Practice N5 test…oh boy. Feeling discouraged. Help?

[Windgreen]

N5 listening resources that I found truly helpful as an absolute beginner:

@Windgreen

• Nihongo no Mori N5 playlist : 14 videos, about 5 minutes each, showing basic expressions and simple conversations, played out by the same one or two teachers, with subtitles in English and Japanese. The teachers speak slowly and make pauses in the sentences, which are fairly “textbook like” (this might be somewhat boring, but was still useful to me as a beginner!). This is the easiest beginner listening resource I’ve seen so far.
• Nihongo con Teppei for beginners podcast : watch out because there’s another podcast by the same teacher, but for intermediate level listeners! This one has 100+ episodes of about 4 minutes each. The teacher explores different topics throughout the episodes, introducing and repeating vocabulary and phrases, and offering lots of different possible answers to the questions he makes. This way, you can get a general understanding of the topic and learn new words, even without a transcript to follow. The speed, grammar and vocabulary gradually increase throughout the episodes. This is harder than the Nihongo no Mori N5 playlist, but still easier that other beginner resources out there.
• JLPT Stories podcast, N5 category : So far, there are 6 episodes in the N5 category of this podcast. The episodes are about 3 minutes long, and consist of a high-school boy narrating aspects of his life. For each episode, there’s a page with the transcript, the translation, and links to other resources explaining some of the grammar points used. This is the hardest of these three resources.