency collocations, it's not that hard to figure out the specific methods that work for identifying and studying them.
P.S. Just to illustrate the importance of collocations: the example I picked, from Nayr's deck, is actually wrong (I didn't notice because I copy/pasted it). While technically correct, it's not the right collocation. The right collocation, in English, is "supply and demand", not "demand and supply". If you say "demand and supply", everyone knows right away that you're not a native speaker, even though it's 100% grammatically correct, and means exactly the same thing. That's why it's not enough to know the words...if you hear "supply and demand", and even the phrase "imbalance of supply and demand", that needs to be one item, in your mind, you don't have time to think and figure out what using the words "supply" and "demand", with an "and" between them, is supposed to refer to. And, the easiest way to be fluent, for natives and foreigners alike, is to make it not just a general phrase, where it's OK to order words differently, maybe use synonyms on occasion: the easiest way is to make it THAT EXACT phrase, every time. Never "demand and supply", or "supply and need", or "production and consumption", always EXACTLY "supply and demand". It's an unwritten, rarely articulated rule, but it IS a rule nonetheless, and you better know it if you want to be fluent.
Edited: 2016-04-07, 8:22 am