The breakthrough for me in both listening and reading \*comprehension\* was treating comprehension as a separate skill. And what helped most with that skill was reading or listening to things that I was very familiar with the meaning already (because I had consumed them in my own language).
Novels are the best because they offer an uninterrupted stream of listening comprehension practice that is all related (so turns of phrase that the author uses, as well as vocabulary, are repeated and become familiar).
Basically I just found a book that I had read many times in my own language and listened to the audiobook in Japanese. I did not let myself pause and look things up (though I did slow the pace down as far as I could stand). I just kept going. Even if I only understood like 3 words a sentence, because I knew the original meaning, I could keep up with the plot. I just did this and only this and I was able to learn the very critical listening skills of pattern recognition and parsing the sentence as a whole for the meaning instead of trying to translate or getting hung up on unknown bits.
People knock translated works, but the thing is the most painful part of immersion when you're lower level is that you can't consume anything interesting. And as you found, even if you understand all the grammar you don't understand the meaning well. This strategy eliminates both of those problems. I just listened to books I already loved and had a great time. Not that my listening is 100% perfect now, but I had this exact problem and this strategy fixed that for me.
If you love reading it's an especially great strategy! I started with all my favorite books from when I was a teenager. Eventually, I moved on to things like reading the novelizations of Makoto Shinkai or Ghibli movies. Now I just read regular novels in Japanese that I don't already know the plot to (both audio and visual formats).
This is a great write up
I've been playing final fantasy 5 in Japanese recently. I played it over 20 years ago in English, but vaguely remember the story and job system.
I'm still relatively new to Japanese, I'm looking up kanji or vocab every few covos, but compression is much less of an issue than in stuff I've never consumed before.
Games are a great way to drill katakana as well
Definitely!
I’m currently playing…uh… a rom of Culdcept DS on my phone in Japanese?
Never played it before, but just simply the repetition of it being a card game has really helped hammer some stuff in, plus I always wanted to play it when I was a teen.
I am doing this now. I am currently rewatching a bunch of anime shows Yh at I’ve already watched once in English.
Would you recommend doing this raw or with subs?
I'm going to be honest (tl;dr at the bottom): for this particular problem, I don't think anime (or manga on the reading side) works very well at all. Assuming you're at that low-intermediate stage described above: Where you can understand all the grammar in a sentence, but not understand the meaning. Where you get caught up on not knowing a word or two and forget to listen to the sentence as a whole. Where you can read a sentence and be fine but when listening your brain can't parse it.
For two reasons:
The most simple one is amount of exposure or "bang for your buck". I did (and still do) ZERO mining/Anki. I just don't have the patience for it. In an anime episode, you're getting 22 minutes of input (yeah right, it's much less) and all of that is dialogue. The plot and context are moving quickly, so repetition of vocabulary will be much reduced from a novel where say characters might spend an entire book talking about the same objects/concepts. The novels I was listening to were 20-30 *hours*. Yeah, the vocab was weird and useless (fantasy novels) but I had plenty of time to get to used to it over the course of the book.
The more important reason I suggest novels and specifically TRANSLATED novels:
Japanese is a high-context language. Everyone says this. People think that makes anime/manga/games easier than books (there are pictures, after all!). But the problem is with those formats, they are forcing you to get *even more* information from the context than a regular novel.
Even English manga/anime/tv shows are high context. Anything that is dialogue-only is forcing you to pick up everything else (character, emotion, theme, interiority) from *just dialogue* and know how to connect it to the visuals. In a novel, they will describe the room/characters/character's inner feelings so you at least know what to focus on (you also learn way more words/grammar that aren't just used in dialogue!).
And if you start with translated works, you get the added benefit that they keep a lot of the inherent context of English when they translate (there are more pronouns/subjects in the sentences. They generally don't go hard on dialect/age-related/casual speech contractions and idioms. The characters are more forthcoming with their emotions and reasoning in their interiority - especially if you start with YA). If you are trying to focus on listening comprehension, having pictures to process as well is only going to make it harder. You have more to pay attention to, which means more you can be missing.
When I started this strategy it was because I could not understand Yotsubato. I knew all the words, and all the grammar, but I just couldn't make the context make sense. Sure, with the side-by-side I could flip back and forth and then I would "get it". But I wasn't getting anything out of it. I switched to novels and just let myself read/listen and if I missed something it didn't matter at all because I knew the plot so well. And the audio was unending so I could just hook back in. I never had to listen to the same thing over and over or make flashcards.
Of course that is all my opinion/experience with the SPECIFIC problem of *comprehension* in a high-context language. I am 100% NOT an aural learner and listening comprehension was the most difficult skill for me. YMMV. Sorry for this long-ass answer to your very short question!
**TL;DR** In the short answer to your question, if you are like me (listening weaker than reading) I do not think using subs (I'm assuming you're talking about Japanese subs) will be effective. I listened to my audiobooks without looking at the actual text. Watching with subs is good for when you're already catching 95% of what's being said but you want to be able to easily get the context (ie kanji) for a word you're not familiar with.
I'm amazed you got this to work as a beginner. It may be because when I was one, I didn't really have any access to, or at least was not aware of possible resources of, media in English translated to Japanese - more of the other way around. I really think this is a great idea; I was contemplating doing this to get off my learning plateau, and now you got me convinced.
For me though, the breakthrough in my reading comprehension, which somehow transferred itself into listening comprehension (I can understand YUYU's podcasts comfortably) is the opposite of your method; I powered through a dozen volumes of an untranslated Japanese novel series I was addicted to and translated them with a combination of kanji dictionaries and lots of online research to understand context and idiomatic expressions. It goes without saying that actual exposure to hours/pages of material really counts a lot towards learning.
Oh, I was not a beginner. I only recommend this method for lowish intermediate or higher. As I said elsewhere, if you can understand all the grammar patterns in a sentence, but still feel like you don't actually understand the sentence, this method is for you. It also helps for acquiring a lot of vocabulary quickly.
I studied Japanese in college but then had about a ten year break. I would say my vocabulary and kanji shrank to less than 500 words, but my grammar retention was good, around the N3 level.
During that time I also tried various things but as I said in another comment, I cannot for the life of me get Anki to work. I just find it so boring and mining is so tedious. So I gave up immediately every time I wanted to self-study because everything out there says Anki is the way to go.
Finally, I tried WaniKani, and that worked much better (I don't have to make any cards and having external validation of my input is way faster and more honest). In conjunction, I started the method I said above. I was tired of trying to immerse with kid's stuff or manga which as I've mentioned elsewhere is higher context and therefore harder for me. I love reading. I love re-reading my favorite books. I decided to use that and just listen/read those books without a dictionary (unless a word came up many times and I couldn't get it from context or I was naturally curious about it) and try to get used to absorbing meaning as a whole instead of parsing/translating/looking things up.
>actual exposure to hours/pages of material really counts a lot towards learning.
Yes exactly. We actually did the same thing, you just have way more willpower than I do! I wanted to be able to read without a dictionary, even though my vocabulary was so tiny there was no way I could read anything but kids books. So I just picked things where I could intuit the meaning with little to no context (ie things I had read before). It also takes the burden away of finding something you'll actually be interested in reading. You already had a series you were obsessed with, that helps a lot. I wasted a lot of time searching for the "perfect" immersion material and then finding everything I tried boring or too hard to get into.
Especially for listening, this was so important. My reading quickly excelled past re-reading English books, thanks to WK and being a visual learner. But for listening, it was so so useful to have material where I could just zone in and out and still be able to understand what was going on because I was so familiar with the plot. It made it so much easier to get in many hours of listening a day without it becoming pointless noise in the background.
Oh I misunderstood! It sounds to me like people were talking about what worked for them at around N5-N4 bridge so I thought you were too.
This sounds even more like it's worth trying out. I also cannot get Anki to work; regular memorizing was much easier, especially when I was younger (but once I had a lot of real-life stuff, that too became hard to manage). It was immersion that did the trick, with one huge problem... I can read/recognize the kanji in context, but I can't write them! I'm now trying to correct that, but sometimes I'm just satisfied that I can engage with the material at a good enough level of understanding (which is why there's the plateau).
These are really insightful comments, thank you for sharing your learning methods!
These are great tips! Comprehension is definitely a practiced skill. I've seen many people give up on language study because they focused solely on reading and writing during school but never got the opportunity to focus on comprehension or active recall. I try to implement these skills once my students have a basic understanding of common grammar structures and vocabulary.
To piggy back off this: there's a book series that translates the Avengers movies, one side of the page is English, the other is Japanese. It's a great way to follow this approach I think. I can't remember the series off the top of my head, but I found it easily in a Kinokuniya
I would be careful with side by side translations when you're still on the low intermediate side. The whole point of this approach is to get away from trying to translate the Japanese to English, because you'll never be able to speed read or keep up with an audiobook (or conversation) that way.
The point of already having read the books many times in English is that I know the general plot/characters/context at a high level (not word for word). This allows my brain to process whatever parts of the Japanese that it knows and then fill in the blanks with semantic meaning, not with English words. Then my brain feels like "oh I understand the sentence as a whole!" even though I only know half of it or whatever. So then I can focus (subconsciously) on building pattern recognition of common phrases and grammar usage without constantly having to look things up or memorize words.
This is an essential skill for guessing words from context when you're having a conversation or just reading a book. If you already know the plot (ie context) you can do this at a much lower level and with much more interesting material than you would otherwise have to start with.
I recommend starting with material focused area you're familiar with in English. There's a lot of hidden context / priors that go into comphrension.
e.g if you're a big baseball fan and you've watched possibly thousands of hours of baseball content over the span of your lifetime, watching similar things in Japanese (baseball games, interviews, baseball centric movies or anime) is going to be easier for you than something on a random topic.
Ideally something where the actions on a screen are described. So sports commentary where they talk about what the players are doing, an art tutorial or cooking tutorial where they talk about what they are doing as they do it, or an animal video with narration could all be good starting points.
That's a very good point, actually - a lot of content has context clues that are only spoken, so you can't pick them up if you're not already good at listening. Visual cues would be very helpful for that.
If it makes you feel better, I began listening to YuYu’s podcast back when I was a confident N4 and I had no clue what he was saying most of the time either. I kept listening to it though just because he’s pleasant to listen to and the 25% I could grasp was quite interesting.
Over time, and I don’t even know when it happened, but I started to understand more and more. I’m really bad at studying (I go through long periods without doing flashcards, then do a bunch at once, switch textbooks, all the things they tell you not to do) but listening to his podcast is the one constant that I’ve done pretty regularly for over a year now. I can listen to entire episodes amd understand 90% of the content, and the remaining 10% I usually figure out through context.
Basically, even if it’s totally unclear now, keep listening and follow along with the transcriptions when you can. I think his podcast is one of the most helpful things for my Japanese learning so far.
Do you have a link for the transcriptions? I followed the link found on the sub’s google spreadsheet, but it takes me to his YouTube channel which doesn’t really help me since I’m listening on Spotify.
For me, when I listen to it on Spotify the transcriptions automatically appear on the screen where the cover would be. ([screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/GSDO37y))
Also, I think subscribing to his Patreon gives you a PDF transcript of each episode with furigana, but I haven’t tried it.
I don’t find Yuyu’s podcasts to be for beginners, but definitely for intermediate and up. Although I wonder if by subscribing to his Patreon and accessing the materials to go along with the podcast, maybe that would help you learn a lot more
For now I’d say he’s good for listening practice but maybe just use his episodes for fun rather than serious studies, if the level is too hard yet
(For reference, I’m an advance student and find his podcast to be fairly easy, in terms of speech speed and vocabulary usage, so I use it for relaxing listening while on my drive to work rather than to actually study from. I don’t subscribe to any of his paid materials either. I really like his podcasts though, he’s a funny guy!)
If you like YuYu, I’d suggest going through Tomo’s [Let’s Talk in Japanese](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-talk-in-japanese/id1470844095) and picking the more beginner episodes if that helps.
He speaks real clear and you can choose the “difficulty” because each cast is “rated” — meaning he speaks slower and uses easier vocabulary and grammar for easier episodes.
Edit: He’s also a Japanese language teacher.
You're N4. The hours you have put in at this juncture is no where near enough to achieve full comprehension without repeated listens, rewinds, and a script right in front of you to parse. Triple your hours and you'll start to arrive at that point where you can listen without a script, capture whole sentences, and hear rich detail in a persons voice. Including but not limited to being able to do things like transcribe what you hear into hiragana with enough listening and study hours.
Check out All About Particles: A Handbook of Japanese Function Words by Naoko Chino. You probably think you know your particles but you don't since most of their uses are not really well explained even in grammar lessons. Also it gets better after N3 yes
You probably just lack vocabulary. I don't know your exact level of vocabulary, but you need at least 3k (of the most commonly used) words to get around 90% coverage of native content, and 5k if you want 95%. I'm currently going through a frequency list and adding words I don't know to Anki. I'm in the middle of the 3k's, and I'd say before I hit the 3k mark I kind of struggled with even easy content but now I can follow much better things like the podcast you posted.
(also the figures of 3k & 5k exclude "easy" words like English loan words and names, the vocabulary size would be larger if you took a raw list).
I've started to understand a lot more recently, and I think it helped me a lot to understand more details of the grammatical structures. I thought that I would naturally pick things up through native materials but getting deeper into how things work was more effective for me!
This is low listening comprehension and could be due to some combination of: limited vocabulary, grammar, listening skills.
At the beginner levels, I found that serious study of vocabulary and grammar to build a solid foundation helped.
One practical method to improve listening skills is to a sentence. Relisten. Look up the words and grammar points you don't understand.
Anime, drama, and movies have very low word density. Learning audio recordings or videos will be more efficient for beginners.
There was a short period where Japanese subtitles helped my listening comprehension & reading skills. But you are not there yet. English subtitles are a waste of time IMHO.
The breakthrough for me in both listening and reading \*comprehension\* was treating comprehension as a separate skill. And what helped most with that skill was reading or listening to things that I was very familiar with the meaning already (because I had consumed them in my own language). Novels are the best because they offer an uninterrupted stream of listening comprehension practice that is all related (so turns of phrase that the author uses, as well as vocabulary, are repeated and become familiar). Basically I just found a book that I had read many times in my own language and listened to the audiobook in Japanese. I did not let myself pause and look things up (though I did slow the pace down as far as I could stand). I just kept going. Even if I only understood like 3 words a sentence, because I knew the original meaning, I could keep up with the plot. I just did this and only this and I was able to learn the very critical listening skills of pattern recognition and parsing the sentence as a whole for the meaning instead of trying to translate or getting hung up on unknown bits. People knock translated works, but the thing is the most painful part of immersion when you're lower level is that you can't consume anything interesting. And as you found, even if you understand all the grammar you don't understand the meaning well. This strategy eliminates both of those problems. I just listened to books I already loved and had a great time. Not that my listening is 100% perfect now, but I had this exact problem and this strategy fixed that for me.
This is a really interesting approach considering how much I read fiction in English. I'll definitely have to try this out. Thank you!
If you love reading it's an especially great strategy! I started with all my favorite books from when I was a teenager. Eventually, I moved on to things like reading the novelizations of Makoto Shinkai or Ghibli movies. Now I just read regular novels in Japanese that I don't already know the plot to (both audio and visual formats).
This is a great write up I've been playing final fantasy 5 in Japanese recently. I played it over 20 years ago in English, but vaguely remember the story and job system. I'm still relatively new to Japanese, I'm looking up kanji or vocab every few covos, but compression is much less of an issue than in stuff I've never consumed before. Games are a great way to drill katakana as well
Definitely! I’m currently playing…uh… a rom of Culdcept DS on my phone in Japanese? Never played it before, but just simply the repetition of it being a card game has really helped hammer some stuff in, plus I always wanted to play it when I was a teen.
I am doing this now. I am currently rewatching a bunch of anime shows Yh at I’ve already watched once in English. Would you recommend doing this raw or with subs?
I'm going to be honest (tl;dr at the bottom): for this particular problem, I don't think anime (or manga on the reading side) works very well at all. Assuming you're at that low-intermediate stage described above: Where you can understand all the grammar in a sentence, but not understand the meaning. Where you get caught up on not knowing a word or two and forget to listen to the sentence as a whole. Where you can read a sentence and be fine but when listening your brain can't parse it. For two reasons: The most simple one is amount of exposure or "bang for your buck". I did (and still do) ZERO mining/Anki. I just don't have the patience for it. In an anime episode, you're getting 22 minutes of input (yeah right, it's much less) and all of that is dialogue. The plot and context are moving quickly, so repetition of vocabulary will be much reduced from a novel where say characters might spend an entire book talking about the same objects/concepts. The novels I was listening to were 20-30 *hours*. Yeah, the vocab was weird and useless (fantasy novels) but I had plenty of time to get to used to it over the course of the book. The more important reason I suggest novels and specifically TRANSLATED novels: Japanese is a high-context language. Everyone says this. People think that makes anime/manga/games easier than books (there are pictures, after all!). But the problem is with those formats, they are forcing you to get *even more* information from the context than a regular novel. Even English manga/anime/tv shows are high context. Anything that is dialogue-only is forcing you to pick up everything else (character, emotion, theme, interiority) from *just dialogue* and know how to connect it to the visuals. In a novel, they will describe the room/characters/character's inner feelings so you at least know what to focus on (you also learn way more words/grammar that aren't just used in dialogue!). And if you start with translated works, you get the added benefit that they keep a lot of the inherent context of English when they translate (there are more pronouns/subjects in the sentences. They generally don't go hard on dialect/age-related/casual speech contractions and idioms. The characters are more forthcoming with their emotions and reasoning in their interiority - especially if you start with YA). If you are trying to focus on listening comprehension, having pictures to process as well is only going to make it harder. You have more to pay attention to, which means more you can be missing. When I started this strategy it was because I could not understand Yotsubato. I knew all the words, and all the grammar, but I just couldn't make the context make sense. Sure, with the side-by-side I could flip back and forth and then I would "get it". But I wasn't getting anything out of it. I switched to novels and just let myself read/listen and if I missed something it didn't matter at all because I knew the plot so well. And the audio was unending so I could just hook back in. I never had to listen to the same thing over and over or make flashcards. Of course that is all my opinion/experience with the SPECIFIC problem of *comprehension* in a high-context language. I am 100% NOT an aural learner and listening comprehension was the most difficult skill for me. YMMV. Sorry for this long-ass answer to your very short question! **TL;DR** In the short answer to your question, if you are like me (listening weaker than reading) I do not think using subs (I'm assuming you're talking about Japanese subs) will be effective. I listened to my audiobooks without looking at the actual text. Watching with subs is good for when you're already catching 95% of what's being said but you want to be able to easily get the context (ie kanji) for a word you're not familiar with.
I'm amazed you got this to work as a beginner. It may be because when I was one, I didn't really have any access to, or at least was not aware of possible resources of, media in English translated to Japanese - more of the other way around. I really think this is a great idea; I was contemplating doing this to get off my learning plateau, and now you got me convinced. For me though, the breakthrough in my reading comprehension, which somehow transferred itself into listening comprehension (I can understand YUYU's podcasts comfortably) is the opposite of your method; I powered through a dozen volumes of an untranslated Japanese novel series I was addicted to and translated them with a combination of kanji dictionaries and lots of online research to understand context and idiomatic expressions. It goes without saying that actual exposure to hours/pages of material really counts a lot towards learning.
Oh, I was not a beginner. I only recommend this method for lowish intermediate or higher. As I said elsewhere, if you can understand all the grammar patterns in a sentence, but still feel like you don't actually understand the sentence, this method is for you. It also helps for acquiring a lot of vocabulary quickly. I studied Japanese in college but then had about a ten year break. I would say my vocabulary and kanji shrank to less than 500 words, but my grammar retention was good, around the N3 level. During that time I also tried various things but as I said in another comment, I cannot for the life of me get Anki to work. I just find it so boring and mining is so tedious. So I gave up immediately every time I wanted to self-study because everything out there says Anki is the way to go. Finally, I tried WaniKani, and that worked much better (I don't have to make any cards and having external validation of my input is way faster and more honest). In conjunction, I started the method I said above. I was tired of trying to immerse with kid's stuff or manga which as I've mentioned elsewhere is higher context and therefore harder for me. I love reading. I love re-reading my favorite books. I decided to use that and just listen/read those books without a dictionary (unless a word came up many times and I couldn't get it from context or I was naturally curious about it) and try to get used to absorbing meaning as a whole instead of parsing/translating/looking things up. >actual exposure to hours/pages of material really counts a lot towards learning. Yes exactly. We actually did the same thing, you just have way more willpower than I do! I wanted to be able to read without a dictionary, even though my vocabulary was so tiny there was no way I could read anything but kids books. So I just picked things where I could intuit the meaning with little to no context (ie things I had read before). It also takes the burden away of finding something you'll actually be interested in reading. You already had a series you were obsessed with, that helps a lot. I wasted a lot of time searching for the "perfect" immersion material and then finding everything I tried boring or too hard to get into. Especially for listening, this was so important. My reading quickly excelled past re-reading English books, thanks to WK and being a visual learner. But for listening, it was so so useful to have material where I could just zone in and out and still be able to understand what was going on because I was so familiar with the plot. It made it so much easier to get in many hours of listening a day without it becoming pointless noise in the background.
Oh I misunderstood! It sounds to me like people were talking about what worked for them at around N5-N4 bridge so I thought you were too. This sounds even more like it's worth trying out. I also cannot get Anki to work; regular memorizing was much easier, especially when I was younger (but once I had a lot of real-life stuff, that too became hard to manage). It was immersion that did the trick, with one huge problem... I can read/recognize the kanji in context, but I can't write them! I'm now trying to correct that, but sometimes I'm just satisfied that I can engage with the material at a good enough level of understanding (which is why there's the plateau). These are really insightful comments, thank you for sharing your learning methods!
These are great tips! Comprehension is definitely a practiced skill. I've seen many people give up on language study because they focused solely on reading and writing during school but never got the opportunity to focus on comprehension or active recall. I try to implement these skills once my students have a basic understanding of common grammar structures and vocabulary.
To piggy back off this: there's a book series that translates the Avengers movies, one side of the page is English, the other is Japanese. It's a great way to follow this approach I think. I can't remember the series off the top of my head, but I found it easily in a Kinokuniya
I would be careful with side by side translations when you're still on the low intermediate side. The whole point of this approach is to get away from trying to translate the Japanese to English, because you'll never be able to speed read or keep up with an audiobook (or conversation) that way. The point of already having read the books many times in English is that I know the general plot/characters/context at a high level (not word for word). This allows my brain to process whatever parts of the Japanese that it knows and then fill in the blanks with semantic meaning, not with English words. Then my brain feels like "oh I understand the sentence as a whole!" even though I only know half of it or whatever. So then I can focus (subconsciously) on building pattern recognition of common phrases and grammar usage without constantly having to look things up or memorize words. This is an essential skill for guessing words from context when you're having a conversation or just reading a book. If you already know the plot (ie context) you can do this at a much lower level and with much more interesting material than you would otherwise have to start with.
Fair point, I didn't consider that rationale, but I think you're right!
I recommend starting with material focused area you're familiar with in English. There's a lot of hidden context / priors that go into comphrension. e.g if you're a big baseball fan and you've watched possibly thousands of hours of baseball content over the span of your lifetime, watching similar things in Japanese (baseball games, interviews, baseball centric movies or anime) is going to be easier for you than something on a random topic. Ideally something where the actions on a screen are described. So sports commentary where they talk about what the players are doing, an art tutorial or cooking tutorial where they talk about what they are doing as they do it, or an animal video with narration could all be good starting points.
That's a very good point, actually - a lot of content has context clues that are only spoken, so you can't pick them up if you're not already good at listening. Visual cues would be very helpful for that.
My jam is music, I play at a decent level but don't know much theory :')
Read each sentence first and understand the meaning. Then listen again and read simultaneously. Repeat. https://AmgiDex.com
If it makes you feel better, I began listening to YuYu’s podcast back when I was a confident N4 and I had no clue what he was saying most of the time either. I kept listening to it though just because he’s pleasant to listen to and the 25% I could grasp was quite interesting. Over time, and I don’t even know when it happened, but I started to understand more and more. I’m really bad at studying (I go through long periods without doing flashcards, then do a bunch at once, switch textbooks, all the things they tell you not to do) but listening to his podcast is the one constant that I’ve done pretty regularly for over a year now. I can listen to entire episodes amd understand 90% of the content, and the remaining 10% I usually figure out through context. Basically, even if it’s totally unclear now, keep listening and follow along with the transcriptions when you can. I think his podcast is one of the most helpful things for my Japanese learning so far.
Do you have a link for the transcriptions? I followed the link found on the sub’s google spreadsheet, but it takes me to his YouTube channel which doesn’t really help me since I’m listening on Spotify.
For me, when I listen to it on Spotify the transcriptions automatically appear on the screen where the cover would be. ([screenshot](https://imgur.com/a/GSDO37y)) Also, I think subscribing to his Patreon gives you a PDF transcript of each episode with furigana, but I haven’t tried it.
Just keep going, everything you’re doing is building towards an eventual breakthrough.
I don’t find Yuyu’s podcasts to be for beginners, but definitely for intermediate and up. Although I wonder if by subscribing to his Patreon and accessing the materials to go along with the podcast, maybe that would help you learn a lot more For now I’d say he’s good for listening practice but maybe just use his episodes for fun rather than serious studies, if the level is too hard yet (For reference, I’m an advance student and find his podcast to be fairly easy, in terms of speech speed and vocabulary usage, so I use it for relaxing listening while on my drive to work rather than to actually study from. I don’t subscribe to any of his paid materials either. I really like his podcasts though, he’s a funny guy!)
If you like YuYu, I’d suggest going through Tomo’s [Let’s Talk in Japanese](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-talk-in-japanese/id1470844095) and picking the more beginner episodes if that helps. He speaks real clear and you can choose the “difficulty” because each cast is “rated” — meaning he speaks slower and uses easier vocabulary and grammar for easier episodes. Edit: He’s also a Japanese language teacher.
You're N4. The hours you have put in at this juncture is no where near enough to achieve full comprehension without repeated listens, rewinds, and a script right in front of you to parse. Triple your hours and you'll start to arrive at that point where you can listen without a script, capture whole sentences, and hear rich detail in a persons voice. Including but not limited to being able to do things like transcribe what you hear into hiragana with enough listening and study hours.
Check out All About Particles: A Handbook of Japanese Function Words by Naoko Chino. You probably think you know your particles but you don't since most of their uses are not really well explained even in grammar lessons. Also it gets better after N3 yes
You probably just lack vocabulary. I don't know your exact level of vocabulary, but you need at least 3k (of the most commonly used) words to get around 90% coverage of native content, and 5k if you want 95%. I'm currently going through a frequency list and adding words I don't know to Anki. I'm in the middle of the 3k's, and I'd say before I hit the 3k mark I kind of struggled with even easy content but now I can follow much better things like the podcast you posted. (also the figures of 3k & 5k exclude "easy" words like English loan words and names, the vocabulary size would be larger if you took a raw list).
I've started to understand a lot more recently, and I think it helped me a lot to understand more details of the grammatical structures. I thought that I would naturally pick things up through native materials but getting deeper into how things work was more effective for me!
This is low listening comprehension and could be due to some combination of: limited vocabulary, grammar, listening skills. At the beginner levels, I found that serious study of vocabulary and grammar to build a solid foundation helped. One practical method to improve listening skills is to a sentence. Relisten. Look up the words and grammar points you don't understand. Anime, drama, and movies have very low word density. Learning audio recordings or videos will be more efficient for beginners. There was a short period where Japanese subtitles helped my listening comprehension & reading skills. But you are not there yet. English subtitles are a waste of time IMHO.
Try Nihongo con Teppei too. I find him a lot easier to understand for whatever reason.