What are Shadow Loops?

Shadow Loops are recordings of spoken Japanese that are played on repeat.

They’re a great tool for improving listening comprehension, pronunciation, and familiarity with the flow of Japanese sentences.

Shadow Loops can be found here, or by going to Library > Activities > Shadow Loops from your My Journey page.

There are 3 albums on the Shadow Loops page that automatically fill on based on where you are in NativShark.

They contain audio from the Lessons, Dialogues, and Vocab that you have seen in the Units you have completed up to this point.

*Currently, Shadow Loops automatically populate audio up to early Phase Two as you keep progressing. We’re looking to expand this to the current content in the future.

Let's take a look at how they can help our Japanese.

Listening comprehension

Shadow Loops can help you recognize how sounds are commonly shortened, underpronounced, or otherwise changed when spoken at natural speed.

They help train your brain to pick up how the language sounds at normal, everyday speed. Sometimes that can be fast for us at the start, but that’s why we use them; to help us get a stronger foothold in our listening comprehension.

Pronunciation

One thing’s for sure: If you don’t know what it’s supposed to sound like, you can’t pronounce it yourself.

While we’re improving our listening abilities, our pronunciation abilities will begin to follow suit passively.

That said, we can be active in improving our pronunciation as well, and repeat sentences aloud that we hear while trying to copy the intonation, shortening of sounds, pitch, and other variations in each of the sentences.

This is known as “shadowing” and can be very helpful when you want to focus on both improving your pronunciation and your listening comprehension.

Using Shadow Loops

There are many ways to use Shadow Loops. They’re all correct and can help you in different ways. We recommend a mix of all of these methods as it suits your schedule, study time, and motivation~

Keep in mind no matter what you do or how often you do it, if you’re listening to these, you’re solidifying your knowledge and making progress ^^

Active practice

Active practice is listening with full focus and perhaps even pausing to repeat and copy pronunciation.

This can be especially helpful when you’re struggling to hear a certain sound in a sentence… or you’re absolutely certain the speakers aren’t saying some piece of it.*

*Listening to sentences you struggle with can be incredibly helpful. Sometimes, however, what we need the most is to continue progressing in our studies, and a night of sleep. Sometimes we might need a few months of sleep and lots of other exposure to the language before something suddenly clicks. It's good to be kind to yourself. Consistency is king ^^

Passive practice

Passive practice entails listening to Shadow Loops while doing other things like going on walks, cooking, or any other daily activities you do where you can’t focus fully on studying.

You can just listen and make mental notes about a few things you hear.

No matter how much or little you focus on it, your brain will be passively noting down at least a few things, so it is still helpful when you're busy and want to fill in some low-focus study time.