🔊 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge - Fall 2022 🍁

Finished the last drill section of the previously mentioned N5 book and then took the mock test. Did much better than expected and got 75%. I wasn’t comfortable at all (I struggle to process times, dates & numbers quickly enough) but muddled along.
Haven’t got any refresh content now for N5 so I guess revising on what I’ve already listened to.
It was raining yesterday so Teppi stayed home with a sulky dog who’s too posh to go out in the rain.

The pressure of a test and this listening challenge has definitely motivated me to keep practicing daily. I want to practice reading, I need to practice listening… “raise the floor not the ceiling” and all that.

Putting a little tick in the box, so motivating! thanks @omk3

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Nov 15, Tue of Week 8 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

I watched Ep.1 of ブラックジャックによろしく with generated sub. Watching with transcript sidebar can be done with a subtitle editor, only that no real editing is done, because of “it wastes time”. So, some real listening has to be done, and of course I knew the storyline beforehand from the manga.

Having 9:41 minutes of unchanging お疲れさ is probably the biggest hardship, and probably worth setting aside some time to fix.

I listened to an episode of Learn Japanese with Noriko on Podbean, on collaboration; and half episode of YUYUの日本語Podcast on Spotify, on Okinawa. Podbean now has mainly female senseis, while Spotify has males. I can’t be bothered to find new people (on Podbean) who I can’t listen to well enough.

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November 15 :film_strip::chart_with_upwards_trend: :headphones:

Today I reached level 50 of Migaku, and had two perfect scores in a row :grin:
Capture1,


I also listened with the volume turned down for some of the time, and even when I couldn’t hear the words very well, I could still hear the pitch accent with good enough accuracy. I’m very impressed that the trainer could get me from “I don’t even understand what that is” to “yes, definitely heiban” so fast. It was well worth it.

I also watched episode 8 of Paranoia Agent - twice. I had commented how I didn’t remember some episodes at all, but this one I started remembering the moment I saw it. I still had to rewatch to catch all the details though. I have no words. It was heartbreaking and heartwarming, bittersweet, silly, absurd, surprising, creepy and dark, all at the same time.

And I listened to the first episode of this AudioMovie thing @pocketcat linked to (thanks for thinking of me and tagging me, your recommendations are always so interesting!). They did a strange thing with the audio direction, where you could sort of “sense” the space because people would speak closer to or further from the microphone, even from a different room, it sounded like, and there were full sound effects like rain and knocks etc. As the name says, audio movie. I felt almost like I was eavesdropping on the two girls. I didn’t catch everything (and certainly not much of what was said from the room next door), but I did follow the story. It did a good job with the heightening (and loosening) of the dramatic tension. As far as the plot goes it was nothing special, but it was nice, quality listening practice.

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Ha, same. I’m pretty sure numbers are encoded differently if you will, than other concepts in your brain. I’ve gotten better at it over time but I have to focus when lots of them are being thrown out because my brain just fuzzes them otherwise.

I’m glad you liked it! I agree it lives up to its name of Audio Movie. Reminds me of old radio shows almost with all the sound effects.

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Pocketcat,

Thanks for sharing the Japanese Sign Language Chart! I was just wondering the other day how the Japanese did that, or IF they used Sign Language. Now I know!

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:fallen_leaf: Day 46, 15th of November :maple_leaf:

:headphones: Back to my Home Post

So sleepy… but watched episode 9 of あかがみんクラフトclassic.

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November 15th!

Today I listened to an episode of Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners, and then watched the first episode of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure with Japanese Subs.
The story didn’t capture me at all - everything seemed really rushed and disjointed - but since its super popular I’m going to try to give it a chance before deciding I don’t like it.

I also listened to Lesson 6 of JapanesePod101’s Upper Beginner Season 1 podcast. It was about catching a bus.

(Home Post)

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Interested what you make of Jojo. I felt the same and watched a few seasons, then gave up on it.

Listened to a bit of Teppi when walking the dog, and did a few N5 drills. Also did some dictation practice where I get sent a small audio recording in Japanese and try to understand it. But it can be kinda annoying spending 10minutes to understand a 30 second snippet of Japanese.

@omk3 just had a go at the pitch trainer! It’s tough. I’m not sure I’m at the right place to benefit from it at the moment though.

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It felt tough for me in the beginning too. Actually for quite a long time. But I did a little every day and it really helped. Whether learning to distinguish pitch accent early on is beneficial or not is a matter of passionate debate apparently, and I don’t think I can comment on that - it certainly depends on your priorities. Speaking for myself, I’m definitely glad I stuck with it. It certainly feels good to be aware of an aspect of Japanese that used to go completely over my head, if nothing else.

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Speaking of pitch, one of the youtube videos I watched recently had a live-action demo of “native speakers hear pitch accent differences and I don’t” in the first minute.

The episode is about some event the podcast hosts organized and went to. When one of the hosts introduces the episode topic, the other host picks them up on the accent pattern they used on the event name, and they have a bit of back and forth about it. For me this is very hard to distinguish the difference – I can only just about tell with multiple listenings and the aid of the on-screen visuals, but (unsurprisingly) for the second host this is not only something they can hear but something where their brain will go “wait, what?” when they hear an unexpected accent pattern even if they weren’t consciously thinking about accent. (I say unsurprisingly, because of course I can do that with English stress accent; I’d notice if you said “blackboard” as “black board” or whatever.)

(edit: seems like every forum I use has a different syntax for hyperlinks. Sigh.)

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Listened to Chanmina while I cleaned, and then watched a few Japanese vlogs I follow. I really need to get serious about my daily listening but it’s difficult lol

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Nov 16, Wed of Week 8 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

I watched 1.5 episodes of ブラックジャックによろしく with generated sub. As great as ever, only that sub generation took 1 hour (45 min audio). I fear that I can’t live with sub, even if it is a not so good one.

I listened to Nihongo SWiTCH. It appears to be her last episode, explaining どうも. Her Patreon will also stop collecting fee soon. Then, I listened to the latter half episode of YUYU on Okinawa. Podcast are probably easily to listen and focus for me (and perhaps also fail-fast).

Although I don’t concern much about pitch accent at the moment (or speaking in general), I remember quite well that some wrong pitch on speaking can cause misunderstanding, especially when combined with other phonetic components such as bad Kana pronunciation (or expectation on the other side).

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For Discourse at least you can highlight the text you want and paste the link into it. No need to remember the syntax…unless you’re on mobile where things are a bit more fiddley.

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:fallen_leaf: Day 47, 16th of November :maple_leaf:

:headphones: Back to my Home Post

Relistened to Nihongoconteppei. Did it go better than last time? No. I’m really just missing too much vocabulary.

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If it gets too frustrating, try finding something that’s been transcribed, then you can get a better comprehension - though typically you have to pay for these unfortunately.

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Anything on youtube has auto transciptions. No need to pay for those.

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November 16 :film_strip: :headphones:

Today I watched one episode of Paranoia Agent, then tried some Supernative, which went okay, some hits, some misses, until it got too noisy (construction work nearby) and I had to stop. Then later I thought I might as well watch another episode, so, erm, I actually watched to the end of the series. It was just as crazy and magnificent as I remembered it. Well worth a rewatch, and I suspect I’ll watch it again in the future. If only I could remove the English subtitles I’d watch again tomorrow.

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November 16th!

Just a tiny listen today - one episode of Nihongo con Teppei.
I had planned to do more tonight, but I hadn’t called my dad for a few weeks so I thought I should call him for a catch up, and we ended up chatting for 2 hours!

(Home Post)

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Watched Chainsaw Man and an episode of Pokemon last night. Feel like my listening is finally getting to the point where I use subtitles to check if my hearing was correct and not reading as much. It’s nice to finally start feeling myself graduate off of them.

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I watched a handful of videos today on true crime. Nothing really note worthy. I also tried watching a video that went over some Buddhist stuff (cause my vocab there is weak) but fundamentally my vocab is weak there…because the topic doesn’t interest me :upside_down_face: So that went about as well as expected.

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