The 4989 American Life podcast is about the daily life of Utaco, a Japanese woman who moved to California with her Japanese husband. She talks about her daily life, travels, impressions of American life and comparisons with life in Japan.
Details
Estimated Level: Easier end of native
Format & Episode Length: Monologue / ~30 minutes
Number of Episodes: 299+ and counting!
Genre: Daily Life / Solo
Transcripts: Available from episode 089 onward on her website (use the search bar to find specific episodes)
Where to Listen
Her Website:4989 American Life (contains links to episodes or search via your preferred app)
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Episodes are roughly 30 minutes anyway so no need to chop them up to reach the time
Potential for schedule change after say week 5 if people want a ramp up
Technically we could have a vocabulary list for the podcasts but not sure if it’s worth it/easy to add to so haven’t included one for now
Planning to use one thread for the whole podcast schedule since there won’t be tons of us. Potentially what we could do in the future if any spinoffs happen is forever use this home thread, or make a new thread every 10, 20 weeks or something
I’ve listened to almost ten minutes of the first episode so far - and will plan to continue at least to the end of that one, even though I’m unsure of whether or not I will continue to listen to future episodes.
My first impressions:
She speaks a little too quickly for me to comfortably follow - not that that’s a bad thing, rather it’s likely just challenging enough for me that it will benefit my language comprehension skills if I do decide to keep at it. Slowing the speed to .75 was too slow for me, so I will continue listening at the normal rate.
While I am understanding quite a lot of what she is saying, I am also missing quite a lot. If I do decide to keep up with the podcast listening, then I will want to do it more actively, repeating sections where I may miss too much, and looking up words as I go along. But if I’m correctly understanding what you wrote above, transcripts may not be available for the earlier episodes. Not a big problem, as I can likely understand enough just from listening to be able to fill in the blanks if I get to the point of actively listening.
I’m curious as to what region of Japan she grew up in. I can’t quite place it, and I may be completely wrong about this, but something about her intonation does not sound to me quite like what I would have expected from a Tokyo native.
I got used to that relatively quickly, within 5-7 episodes. And if you’re catching enough to get the gist, then you may well get even more after we discuss the episodes here. That’s how it went for me in the daily listening thread when both me and Lisaveeta were listening, the more details I knew about (even in English) the more I could understand in Japanese.
Perhaps the club members can help each other out by writing short summaries in English, and list some key words or surprises that might be tougher
Can you be more specific about the intonation difference?
I’ve just listened to the first episode. I noticed that she consistently speaks with standard Japanese pitch accent, even when speaking very rapidly and spontaneously, and that makes her speech easier for me to understand.
Judging from her pitch accent, I would assume that she grew up on the eastern side of Japan, possibly somewhere not too far from Tokyo, or possibly somewhere with a similar pitch accent, such as Hokkaido.
I used Podcasts to learn other languages. What I find helps the most is to listen to the same podcast several times. Maybe listen to the first 5 minutes 3-5 times and see how much you understand after each repetition.
Just listened to episode 1!
Wow quite a step up from Nihongo con Teppei - Beginners. She talks way faster and goes through a lot of different topics. Very much outside of my comfort zone, I wouldn’t have attempted to listen to it now if it wasn’t for this club, so very grateful to you for the initiative and the organization @WeepingWeeb !!
At the beginning I got scared that I wouldn’t be able to follow, it goes so fast that there isn’t really time to translate or process in your head what was said, or you will miss what’s being said next. (unless you pause of course, but chose not to use that for my first listen through). But somehow I still feel like I managed to follow!
Might do a re-listen another day and use pause to write down the timestamps but from my memory the topics that I remember she talked about were:
Episode 1 incomplete Summary
why did she want to do a podcast (she really likes the media and it’s not very well known in Japan, people use more youtube)
what it was going to be about (life in America)
what she was doing in the US and how she got there (she got married)
about learning English / talking English (she was sometimes living in areas where the level of English wasn’t high so she didn’t have a need of getting better)
… and the rest not sure if I missed it or already forgot!
Looking forward to hearing more, seems like it will be super beneficial for listening practice, thanks for the nomination @mitrac !
Decided to drop in, I listened to this podcast for a bit in the past when transitioning increasingly out of beginner-focused stuff, apparently that was like 2 years or more ago when I remember listening to this.I didn’t go to the beginning at the time so I think this episode was new for me; I was just listening to random ones before.
I’ve been feeling kinda bad at listening, and I guess coming back to this is a good piece of evidence that my problem is just rough speaking styles or less common vocabulary (when trying to watch movies and the like). My mind was wandering occasionally and I’d have to snap back into it, which I’m terrible about with podcasts and that’s part of why I rarely listen to them haha. But that aside, I can follow basically all this very comfortably.
Having someone living in the US from outside of it and getting their perspective is kinda neat, but I don’t think she grabs me quite enough that I stop feeling like I’m just doing it for listening practice, but that’s ok. I think this is a good pick because it does really bridge that gap into more native material.
But even as an American, the desserts really ARE too sweet.
Okay, so I’ve never joined a “club” before (although I have done challenges) so I’m wondering how we do this….
I’ve listened to probably around 20 episodes of this podcast in recent times & really enjoy it. I guess I like listening to a foreigner’s view on any culture (and in this case, as a non-American, I’m looking on from the outside as well), and I appreciate her teasing out what it means to live surrounded by a language you are struggling to learn but - as is often the case - not living in “immersion” as she lives with her husband who shares both her native language and her culture. I also appreciate many of her tips on how to break out of this isolation and in her case, dependency on her husband who can speak English - many of the barriers she feels in regards to learning English, I feel in trying to learn Japanese. And she’s absolutely right about “textbook” language - it’s stilted and fixed in a way living languages never are.
I just finished the first episode and I really enjoyed it so far! It’s hard for me to find podcasts that are just right in terms of challenge - not too easy but not impossible to follow either. And I enjoy the Japanese-in-America perspective, as someone who is neither Japanese nor from the US.
I tried to note down a couple of words/expressions during my listening which I found interesting, but the list isn’t too extensive since walking and writing doesn’t always work
Chapter 1: Vocabulary/expressions which caught my attention
積極的: Positive and 消極的: Negative. I heard them quite a bit in the beginning and I like these words not only because they are common, but from their construction - positive uses the kanji of 積, which can convey “amass, accumulate”, while the 消 from negative carries the connotation of “remove, spend, delete”
She also uses ポジティブ and ネガティブ, so I expect these are quite common.
Regarding hardship, she uses vocabulary such as 苦労 (difficulty, hardship) and 悩み (trouble, worries) to describe her overseas (海外) experience. One word I particularly enjoyed was 経緯, meaning “sequence of events; circumstances; how things got this way” - which she used when she started telling about how she came to the US.
I also noticed a lot of repetition of words such as 無能, 無力… I can understand she had a rough start moving abroad.
I found the section very moving where she recalls how in Japan she was a capable person who was able to live alone and earn her own living, and then after moving to America she suddenly found herself helpless and incompetent.
@16:08:
一人前
（いちにんまえ）coming of age, attaining full adulthood
@16:14:
社会人
（じゃかいじん）working adult, full-fledged member of society
I listened to this week’s episode just there. It’s at a level where it’s definitely not passive background listening material, but actively listening and with a few pauses for stuff to buffer in my brain it’s fine.
I should take notes next time, my thoughts are mostly on the last two segments.
First, lol at the English being taught in Japanese schools. Culture has moved on and neither of those phrases mean what they say on face value. “I beg your pardon” is basically “WTF did you just say?” here, and if someone says “I’m fine” in reply to “How are you?”… they’re very much not fine.
The sweets thing was surprising for me, especially given Japanese food has its own reputation for sweetness. Especially I think at one point she was giving American chocolate as an example, and umm… that does not bode well for Japanese chocolate lol.
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