I am watching dramas with subs in Japanese or more like pausing, reading the Japanese subtitles, playing the video, going back and forth 2 or 3 times, making sense of it, and moving on to the next line.

To complement this I am downloading the video with DownloadHelper (Firefox) then extracting the audio with QuickTime, trimming the intro / ending music sequences and importing it to iTunes for listening practice.

Have you tried this? How'd it go?

[s0apgun]

You should check out the program Subs2SRS it has a lot of functionality, see NukeMarine's video series on the program.