I have really been focusing on increasing my listening ability recently and just listening to ripped audio from anime has helped a lot so far.
Today I began to transcribe some Japanese audio and I remember doing this as a young child with English song lyrics and I guess it was effective.
I’m wondering how many of you out there do this as a regular practice and if you find it worth it or not? I think I’ll give it a go and see what comes out of it.
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It is the main thing that I do. It has been one of the most challenging things for me, but also the activity that gives me the best “sense” of accomplishment.
I mainly do songs (as opposed to dialog or movies or whatever).
I think the best thing about it is that it forces you to make a decision as to what you hear. I think its really easy to listen to stuff and just let the parts you don’t understand pass by. Doing this forces you to either write down the words you are hearing or if not, at least transcribe the sounds you are hearing. It’s crazy to me how much harder this is that I thought it would be. So many experiences of listening to something a bunch of times and then realizing it was a super “simple” phrase that I knew.
I also think its really good for getting better at katakana words (which WK doesnt teach).
Practicing this also opens up alot of opportunities to interact with Japanese in situations when it would be inconvenient/impossible to read (in the car, while going to sleep, having things on while you are doing dishes, etc.)
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I do too!
Recently I’ve started doing it more systematically using cloze deleted anki flash cards, and only using sources that actually have subtitles or similar that are more likely to be correct than my own attempts 
I think it’s helped, but my listening ability has always been improving as I studied the language, so it’s hard to be 100% sure!
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Haha so true. Yesterday I couldn’t make out a simple どうして cause I kept hearing a ぶ sound for some reason. This morning when I listened again I clearly heard どうして though… it’s interesting.
Yeah, I think I will stick to material that has subtitles available so I can compare and add +1 sentences to Anki. Even if I’m preeeetttyyy sure that what I heard is correct you never know since my ears like to delete particles.
I often fail to distinguish between は and が, は and を, or long and short vowel (like did they say だろう or just だろ)…
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Do you know of any nice resources that provide accurate Japanese subtitles? I recently realised that the one I use drops some of the particles being spoken and uses strange/incorrect kanji occasionally.
I’ve gotten it from a few places… some I’ve taken from Netflix (Nihongonobaka has converted a bunch of Netflix subs in japanese into .srt files and put them here).
Some I’ve transcribed myself from this guy’s let’s play channel (he has the habit of writing a lot of what he says on screen)
I’ve also made some from persona 4 using this script browser and cropping out mp3 files from let’s play videos…
I’ve used some amateur-created ones as well, but those may well have the same problems your have.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I found some here as well, and also found some subbed Japanese TED talks. (Though I don’t know how legit either of those sources are)
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