🔊 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge - Fall 2022 🍁

:fallen_leaf: Day 14, 14th of October :maple_leaf:

:headphones: Back to my Home Post

Today I watched an episode of Comprehensible Japanese. It was about the weather and I really liked how she went through it. She not only explained what the weather is called, but also constructed basic sentences and questions. I think I’ll have to go through it again later and maybe do a bit more shadowing and also pay attention to pitch.

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Oct 14, Fri of Week 3 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

Today (after the first post), I listened to 3.5 episodes of Nihongo SWiTCH on Podbean. I can understand well by listening (around 70%, I think), but the transcript definitely helps (also, the Kanji part).

There are two episodes every month, and the next one would be Oct 18, Tue, I think.

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Main post

On October the 14th I’ve listened to

  • Today’s NHK Easy News

P. S. This post should have been a reply to this post:

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I’ve been bouncing around a bit. Listened to the second cult video, found another one about a different cult, listened to a quite easy video of someone summarizing poll results from Twitter on ‘best mystery’ books, and started watching a video on police misconduct. I also downloaded the audiobook for 双頭の悪魔 | L35 which was mentioned in the video as I had a 500円 credit on audiobook.jp that was going to expire.

Found something maybe of interest to @fallynleaf too!

I haven’t watched it yet but I have it on my list to. It’s about someone who transitioned F → M and was/is? a pro wrestler going by the title?

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Yes!! That is Yu Ishino, who was a former wrestler for World Wonder Ring Stardom, where his ring name was Kagetsu. I believe he was one of their trainers for a long time? He was a joshi wrestling legend when he was an active wrestler.

He came out as trans earlier this year, and actually made a brief appearance at a wrestling show, though he didn’t wrestle a match. He was at the second Hana Kimura Memorial Show on May 23, and he briefly reprised the Kagetsu role to do the Oedo Tai dance (he found a way to show off his post-top-surgery bare chest haha) with his former Oedo Tai factionmate and tag partner, Hazuki (who is now back with Stardom after retiring for over a year), as well as joining in some other shenanigans during the matches, like helping Kyoko Kimura (Hana’s mom, who retired years ago, but she came out of retirement briefly for her daughter’s memorial show) cheat during her match haha (Oedo Tai is a heel faction, but obviously the fans are going to cheer them no matter what they do here).

Yu Ishino’s last match was at the first Hana Kimura Memorial Show in 2021, where he briefly came out of retirement to wrestle in the main event, facing a wrestler named Asuka, who is a trans woman. We didn’t know it at the time, but that show was actually main evented by two trans wrestlers, which is really neat, even though the actual wrestling on the show was largely overshadowed by everyone’s grief at Hana’s passing.

It’s unlikely that Yu Ishino will unretire, unfortunately, because I believe he chose to retire due to lingering neck injuries, but I’m so proud of him for publicizing his experiences as a trans man, and I believe he has done some LGBTQ activism? He’s just a really cool person who had a great career as a wrestler, and who has gone on to do really cool things after that, too! :blush:

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October 14th!

I had a lesson with my tutor today so I’m counting that as most of my listening practise today - but I also had a 2.5h car journey that I spent listening to japanese music too.

(Home Post)

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:fallen_leaf: :headphones: softlyraining’s leaf pile listens :maple_leaf: :studio_microphone:

October 14th:

Ended up listening to an episode of Nihongo no Teppei, so the cult videos will have to wait until tomorrow. Teppei discussed the things he looks forward to when it comes to the winter season.

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Yesterday I just went over the first section of TRY N5 practice exam section 1.
Dunno how I only found 5minutes in a day of 24hours long to do the one thing I wanted to.

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October 15 :headphones: :chart_with_upwards_trend:

Supernative 2346 → 2356
Migaku Pitch Trainer

Some more Supernative today. I also subscribed to Migaku for this month, cause I really liked their Pitch Trainer. I mean, I don’t really enjoy being shown how tone-deaf I am, but I do feel like it’s helping me slowly grasp what this fabled beast called pitch accent even is. Some times I surprise myself by how well I seem to hear it, and other times it’s as if I’m being asked to spot a ghost - it’s not there, or if it is I just can’t perceive it.

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Interesting app, I tried the demo. I can do the questions where you can hear the different renditions of the choices (i.e. I can hear that there is a difference) but my success rate at the questions where you have to identify just from audio without comparing seems like it can’t be much higher than random-guess level…

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Main post

On October the 15th I’ve listened to

  • Nihongo Con Teppei for beginners episodes 627-633

P. S. I confused myself for a moment, because it turns out that both my post on 13th and my post on 14th were a reply to my post on 12th, while the 14th should have been a reply to my post on 13th.
This is the disadvantage of the system where I reply to my last post – I have to remember to add new bookmark and remove the old one. Anyway, I’ve now fixed it.

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Yeah it takes a lot of getting used to if your ears are untrained as mine are. The first stage where you can hear the same word in various pitch accent patterns certainly helps understand the difference. Then in the next lessons each pattern is tackled one by one, and this really helps differentiate them. I’ve completed the single words lessons successfully, but now that I started word combinations and phrases, I’m completely lost again. :expressionless:

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October 15th!

I’ve been at a wedding all day so I’m super tired, but I still managed to squeeze in an episode of Nihongo con Teppei for beginners. It was about chocolate, and had a bit about various flavours of Kitkat.

(Home post)

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I started a new show, not done with episode one because of course it’s an hour long episode and I got home late. It’s called Silent and seems to be a romance drama where I’m highly hopeful someone will get cheated on in a deeply dramatic and emotional way. I have my popcorn and tissues ready as needed.

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Missed posting for a couple of days but kept on listening.
Let’s see, I remember I listened to a bunch of random bits and some Nihongo con Teppei on Wednesday. Pimsleurs Japanese Level 2 lessons 5 and 6 on Thursday. Then lessons 6 and 7 yesterday.
Listened to some random stuff during the day today but in the evening I went to see Melt-Banana in concert! That counts as listening to Japanese right?

Listening practice will be more difficult tomorrow I’m certain. My ears are shredded.

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:fallen_leaf: :headphones: softlyraining’s leaf pile listens :maple_leaf: :studio_microphone:

October 15th:

Today turned out busier than I thought, so still waiting on watching those cult videos. :slightly_frowning_face: Instead, I listened to an SBS Japanese report about Australia’s COVID isolation rules.

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Oct 16, Sun of Week 3 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

Today, I listened to 1.5 episodes of Nihongo SWiTCH.

It also means that I didn’t listen to the latter half of 神無月 on Friday. Though, today I listened to half of 気分 on public transport, before listening the latter half inside the building.

I didn’t listen to Nihongo SWiTCH on Saturday. Instead, I watched 1.5 episodes of Death Note with JP sub (just not to be ahead of my reading and reading club, and I watched the other half episode a while ago); skimmed an older episode of Death Note; and watched an episode of HUNTER x HUNTER (with generated sub) on that day.

I am considering Nihongo SWiTCH for completion challenge (100+ episodes to go), and I am OK with taking time (at least for now).

On Saturday (yesterday), I focused on reading (without any drawn images), and sometimes read aloud quietly…

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I’m not officially signing up for this challenge until the off month probably, but I had my biggest listening comprehension victory yet (with Spanish) and I wanted to share haha.

Today I watched my first Mexican wrestling show in a while (AAA’s Triplemania), which had Spanish commentary, and I was blown away by the fact that I could… actually understand it for the most part? I had probably 80% comprehension, even without subtitles.

I’m not sure what exactly changed since the last time I watched lucha libre, since I haven’t really been watching/reading much wrestling stuff in Spanish lately (though believe it or not, I’ve been learning Spanish move names from translating Japanese wrestling haha). I guess it was a probably a combination of reading (which improved my vocab) and then listening to the Duolingo podcast and then the TV show and films I watched for the summer challenge, which boosted my comprehension speed as well as gave me practice with recognizing words when I hear them.

It made the show a lot more fun because I was able to get more context on the wrestlers I wasn’t as familiar with (the commentary would point out notable moves and explain some of the characters’ history), and I also caught what felt like a fun easter egg lol when the commentary mentioned that Kenny Omega (my favorite wrestler, or, well, one of my top two faves haha) wanted to be in the match for the Megacampeonato belt, but his AEW suspension prevented it. That is more than has been officially said on AEW television regarding his current status (though we know a bit about what’s going on from what has been reported on in the dirtsheets). Being multilingual with pro wrestling gets you all kinds of fun bonus information haha.

It was just really cool! Felt like all of my studies were really starting to pay off. It’s super neat to watch native content without subtitles and actually understand it.

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I’ve finally settled on a podcast I’m enjoying: ゆる言語学ラジオ, which is a podcast about language. It’s a bit tricky listening for me but I like and have some background familiarity with the topics, which helps a lot. Also available on youtube, where it has some captioning that makes it a bit easier than the audio-only podcast.

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Main post

On October the 16th I’ve listened to:

  • Nihongo Con Teppei for beginners episodes 634-642.
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