🔊 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge - Fall 2022 🍁

Teppi came on the dog walk in the morning and came to the shops with me for a lunchtime outing to buy some bread (ok and 2 chocolate bars and a coke). A few N5 listening drills after work.
Oh I also did a level of the pitch trainer - it was long! I thought it would be 5 minutes but I think it took me more like 15 or so.
Oh I also looked at the pronunication stuff from @Twelvewishes original post. Think I’ve cracked my つ pronunciation thanks to it! Feels like a big win. I parrotted the full list of pronunciation drills and tried to keep up as there’s not much gap. Quite interesting to see the pitch bars as you’re listening.

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Nov 17, Thu of Week 8 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

I started watching Pokemon series from 1997, without sub (1.5 episodes) Even if I generate sub, I see that it is not good enough to help much. I can remember soundtracks well from the games (but early games’ texts aren’t spoken). There are obviously new BGM’s as well. I missed しげる so much.

I looked at mimicmethod.com in @Twelvewishes’s Home Post. Truthfully, I don’t want to listen to much of anything else, other than Japanese, but after Course Introduction (watch this first), there are PDF for every VDO lectures. I also see Soundcloud in some classes.

As a matter of fact, it’s pretty bad to study a language without phonetics at all; but a question is how to execute the learning well. There is also a part about some ideas of language learning. I don’t see the course on pitch and sound changes, though. But of course, I have problem with distinguishing some consonants, so that will be the first task.

About the ideas of language learning, I might apply to another language, Mandarin; where I went nowhere. (I got some ideas from audio Anki first, though. Maybe later, say 2024.)

I listened to an episode of Learn Japanese with Noriko.

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:fallen_leaf: Day 48, 17th of November :maple_leaf:

:headphones: Back to my Home Post

After I saw some people refer to my link to the mimicmethods lectures, I couldn’t sit still and decided to finally do them. I kept putting it off because it seemed like such a huge time commitment, but I think I will just go through all lectures over a few days and then only do the drills. I studied phonects for a long time in an academic context, so there won’t be anyhting new for me there, but taking the time to train my ear and mouth to these sounds seems like it will help me when I kept struggling with Supernative and such.

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November 17th!

Today I listened to 4 episodes of Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners.
One was about international marriages, which was interesting.

(Home Post)

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Yesterday I just barely got around to watching one episode of Pokemon. x.x
Aside from the daily conversations I listen to at work I had a really hard time getting listening in yesterday.

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Summary Post

November 17th
What did I listen to?: A Series of Unfortunate Events Ep 10
How much time did I spend listening?: 45 min-ish (1 episode)

I…honestly felt like I didn’t get the majority of the dialogue in this episode :upside_down_face: Today was not a good listening day lol. But I continued to let the Japanese wash over me, in hopes that it will help something eventually :joy: I’m counting the fact that I did anything as a victory, considering my track record lately :eyes:

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So I’ve been in a bit of a mood today, since I resumed ‘formal studying’ of I’ve had feelings of ‘man, my Japanese sucks’. Studying formally requires me to look at the blind spots I have with a more critical eye than I usually take.

So, I opened up my notes that I take on my progress and my last entry was from June and it said:

[ video ] is barely understandable to me. It goes way too fast for me to keep up.

That video is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxYl7DErz0k
And I can understand it now. Not 100%, but it no longer feels impossibly fast and I got the gist of what she was saying for the majority of the books although a few passed by with ???. She does talk fast :joy:

So that was a nice little boost when I needed it. I am improving. Oddly I’d gone into my notes to find an Aozora short story I’d felt was too hard sometime last year (I think). Still need to locate that and give it another whirl.

Also, one of the books in the video is 漱石先生の事件簿 which is described as

『吾輩は猫である』の物語世界がミステリーとしてよみがえる。
ユーモアあふれる“日常の謎”連作集!

Paging @Zakarius if you want a follow up to the original work! Also @Naphthalene too I guess cause hey, it’s on Audible!

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November 18 :film_strip: :headphones:

The quest for something to hold my interest continues. Today I watched the first episode of Dorohedoro on Netflix. It was …bizarre. There’s no other word for it, I have no idea what I just watched. But I somehow watched it to the end, when I’ve stopped countless other anime halfway in the first episode, so, who knows? I might continue?

Also some more Supernative. Not even looking at the scores any more. Or at least I’m trying not to. I’ve been at around the same score for ages, and that’s okay. It’s pretty realistic, after all, even if not very pleasant.

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Stick with it, I really enjoyed it, bizarre is the correct word!
Oh yeah it’s coming back to me now…

Teppi morning dogwalk, Teppi lunchtime pharmacy and convenience store walk, half a dozen n5 drills towards the end of the day.
In a bit of a streak of Teppi episodes where I don’t understand a lot - it’s generally when I don’t understand what the topic word is… ‘todays topic is naninani…’ and I spend the rest of the episode thinking ‘wth was the topic’… sometimes I stop and try to look up the word there and then, sometimes helps

EDIT: oh also did some supernatively listen and type in the word thing that @omk3 mentioned. was good but it was only sentence endings, I’m sure it will get much tougher!

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This looks cool! Thanks for tagging me, I’ll put it in my booklist!

I listened to the video you shared too so I could get some listening in, and yeah she does talk rather fast :sweat_smile:
But her pronunciation is pretty clear so I could follow along a bit! And by a bit that means hearing strings of hiragana without knowing what words they make then suddenly recognising a word and being like “I know that one!” One day I might be able to listen to something and actually keep up with it.

YouTube also suggested this to me:

Animation quality that rivals a lot of anime just for advertising a tasty crunchy snack?
But it does look tasty… that crunch sound also, cute fox girl :fox_face:

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It’s much easier to do animation at that quality level if you only need 30 seconds of it :slight_smile:

I put that book on my to-buy list too.

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Haha I feel you! I’m currently listening to The Neverending Story when I go for a run, and when I bought it I thought that I might struggle with vocab, but I figured that I had read the book before in my native language and so it should be fine.
I did not factor in that I read it like 40 years ago and that all I remember from the plot is “there are these two boys and they rescue the world” :joy_cat:
(ok I do remember some other tiny bits and pieces, but the audiobook is more than 21 hours, so you can imagine that my memory gaps are quite wide :grin: and also the fantasy vocab is not exactly helpful…)
Anyways, I was listening to one part where a じんろう appeared and I was like what on earth would that be… it was repeated so often that I had to pull out my phone and look up the word while running :grin:

(it’s 人狼 - werewolf - by the way).

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:fallen_leaf: Day 49, 18th of November :maple_leaf:

:headphones: Back to my Home Post

I finally found out how to best go about listening: Choose any audio, slow it down by ~50% and read along with a transcript. Made Nihongo con Teppei so much more digestible.

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November 18th!

Today I listened to an episode of Nihongo con Teppei, and also two “Culture Class: Essential Japanese Vocabulary” lessons from JapanesePod101. I don’t like this series as much as the other vocab building series I’ve listened to from them, because the example sentences are a bit too long for me to keep up with!

(Home Post)

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Summary Post

November 18th
What did I listen to?: A Series of Unfortunate Events Ep 11
How much time did I spend listening?: 45 min-ish (1 episode)

I definitely do not remember these later episodes as well as the earlier episodes :sweat_smile: I think I was relying quite a bit on the fact that I could remember the English dialogue almost to the word for the season 1 episodes (the first 8), because these second season episodes seem a lot harder and I know I haven’t watched them as much lol. I do still catch a pretty good number of words, but it goes juuuust a little too fast for me to put it all together in a sentence.

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Pretty dark vid today, so putting behind a spoiler:

【日本の事件】病気で亡くなったとされた男性。しかし、全身に痣が出来ていた【事件解説】 - YouTube
Basically about an incident of a SUPER ブラック企業, circa 1993. A man was beaten to death and the company tried to cover it up. Even an employee with bruises from being beaten himself lied and said he didn’t witness anything. Those poor employees must have been terrified. The police did a bioluminescence (I think that’s the word in English? I forget) test and found blood all over the reception room.

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Even has subtitles in japanese (cc), will check that channel out for sure. Benefits with cc is that you could easily check words with yomichan.

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Ugh can’t remember, think it was Teppi on the morning dogwalk and some N5 drills.
N5 drill seem so much slower after listening to Teppi. He really seems to speed up after a bunch of episodes, but it’s a good thing.
I never realised the episodes were on youtube, very happy I can go and check out the transcriptions of episodes I really struggle with.

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Day 50 of the challenge today! Over the last week or so I have mostly been listening to a mix of the NHK schools TV Japanese history programmes, and ゆる言語学ラジオ episodes. (I’ve found the Youtube versions of those much easier than the pure audio podcast episodes, mostly because of the onscreen captioning.)

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Nov 19, Sat of Week 8 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

Yesterday, I watched half episode of Pokemon (1997) EP.2. It’s actually the introduction of Rocket gang, that is, 武蔵(Jessie) and 小次郎(James). (I am not very acquianted to English names, so I searched just now. I might know much more about English Pokemon names, because they are in the games.)

Today, I listened to an episode of Learn Japanese with Noriko Extra!, on Patreon. It got notified, so I wanted to check that out.

Recently, I played some games with dialogue lists, of a few lines of text and most have accompanying audio. Although having audio should be important for learning, I don’t think I would call that a dedicated listening exercise yet; because of missing pieces of having homophones, and phrase detection, as well as the flow of audio in the bigger scale. Nonetheless, it helps cement association of some written forms with audio. Also, it is pretty convenient for vocabulary and phrase mining.

I would still listen at least minimal everyday, although it also partially depends on occasions.

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