I struggle to find time to study and I am looking for a good listening resource I can listen to while driving and/or at work. As I have a data entry job that allows me to listen and to pay a decent amount of attention to what I’m listening to a lot of the time.
I am using the below resources to learn with as they have worked well for me so far:
As with all content, as a beginner, there is a bit of balance between comprehensible and enjoyable for listening resources. Things like Nihongo con Teppei are pretty high on the comprehension side of things, but back when I still listened to it, I also grew tired of it quite quickly. For me, content like that wasn’t enough to make me want to listen for hours every day.
What I personally found more engaging was taking the audio of easy’ish slice of life anime I’ve watched before (e.g. umaru-chan) and listening to it again. I think I first did this when I was at an N4’ish level, and even back then it was quite the surprise how much I understood on the second time. (Quite a bit more than on the first time)
What kind of content you choose (Dramas, Anime, YouTube videos, …) doesn’t matter so much, as long as you’ve actively consumed it before so you know what’s going on even if you don’t understand what’s being said.
It is a bit hard to find things this works for, because it needs to be simple’ish, you need to like it enough to listen to it again and still like it, there shouldn’t be a lot of silence/screaming/jump scares/…, but personally I credit doing this for my (compared to my other skills) high listening comprehension.
I don’t think this is necessarily better than beginner podcasts, if you can endure listening to those all day that’s great, but in the end what’s most important in my opinion is putting on those headphones and actually listening to Japanese. Even if you feel like you understand almost nothing at first, it will make quite the difference over time.
How beginner-friendly they would be definitely depends on which you choose, but in addition to audiobooks or just listening to audio tracks of anime, if there’s a series you like (anime/manga) you can check if it has any associated “Drama CDs.”
https://soundcloud.com/ is a good place to search for tracks and take a quick listen to see if the level fits what you need.
Most important is that you like it, because ideally you’ll be listening to it a couple times and still enjoying it, so this is pretty personal.
For easy’ish slice of life stuff that I enjoyed Umaru-chan, Horimiya, Uzaki-chan, and Wotakoi come to mind. For ones that I didn’t like so much but are easy’ish and popular Takagi-san and Shikikomori-san come to mind.
You can also check jpdb.io and see what anime they have listed. Their rating seems a bit odd at times, but mostly anything of difficulty 4 or below should be fine in terms of difficulty. The longer the better because vocabulary tends to get repeated.
I loaded my Japanese for Busy People, Genki, and Minna no Nihongo audio files onto my phone and have re-listened to certain tracks over and over and over again. It works well with material you’ve already studied… and helps develop more automaticity and fluency in your listening and speaking… It’s easier for me to re-listen if I need to pay attention to the world around me (i.e. at work).