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).