Going back to an earlier discussion about episode 4: Was listening to a podcast today, and in the middle of talking about what she used to do in junior high school with her friends the podcaster starts explaining about プリクラ. Here’s the link and the section where she talks about it is 12:36~16:35.
Utako struggling to say “potluck” in this episode made me feel so much better about my Japanese pronunciation 
Episode: 016
Time Count: 30:16
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Hi! I’m late but I’d like to join. I’ve been listening to a few different podcasts, but upon first listen, Utaco’s enunciation sounds very clear, so this seems like a great transition to other native materials. I’ll listen to this week’s episode on my commute tomorrow and see how it goes (:
Episode: 017
Time Count: 27:17
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welcome to the club!
yes, in comparison to most other podcasts I’ve tried, she has great recording equipment and clear speech. She definitely put thought into how she records and organises her podcast - from the very first episode. I hope you enjoy it!
Hi 
I jumped right in with episode 16 despite not having heard the other episodes yet. I really enjoyed it! Because I wasn’t driving, I was able to take some notes and look up some words. I’m gonna record them below if ur interested ~
Words I Looked Up:
Thoughts:
It was so interesting to hear her thoughts around American work-ethic/relations, especially as I work in a Japanese-American office and have to navigate varying work cultures every day. The bit about American folks not apologizing was super relatable hahah, it’s a funny situation I run into while interpreting, because communication from the Japanese side is all about apologies and awareness of your effects on others, and that is distinctly absent on the American side. Not that I think either way is particularly bad or good, it is simply different. I have a crazy time interpreting for American folks in situations where I feel the need to be apologizing like wild in Japanese, but the Americans just do not express that, so I feel rude speaking to my Japanese 上司.
Love the random banjo, what an instrument!
It was funny to me when she was describing westerners’ appearances and said ‘everyone looks like wasps’ lol. I was also wondering–honestly, what is a small face? I’ve heard it used a ~lot~ in Japanese and felt like I got the general idea, but Utaco talked about how she felt like everybody has a small face in America, so ‘small face’ is not at all a complement or known concept there. I know she’s exaggerating, it just made me think, lol, what does that even mean?
I love her openness and honesty when discussing her experiences. It made for great listening.
The English Corner section was cute and fun, I was thinking about places I find Japanese more convenient than English. I 100% agree about Google Maps though, all of the street names in katakana is literal hell to navigate.
Those are all my notes! What a nice podcast, I’d like to listen to the next ep. this week.
I jumped in around ep 8 or so and it’s never been an issue that I didn’t listen to the first few. In fact, she’s quite good at getting you up to speed if she’s talking about something that was in a previous episode.
Okay, here’s a short summary I did for this episode last year. Haven’t posted recently because I’ve been slowed down by having one arm in a half cast….
嬉しい再会
It’s summer holiday time & she’s looking forward to some unplanned time (in contrast to previous summer holidays). She catches up with a young man she first met back in Japan at her tap dancing classes - he was in junior high at the time but now has just graduated from university in America and is about to return to Japan. Out of the blue (it’s five years since they last met), he contacts her & asks if they can catch up before he returns home to Japan. He comes to where she lives and their meet up is a happy one despite their significant difference in age
My favourite:
here she talks about one of her favourite places - Big Sur which isn’t all that far from where she lives (Monterey area). She goes there for a drive with the young man who’s visiting. Enjoying the fabulous scenery, she thinks to herself that she really needs to go there more since it isn’t all that far away from where she lives. Being from Shizuoka, she is reminded that many Shizuokans have never climbed Mt Fuji even though it’s in their backyard
mとnの発音:
here she talks about how she’s only fairly recently realised that she’s been pronouncing the “n” at the end of English words like an “m”, closing her lips as opposed to keeping them open. She wonders if this is because in Japanese the ん sound often ends with closed lips. She is surprised when a native English speaking friend can so easily distinguish between the “n” and “m” sounds at the end of English words.
There’s an interesting idiom she uses at 21:29 - 目からウロコ which means “to see the light” or more literally “scale (of fish, snake, etc.) from the eyes” which is like the English idiom “scales fall from the eyes” which comes from the biblical account of Paul’s conversion to Christianity and I wonder if this isn’t a borrowing from English or another Western source.
I came across it again recently in NANA:
Hooray for minimal pairs 
It took me a while to come up with one, but clam and clan is one that I don’t even think world be that hard to hear the difference.
I could also definitely tell the difference when she saying “open” and “opem”.
Now I wonder if there are any Japanese minimal pairs I should go review… 
I think English speakers probably are not great at distinguishing つ & す - when listening and speaking. Or at least so I was told by one Japanese speaker
I can hear the differences better than I can say them, but they are probably some of the trickiest to hear the difference between.
For saying them, the trick that unlocked it for me was someone telling me that we do have the tsu sound in English, it’s just not an isolated sound, and you say it when you say “its” and “cats”.
I think I have trouble sometimes differentiating し and ひ in when I hear a new word!
Maybe in a past life you were an 江戸っ子 - the original inhabitants of Tokyo’s 下町 didn’t/don’t distinguish between し and ひ.(笑)
Episode: 018
Time Count: 29:05
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woah that’s cool, I didn’t know that!
I thought this discussion was very interesting - I had never realized that the Japanese ん is pronounced often with closed lips. I think I can hear the difference, so it’s something to pay attention from now on.
I agree. I think her podcast is full of interesting insights like this.
