Listening practice for N5/N4 Level?

I’ve been struggling to find good listening practice, I finished the Genki book 1 and passed some N5 practice exams and am starting Genki 2, but I do the Genki 1 workbook on a delay after learning it and the listening comprehension had a huge difficulty spike for me around lesson 8, I can barely make out what they’re talking about at full speed and miss questions every time. Do you listen to this multiple times until you get it? Seems unreasonable at full speed one time through.

I’ve tried some podcasts but they seem either super basic or way too advanced, and I don’t find it interesting to listen to the basic ones. Any good kids shows or good podcasts around

5 comments
  1. On the tokiniandy website there is an immersion section. It is graded based on the chapter of Genki. It’s excellent.

  2. I found Japanse with Shun, Learn Japanese with Noriko, Sakura Tips to be perfect for me once i got thru Genki I. They are all free podcasts

  3. If your goal is actually the N5/N4 test then going on YouTube and taking practice tests for listening can help a lot! Now if your goal is just to increase your understanding then yes listen more to those exercises but also start to expand out. Consider watching japanese kids shows on YouTube like Peppa Pig or Shimajiro. You could also try Nihon Go Con Teppi for Beginners podcast if you haven’t yet.

    The other thing that helped me a lot in the beginning is all my Anki cards from the Tango N5 and N4 Anki decks have audio on the back, and I even did listening Anki cards for those 2 decks as well. One of the reason I like those decks is because they are in i+1 sentence order which means each card only shows one new word per sentence and they have native audio for every card.

    I also came to find when I passed the N2 that they use the same voice actors for those decks/books as the real test.

  4. It’s always good to aim slightly above your weight imo, so you might find it worthwhile to check out Nihongo con Teppei. Easy, interesting podcasts. Grammar/vocabulary-wise, I haven’t encountered much above N3. The guy is funny, too, which helps; overall, it doesn’t feel like I’m listening to something entirely educational, which makes it bearable compared to other resources.

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