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.

Shadow Loop categories

On the Shadow Loops page, you'll find a bunch of albums sorted by various categories:

Made For You

These albums are generated based on your personal studies and have a few options for further customization, including answers on flashcards, Mastery level, Archive status, and more.

These are a great way to get some quick review on things you learned recently, or to take a look back at all the things you've gone through up to this point in your studies!

Custom Albums

If you find something during your studies that you want to make sure you hold onto, a Custom Album might be a good place for it.

These can be a good place for things you want to remember for a specific reason. You might make an album to practice things you might encounter during a trip, grammar that isn't quite sticking, spoken language that you want to practice to ensure you can produce it faster, and so on ^^

Creating a Custom Albums

Custom Albums can be created in two ways:

1. By clicking on Create Album here:

2. By adding a sentence from the headphone icon near sentences and hitting "Add to new shadow album...":

Adding Loops to a Custom Album

There are three ways to do this!

1. Hitting the headphone icon near sentences while studying across various content, including lessons, reviews, and Dialogues. Here's one from a lesson sentence:

2. Add from the Custom Album itself by clicking "Add Track":

3. While browsing the default albums (like the ones from the Phases and JLPT), you can click on the three dots on the track list, then select the album you want to add it to:

Why use Shadow Loops?

Shadow Loops are fantastic for getting our ears used to the sounds they need to pick up, and building a kind of "library" of sentences in our brains we can pull from and adjust while participating in conversations.

They can even help improve our pronunciation and general flow/naturalness as well ^^

Improving 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. They help us get a stronger foothold in our listening comprehension.

Improving 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.

But what exactly is this "active" and "passive" studying we're talking about here?

Studying with Shadow Loops

There are tons of ways to study with Shadow Loops, and your approach can (and probably should!) be adjusted depending on the focus of your study day, along with available time and energy.

We like to recommend mixing all the approaches below based on what works best for you. Please experiment and have fun with these!

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 ^^

Passive practice

Passive practice usually means having Shadow Loops on in the background, perhaps while going on a walk, cooking, driving, or so on. It only takes partial focus, and we might zone in and out as we go through them.

Even though we aren't fully focused, it is a good way to get in some "low-effort study time". Just make a few mental notes every now and then! With time, you'll likely notice certain sounds and ways of saying things are a bit clearer to you.

You'll also be passively building that library in your brain to pull from as well, especially for recognizing things you run into in the wild during your native material studies or trips to Japan!

Another obvious benefit from this is that due to the low effort, it can be easier to keep up with while not taking up a lot of brain power

Alternatively, we have...

Active practice

Active practice is listening with full focus and perhaps reading along and/or repeating aloud.

Reading the sentence while listening along can help with improving both listening and reading abilities, and the extra reading can help support our listening whenever we feel shaky about a certain sentence.

We can even go a step further and add some extra space in the interval settings to give us time to repeat the sentence as well while trying to copy the intonation, pronunciation, and so on. This is a great way to get our mouths used to making the right sounds, and helps further cement the sentences we're practicing in our "library".

These active approaches can often be more "productive" than the passive approach, but tend to drain brain power much faster. That said, they're a great way to train and drill listening and speaking skills with sentences we want to work on.

They're also a great way to review the things we might be struggling with at the moment. If there's a tough piece of grammar or vocab, then making a Custom Album to review that might be the key to getting through it.

Being active with your Shadow Loops studies or spending extra time reviewing can do wonders for your studies, no doubt.

That said, sometimes when something isn't clicking, what we need most is to move on, and perhaps a few nights of sleep.

Be sure to check out this information about the learning process:

There is no passing or failing when learning

And how moving on can be the best approach in certain situations:

The power of moving on when stuck

Either way, it's good to keep in mind that being kind to yourself along the journey is a good thing. It takes time and consistency. Just keep showing up!

Shadow Loop Settings

Here are all the controls the Shadow Loop player comes with!

Click to change the album nickname (Custom Albums only)
Color settings (Custom Albums only)
Click to change the album title (Custom Albums only)
Delete the album (Custom Albums only)
Shuffle playlist
Restart track/jump back a track
Play/pause track
Skip track
Repeat playlist (Default on)
Loop repetitions (per sentence, max 8)
Interval between each Loop (max 10 seconds)
Volume
Active sentence