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In terms of schedule, the episodes gradually get longer over the course of the podcast with a big jump at episode 14, so I tried to line them up evenly without cutting up episodes across weeks.
Also, some of the episode numbers are not in a great sequence on apple podcasts. Some of it is because e.g. “episode 2” is taken up by a 2 minute announcement, but others are missing.
Listened to the first episode today, and it’s definitely harder than the previous podcast. I couldn’t follow much of the conversation.
There are two hosts, both are university students, one of them is 21 and the other I couldn’t be sure. One of them is studying abroad in London for a year. After introducing themselves, they talk about the coming of age ceremony, which most Japanese young people attend when they turn 20 (the one who is is London could not attend). The one who went spoke a lot about the furisode she wore, and here I got lost (she wanted to rent a pink one, because they are expensive, but ended up being happy that she wore her mother’s purple and white furisode?). Then they briefly explained that day - during the morning there is a ceremony, and in the afternoon it’s similar to a party. She said it was like a class reunion of her middle school class, with people she had not seen for 5 years.
Since this week’s episodes are short I’ll try to relisten during the week, to see if I can catch more of their discussion.
Edit: I found their choice of words to translate to be very weird - they speak quickly, with at least intermediate level grammar and vocabulary, and some of the words they select to give an english translation are 親 and 高い??
I’ve found this happen with other Japanese learner podcasts I’ve listened to - Layla from the The Japanese Bite Size Podcast did this too in her first podcasts (which I found irritating) but she later dropped the habit and now produces excellent podcasts for Japanese learners. I think it’s an artefact of them not really knowing what a Japanese learner might know and wanting to be helpful they translate words that they themselves know into English so you get the ridiculous situation where they’re talking reasonably native-like Japanese at reasonably native-like speed and then they suddenly feel the need to translate the word お母さん!
Episode 3 キット勝お守り
In this episode they talk about taking exams in Japan. When it’s comes to job hunting etc which university you studied at is really important so the university entrance exam period is also very important. Sitting these exams isn’t just about studying, it’s also about fighting off the flu. The exam period for Japan is January, February & March which is also happens to be the flu season so they talk about what strategies they had for avoiding getting it. They think most students get the flu vaccination but the girls (and almost all their classmates) also wore masks every day even if they weren’t unwell. Eating yogurt is also thought to be effective against getting colds and flu so one of them ate R-1 yoghurt every day for breakfast - R-1 is a popular brand in Japan available in most supermarkets. The other one ate yoghurt regularly but not every day.
Asked about her own memories of this time, one of them talks about being given a kitkat by a friend before the exam. KitKat in Japanese becomes キットカット which breaks down into きっと(surely) 勝っと(apparently a Kyushu dialect version of 勝) so giving someone a KitKat before an exam is to wish them luck in the exams - a kind of pun which the other hadn’t even known about even those she’s eaten plenty of those pre-exam KitKats (I find this surprising because I’ve heard a variation of this explanation before!). Apparently one third of Japanese students sitting exams eat these good luck charm KitKats. The other one is surprised by this and thinks a lot of KitKats must be sold during this time. Students also visit shrines before exam to pray for a pass and both girls tried to avoid dropping things because 試験に落ちる means to fail an exam. One of them also tried to avoid saying things like 「あー落ちた！」 when something dropped. Nevertheless, on the day of the exam, she actually fell on the stairs but passed the exam anyway.
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