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.

(2016-04-07, 8:04 am)Stansfield123 Wrote: 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.

Thanks for this post Stansfield.

The lead teacher for Japan's largest language school emphasized this exact point to me a few years back. To paraphrase her key points:

- For westerners, Japanese grammar, vocabulary and writing is so far removed from those of our languages, that we need to memorize common phrases. As an English speaker, we have a lot of "grab bars" in Spanish, French, Italian, etc. Not so with Japanese

- As one moves from teenager towards adulthood, active memorization becomes increasingly important.

For me, the "grab bars" make learning latin-based languages fun and quite easy. That made me "anti memorization" and (with the benefit of hindsight) was a mistake for learning Japanese.

Another point; I am not convinced science has a good (or even rudimentary) understanding of how memory works. Perhaps good short-term memory (whatever that may be) is important but retaining information for longer periods is more important. Interestingly, my good Chinese friends who are learning Japanese benefit from said "grab bars." Because they had to memorize so many hanzi as children, they tend to be good at rapid memorization. But a lot of my close Chinese friends admit that they "forget" everything a few days after a test; they say they are leveraging their Chinese as much as possible in daily life. I don't think they are forgetting so much but this helps me see the value of SRS.

(2016-04-07, 10:19 am)scooter1 Wrote:

(2016-04-07, 8:04 am)Stansfield123 Wrote: 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.

Thanks for this post Stansfield.

The lead teacher for Japan's largest language school emphasized this exact point to me a few years back. To paraphrase her key points:

- For westerners, Japanese grammar, vocabulary and writing is so far removed from those of our languages, that we need to memorize common phrases. As an English speaker, we have a lot of "grab bars" in Spanish, French, Italian, etc. Not so with Japanese

- As one moves from teenager towards adulthood, active memorization becomes increasingly important.

For me, the "grab bars" make learning latin-based languages fun and quite easy. That made me "anti memorization" and (with the benefit of hindsight) was a mistake for learning Japanese.

Another point; I am not convinced science has a good (or even rudimentary) understanding of how memory works. Perhaps good short-term memory (whatever that may be) is important but retaining information for longer periods is more important. Interestingly, my good Chinese friends who are learning Japanese benefit from said "grab bars." Because they had to memorize so many hanzi as children, they tend to be good at rapid memorization. But a lot of my close Chinese friends admit that they "forget" everything a few days after a test; they say they are leveraging their Chinese as much as possible in daily life. I don't think they are forgetting so much but this helps me see the value of SRS.

What I mean by short term memory is this:　the average person can remember about seven distinct things, at a time. So, if the average person is presented with a list of seven random words, they can repeat them (that's an experimentally proven fact...as you can imagine, it's not that hard to test). Similarly, if an average person is presented with a seven word sentence they never heard before, they can make sense of it (as long as they know the meaning of each word, and the relevant grammar rules, and they have the time to process it all). But that's the limit, for the average person.

My point is that a person with good short term memory can manage a few extra words. Which is a very helpful skill to have, for reading comprehension in a language you're in the process of learning (on account that sentences often contain more than seven words, and it's important to be able to remember all of them, as you're processing the sentence)...but it doesn't help much with listening comprehension, because, even though you can make sense of longer sentences, you don't have time to. The next sentence has already started...your short term memory is useless, you need to have stored the entire sentence, as a long term, single item in your memory.

P.S. I would like to add that, even with Japanese (which has unusual grammar, compared to Latin languages), grammar is not that important. If you have the ability to remember the ten words that make up a complex sentence, and know what each word means, more often than not you can figure out the meaning of the sentence, even without having any idea of the grammar rules. Also knowing the grammar rules helps, sure (might even help you get away with not knowing the meaning of a word or two), but it's not essential.

As an update,  I've been watching Jdrama's recently along with the NHK News at 7.  I was wondering if listening to audiobooks is a good idea? My first reaction was no because it is a verbal transcription of written language.  But then I thought maybe it would be helpful overall.  I have an audiobook of Harry Potter in Japanese.  Should I go through it?  I'm pracicing for N1 level and beyond.

I think it's a great idea! The book is rather long so you can get a good amount of listening for it. If you want read HP, here they are in html and txt format (along with other few innocent books). http://forum.koohii.com/thread-5011-post...l#pid60992

(2016-04-28, 12:44 pm)RawrPk Wrote: I think it's a great idea! The book is rather long so you can get a good amount of listening for it. If you want read HP, here they are in html and txt format (along with other few innocent books). http://forum.koohii.com/thread-5011-post...l#pid60992

Thanks for the link.  It's helpful to have the text when you don't pick up something by listening.

I've been listening to an audiobook of The Hobbit which I got from Febe, though it's been pretty tough going.

(2016-04-28, 1:35 pm)anotherjohn Wrote: I've been listening to an audiobook of The Hobbit which I got from Febe, though it's been pretty tough going.

Yeah, that's what I thought.  I'll try later though.  I have a large vocabulary as I stated earlier in the thread but I would think that a lot of words used in books like this,  people are not used to hearing but show up in written form.

(2016-04-28, 12:05 pm)PotbellyPig Wrote: As an update,  I've been watching Jdrama's recently along with the NHK News at 7.  I was wondering if listening to audiobooks is a good idea? My first reaction was no because it is a verbal transcription of written language.  But then I thought maybe it would be helpful overall.  I have an audiobook of Harry Potter in Japanese.  Should I go through it?  I'm pracicing for N1 level and beyond.

Yes, sure. In preparing for N1, I did a listening-reading of the first two Harry Potter books, and listened to the books repeatedly. I liked listening to it on my commute home. There's a lot of dialogue and the narration is in a very conversational tone anyway, so I wouldn't really worry about it being written language. I mean, strictly speaking it is, but I don't think that makes it bad practice.

It's read at quite a relaxed pace, which can make it a good bridge if you're struggling with faster material. On the other hand, it won't help you learn to listen to lightning-fast speech. Then again, the N1 listening test is also spoken at a relaxed pace.

(2016-04-28, 6:03 pm)SomeCallMeChris Wrote:

(2016-04-28, 12:05 pm)PotbellyPig Wrote: As an update,  I've been watching Jdrama's recently along with the NHK News at 7.  I was wondering if listening to audiobooks is a good idea? My first reaction was no because it is a verbal transcription of written language.  But then I thought maybe it would be helpful overall.  I have an audiobook of Harry Potter in Japanese.  Should I go through it?  I'm pracicing for N1 level and beyond.

Yes, sure. In preparing for N1, I did a listening-reading of the first two Harry Potter books, and listened to the books repeatedly. I liked listening to it on my commute home. There's a lot of dialogue and the narration is in a very conversational tone anyway, so I wouldn't really worry about it being written language. I mean, strictly speaking it is, but I don't think that makes it bad practice.

It's read at quite a relaxed pace, which can make it a good bridge if you're struggling with faster material. On the other hand, it won't help you learn to listen to lightning-fast speech. Then again, the N1 listening test is also spoken at a relaxed pace.

Does anyone have the audiobooks for Harry Potter I can get? We can trade? Maybe bad practice, but... Anyway if someone has audiobooks (not just HP) please PM me!

Here is a video playlist for the first chapter of HP1.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...Ozqxv0VH0L

I've never actually looked at Erin's challenge before. I like the advanced skits, they're sort of my speed. I listen to more advanced stuff but its nice to feel like I'm actually totally sure of whats going on. I think the best option is always jdramas with subtitles, exspecially at such an advanced level as 37k words. I probably know about 2-3k (I'm not entirely sure... there's a lot of stuff I know just from repitious listening alone and not anki) and I can follow the story of a jdrama that way. Really, context, setting, facial expressions, tone and just knowing the premise of the show can really help you work out words. And people's diffferent accents, level of slurriness etc is something you really have to learn to deal with because that's what speaking to people is like. I also like to listen to really casual podcasts, which get much more slurry and slangy than any j-drama. I think though, some dramas will be worse than others. Somehow I had a great problem with GTO because it seemed way faster and slurrier than nay modern jdrama for some reason. So I gave up on that one. I feel like anime characters have clearer voices but jdrama characters have real voices and more regular ways of speaking. So I would generally say a day-to-day sort of drama is best. News and stuff requires such diverse specialist language and not as much auxilliary clues. Plus nobody speaks like a news person.