Hello.
I’m asking this question more out of interest in what other people do or have done rather than looking for advice but I was just wondering what everyone thinks and if people have different opinions. I’m likely going to be working on a small listening focused study project soon so want to gather ideas. The headline answer is of course “listen more” and “make your listening comprehensible” but if you’ve got any tips, tricks, or hot takes then let me know.
Cheers!
I shall probably be giving the most boring and straightforward answer.
Personally I try and go out a walk for a each day, while doing so I listen to Japanese podcasts, specifically Nihongo Con Teppei. He has several podcasts of different levels, but the biggest reason I’d suggest him is because he’s just released so much stuff.
For example, Nihongo Con Teppei for Beginners has 1215 episodes.
Another benefit is a bit more personal, I like feeling like I’m making progress towards a goal, and because every episode is numbered and short, I can listen to a podcast and feel like I’m making progress on catching up to the latest episode, as compared to lets say just watching a japanese twitch stream or something on youtube where there doesn’t appear to be a measurable end goal I’d be working towards and therefore can’t see myself making progress( even though it probably is helping my listening comprehension ).
Sorry, but the only way to get better at listening is to listen a lot. Podcast can be nice and just having some japanese playing in the background can be useful no matter what content it is.
A couple tips to make it easier in the beginning, assuming you are okay at reading, would be to watch japanese shows with japanese subtitles, or reading through a book while also listening to the audiobook.
I found that my biggest hindrance for listening comprehension was and still is my lack of vocabulary. I’ve felt a drastic increase in comprehension after focusing on it.
Well, you already know how my story ends 
but here’s a spiel, maybe something useful here for others.
(TLDR: When not in the wild, practicing tuning out life and absorbing myself in the context of the audio, and when in the wild, practicing tuning out my ego and being present, have helped me overcome multiple listening plateaus.)
I’m so practiced in English (my native language) that simply hearing it is enough to comprehend it, and so my mind can wander while consuming English yet I can still essentially “listen.” I learn by immersion, but it took me some time to realize that I need to listen to, not just hear, Japanese to make it stick.
That might sound obvious, but I’ll add that I live in Japan and figured that daily exposure to Japanese in the wild would be enough to eventually “get it.” However, I found that what I do is comprehend enough to understand the gist of what’s being said and how to appropriately react and then essentially mentally check out. By mentally check out, I mean that once I felt I grasped the subject or message, I subconsciously switched from listening to hearing until the end of a statement came and I needed to pick up the verb or sentence-ending intonation to finish parsing, for which I switched back to listening. You can do this–understand like 30% of what’s being said–and “make it” in Japan. You’ll be that socially uncouth person, but you can get by. (At first I didn’t understand how foreign people could live here for 10+ years and not know Japanese, but then it clicked.) This habit caused my listening to plateau quite early.
I needed to treat listening like reading–remove all other thoughts and distractions and actively parse what’s being said, mostly letting my focus track the head of the conversation and training myself to not get hung up the moment I don’t understand something. (That will and has ruined me in the wild many times.) I also needed to train myself to resist translating to English and just let Japanese occupy my brain. This took some practice because in the beginning I, probably like many others, translated on the fly to my native language to make sense of what I’m listening to, so I had to unlearn that tendency.
I figured if babies are exposed to Japanese and then are effectively conversationally fluent (albeit with small vocabularies and simple grammar constructs) in about 5 years, I’ve just got to expose myself and I’ll get there. The (obvious) thing is, babies are getting a lot of other signal simultaneously with the audio that helps the brain build its map from human language to internal language, and babies are focused on making sense of things and learning to survive and communicate primal needs, not on taxes, work, and all the other adult obligations. My mind was often occupied with the later while “listening,” which changed my listening to just hearing.
I thought that if I put a pair of Bluetooth headphones on and listened to some long-running show like Detective Conan while doing house work or cooking that I would eventually build my learning comprehension. It’s tens of hours of listening, cumulatively, and then hundreds. I can tell you that I went over 900 episodes in, have just listened to–not watched–90% of that, and for perhaps the bulk of it found my listening skills to hardly have improved. This was because just focusing on another physical task at hand was enough to switch my listening to hearing. And we’re talking about scrubbing the shower, cleaning mirrors, making curry–not doing rocket surgery. Be it a technical English podcast, no problem, I follow it. But Japanese just wasn’t second nature enough for me to learn in the background.
As I appear to be so easily distractable, it’s perhaps no surprise that subtitles turned listening into reading for me. I turned those off, to my benefit, with exceptions being for things even Japanese people half-jokingly consider inscrutable at times, such as Evangelion.
Lastly, another challenge in the wild, for anyone who might find themselves in a similar situation, was ego. This one was very difficult for me and still gets me occasionally. I started learning Japanese in my home country, and there I otherwise lived as an adult, didn’t actually depend on Japanese for anything. Japanese was just a hobby. I moved to Japan when my Japanese was still very weak. I could read a bit and speak a tad, thought I was the stuff because many other foreign people moving here couldn’t even do that. Then I show up at the ward office, and what, Genki and whatever didn’t prepare me to discuss proof of residency certificates and local taxes, show up at an electronics wholesale store to furnish my “mansion” and what, what is all this about refrigerator power efficiency, scheduling shipping, insurance, and rebates? I wasn’t used to suddenly only having the conversational capability of a child, and all I could think of was how dumb I looked, and my ego flooded my head in the heat of the moment, and my listening shut down. This happened many more times. Overcoming this was just learning to embrace sucking in public for (quite) some time and accept that yes, I was an adult with only childlike capabilities.
It’s a personal anecdote, but working on all the above has slowly allowed me to track more of conversations passively (hearing) than always needing to do so actively (listening).
I totally agree to this, I went through the same over a long period of time where I for a while would think I get the overall meaning which seems good enough, but as I switched putting more focus I could feel a definitive faster improvement.
I tend to find AJATT stuff delusional for that reason for someone without a strong base, but that is my opinion and I have no doubt it is not shared by everyone no need to jump on me 
Listening in quantity will help catch the music of the language without a doubt but doesn’t make you skill improve that much, so I’ll also advise to listen with a proactive attitude.
2 other ideas :
the tricky thing to me is to find content that is perfectly matching your skill.
I get you look for something more than “quantity+comprehensible content” advice. But IMO this is far less obvious than it seems as you have to find your own balance with this. I think finding the right comprehensible amount is extremely hard, as if even slightly either too easy or too hard, I feel like I don’t pay enough attention, there is a sweet spot and no one can know it except yourself.
If you find a style of speech that you aim to get to, it should boost your interest and what you take from it.
For example some podcasts hosts all have a totally different personality, type and speed of speech than I have myself, so I just avoid them just like I would looking for content in my own language.
I would avoid too generic content for that matter, and outside of an attractive personality/content, I’d target same gender host.
You could even maybe try to find some one you’d see as sort of a 日本語 role model, representing what you want to be when you speak the language. That would be a must as you’d pay extra attention automatically (I don’t think I have found anything that meaningful myself yet )
So just to summarise some of the techniques so far:
Make progress measurable.
Increase comprehensibility by using the written language to support your listening.
Generally increase vocab as to increase comprehensibility.
Spend time seriously focusing on language features and precise understanding rather than general comprehension of messages. Active engagement is required.
Humble yourself and get comfortable being uncomfortable.
Focus on your own learning and trust your own judgement (perhaps) - at the very least focus on what is right for your own level and interests.
After my current 100 day back to basics study log is over, in about 10 days time, I will be starting a listening project for a couple of months and will make a longer post about my thoughts and goals then but for the moment thank you for the ideas! It is always interesting to see what other people think.
I have some thoughts on this topic which I will put into my other post when I make it. I tend to agree with what you’re saying though, @stephane. There is more to the puzzle than just blasting anime into your ears for days on end.