I've been learning Japanese for around 4-5 Months now and I'm curious on how I should improve my listening skills. Obviously, I know I should listen more but I'm just curious on how many hours I should be doing. If you want me to be honest, I probably have less than 20 hours of actual focused listening when it comes to Japanese. Reading sentences and being able to comprehend them is the super-easy part. I've recently started focusing on Grammar and just finished Genki 1.
For Grammar I'm using Tokini Andy on YouTube, and I'm just watching 1 chapter of Genki a day because I feel as I'm behind in grammar at the moment. Once I finish watching his genki series in around 2-3 weeks I'll just slowly start doing around 3-5 grammar points a day and just skimming over them. Probably from Tokini Andy's quartet series and game gengo full JLPT's grammar videos.
I've seen a lot of AJATTERs online talk about having an earphone in all day and just listening to Japanese. I'm curious if that is actually helpful or not. I'm actually attending Language school in Japan in the next 2 months and I want my listening skills to be pretty good before I arrive. I'm attending Language school so I can be put in a very structured learning path because right now I'm kinda just learning new vocab. Being forced to learn Grammar and being forced to speak Monday-Friday would honestly be so helpful for me. I waste so much time throughout the day playing games and just watching random stuff on social media.
I start working as a stocker in a grocery store in around a week and I plan on just having a airbud in my entire shift which is 8 hours. Would 8 hours of passive listening to actual comprehensible input be beneficial for me? The job is pretty easy and majority of the time I could mainly focus on actually listening instead of having it as background noise.
Anyways I'm just looking for some advice to improve my listening and was wondering if passive listening is actually helpful. I realized my listening is horrible once I actually called a Japanese person and had to tell them to repeat themselves multiple times. I also plan on trying to do at least 2 hours of actually focused listening everyday from now on. (youtube,netflix, podcast etc). I'm just hoping I have to trust the process and just keep on doing it and eventually my listening will become better. Please give me any advice if you have any! being able to learn new words through anki is so simple for me and being able to comprehend what people are saying on social media and hello talk is so easy for me. Even reading textbook sentences and passages is so easy for me to comprehend in real time but my listening is just horrible lmao.