２月２９日 (home post)
It’s time! Big Wrap up Post Time! Javerend’s Listening bootcamp has officially come to a close, so let’s see what the damage was.
I am not counting anything from today in my stats here, but here’s how my 100 hours broke down:
I tried to group things by style of content rather than by the channel: Any sort of event presentation or thing that was intended to be informative (news, speedrunning event vods with commentary, some edited/semi-scripted vlogs, cooking videos) I stuck into one category and anything else I stuck into the informal/chatting category (mostly vtubers). Some stuff obviously has overlap in real life, but for this I just tried to keep it simple.
Going back and looking at my goals when I started this, my main goal was to “get [my listening] to a point where I can be a bit more comfortable.” To elaborate on that: what I was hoping to do was make my listening closer to my reading level, where even if I don’t completely understand something I’m still capable of following along and enjoying what I’m doing, and also I’m comfortable enough hearing something and knowing how to look it up. Previously, my main method of listening was trying to listen to shows while having english subs on, which I ended up completely falling back on as soon as the sentences got too long, and I wanted to get to a point where I no longer needed (english) subs as a crutch for comprehension.
Some stuff I really noticed, and some achievements:
- Finished my first visual novel!
- I got better at looking up words - hearing a word once, pausing to look it up, and being able to hear the difference between long/short vowels and hearing geminate (double) consonants on the first try, being able to hear where word boundaries are, that kinda stuff. My early search history is full of me trying to look up like “ころく, こうろく… ぽろく？ OOOH とうろく” and, while not perfect, it definitely felt like I got more accurate as time went on
- I got better at hearing numbers - I don’t have a way to quantify this but I really really noticed at some point that some numbers just started to feel natural, I didn’t need to stop and think about the 二千二十一のコンクール and go “ok 2000 + 20 + 1” it was just “2021”, or hearing and understanding commentary talking about the pace of a speedrun and not needing to skip a beat
- My listening stamina improved - before this challenge, breaking an hour in one sitting really felt like my complete limit. In my test days, I made it up to 3 and that really felt like I was going past my actual breaking point, but then by the end I was just sitting down and watching a 3+ hour speedrun presentation with maybe at most a tiny break to grab some water
Finally, as a little point of comparison, I decided to rewatch a video that I watched on the first day of the challenge to see if I understood more. I was a little worried because it’s really hard to tell if you’re improving something as you’re working on it, but I was blown away by how much different it felt to watch this video today vs at the beginning of the month. There are whole sections I remember just kinda vaguely glossing over that felt obvious to me now! Actually just completely night and day experiences.
That being said, this challenge was a lot of work. It turns out that 100 hours in a month is just… a lot of time to dedicate to something 
I basically had to drop everything else that I was working on, all my book clubs, all my side reading projects, all my english reading projects, pretty much anything that required me to actively focus got shifted to the backburner for a full month. Some days I was just absolutely exhausted by the end of making myself watch something for 5 hours and just hoping that at least a few of the words rolling off my brain would somehow leak in through sheer quantity
TLDR!
- did I have fun? Absolutely!
- did it help? Absolutely!
- would I do it again? Absolutely not!
But, ideally, this is not the sort of thing you have to do again. My learning loop looks something like this: do stuff for a while → notice a weakness → do targeted practice of that weakness → repeat. If your targeted practice is successful, which I think mine definitely ended up being, it’s not a weakness the next time around 
It’ll be a while before I’m re-evaluating how my listening stacks up to my reading, but for now, I think my ears have earned a well deserved break
Home post and thread
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Persona 3 Reload
RPG
4/23
2h00m
Japanese from Small Talk
23-24
But I do intend to keep it up for the bonus period in March too.
Fire Force (炎炎ノ消防隊), 2 épisodes.
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The Jam Maker on Satori Reader, episode 1
Kusuriya no Hitorigoto ep 20