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
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
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”
(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 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
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.)
Yesterday, I watched half episode of Pokemon (1997) EP.2. It’s actually the introduction of Rocket gang, that is, 武蔵 and 小次郎. (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.
Second episode of Dorohedoro. Still bizarre, still have no idea what I’m watching, still strangely captivating. I guess I’ll keep watching.
And I realized I could still use the demo version of the Migaku Trainer, so did a few levels there. It was very disappointing to see that after only a few days away I was already a bit shaky. My scores were still decent, but not very good, and I missed words that I would have gotten with confidence a few days ago. Apparently pitch still needs constant practice to properly sink in. And I’m sure speaking it will be another matter entirely, if and when I decide to practice that.
Another vintage film: this is one from Matsushita (aka National, aka Panasonic) in the 1960s, about their electric and electronic appliance manufacturing:
1960s Japan notes:
Starts with all the factory workers standing to sing the company song…
all the people on the factory line assembling the electronics are women; all the people in the business training and tech training classes are men
a few of the members of the public who’ve come to see the demonstration/showroom at 12:00 are in kimono – this must surely have been the final years when some women still wore kimono for daily life?
goods for shipping still being loaded on board as individual boxed TVs; containerization would I think arrive within ten years
I’ve definitely seen some references to women in kimono (in everday situations, seemingly to signal they’re Proper Ladies ) in 1960s texts but it seems gone by the 80s. I honestly can’t think of anything from the 70s I’ve read or watched though
Today’s listening was something entirely new! My tutor who I have been having lessons with via iTalki for over 2 years was working as a sound engineer for a Japanese band in a city about 30 minutes from my house so I went to the show to meet him in person for the first time.
He introduced me to some of the band members so I got to practise speaking Japanese in person - it was the first time I’ve had a real face to face conversation in Japanese, and also the first time I’ve spoken Japanese to a native speaker who wasn’t a teacher!
It was a really great experience all around, lovely to finally meet my teacher after so long, and the band were great. They were called the Wisely Brothers, if anyone wants to check them out on Spotify!
Got caught up with Mob Psycho, rewatched the last 3 episodes of Chainsaw Man. Watched an episode of Gun Gale Online. My Pokemon craze ended today. I watched 23 episodes in a week, so I am pretty burned out on Pokemon.
Took Teppi round the supermarket. Discovered that the episodes are also on youTube. I’ll go back and follow along with particularly tricky episodes where I don’t understand much at all, I think.
New n5 listening book arrived on Friday, it’s a bit older and the reviews on amazon said it’s too hard - it’s most definitely harder but thats good practice. An example of something that’s harder is a question where you had to listen and then so some mental arithmetic to arrive at the answer (I’ve got 2000 yen and I need to buy 6 cakes which cake do I buy)
Hello everyone!
I only learned about this challenge today, so I’ll just try to do some listening every day from today till the end of November.
I’ll probably watch YouTube (あかね的日本語教室 or さいとうなおき), i would also watch Blue Period.
By chance youtube recommended me another Tokyo Lens video. Once again tiny homes and fun chats with the architect who build the place and lives in it, as well as the (now graduated) architecture student Ayaka!