My listening comprehension is terrible. Part of that is simply due to not enough time spent, I think; but getting listening material that’s 95% comprehensible is a lot harder (at the early stages) than reading material, because you can read as slowly as necessary but you can only listen at one speed. Learning from context is pretty difficult when three fourths of the context itself isn’t understandable. So to bring a few things together, I intend to combine incremental reading with repeated listening. There’s a few different things I’m considering:
- Anime or drama. Get something with subtitles and put the subtitles in an incremental reading deck. Watch episodes as you become familiar with the reading cards. Alternatively, put the episodes themselves into their own SRS deck; or possibly along with the reading cards in the same deck. Durarara!! has j-subs available and I can rewatch that pretty much limitlessly so I think it would be a good place to start. Also maybe something like Hidamari Sketch.
- Podcasts. I’m mostly finished making this deck, just have to add in the audio. I’m using Miki’s blog from japanesepod101. They’re short, interesting, Miki and the hosts are fun to listen to, and I can get a lot out of them already without having read them at all. Transcripts are in the episode comments. I’m putting the audio on the same cards as the transcripts, although I might not listen to them every time; and also putting the podcasts on my iPod shuffle for random reinforcement. I can usually get three to six hours of listening in at work in a day so this should work nicely.
- Lyrics. Basically the exact same as the podcasts. Not sure if I’ll put the audio on the cards or not. Can’t hurt to have it there I suppose.
Lan'dorien's Mysterious Journey 
You know, I’ve been thinking along the exact same lines lately, since my listening comprehension is nowhere near my reading skill! I didn’t really care about that, but somehow reading a lot has helped my listening skill automatically, and once I realized that I thought, cool, I might as well try listening more and see where it gets me. (I also thought, “If there’s any chance in hell I’m going to pass the JLPT in this lifetime, just reading isn’t going to cut it.” ^^;;)
So I’ve got some music, just the dialog from the easier JapanesePod101 podcasts and the recordings of the graded readers to start with. I’ve been thinking I might try shadowing, too — out of curiosity, perhaps, or it might be more accurate to say because all my tadoku friends seem to be into it. They were right about tadoku, so ^^;;
I look forward to hearing how your listening practice turns out! お互いに頑張りましょうね（^^）
Reading very definitely helps listening, I agree. The point of this exercise is basically to close the loop. I think it should work pretty well. Will definitely report on it after a while.
Shadowing reminds me, the text and audio from the shadowing books I got from White Rabbit would be good material for this too.
Hey Lan’dorien, I’ve been in that boat before…
I’ve made two decks: one which is mostly based off of TV subtitles and one which is mostly made up of songs (both Canto, obviously).
The TV subs one took a long time to come to fruition, but now I can understand a lot more of what people say on TV than before, so it does work.
The song one is great fun, but it takes forever to splice audio (and using full length songs as part of cards didn’t seem especially helpful).
Look forward to seeing how you get on!
Thanks for your reply Eldon; it’s great to hear from someone who’s been down the same road!
I was also thinking that full songs in the cards might not be the answer. For now I won’t bother, then. The idea is to combine this with the “instinctive SRS” that I’ve talked about before, being the notion that the mind gets “tired of” something when it’s learned all it can from it. So I’ll listen to the playlists as I feel like it, and that should be about right.