I'm reading zero no tsukaima and I'm surprised of how much I understand of it, altough I'm still not too far from the beginning... As my main goal is to achieve reading fluency I intend to continue to prioritize this skill, but this does not mean I'm not interested also in achieving a decent listening comprehension. Futhermore I think listening could bring advantages to my reading skills too, reinforcing words readings.
Unfortunately Zero does not have an audiobook, so I was thinking, from what it is better to start? I have two options:

1) beside Zero, I could read another book which has an audiobook available, and do it at a more slow pace just to not interfere with the reading of Zero;

2) start with basic material like JapanesePod101;

Someone uses JapanesePod101? I tried to use it some time ago but it was too annoying to listen to, but I've just realized there is an audio version which contains only the dialogue, without any english chattering... And I must say the audio quality is very good, no comparison with the shitty audio of Genki and other books I've tried to listen to...

So considering my listening skills suck maybe it's better for me to start with this resource, but still it would be great to know if there are audiobooks of light novels as easy as Zero. What about Harry Potter? I've tried to read some line from the beginning and it seem more difficult than Zero but still doable... How is the audio quality of the audiobook? It sounds professional or it seems recorded in a basement with a 10$ mic?

I built my listening comprehension listening to japanese every minute of my day, and I'm actually still building.

Just a couple of things:
- Yes, listening and reading comprehension do reinforce each other
- JP101 is good for the very first months of learning, if you already understand novels I'd reccomend starting with raw stuff. Podcasts are really good for this purpose, you can get them easily with an iOS or Android device, for example.

Hope this helped

I haven't listened much, but Anytime Andante podcast is pretty easy to follow along with if you're into hearing about teenage girl things. There's a parallel english japanese transcript of some episodes too.

I hear you about Jpod101 - it's pretty annoying and I stopped listening to it for a while. I recently came back to it and now I listen to it in the car. If it wasn't for Peter, Jpod101 would be ok, so I've just decided to get over/ignore him and learn something on my way to work. The dialogs by themselves would be good if you can keep up with them (I can't yet). I've been finding that the part where the do the sentence in Japanese and then in English is pretty good for my level because I can't process Japanese at full speed yet. I think you are a little ahead of me, so maybe the raw dialogs will work better for you.

Another thing that I did a while back was listen to the core audio sentences in the car on the way to work. That was good because I already knew all of the vocabulary so it was purely listening comprehension. I made mp3 tracks with a pause after each track so that it wasn't just a solid wall of Japanese. I can get you those files if you are interested.

I listen to raw podcasts including NHK ラジオ, Tokyo FM SCANOMICS and ザボイス when away from home and when I'm at home I watch dramas and anime and sometimes let's plays and vlogs. I cannot read novels, but I have never used dumbed-down listening material and it's not necessary. I have reached a level where I can get 100% in a Japanese GCSE (British exams for 15-16 year olds (I'm 16)) without having to listen to stuff that is tailored and that I can fully understand. It's best to train yourself to struggle and to enjoy fun material like dramas without freaking out about every word and be pleasantly surprised in the exam than to feel safe with Jpod101 and struggle along in an exam. (Even if you're not planning on any exams, you get what I'm saying).

For dramas, I have a method to improve my comprehension that I started a week ago (1 cycle takes about a week):

1) Watch the drama without subtitles
2) Retreive the transcript from http://www.dramanote.com/
3) Read the transcript in yomichan (an addon for the anki digital flashcard program http://ankisrs.net/ ) https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/934748696 and automatically create flashcards of unknown words (automatically retreive example sentences for this using this anki addon https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2413435972)
4) Learn the words
5) Rip the audio from the drama and listen to it on the bus to reinforce learning.
6) Watch the next episode and repeat.

It is a really great applied way of building vocab. If you find a drama that you really enjoy, it motivates you because it gives learning the vocab an immediate purpose. Also the reinforcement of relistening, and continuing to study more episodes of a drama of the same subject really helps you remember.

I've been listening to the NHKジャーナル show now almost every day for about a year and a half, along with reading news. I'm not at perfect comprehension yet, but I've come a long way in the past year.

Beyond that, 杏のAnytime Andante, ねえねえ聞いて、and HOTCAST are all great, easy podcasts about everyday topics. I also listen to 心の電話, which is a neat little podcast whose material is written by various priests from the 曹洞宗 sect of Buddhism.

If you can read novels, by all means, find some good TV shows with 日本語字幕. A long-running series is great, as the more you watch the series, the more you can understand without the help of subs. I've been doing this with 花子とアン, and my ability to pick up what's being said has improved noticeably since Episode 1 (I'm up to #93 as of this writing).

I agree with folks about not obsessing over every word. Listen closely, and absorb as much as you can. If you feel like you can't understand a drop of anything that's being said, find something easier until you level up.

A lot of light novels and anime related stuff have drama CDs - kind of like radio plays, I think. A bit of googling shows that Zero no Tsukaima has four of them.

cophnia61 Wrote:JapanesePod101...So considering my listening skills suck maybe it's better for me to start with this resource

I'm all for doing native materials like audiobooks and radio for listening comprehension, but if you're gonna go with a study material, you really should use SRS over pre-made audio lessons. If you're studying anyway, you might as well have full control over WHAT you're studying, how often you iterate through it, etc.
Arguments for SRS:
1. you save ridiculous amounts of time by not having to iterate through things you already know over and over again
2. you go at your own pace, rather than have to deal with the annoying pre-determined pauses between sentences in a pre-made audio lesson, that are always either too short or too long
3. you're able to study difficult items more thoroughly.
Arguments for audio lessons:
1. You get a little more context than the single sentences + translations that come with an Anki deck.

I think that, given the right Anki deck, the pros easily outweigh the cons.

What I'm currently doing to work on my listening skills (aside from listening to radio) is going through Nayr's 5000 sentence deck in Anki, with the audio and sentence both in the question (I suppose it would be fine to just use audio in the question, but I want to progress with reading as well). It's a very fast pace (under 7 seconds/review, even though I always take the time to fully understand the sentence, sometimes even hit R to hear the audio again), so at least 2/3 of the review time is spent listening to audio (the audio files average a little under 5 secs in length).

And the quality of the sentences and translations is such that you're not affected much by the lack of context. On the rare occasion that more context would be needed to understand exactly how a sentence would be used in natural speech, Anki has some handy dandy delete and suspend options.

Wow thanks to all for the suggestions! In the end I'm going to try a sum of various things and see what I like best
I know SRS is ideal but it's enough for me to do core + sentences every day, so I think to SRS also audio would be too much for me xD

cophnia61 Wrote:Wow thanks to all for the suggestions! In the end I'm going to try a sum of various things and see what I like best
I know SRS is ideal but it's enough for me to do core + sentences every day, so I think to SRS also audio would be too much for me xD

You could always add audio to the front or back of your core cards. I was really liking it when I did that, but I'm usually studying in locations/situations where listening is cumbersome so my volume is usually down.

Btw, I notice you're doing sentences now. How is it working out for you?

yogert909 Wrote:

cophnia61 Wrote:Wow thanks to all for the suggestions! In the end I'm going to try a sum of various things and see what I like best
I know SRS is ideal but it's enough for me to do core + sentences every day, so I think to SRS also audio would be too much for me xD

You could always add audio to the front or back of your core cards. I was really liking it when I did that, but I'm usually studying in locations/situations where listening is cumbersome so my volume is usually down.

Btw, I notice you're doing sentences now. How is it working out for you?

In the end I decided to continue with core and I look almost always to the word only, without paying much attention to the sentence, unless it is necessary. But I have another deck where I put sentences taken from Genki and IAIJ, and in future I think I'll do the dictionaries of b/i grammar (but I'll use the already made deck xD ). So I use sentences only for grammar (sentence on front, translation on back), and I must say it's working very well. In the beginning I was like "oh shit, I recognize the grammar point because I've seen that frase soo many times" and when I encountered the same grammar points on the wild I was struggling to recognize them. But in the end is only a question of time, you'll interiorize them and I think the same goes for vocabs. Maybe in the beginning you recognize them in Anki but fail to recognize some of them in the wild, but with time this issue vanishes. This is why I'm doing (almost) vocabs only, they are faster to review, and the rest of the time is available for native material where you'll see the same words in various context and in various sentences, instead of being in the same short sentence, like it is in core. Now I just try to read and save every word I don't know, then I unsuspend them on core or I make a card for the word, if it's not on core, and I study them, and I feel it is going well despite I still feel the sensation of frustration in not being able to recognize so many words and I know this sensation is going to be with me for a long time still... But it's satisfying to think at four or five months ago and see the progress I've done! I keep myself saying this, every time I feel discouraged, because we tend to see always the negative side of things. If you recognize 90% of words on Anki, you'll keep thinking at those 10% you failed. Or if you read something and understand 9 sentences over ten, you'll keep thinking at the sentence you didn't understand. And this bring the impression you've made no progress at all. Stupid human psicology xD

I'm still tempted to start reading Harry Potter because of the audiobook, anyone have read it? How is in terms of grammar compared to zero no tsukaima?