The problem is that I feel compelled to listen and read the contents for beginners, I feel much better and happy reading and hearing things that make sense, articles, stories, dialogues, even though many new words and I can not understand much.
I usually use audios which has up to 5 minutes duration but no more.
I always start with learning materials that are in an intermediate level here at LingQ, then when I’m more advanced I learn more about the basics of the language.
Well, I see, maybe it would help to break the 5 minute text down - like, work intensively on the first 1 or two minutes so that you understand most of it, but keep listening to the whole lesson, even several lessons. After some time take the next 1 or 2 minutes and repeat the process. By then you will understand more of the rest of the lesson/series than if you kept listening over and over without increasing your comprehension of smaller parts. I have used this method with collections which take me longer to absorb. Because you can’t absorb everything there is in a 5-minute lesson quickly at an early stage.
You could even go sentence by sentence when you have the time. Or if you have a chance to split the longer audio into small bits, listen to the bits repeatedly. I know beginner content tends to get boring, so I like to switch between different collections. I focus on the constructions and the way the ideas are expressed and forget about the story. Then I try to use some of the key words or patterns in writing. But you don’t have to study vocabulary or grammar early on. You will ‘learn’ a lot from context.
Alleray,
I’ll break the lesson and I’m sure that is more effective to learn part by part that spend hours listening a very long audio and did not understand anything.
Thanks.
I dont think I will be saying anything different than what has already been said but regardless this is a brief description of how I think passive listening has impacted my Japanese learning:
I do a lot of passive listening and I started doing it rather early on in my process of learning Japanese. I didn’t have much access to basic Japanese audio (I wasn’t aware of this site yet) so I listened to what I could - news podcasts, TV shows, music. Especially TV shows and music since I could enjoy it without understanding the Japanese. It mostly sounded just like TheBrazilianPolyglot describes German - noise. I couldn’t even tell when one word ended and another begun. Occasionally I could pick out an individual word or two but I just didn’t have the vocabulary.
Something changed over time. Maybe I just listened to enough or maybe my vocabulary had improved enough but at some point I started to differentiate words, even if I didn’t understand the actual word. Now I don’t have much issue with this at all. Now that I have got past that initial stage I think listening does two things for me - it helps me retain the words that I do know and I occasionally learn new ways to use the words I already know. I think that as I become more advanced it will help me learn new patterns more frequently and I think I’ll begin to be able to learn new words from listening (much like one can do by listening to their native language). Although currently I think I am far from that stage.
The important thing is to leave the initial stage.
I’ll keep listening, but now I do it the right way, with small audio files.
(In this case “small audio” is correct or “short audio”) ??
My ‘smaller parts’ may not be very natural - I was thinking of ‘smaller bits’ that you can understand - “short audio” (short audio passage) sounds more like it 
My own theory is that we all have a speech recognition system in our brains, but we have to hear the language daily for our brains to even start caring about the language.
Once you’ve got a few hundred hours in, things start to change, like many before me have said.
In short, keep doing it, even if you’re afraid it won’t work, because you will eventually get it
@TheBrazilianPolyglot Audio files can be small. Audio clips can be short.
There may be a few exceptions that I can’t think of at the moment, but as a general rule:
Small refers to 3-D space (mass, volume, etc) or virtual space (GB, MB, etc)
Short refers to length (time, distance, height, etc)
Thanks for all…