It’s an interesting video, but at least from my experience, the suggestion that unvoiced vowels are the (or ‘a’) major reason why Japanese learners have difficulty in listening comprehension does not apply to me. Likewise, some of the other proffered reasons for difficulty in comprehending Japanese conversations do not seem to be major obstacles for me.
Rather, for me, these factors seem to be the most important ones, in rough order:
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difficulty with my short-term memory (by the time I hear the end of the sentence I have probably forgotten what was said in the beginning of the sentence, and Japanese sentences are often structured in such a way that the ‘payoff’ in understanding the sentence only comes at the end of it)
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notwithstanding any short-term-memory-related issues, the speaker is going too quickly for me to keep up (I’ve found that to be the case when listening to the NHK shortwave radio broadcasts that I mentioned in my thread here, where they speak very quickly: https://community.wanikani.com/t/anyone-else-listen-to-nhk-japanese-service-vis-shortwave-radio/64711/8 )
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I need to practice ‘moving on’ rather than getting caught by an occasional word that I either am not familiar with or that I missed, which could lead me to miss the following words
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I do need much more practice in interpreting Japanese sentences, partially due to not having as much grammar as I’d like, but also due to differences in the thought processes underlying sentence structure - better understanding of those patterns, including by mimicing sentences through shadowing, will help me in both understanding as well as in formulating and producing acceptable speech (rather than speaking using English conventions and speech patterns but substituting Japanese vocabulary within those English patterns)
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for whatever reason, I tend to stumble on hearing numbers, trying to translate them in my head to numerals - that is different from other types of vocabulary that I may hear within conversational speech, because in many cases I have actually made the leap from mentally translating word by word into simply hearing and understanding without an intermediate ‘translate each word’ step
Unlike what was stated in that video, I don’t think that I have a problem dealing with Japanese rhythm, intonation, or pronunciation.
But I do think that shadowing can help me in emulating Japanese speech patterns, so I will give it a try (I have a couple of shadowing textbooks that have written sentences along with CD audio that I can use).
(FWIW, I’m at an ‘advanced beginner’ level, not quite ‘intermediate’, but about at an N4 level)