Thanks so much for recommending Teppei! I have finished(!) all levels of WaniKani and am slowly trying to read more and learn more grammar, but I’ve really been putting off any dedicated listening practice.
I just listened to 5 episodes of this and understood tons. It’s such a gentle introduction to listening, and he has a pretty delightful personality. And he seems to have a great intuition for when to repeat things too. I will definitely be listening to more!
A couple related trivia tidbits:
しらねえ しらんAll this to say, it takes time to train your brain to this language but you’ll get there. 
In my personal experience, around Bunpro level N3 and wanikani level 25 you reach the point where reading several manga bubbles in the row without consulting dictionary or grammar becomes more and more common. At that point it also becomes possible to understand 4-5 lines in songs in the row just by listening.
(It helps that lots of songs share lots of vocab, especially 一人、二人、抱きしめて、会いたい、笑顔 , and they tend to repeat lines)
If you only tried the ones the middle you might want to try again at the beginning. They get harder as they go on. (But yeah, at 4 months in it might still be too hard.)
Learning a language is a slooooow process. Not several months, but several years.
I’m a native German speaker, after 3 years of daily English classes I started watching movies/reading simple books in English. Just for comparision. (Some classmates started earlier, I wasn’t that good a student tbf lol)
As someone else mentioned as well, Japanese has the added difficulty of the several formality levels. I’m very comfortable listening to Teppei’s podcasts, or other resources that use です・ます形. Sure, there’s some words I’m missing, but with context I can usually figure out the main gist. However a news report (more formal) or the average YouTube video (more casual)? Nahhhh, I’m out completely. Of course, what you understand does depend on what you practice. I originally learned with Minna no Nihongo, which focusses on formal office language, and I listen to a lot of Teppei’s podcasts. If you want to be able to understand more casual Japanese, then listen to that. Although I’m not sure if there’s many beginner resources out there.
Speaking of resources, I found this channel to be quite a bit easier than Teppei https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu6sZrHyl4hSS2PvlUo2XZA Also a bunch of videos following the Genki textbook, if that’s something you want to use.
Also, someone said get a teacher on italki once you finish Bunpro… I’d say get a teacher asap. Bunpro is great, sure, but nothing beats an actual human you can ask things and practice with directly.
(Also nothing wrong with pre-made Anki decks.)
Not understanding anything in audio is extremely normal at first. I minored in Japanese and when I started listening practice again years later, I still couldn’t understand a thing for at least a month!
You’re doing SRS practice, which is good, but a critical component in getting your Japanese to become real-world useful is immersion, even if you don’t think you’re getting anything out of it. It takes spamming yourself with a tremendous amount of text/audio over a long, long period of time. For the audio, you really will start to hear a few words that you recognize, then a few set phrases, then eventually a sentence or two. But I’ve been doing immersion practice about an average of every other day for over a year and I have a long way to go, and that’s after five total years of taking Japanese classes at school!
I’d strongly recommend starting on kanji as soon as you can, even if you go slow. I personally enjoyed WaniKani, but it’s not for everyone and you won’t get the full effect unless you study additional words that WaniKani doesn’t have. A lack of kanji knowledge will become the biggest obstacle in your progress later, so the sooner you start, the better.
But your progress is perfectly normal for who’s been studying casually for four months. Study kanji, keep up with your other SRS’es, and keep reading/listening and you will see gains. I’m sure of it!
this is the kind of thread i need to read right now. i’m an experienced language learner - which isnt to say particularly successful - just that i’ve tried a million books/classes/apps techniques. japanese is uniquely frustrating, that’s for sure.
perhaps other people can relate to this feeling, but with other languages i’ve worked on (french, german, russian, etc) you feel like you’re just spinning your wheels, not learning or retaining anything… and then you look back and suddenly notice that you actually have made a ton more progress than you realized.
japanese feels the exact opposite. i constantly feel like i’m making so many meaningful gains - x kanji, y vocab, z hours spent reading grammar points and conjugating verbs, immersing myself in music and movies… and then when it comes to putting it together, i look back and realize i can’t understand a single #%&@ing thing 
OP, have you tried wanikani to learn some kanji and vocab? I would never start grammar without knowing a little bit o those first.
my path was I started wk, then only after level 30 there I started bunpro here.
I am the type of lazy student, just do the bare minimum with srs daily and so far so good, I can understand sentences and 70% of nihongo con teppei beginner. Max 1h every day for japanese.
A tool that helped me a TON is Delvin: http://delvinlanguage.com/
You focus on one word at a time, it’s pretty incredible training.
I think @Maykeye has it right as far as the answer to “at what point”.
I took/passed N4 in December, have studied about 1/3 of the N3 grammar in Bunpro, and am at WaniKani level 32. I feel like in the past few weeks my brain has finally caught up and I am starting to understand WAY more than I ever used to.
There’s a podcast called Japanese with Noriko that I have always found pretty difficult because she speaks quickly, but I listened the other day and felt like I could keep up with at least the gist of what she was saying which is a new experience.
Great post! I’m just a beginner myself, but these two resources I thought were fascinating:
https://learnjapanese.moe/faq/
Everything on themoeway is good, imho.
Also, since you like anime, download the Language Reactor plug-in for Chrome and use it to watch Netflix shows. I’m finding it really useful. If you wish, add more time to your learning clock while having fun!
I would find the most structured listening exercises possible. That is, fairly short sentences, using vocabulary that you’re mostly familiar with, with the sentences available in written form.
That way, you can read the sentences, listen to them (again and again), and you can compare the two. That way, you can train your brain to differentiate the sounds that you can read in the sentence but you feel like you simply can’t hear.
You can, and I think you should, also go further than that. I used to have a paper printout of the sentences and mark which sentence parts are frequentlyspokeninonecontinuousbreath, where aaaare the slower parts … and the breaks within the sentences. I would also mark where the sentence intonation went up vs down.
Finally, I’d slow the audio way down and speak the sentences together with the audio, at first only trying to imitate the sounds, but later also trying to mimick the pauses and the rising and falling intonation.
Later on, you can graduate to easy material for which you don’t have the transcript. I would first, however, make sure that your brain can hear the sounds and perform the sentence segmentation correctly.
Exactly what material to use? The most used material in the world is the text & audio in the Genki textbooks. You also got a lot of other good suggestions in this thread.
I spend about two hours a day studying Japanese, and I live in Japan. I’ve been here for over a decade. I am unable to form a single sentence in the language.
I worked in a hotel here once. I was there for about 6 months. In the hotel, every time you see another member of staff, you have to say “おつから…something or other”. I could never remember the phrase, so I wrote it down on my pass key.
For six months, every time I saw another member of staff I’d quickly look at my pass key in order to remember the word. I used this word dozens of times a day, for six months. I never learnt the word, and still can’t say it.
For some of us, learning a language does not come easy, and the idea that you can learn it in a year is laughable!
おつかれ（さま） - Thanks for your hardwork/efforts, or just “good job” 
This language is dang hard, man. Don’t feel too bad.
When I first started learning Japanese I was spending 4-5 hours a day with about 2 hours of that being focused on listening. I’d basically watch 2 hours of anime (unsubbed) a day not understanding a single word being said. After about 16 weeks of doing this I finally ran across a 15 second dialog in Shirokuma Cafe where I understood everything being said.
Flash forward to now, I understand full sentences all the time, but the thing is I don’t even realize it. I still focus on what I don’t understand and I feel like I’m making no progress. The thing about listening (for me) is two things: 1. It takes a long time and 2. you don’t feel like you’re making progress even when you are. However, each day that you put time into listening practice, even if you don’t understand a single thing being said, your brain is putting in work behind the scenes to unpack all the sounds.
I know it’s tough not understanding anything at all, but everyone goes through this and the only way to get past this is to listen and trust that your brain will start making sense of it all.
One tip I have, which I wish I had when I had just started my listening practice - put a lot of focus into hearing words you know. Make it a game. Since you’re just staring out you’re not going to be able to hear full sentences, so just focus on the words being said. For example, if you hear “おはよう” recognize that you hear it. Maybe keep a tally for every time you hear a word you know. It’ll help keep you engaged (and being engaged will help your brain unravel the sounds faster). Eventually words you don’t know even know will start popping out at you as well.
Yeah, I didn’t want to be mean or discouraging, but “learning” Japanese in a year is an unrealistic expectation for anyone. And a nebulously-defined goal besides.
I took two years of Japanese in college and listening was absolutely my worst of the four core skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking). I also further breakdown Japanese writing into composition or production (like speaking) and actually writing hiragana/katakana/kanji to further muddy the waters.
I was really godawful at listening, like worst in my class even compared to people with somewhat comparable experience to me. I watched three episodes of anime almost every day and after about a year it seemed like suddenly a switch was flipped in my brain and I started understanding everything that I knew. Now my problem is a lack of vocabulary and my grammar is still pretty weak, but I absolutely can follow basic conversations in shows as long as they are using vocab I know. Not gonna lie, there was a time I really thought I was helpless with listening. I just had to do a whole lot of it.
First Congtats! Your dedication and consistency is really impressive. Everybody is good at different things, so don’t worry and just enjoy the process.
Please try to study a bit of Kanji too. It will really help with vocab and with everything else too!
I could understand some sentences / words / phrases from the anime “One week friends” after studying 2.5 years (I just had Japanese evening classes once a week for 3 hours… did not study during the summers). Before that, I used to watch anime for 2 years and while studying Japanese I got really into Jdramas… I guess I knew maybe around 1.5k words and a mix of some N5/N4/N3/N2 grammar.
N5 and N4 grammar is just the foundation. Towards N3 and maybe very minimum 2k words, things should start to open up…. Again it really depends on the show /manga / way of speech and the vocab it uses.
If you can find an anime or drama that you really like and re-watch it multiple times (with subs and without), you will definitely be able to pick up more parts over time, like the sentences, where words start / finish. eg なるほど。…そうよ。またね etc
Try to add reading to your methodology too. Eg Bunpro’s reading section and later NHK Web Easy (the news site for kids, not adults NEWS WEB EASY (nhk.or.jp)). There is audio for some of the articles and switchable furigana for the kanji reading.
Don’t worry, you are doing great.
If you continue like this, you will be amazed at your progress by the end of the year.
Thank God for those polite, calm, female characters in Japanese games. They are the only ones I can even vaguely understand. Barret in FFVII, Ryuji in Persona5? No chance!
I’ve lived in Japan for 5 years and can reasonably carry on a conversation with people. However every time I try to watch an anime without Japanese subtitles it might as well be a different language completely.
In Japanese school, I think it was around N4 level where I didn’t feel completely lost when listening to others, both for grammar and actual listening reasons. However, that’s meeting every weekday and listening to a teacher for ~4 hours with a dedicated listening activity once a week. So, you need to be constantly listening. Maybe several of those audio Japanese readers/e-books would be good (actually have a few that I haven’t tried yet).
But otherwise your average Japanese sentence seems to be a mix of all levels of grammar, so if grammar is an issue it’s simply a matter of getting through the material. i.e. almost every sentence I hear or say contains N2-N5 or N3-N5 grammar. I’d say once you reach N3/N4 you’ll start recognizing grammar points on a regular basis and understanding some sentences from that perspective, but then vocabulary will begin holding you back. Until then, it’s grammar that will hold you back.