While obviously it's not the best teaching method, watching anime does help to a certain extent, perhaps enforcing already learned words or phrases. I'm a near fluent Japanese speaker, but there was a period of about 5 years when I moved to Australia that I spoke zero Japanese, and I had forgotten a large amount of Japanese (to the point that I couldn't read Hiragana anymore).
And then I watched anime and everything was fixed yey
But seriously, just listening to Japanese conversations in general helps a lot. I would watch Japanese talk shows (from my experience, they often spoke slowly and with many pauses, and that helped) to practice my understanding capabilities.
Last edited by Meimoo; Nov 3, 2012 at 11:07 AM.