I’ve actually seen that one! Definitely a good pick. You’re dead on about how unlike the tropes or… really anything else that that movie is. Years ago I tried a Satoshi Kon thing, but that didn’t go as well as I expected it might. That movie is definitely taking it a solid step further, haha.
Been a mega listening weekend. Will put things behind detail curtains to not grab too much space
シグナル
I finally finished シグナル after watching episodes 1-8 last year (or maybe even in 2020?). It’s a really good show, but much harder for me to watch because the scenes can be so emotional. Highly recommend it, though. I still have the stand alone special that came out last year to finish yet, but the first season is done!
I remember when I started watching it I strugggggggggllllleeeedddd to understand what was going on. Tons of rewatching scenes, looking up words, dissecting dialogue. Now I’d place it as somewhat easier than 密告はうたう, at least for the last two episodes. It overall uses less flowery phrases and has more back and forth quick dialogue than long monologues (I personally struggle more with those).
Some random 1st episodes
Also watched the first episode of ケイヤク which, surprise! is a crime drama. This one seems to be a BL crime drama of some sort and there’s already 3 actors from 押井刑事, which I loved, in this show. Basically about a yakuza member and a cop end up working together. I won’t say why as that’d spoil the ending of the first episode.
Also watched an episode of たびくらげ探偵日記 - verdict is still out for me on this one. It’s pretty easy to understand and follow along, I just don’t know if it interests me enough to. If you want to practice listening to casual male speech (men in their 20s) this would be a good show to get that practice from.
私の正しいお兄さん
I started 私の正しいお兄さん (4 of 8 episodes done. Half hour episodes). It’s about a girl with a big brother complex who meets a guy who reminds her of said brother. He has trouble sleeping - unless he’s with her - so naturally he asks for this favor. Reason I kept watching but spoiler for end of first episode: annnnnd he’s a murderer.
This show is incredibly easy to follow along with. No JP subs and I almost feel like I’m cheating at “studying” by watching it. Probably because it’s more focused on the romance than the other aspects. I’m somewhere vaguely in the intermediate plateau so I’d guess this to be a good show for people at low intermediate? It’s not beginner friendly vocab or pacing. Mildly violent (one scene so far).
I’m mostly just enjoying the absurdity of this one and want to see where it goes.
Audiobooks
I also stopped listening to the audiobook for 君の膵臓を食べたい because I just wasn’t enjoying it. This wasn’t a huge shock to me because I read another one of the author’s books before and sincerely disliked it, but I felt I needed to try his most famous work to give him a fair shake. His work is quite popular based on Natively so take that with a grain of salt - if my tastes don’t already align with yours, don’t weigh my opinion too heavily. 
I started 謎解きはディナーの後で and it’s been going ok. It’s a pretty standard detective comedy so enjoyable to listen to while out on walks, but nothing amazing. I have to focus more when listening to it compared to something like コーヒーが冷めないうちに but I’m never lost listening to it either so it’s a nice little listening challenge for my current level.
Currently at 22/400 hours for my yearly goal.
I’m joining in too !
By the way, if anyone is looking for content, here’s some youtube channel that I enjoy watching (all of them are uploading short stories and they do have subs) :
Short stories about three friends with supernatural powers that are running カレコレ屋, a place where people can request help for pretty much anything.
混血のカレコレ
Short stories about a guy that constantly raises death “flags” (and other kind of flags). (comical)
全力回避フラグちゃん!
Short stories on horror topics (in a humorous fashion).
秘密結社ヤルミナティー
Thanks everyone for the suggestions! And welcome, @ToAruNoKON! I went and subscribed to those channels. 
@Daisoujou I watched the first episode of からかい上手の高木さん because of your recommendation. It’s very cute and while I’m at a lower listening level, I am still getting value out of watching with the Japanese subtitles. I’ll definitely keep watching!
My recommendation this week: The "Thinking in Japanese Podcast"
The host, Iisaku, speaks pretty slowly and will pause between paragraphs, so your brain has time to catch up with what he just said. But I also like that the episodes are longer and cover more advanced topics than Nihongo Con Teppei for beginners. (No hate to Teppei, I like his work.)
I went ahead and subscribed to the “Thinking in Japanese Podcast” Patreon to get transcripts of the episodes and reading those along with the episodes has also been really helpful for me.
I have a question for everyone: Do you tend to space your listening practice throughout the day, or do you try to do it in one block of time for extended immersion?
(Btw - totally unrelated to anything - @pocketcat, your pfp makes me crack up every time I look at it. Thank you for that.)
Haha, I’m glad. It also makes me laugh which is why I chose it 
While we’re sharing youtube channels and such - most of the channels I watch have wandered off into my niche interests, but I looked up a couple I enjoyed when I was just getting into JP listening via youtube since they could still be useful to a lot of people here:
ジェルちゃんねる - dumb skits but they’re a lot of fun and the amount of puns and kanji jokes was honestly really useful for me.
Pokémon Kids TV Japan - specifically the 体験探検 videos are super handy if you’re just starting out listening. They introduce you to a lot of topics in an easily digestible format and there are subtitles with furigana for nearly all the dialogue.
Original Story - scary(?) stories narrated with JP subtitles. They’re written like short stories but include animations so it’s helpful for connecting words to meanings and might help someone get more comfortable with the ‘flow’ of writing in books.
That’s fantastic! Glad you like it! I’ve definitely watched stuff prior to this where I only caught bits, recognizing words and the like, so I’m sure you can get some value of it regardless of where you are. Have to start somewhere. And more often than not the show makes it clear what’s happening even if you’re missing stuff, so I think you’ll have fun either way.
Personally, I like to do intensive listening (looking up a lot) in one block of time when I have the most energy (in the morning). For extensive listening, I tend to do it throughout the day as a way to take a break or while doing other things (frequently watching a japanese video while eating, for example).
Neither - I listen / watch in bursts when I feel like it. I also watch while eating quite often, but not always/ most of the time. If I’m in the mood, it can be anything from 10 minutes to a couple hours at a time, but I also have a lot of days where I don’t (purposefully) listen at all. Not counting music/random YouTube snippets here.
I have a question to everyone myself:
How do you handle the different episode counts/lengths of drama series etc? I’m counting ‘number of series’ in that goal right now, but I ended up binging a short, 6 ep series in between the series I was supposed to be watching that’s twice the length.
I suppose it’s fine and evens out in the end…?
Somehow this feels like a bigger, more significant difference than it does with books. 
does anyone else feel like that? I’m beginning to think it’s all in my head.
I think it’s 100% up to you, anything goes!
Personally I’ve always just marked every unit I’m counting as 1 regardless of actual length, honestly maybe just because I think it’s funnier that way.
I’ve marked a 10 episode show the same as a 51 episode show - and in the other thread, I’ve counted a ~200 page Yotsuba volume, a ~1200 page wordy manga omnibus edition, a brief 1-hour comedy game, and an elaborate and melodramatic RPG I played for 100+ hours all as “1.”
But I’m not relying much on my numeric goals to be motivating, so it doesn’t really matter to me if they don’t make any sense so whatever works best for you!
Oh, I missed this. I tend to do larger blocks in the evening. I find Japanese distracting during the work day unless it’s just some quick written word thing (twitter/memes/checking something in Japanese).
I count raw hours rather than series. I have a long standing habit of not finishing some series for months on end and then finishing others in 2 days. 
Similarly I don’t care so much about number of books as I do about page count. I’m currently reading a 560 page book to be followed by a ~650 page book. I could get “more” books by reading four 300 page books (both would be ~1200pgs) but since I don’t care about the book number it doesn’t matter.
But agree 100% with @rodan - if it motivates you and you’re enjoying yourself then track in whatever manner is the most frictionless for you.
These are weirdly wonderful, thanks for linking! (Just enjoyed a Poketoon called「プリンのうた」)
Today I watched 逆転裁判 (2012), also known as Ace Attorney! I lucked into seeing it with subtitles, and because I’ve played through all of the relevant parts of the first game recently, comprehension went quite well! Definitely my best attempt at a film yet, though I think without subtitles it would’ve been pretty sketchy.
I threw together a longish review for Letterboxd that is pretty spoiler-free despite a few mild implications, which I’ll collapse below for anyone interested. The short version is, although this was great practice, I’m fairly unimpressed with the movie. With Takashi Miike directing it absolutely has some style to keep it watchable, but the project feels too big for this movie to contain, and for various reasons, the changes really detract from what is enjoyable about this series.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I wanted to say, the movie taught me that 湖 is just read こ when it’s attached to a place name, and not みずうみ. Oops.
Said review
Recently I’ve played through most of the first Ace Attorney game in Japanese as one of my primary ways of studying the language, looking up tons of things and mining sentences with unfamiliar words. It’s a game I’ve played a few times before, but in English, of course. I’ve finished all that matters for this film (I’m tapping out in case 5 because the writing is substantially harder; maybe I’ll come back later), so I figured this would be good listening practice. And that it was! With subtitles, I was able to follow the majority of the speech because I’ve studied the core vocab so closely already. Comprehension-wise, it’s the best time I’ve had with a Japanese film so far. Otherwise… ehh.
I recognize that adapting a ~20 hour videogame that consists entirely of text into this format isn’t easy. With Takashi Miike helming the project, at least we get a lot of style. Most characters have the proper whacky outfits and haircuts, there’s the exact over the top objecting the series is known for, and they add in some interesting surprises like the wild holographic technology used in the courtroom. The first time Naruhodo flung a screen into a person, I was totally on board.
Unfortunately, when compromises have to be made, it feels as if we got the worst of all possibilities. I’m going to complain a lot about differences, but I don’t think this is the sort of insignificant squabbling people do about changes from media they are attached to at times. So much of the very reasons the games are liked are missing here.
Especially this early in the series, it was rarely, if ever, hard to tell who the culprit was. What was clever and surprising, though, was the how and why. Particularly central, was the enjoyment at figuring out those contradictions. And I get that this isn’t an interactive medium, and even at 2 hours and 15 minutes this feels rushed so maybe it just wasn’t feasible, but the movie totally fumbles any enjoyment in how the twists and turns play out, because it mostly has to give us the contradictory information the moment it’s being presented as a contradiction. It just feels like a movie where things are suddenly brought up, that we are never privy to, and I can’t imagine someone who hadn’t played the games feeling like it’s particularly satisfying to just… be given an explanation of events, then have someone say “OBJECTION, that’s actually not it.” The vast majority of the movie plays out that way, though.
Even more worrying are changes to the characters and certain plot elements, for two reasons. When this film has only style to coast on, some of the people were robbed of their very quirks that made them interesting. Sometimes, like with the boat shop owner, you just get a shell of a person who does very little at all. But toning down someone like Von Karma means that his entire arc rings hollow. Sure we hear he’s undefeated, but he’s just a dude who objects occasionally. In the game he was turned up to such extremes that the judge himself seemed terrified to go against him, and that sort of characterization is needed to make him feel like a properly worthy adversary.
Further, character development is mostly cut out. Naruhodo as a fumbling mess is entertaining at the beginning, but he never really has a chance to change. Meanwhile everything about Mitsurugi’s arc doesn’t exist, Mayoi is robbed of the agency the game gives her so that she really is just a conduit to summon her sister and nothing else (though that isn’t even mentioned either)… the list goes on. I’d go so far as to say the one basic core tenet of this series, the importance of standing by and believing in someone at times when they have no one else, is only vaguely intact by implication through a couple events they didn’t cut, but the whole heart of it is just gone and ignored.
It’s a single-focused vehicle for style, but when it regularly opts to aim lower in that very style than the property it’s based on… what are we left with? I didn’t hate this but it feels like my own involvement in going “Oooh it’s that person made real!” is the only thing that carried me through.
Well, except my Japanese learning. That went great 
I watched a couple of movies:
俺は待ってるぜ (or “I Am Waiting” in English - couldn’t throw an apostrophe in there to at least try to match the register huh?)
This is an early Nikkatsu noir I watched on the Criterion Channel. It’s pretty good!
I don’t get the impression it’s especially notable in any one particular way, but I found it very solid. The theme of getting kind of stuck waiting in an older sibling’s shadow even when it turns out they haven’t gone anywhere resonated pretty well with me, and it’s got fun character actors like you would want in a noir, like the drunk doctor is very good, and I particularly liked this guy (the actor’s name is 波多野憲 I think, but he doesn’t appear to be famous) as a guy who acts tough with a gun but never manages to use it:
The main actor is strangely baby-faced for the boxer role (I think he was a famous singer before the movie), but sells the charm pretty well, and the central romance is fine.
The subtitles were baked in and I tried not to look at them, to some success. I remember it feeling sort of like reading along with a dictionary - I would frequently hear something I didn’t understand and glance downward at the English. Which I guess is okay?
仄暗い水の底から (or “Dark Water” in English)
I was a little reticent to watch this one so soon after I watched the Ring movies, as it’s along similar lines, by the same director (中田秀夫) as Ring 1&2 based on a story by the same author. But I do like those movies, so hey.
And yeah! It’s very similar to Ring, in a good way! Both movies are full of quiet slows shots of just like - interesting architecture and lived-in feeling environments that I love. And a movie can really go a long way just selling you on the place and atmosphere. Like, the apartment building central to the movie and its kind of crummy staff, or the kindergarten, or the publishing company used in one scene, all feel very memorable to me.
The star, 黒木瞳, I think does a great job as a very stressed single mother (and the child actress is good too), and it’s one where I strongly wished for things to work out for the characters. And having moved to a new apartment recently, the anxiety around wondering if that small blemish will go away on its own or if it’s going to turn out to be a serious problem is plenty real.
I think the only things taking it down a notch compared to Ring are just that the ghost involved isn’t aesthetically as interesting to me (VHS tapes are cooler than water to me, apparently). And there’s some things in the climax that unfortunately come across as corny (there’s a bad 2000’s CGI moment that defused a lot of tension for me suddenly, for one).
The first scene is very dialogue heavy and implies a lot of backstory, so I ended up rewinding and watching it a total of 4 times - twice without subtitles, once with the English subtitles turned on, then finally again without. I had been able to understand very vaguely what was being said, but I didn’t get fully that it was about discussing a potential custody fight with divorce lawyers until the runthrough with subtitles.
After that I did pretty good without subtitles though!
Ooh, I’ve seen Dark Water too! I think we largely agree. More than a year later, the apartment itself is what sticks with me the most. I thought some of the moment to moment horror stuff was executed really well (if not pulled away from a little too quickly, IIRC?), but ultimately yeah, I had issues with how it wrapped up as well. I remember it reasonably fondly for what it did well anyway. And nice job on the comprehension of most of it!
Well, today I wrapped up the last two episodes of season 2 (and currently the last season) of からかい上手の高木さん. I was already enjoying stuff about it before like I explained, but I think this season overall did well to amp up the stakes a little. I mean, it is one of these lightly romantic anime where plot advancement is forbidden, but the two got a little closer and I found it super endearing when they did open up a tiny bit. Honestly, the sections in each episode with the 3 girls in their class might be my favorite parts though. They’re amusing.
Overall, I was still pleased with what I could understand! This was still with subtitles, though I was wondering if I should experiment a little with removing them for easier shows like this. I tried going back to an episode of Midnight Diner recently and by comparison that is still absolutely packed with words I don’t know and just generally hard to follow (this is with subtitles, but if it wasn’t, it’s obvious how much clearer anime speaking is too…). So I guess for now I should seek out more simple anime with subtitles if I can. Haven’t settled on where to go next, but that seems most productive and, at least in Takagi’s case, was a rare thing that didn’t leave large enough gaps to be frustrating.
Took me long enough to put myself in the wiki. lol Anyway, I’m currently listening to Vassalord, a BL-series about vampires, cyborgs and general fun. Kenichi Fujiwara does the main character Johnny Reyflo (and that IS a ridiculous name) but well matched by Charles Chrishunds 
played by Ryotarou Okiayu . This is a lighthearted comedy series that suits Fujiwara’s acting style so well! 
That sounds intriguing…?
As an aside, do you know of an easy (legal) way to access drama CD content online, without having to ship CDs halfway across the world?
I’ve only really used Amazon JP for my buying needs. It’s really fast and reliable after all. I guess you could google for digital downloads and drama CDs and see if you can find something? ^^
I think this is what you’re looking for?
Audiobook.jp drama category
ListenGo drama category
I stopped using the ListenGo because the subscription model didn’t appeal to me and so far as I was able to tell there’s no way to keep the files of the titles you purchase (maybe I didn’t try hard enough/look around enough). Audiobook.jp is my go-to though and it looks like most of their dramas are available on 聞き放題 if keeping the files doesn’t matter to you. If you purchase outright you can download the MP3s.
Wanikani is scolding me for posting in this thread too much but I want to be helpful 
I think I stumbled on audiobook.jp before, but I had forgotten about it again. Thank you! I’ll take a look through their content. 
Oh, thanks for pointing the way to those sites.