Thanks @Lisaveeta for hosting these listening challenges!
I think I’ll keep doing weekly updates like I did in the previous challenge as it never feels like I listen to enough each day to warrant daily posting. But, so far this week I’ve already beaten last week’s listening times, sooo hopefully that is a good sign.
Think I’ll keep 150mins of listening a week as my baseline goal for now since I still haven’t quite found a reasonable schedule to stick to with listening yet. It is always so much harder to fit in than reading for some reason.
Been really looking forward to today – and very early in the morning after I slept only a couple hours, my power died on one of these days with extreme heat, so between the complete lack of background noise making me practically hear my apartment neighbors’ heartbeats and the worry about how bad it was about to feel if they didn’t fix it quickly, my sleep got all wrecked. So, rough start with my brain only half working.
So, like I said, I’m watching 人志松本のすべらない話 (Hitoshi Matsumoto no Suberanai Hanashi). A little while back I got into Documental, a show hosted by the same guy that’s basically a no laughing challenge where they put ~10 comedians in a room for ~6 hours. There are next to no rules (at least, until it got explicit enough Amazon refused to air one season ) so it gets pretty ridiculous.
Anyway, this has let me learn about a lot of Japanese comedians which has been really interesting and useful for finding listening material. On this show they gather people, and just roll a die with everyone’s name on it. The person chosen has to tell a funny story and, well, that’s it. Weirdly they are allowed to repeat them, which ended up honestly one of the most amusing parts of this episode when it kept landing on a guy repeatedly so he was telling abridged versions of the same story like 3 times and the fact he kept doing it was the joke.
Honestly results were pretty good for day 1. There were a few I particularly struggled with but I understood the story enough to get the joke in more of them than not. At the level I’m at sometimes there’s an important word I don’t really know, often because the more everyday life words that are still kind of less common don’t come up in the Japanese I’m exposed to, like 教習車 (driving school vehicle) or something. But the worst part is when occasionally some word or phrase just descends into unintelligible mush here and there which comes more down to the speaker than anything. There were people who tripped me up all over the place and people I had nearly perfect understanding of.
I rather like Chihara Junior based on his Documental appearances but he slurs harder than most people I’ve heard, gotta work on parsing some of what he says when he really gets going.
7月1日(水): Listened to 4 episodes of Nihongo Con Teppei (roughly 25 minutes)
(also made me realise how badly I need to do this challenge, haven’t practiced in a bit and my listening skills have already deteriorated )
Hi all! I’m excited to participate in this. (This is actually my first time using the WaniKani community forums.) I plan to focus on the Doraemon anime, Japanese dubs of Star Wars, and the Slow Japanese podcast.
I was pretty happy with how much of the story I understood, but there were definitely big bits where I felt a bit more at a loss; I think it’s worth relistening again a couple times. I think in terms of media, I’m gonna use this and the Chainsaw Man anime for listening practice for a bit.
I’m definitely interested in branching out to live TV (the news, game shows, etc) if I can figure out accessing that here in the US…
Nice job with day 1 everyone! And yeah @farmcodegary Welcome! Nice to have you.
Watched episode 2 of 人志松本のすべらない話, another 45 minutes of listening done! I was surprised they didn’t mix up the people involved more, just one guy switched out for another so far. This show is definitely good practice like I hoped, since it’s just straight talking the whole way. And if I really can’t follow something it’s not like it’s a narrative building on things, annoying as that is at worst I’m a few minutes away from a new story starting. Very dense with speaking, and I think good for the level I’m trying to train. With comedians there’s a big aspect of performance itself so it gets a lot rougher and sloppier intentionally than something like an audiobook, cause I need some practice with those challenges. At least them acting things out helps as a little context sometimes. I’m also really noticing how much they mix in onomatopoeia to give some energy to this stuff.
Today was… fine. Somehow feels both better and worse than yesterday and I can’t quite settle how I think I did. Had a pretty good time watching anyway so that’s good. I think I’m more getting tripped up on words I can’t follow which is probably the better outcome than a more fundamental struggle with listening, over time the number of words I know well enough will always be slowly climbing. Learned a few like 軟式テニス ("soft tennis), ヤンしゃ (the type of car a ヤンキー drives), umm… 脱肛 (anal prolapse; they put an explanation up on the screen of it when it was mentioned). I very much appreciate this show’s little reference images when they mention a celebrity, or like last episode when they were referencing some fish (thankfully, no reference images for that last one!).
I’m joining this a bit late, but this is exactly the kind of challenge I needed.
For July, I’m going to focus mostly on Netflix anime/dramas with Japanese subtitles. My goal is not to understand everything, but to save a few useful lines per episode and rewatch scenes until the audio starts matching what I can read.
I’ve been experimenting with a small Chrome workflow to make this less painful, because the hardest part for me is constantly pausing, looking up words, and losing the flow of the episode. Curious if anyone else here studies Netflix/anime this way.
Yes! I have not as much recently, but when I was really grinding vocab from listening, I used free chrome plugins.
The plugins I set up were Language Reactor (makes subtitles selectable) and Yomitan (install a dictionary and then shift/hover over any word to get an instant definition)
I also messed with Anki for a while and set up that if I click one button on Yomitan it automatically makes an anki card
Dang, these episodes got hands. I guessed correctly that continuing onto episode 3 would help make some of the end of episode 2 make a bit more sense. Overall on this first watch I got a bit too attached to words and lost the flow of sentences. 理不尽 stood out to me, but I misheard 尽 as 人 since I haven’t learned 理不尽 completely yet… Denji is hilarious, though.
Joining late, 遅くなって、すみません！
I’m not sure about my goals this time around, guess I just want to be more consistent in my Japanese study routine. I’ll update and add more details as I go. みんな、頑張りましょう！
That’s really helpful, thanks! I used a similar setup before with subtitle tools + Yomitan, but I’m now using kikugo for this workflow when watching anime on Netflix.
The main thing I like is that it keeps everything in one place: furigana, translation, grammar/context explanations, and the ability to export useful lines as Anki cards while I’m watching. For me, that helps a lot because I can stay closer to the episode instead of constantly switching between tools.
I’m still trying not to mine too many sentences though, mostly just saving lines that feel useful, clear, or worth rewatching.
) so it gets pretty ridiculous.
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