As a beginner of Japanese, I very often I don't understand or completely
misunderstand spoken Japanese - even if I know every word in the sentence, and
may have recognized it in different context. Here is an example where I was
completely stunned - had no clue what it said until I saw the text. A native
Japanese speaker saying the following sentence:

> まだ学校へ行くには早い時間です。  
>  It's still to early to go to school.

(This is from some flashcard stack in Anki. The accompanying picture shows two
young kids who may have just woken up.)

When listening to this first, even repeatedly, without knowing the text or any
other hint, I heard roughly the following, if I had to write it down in kana:

> まだが こへい くには はやい じかん です。

Or in letters (deliberately not exactly rōmaji):

> Madaga kowei kuniwa hayai jikan des

First, one thing seems to be a general rule: In 学校 the individual readings
がく＋こう get contracted to がっこう. (Is there indeed a rule behind this? I heard the
short pause in gakkou as a word boundary.)

The other thing I got totally wrong was the place where there are essentially
four vowels in a row in 学校へ行く：

> がっこうへいく in the underlined ouei. (the へ is basically just the vowel e in this
> situation)

I don't know exactly how to pose this as a question. But I still wonder how I
can accelerate my listening understanding (besides just more training)?
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spoken-language pitch-accent listening
Beginner miscomprehension of spoken Japanese - finding wrong word boundaries
What Lyle said is true―you'll want to practice a lot. It's much easier to
recognize words and phrases you're used to _hearing_ , not just used to
_reading_. That means ear training, and there's no way around it!

Still, we can look at some facts about Japanese pronunciation. I'm a non-
native speaker, and one of the trickiest things for a non-native speaker to do
accurately is describe pronunciation details, but I'll try my best anyway :-)

* * *

Let's look at your example:

> まだ学校へ行くには早い時間です。  
>  mada gakkō e iku ni wa hayai zikan desu

The way I've romanized it here, I've split it into nine words. But is each
word really pronounced separately with space in between? Of course not―we put
words together when we speak. This is true in any language, not just Japanese.

So how _are_ words put together in Japanese? First, let's start by grouping
**particles and auxiliaries** with the words before them:

```

    まだ　　学校 **へ**　　行く **には**　 　早い　　時間 **です** 。  
    mada 　gakkō= **e** 　iku= **ni** = **wa** 　hayai 　zikan= **desu**
    
```

In this sentence, we have the particles へ{e}, に{ni}, and は{wa}, along with the
auxiliary です{desu}. I've grouped each of these with the words before them.

These groups form the basic **accent phrases** (APs) in this sentence. In
normal pronunciation, each accent phrase is pronounced together as a group. In
Standard Japanese (based on a Tōkyō accent), each accent phrase contains at
most one large, rapid drop in pitch called a **pitch accent**.

For example:

> [まだ]{HL}  
>  ma↓da

This word is pronounced with a drop in pitch about halfway through. We say
that the ま{ma} is "accented" because the pitch drops sharply afterwards.

This is the sort of thing you want to listen for. When you learn the word
[まだ]{HL}, you can't just memorize the consonants and vowels. You've got to
memorize the drop in pitch, too! That's just part of learning the Japanese
language.

That doesn't mean you've got to sit down with a book and start writing down
where the pitch accent is in every word. What it means is this: **Listen to
how native speakers of Japanese say words, and try to talk like them.** We
naturally learn by **imitation**. You'll come to absorb the fact that [まだ]{HL}
has a pitch drop in the middle, and that'll help you recognize the word when
other people say it.

And yes, that means you're going to have to practice listening and speaking!
You can't learn to use the spoken language entirely by reading :-)

* * *

Let's take another look at our example sentence:

```

    まだ　　　学校へ　　行くには　　　早い　　　時間です。  
    ma↓da 　gakkō=e 　iku↓ni=wa 　haya↓i 　zikan=de↓su
    
```

There are three main pitch drops to listen for:

  1. ma↓da
  2. iku↓ni=wa
  3. haya↓i

And of course, in order for these drops to occur, pitch has to rise at some
point, so you'll notice this sentence naturally goes up and down like a
rollercoaster. This is what you want to listen for; these groupings help you
identify the parts of a sentence.

In natural pronunciation, sometimes these phrases are run together into larger
groups. If all five of the accent phrases were really pronounced separately
like I wrote above, we might expect this:

> [まだ]{HL} [学校へ]{LHH} [行くには]{LHLL} [はやい]{LHL} [時間です]{LHHL}。

You'll notice that I've written a fourth pitch drop here in [です]{HL}. But in
terms of actual _phonetics_ , you might not hear a pitch drop at all! Why not?
Well, you wrote "des", right? Like the vowel /u/ was entirely missing from
[です]{HL}. And if the vowel is missing, it can't carry a pitch!

So if it's pronounced that way, you won't be able to listen for a fourth pitch
drop. And without a pitch _drop_ , the pitch may never go _up_ in the first
place, which means the entire thing could be pronounced with a low, flat
pitch! But you _will_ be able to listen for what you've written as "jikan
des". That's what the [時間です]{LHHL} notation represents, even if the physical
pitch is flat.

But since I'm concentrating on the _physical_ pitch you need to listen for,
and not so much on the theory, I'm going to cheat here and write [時間で]{LLL}す.
So let's do that, keeping in mind that it's cheating a little bit :-)

> [まだ]{HL} [学校へ]{LHH} [行くには]{LHLL} [はやい]{LHL} [時間で]{LLL}す。

I think this is starting to look accurate. In natural speech, though, I think
it might be grouped together like this:

> [まだ]{HL} [学校へ行くには]{LHHHHLL} [はやい]{LHL} [時間で]{LLL}す。

After all, it's not really necessary for the pitch to be low at the beginning
of 行く. What's necessary is for the pitch to be high before it drops, and it's
already high at the end of 学校へ, so the phrases sort of naturally run together.

There's also a phenomenon called **delayed pitch fall** , which most people
don't really notice, but you might as a learner, so I'm mentioning it here.
For example, if the pitch fall is delayed in 早い, it might actually sound more
like this to you:

> [まだ]{HL} [学校へ行くには]{LHHHHLL} [はやい]{LHH} [時間で]{LLL}す。

Once you can hear these groupings and where the pitch accents fall, you'll
have an easier time identifying lexical words and the particles and
auxiliaries that attach to them.

Of course, in real life pitch moves smoothly up and down; people don't
pronounce language by singing two different notes! That would be silly :-) So
it might be something more like this:

![pitch graph](https://i.stack.imgur.com/KS65R.png)

* * *

Let's see what we can learn from your transcription.

You identified the first word as まだが. Listening for pitch tells us that can't
be the case! The が must be part of the next word. Over time you'll also come
to know that [まだ]{HL} is a word but [まだが]{HLL} isn't, and that knowledge will
help you too.

You also wrote this:

> In 学校 the individual readings がく＋こう get contracted to がっこう. (Is there indeed
> a rule behind this? I heard the short pause in gakkou as a word boundary.)

Sure, there's a rule predicting it. The rules are too complicated to describe
here; feel free to ask them separately or look them up for yourself in
Laurence Labrune's _The Phonology of Japanese_ (2012).

But there's not much point in describing those rules here anyway. You need to
know that this is a **word** , and that it's pronounced /gakkoo/. It
**cannot** be pronounced /gakukoo/. If you don't have this memorized, you
won't be able to recognize it in speech; it doesn't matter whether or not you
know the rules mentioned above.

By the way, I wrote /oo/ at the end because, even though the last kana is う,
it's pronounced like お. You wrote "ou", but there is no /ou/ in this word,
even though that's how it's spelled in kana. And I didn't write a ↓, because
there's no pitch drop in this word for you to memorize. So it's actually
pronounced like this:

> 学校 = [ガッコー]{LHHH}

In short, to recognize words like this, you have to have this knowledge
internalized. You can't _think_ about 学 and 校 combining at this point, because
the speaker will be done with the sentence before you figure it out. If you're
going to recognize words, you have to _know_ them. And that just means
practice.

* * *

The last thing you'll want to listen for in identifying words is **devoiced
vowels**. This is another big topic, and I can't describe it in detail here,
but you'll want to read about them and pay attention in your listening
practice. In your example, the only devoiced vowel is in [です]{HL}, which we
discussed above.

* * *

Sadly, there's no easy answer to your question. You're just going to have to
learn to pay attention to all of these details. But don't worry! The more you
practice, the easier it'll get :-)
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answer
snailboat has already provided an excellent response, but I'd like to share an
online resource that's pretty useful when trying to figure out the pitch
accents of any given text.

Just stick your Japanese text into [Prosody Tutor Suzuki-
kun](http://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/eng/phrasing/index), tweak the
settings as you see fit, hit "analyze", and you'll see a rather accurate pitch
analysis of the input text.

After analyzing the text, you can even generate an accented voice clip to
listen to. You can also tweak the gender and speed of the speaker, but you'll
have to hit "generate" to apply any new settings.
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answer