That’s probably what I would have though if I hadn’t seen this discussion first 
3 Likes
The booths are very popular here in Japan amongst young people - loads of teenagers talk about going there on the weekends while at school etc. which was how I learnt about it. You also see the big eye photos they make everywhere over social media etc. as well.
As an aside, does anyone know if the earliest episodes are available on spotify/itunes etc? I can’t find them anywhere else but Youtube, but idk if I’m just being blind. I would prefer to have it in some audio-only form so I can listen to it while out and about.
6 Likes
Haven’t found them either but if you don’t mind a bit of work, there are websites to convert YouTube videos to MP3
3 Likes
I found it on spotify though? Doubting myself now because no one else has fsfs 
3 Likes
I’ve seen it there but I’m not sure it has the earliest episodes which this club is listening to - places like spotify and itunes etc. all seem to start from around like ep. 206 rather than ep. 1 I thinkk
Good suggestion, I might just do this, it’s not that much work if it’s only like an episode a week I guess so I’ll just do it in a batch.
3 Likes
ahhhh I’m so sorry my brain mixed up ‘earliest’ and ‘recent,’ so I thought you wanted to listen to the most recent ones lol. you’re right - it starts from the 206th ep :3
3 Likes
Week 5
Episode: 005
Time Count: 27:26
Participation
Will you be listening along with us this week?
- I’m listening along
- I have finished this part
- I’m listening to this episode after the club has finished
0
voters
If you’ve already listened to this podcast but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have finished this episode.”
6 Likes
Episode 5
5:04 felt like a tongue twister
I forgot everything she discussed after she started talking about shabu shabu, But I think it was practising English, saying good morning and thanks to people, garage sales, she mentioned previously living in little mexico?, having Japanese friends in America and how she thought it would be better for her English not to (or a relative thought that?) but then turns out its nice for complaining and such, and then lots of shabu shabu.
9 Likes
Episode 5
She really does speak quickly ~5:04 when she’s talking about wanting to improve English while hanging out with Japanese friends!
About “hanging out”, she uses the word: 連む (つるむ) = to hang out with; to do together (which I’d never heard before – usually just 遊ぶ?).
~4:57 she says something like: つるむって言葉なんか昔のヤンキーみたいですけど
I was wondering why つるむ is a ヤンキー word. Apparently, on Yahoo!知恵袋 there was a discussion about it giving a “vulgar” impression – or not “classy” or a word most female speakers would normally use. Just looking in Jisho, you’d have no idea what impression a word gives…but listening to native podcasts really helps with that I think.
I learned a new meaning of 空気 (くうき) which I thought was funny: 私は空気です。
空気 = Someone with no presence; someone who doesn’t stand out at all. (Colloquial). Reading ぼっち・ざ・ろっく! lately, it reminded me of that.
BTW: ~7:38 she sings 育ってきた環境が。。。
Is she singing セロリ (Celery) by Masayoshi Yamazaki? I don’t know much about Japanese music and was curious, so I tried searching for it. I don’t know if that’s the song, but I think those are the first words (anyway, it’s a pretty good song – the 90’s had a lot of great Singer-Songwriters).
8 Likes
Episode 5
I’m with everyone else - I was surprised by how fast she was talking for a bit (around 5 min). The vocabulary itself wasn’t too hard, but the speed just made it difficult to follow/focus!
Anyway, in the beginning, she is talking about how January is finishing and it’s getting warmer, so she’s happy about that. The theme of the episode is the latest news and also about Japanese people around her. In the beginning, she goes to a yard/garage sale with a friend, who she met 2 years ago in ESL class. They are the only other Japanese there, but will leave soon. There are noy many Japanese/asians in Little Mexico.
車庫 - garage
引越し - to move
賑やか - bustling, lively
方々 - people
She actually doesn’t feel the need to have JP friends, as she wants to practice english.
断ち切る - to sever, cut apart (forgot the context; maybe cutting ties with people moving?)
留学生 - foreign student
人付き合い - social disposition
しみじみ - earnestly, seriously
助け合う - to help each other
情報交換 - information exchange
普段な生活 - ordinary/day to day life
重要 - essential, important
育てきた - raised
イライラ - to loose patience
Here she also mentions that conversations also depend on the culture and how someone was raised, so she also misses sometimes talking to Japanese people, only for the way of talking or to discuss certain topics.
現在 - the present time
周囲 - surroundings
恵まれて - to be blessed with, rich on
地域 - area, region
恋しく - yearn for, miss
語りたい - want to talk
英語の話のコーナー
Here she mentions having to get used to english the first time she came to the US. She spoke with a broken english, so had a difficulty understanding others and being understood. She struggled to figure out how to practice the language.
とにかく- anyway
まず - first
場面 - setting, place
状態 - state, condition
話しかける - to address someone
基本 - basis, fundamentals. She talks about how she practices the basis with people in the neighbourhood and stores: good morning, thank you, please.
She consciously makes an effort to be bright/joyful in her greetings: 明るく
勇気が得る - to earn courage
無視される - to be ignored (she worried it would be the case in class)
注文 - order
お会計 - bill (at a restaurant). She was often unsure what to say when leaving a restaurant; often she would just say thank you.
引き続き - continuously
My Favorite: しゃぶしゃぶ
我が家 - our house
薄い肉 - thin meat, literally (I’m not sure if she is referring to literally thinly sliced meat, or to a specific cut eg. lean meat)
伝わる - to transmit
It seems that the meat available in the US is not really good for shabu shabu, as it’s quite tough. She can only buy the ideal type of meat in asian markets, in larger cities.
油味 - oily taste
すごく硬い - very tough (meat)
都会 - cities
甘味 - sweet taste
A friend couple the age of their parents often takes them out to eat. They want to cook them some shaku shabu as thanks.
おもてなし - hospitality
土鍋 - earthenware pot
ご夫婦 - husband and wife
感動的に美味しい - moving taste
10 Likes
Feel like this is cheating but this is my summary from a couple of months back. Will listen again tomorrow & see if I have any more to add
4989 American Life #5: an episode all about friends.
日本人との付き合い方: how she initially didn’t seek out Japanese friends because she thought having such people to talk to might hamper her ability to learn English, but then having made some, realised they had a useful place in her expat life
英語に慣れるために気をつけていたこと: talked about how as a beginner in a foreigner language, you need to get out and practise at least greetings with native speakers to gain the necessary confidence to speak.
アメリカでしゃぶしゃぶを食す: talks about how much she loves しゃぶしゃぶ, how difficult it is to find suitably thinly sliced meat for it in America, how American meat - even when thinly sliced - isn’t quite right for しゃぶしゃぶ & how she found suitably thinly sliced (but expensive!) meat at Japanese food stores and then finally find similar but less expensive meat at other Asian foodstores (Korean, Chinese). She also talked about sharing しゃぶしゃぶ with an older American couple with whom she and her husband are friends, and how they gave the couple a しゃぶしゃぶ pan.
10 Likes
I’m sort of annoyed I don’t have the attention span to sit and listen with the transcripts (well subtitles for this early stuff). It’s weird, i can listen to it in podcast form (well recent episodes anyway) easily just accepting i don’t know what I don’t know but i get really antsy listening to it and trying to focus
6 Likes
Just relistening to this episode around the 6:30mark and enjoying the part where she uses the English word “comfortable” first and has to search for the Japanese word 快適
まぁ、それがカンフォタブルな/
カンフォタブルって何だっけ/
快適な？
9 Likes
Week 6
Episode: 006
Time Count: 27:29
Participation
Will you be listening along with us this week?
- I’m listening along
- I have finished this part
- I’m listening to this episode after the club has finished
0
voters
If you’ve already listened to this podcast but are still going to join the discussion, please select “I have finished this episode.”
8 Likes
Poll is open for the next podcast pick! Cast your beautiful vote now!
5 Likes
Okay, so this is the short summary I did a couple of months ago. Will be relistening to the podcast soon & may add some things:
Summary
2月の3連休: Talking about how she spent her time over the two three consecutive day public holidays (what we’d call long weekends) including Abraham Lincoln’s Day & President’s Day. She gives a brief historical explanation of the holidays but then says she could have got it wrong, having read it in English.
On the first of the long weekends, she went to a friend’s house for dinner on the first day, hiking with her husband on the second, & spent the last day at home taking it easy and doing a few things round the house that she’d wanted to get done.
She describes the second long weekend as なんかちょっと微妙だったかな. The first day was great. Her friend’s car needed work on it and Utaco’s husband went over to help her friend’s husband with it while Utaco tagged along. Her friend is Japanese but her friend’s husband is American, and although the wife was Utaco’s friend first, the couples have since become good friends and often go to each others houses, eat & go places together - in fact, it was their house Utaco and her husband went to for dinner on the first night of the previous long weekend. Love the description of her husband bonding with her friend’s husband over car repairs (男性チーム)while the girls (女性チーム)gossip inside the house! She bemoans having wasted the rest of holiday by losing her mojo, envious maybe of people who are on the hyper ガンガンside
アメリカあるある(愚痴です…): a short rant about American pedestrians taking their time walking slowly across the road だらだらin dribs and drabs たらたら even though there are cars waiting. Singles out high school students (junior & senior) being particularly bad arriving at & leaving school
英語に慣れるために気をつけて後編 :Talks about how when she first arrived in America, she lived in a small town with no ESL classes. With no English & zero confidence , she had to find a way to get out & improve both so she hit on the idea of going every day to the same supermarket at the same time to buy the same things from the same kind young female shop assistant. Over time, they began to exchange small talk & she was then brave enough to start conversations with other shop assistants. She even finds a friendly young man at a laundromat & goes there even though it’s not particularly close to have the chance to talk English. She points out that the effort has to be on the learner’s side to get out and meet people
今週のmy favourite: here she talks about getting into baking banana muffins because American houses have convenientaly large ovens unlike Japanese houses
10 Likes
There’s also で which is the shortened colloquial form of それで.
4 Likes
Thanks @Lisaveeta for the summary - it’s definitely super helpful, there were some parts that were really unclear to me but now it makes much more sense… I took a few notes, but I have a feeling I missed quite a bit of information for this week’s episode.
Episode 6
It is still cold in California. In this episode, she wants to share some of the things which have been happening lately.
三連休: 3 day weekend, long weekend.
各州: each state (of the US). Here she is talking about regional differences in days off, if I got that right.
連休: consecutive holidays
大統領: president of a country (while talking about president day).
I have to say, I still struggle with dates/years/days and counters, to the point my mind just blanks when these are noticed. So I just kind of spaced out in this part about the president day, Abraham Lincolm etc…
Back to having a few days off, she talks about things she has done, such as hiking, sewing, lazing around. Then she mentions hanging out with a couple they are friend’s with, the wife is Japanese and the husband is American. She would also like if her mention condition/energy levels were a bit better, to do as much as some other people are able to in such a short time.
借り出す - to borrow, take out
調子 - condition, state of heath
常に - always, constantly
ガンガン - often used to represent ‘throbbing’, eg. a throbbing headache.
Aruaru corner
横断 - crossing/intersection
高校者 - high school students?
小走り - trot, jog
信号がない - not having any traffic lights
交差点 - intersection of a road
批判 - criticism
間に合わない - to not make it (in time)
はねる - this is an interesting verb. It can mean to leap, jump, but can also mean to hit (eg. with a car). Here she was saying that she almost hit an old man with the car.
英語の話
She is getting better at talking in English, and she mentions how her routine works: she goes to the same stores and market, so she often sees the same cashier and greets her, for example.
恐怖心 - fear, terror
編み出す - to come up with, to think up
目立つ - to stand out
形式的な相槌 - formal greetings
白菜 - chinese cabbage. The cashier was asking her about it, as it’s a produce american’s apparently usually don’t buy so often.
She is generally a negative person, but in the last year in america, even if there is a lot that she cannot do and she has lost some confidence, she is moving forward one step at a time to become ‘useful’.
共同洗濯 - laundromat (coin laundry). She met a local young men who became acquaintances with her and she always chats with there.
人と接する - to come in contact with people
My favourite: banana muffin.
These are quite popular for their 優しい甘さ - subtle sweetness. You can also do variations such as using coconut oil instead of butter, and using nuts or dried fruits. Utaco is interested in those.
In the end of the episode, she mentions she created a Youtube channel. Which is funny, since I’ve been listening in youtube since ep 1… but I guess she had the episodes originally only in iTunes.
She also asked listeners to send her requests if they have, to her email address.
9 Likes