掲示板 Forums - How does understanding listening click?

Hi all, I have a question about finally understanding spoken Japanese. My native language is English and so far one big stumbling block for me is listening practice. With reading I can translate and understand a lot easier because it's visual and I can stop and break it down into the order I'm familiar with as an English speaker. But obviously with speech you can't really do this.

So I guess my question is for those of you who's native language uses a different sentence order than Japanese, how did listening finally click for you? Did you just get familiar enough with Japanese that you stopped having to mentally translate? Did you get used to mentally translating and just interpreting the sentence in a different order? What goes on in your head when you listen to and understand Japanese?

I am also definitely not one that is "fluently" understanding spoken Japanese, but for me the renshuu sentence listening schedules did wonders.

I was really struggling in keeping the whole sentence I heard in my head and catching/discerning the individual vocab items of it before, but since renshuu added sentence schedules with a "listening -> type the sentence you heard" vector my listening skills drastically improved in that regard. It definitely improved now to an extend where I started to "just" understand a lot of spoken Japanese on the side without thinking about it too much, whereas before I only catched the beginning or end of the sentence and was left feeling like a deer in the headlights.

Granted, there is most likely more at play here than a magical "use this renshuu feature and you are a listening god" (i.e. all the vocab and grammar I built up over time), but at least I chose to believe that this sentence listening vector really helped me in getting used to hear spoken Japanese and apply the already present vocab/grammar knowledge "on the fly" on what I just heard by giving me the tool to practice exactly that shortcoming.

I do believe this is a renshuu pro feature, though - at least I consider it to be so good that it certainly would be worth a pro membership.

You mention translating. I don't know what it's like for everyone, as I started using Japanese at a young age before I started formally "studying" it, but I think it's the moment you're thinking in the language, rather than translating. When I use and hear Japanese, I don't translate. Sure, there's times I think of a word in English when speaking, then need to translate that individual word, or get caught on an unfamiliar word, but the sentence as a whole is thought of and processed in Japanese. So, perhaps one way to approach is it practising thinking and talking to yourself in Japanese--think in that grammar, think in those words, rather than translating.
Then, there's the actual listening practice--you could try children's programmes (NHK has some in the learning section) or songs. It's probably trial and error finding the level that works for you at your stage. But really, I think it starts with the thinking process... You may not understand everything and, outside of the classroom, that's okay and you'll get there eventually. So, there's also not getting too caught up on missing something while you work on the skill too.

A lot of what people have said here already covers my thoughts, but also something that helped me early on was hanging onto the words that I knew and trying to find them in videos or movies I watched in japanese. Or even just in the voiced example sentences, picking something small to try and identify from listening alone is much more doable than trying to catch the entire sentence. (In real conversations we don't get to hear everything either! But even if the other person is eating while talking to you, as long as you can identify the important parts, and with some help of the rhythm and intonation, you can get a very accurate guess ) And lastly, it's one of those things that just gets easier with time, like most things related to learning a language.