Improve Japanese Listening Skills

The best thing to do would be to watch lots of Japanese animes. You need to learn to enjoy listening. If you just keep on listening to the practice exams there’s a big chance that you’ll get bored and everything would sound nonsense.

Watch lots and lots of anime and sometimes listen to NHK .

Listening to the dialogue from past tests helped a lot. For higher levels, listening to Japanese news programs is a very good way to improve. The best way is probably to talk with native speakers, if you have that opportunity.

If you are studying for the listening portion of the JLPT in particular, shy away from language tapes, anime, and other things like this because they aren’t a good representation of the way people really talk. Language tapes (the ones usually packaged with text books marketed to beginner students) feature speakers who talk very clearly; it’s much more clear than what you will hear on a test. Anime almost always features unnatural Japanese that you will never encounter in real life outside of movies; it’s not good for practical study.

Everyone has their own way of improving their Japanese listening. Some go for ‘full immersion’ listening to Japanese as often as they can while others may only put on a study tape when they go to sleep hoping that the tape/cd will sink into their head.

Listening to J-pop music or watching Anime is fine but you have to listen with some kind of meaning behind it, if you are using this to study for the JLPT exam. Even if you write down a few words when you are watching a film or listening to song and then try and find out what they mean afterwards it can be useful.

Also it might be useful to listen to standard Japanese broadcasts from places like NHK radio.
http://www.nhk.or.jp/rj/index_e.html (Go to the ‘On Demand’ section and click on Japanese)

Solve a lot of previous exam papers. First play the cd/tape once and then listen to it again and attempt at the answers. If you got the answers wrong, Try to work out why you made mistakes and look up words that you didn’t know.

Also things like video/voice messenging (MSN, SKYPE…) with Japanese friends is also a good way of improving not only your listening but speaking as well as improving your general level of the language. If you don’t know anyone in Japan to communicate with you can visit - http://www.mylanguageexchange.com