Active Immersion

After spending at least a few months building up vocabulary and grammar understanding, you can try doing active listening. Think of it as a sequel to intensive reading. You can also call it “intensive listening”, I suppose, but I refer to it as “active” to underline it being the opposite of “passive” (the technique I am about to talk about doesn’t come down to just actively paying attention to your immersion, though). Alternatively, you can spend however much time you want just doing reading and passive listening. A year, if you want. Would hardly be a waste. Especially if spoken Japanese isn’t your extremely time-sensitive priority. If it is though — yeah, depending on how fanatic you’ve been with the previous steps, you might be ready to dip your toes into active listening even after just a few months of reading. If you want and mentally capable of doing this as your main Japanese activity, it can completely replace reading (just mine using this method instead of reading).

• Find a piece of media like a TV/episodic show or a movie that is intended for native speakers and has Japanese subtitles. Yes, anime is totally fine. Preferably get something you can download and play locally on your computer (once again, you’re most likely going to have to torrent it): web players aren’t quite as good for what you need, but if you absolutely have to use some kind of netflix — it’s not a deal breaker. Also, use headphones whenever possible.

• If you are playing it back locally, configure your player so that you can easily jump back and forward an interval of about 3 seconds (even 5 would be too much). Control the player using the keyboard, obviously. I recommend VLC. It isn’t especially fantastic, but has a very solid feature set.

• Listen to the first line and immediately pause. Did you get it? Probably not. Read the subtitles. Did that help? Probably not. Skip back and listen one more time: try to follow the subtitles as the line is being spoken. If the sentence doesn’t make much sense to you, look up the words you don’t know and try understanding it to the best of your ability without going too deep into things like new grammar (just ignore confusing stuff as long as it’s not absolutely critical for understanding the meaning). Listen to the line a bunch more times simultaneously following the subtitles until you’re confident you are clearly making out all the words being said (a few dozen times even, if you have patience for it). Turn the subtitles off and play it one more time (just for testing, don’t do this every time!). Can you repeat it? Would you be able to write it down right now? Basically, what you just did was an extremely effective neural exercise that connects exact sounds you’ve just trained yourself to identify in a string against others to words you understand (or at least in the process of remembering). That’s the full package, isn’t it? Phonetics, meaning, spelling. Well, congratulations: you’ve just been told the secret to becoming fluent. Now do this for a few months and you’ll literally understand 100% of the language you are capable of understanding vocabulary- and grammar-wise: you’ll pretty much have native-level hearing. Some accents will be throwing you off of course, but only time and experience can remedy that. Guess what: accents are throwing off natives as well. A lot. Don’t worry about it.

• Similar to how I recommended with reading practice, try to extract meaning from context as much as you can before looking things up (and even instead of looking up — just make an assumption, risk being wrong — who cares? you’ll correct yourself the next time you encounter this word and realize that it doesn’t make sense the way you understood it last time). Also feel free to completely skip some of the stuff that has just too much stuff to look up: if fact, do it quite often to save yourself some sanity here and there. Moving forward is extremely important: even if sometimes it means skipping a sentence with that sweet new knowledge waiting to be mined. If there is too much of it there, you will probably not process it all anyway (i.e. forget immediately). Remember: if you feel like you are missing out on truly appreciating what you are watching by skipping too much of it, you can always rewatch stuff later when you’re closer to fluency (right now, with constant pausing and rewinding, you’re not in the “appreciating” territory anyway). In fact, you probably should.

• Depending on how much time and effort you put into this, at some point you’ll be pausing-reading-rewinding-playing out of habit rather than necessity. The thing you need to be on the lookout for is this: as soon as you realize you pretty much hear and identify all the words even if you don’t necessarily get final meanings of sentences — it’s a sign that you can finally start saying goodbye to subtitles. Try doing the same thing you’ve been doing but turn the subtitles off. The next step is the most challenging one — start eliminating pausing. Let as many lines as you can go by as long as you can follow the plot and pause only when you absolutely have to (or want). Maybe go back to some of the content you went though in the past and see if you can now watch it as a normal human being.

Having trouble finding stuff with subtitles? Nyaa, search bar: jpn sub / jap sub / jp sub. Try all three options, at least one of them will give you a lot of results.
Of course if we are talking anime you can find lots of subs on kitsunekko.net. If their subs aren’t timed correctly for the version of the anime that you have, you can offset them in VLC with the delay function (just fyi, you really should have the VLC’s HUD on for that, in case you have it off), but I must warn you that for some reason offsetting subs timing in VLC makes the player run reeeally laggy. Even Light Alloy could do that 20 years ago, and everything worked not only smoothly but was also 50 times easier to do (offsetting subs, I mean). Unfortunately, you don’t really have many other options these days, let alone better ones.

Don’t forget that you can modify the subtitles’ formatting in VLC. If subs don’t display correctly, try changing default encoding to Japanese Unix or other similar options.