🔊 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge - Fall 2022 🍁

Dec 22, Thu of Week 13 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

EP.2 of 緊急取調室. Minimal rewind, but not with a good comprehension.

Learn Japanese with Noriko Extra! on Patreon; and a track of かがみの孤城, March [5/10] – memory fragment.

Then I revisited Netflix on VPN, to find SPY x FAMILY with both JP and EN track, where with Language Reactor, it’s easy to see figurative translation when wanted. I believe the series has both JP and EN sub even without VPN, though.

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3 more episodes of Re:Zero. Which means I’ll have binged 50 episodes and 2 OVAs in less than 2 weeks.

… Does this make me a viable candidate for King of the losers?

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I finally finished 夢探偵フロイト: -マッド・モラン連続死事件- | L34. It was a lot harder than I expected towards the end. Dialect especially was difficult for me. I also felt like for whatever reason I only got like half of what one of the police officers was saying, despite being very comfortable with police-speak. Definitely some unknown words in there. I think I probably would have done better doing a read/listen with this book, but since the difficulty only spiked for me at the very end it felt like a waste to buy the text.

This wraps up my lingering audiobooks for the year. Looking forward to next year’s listens :champagne:

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All these days I wasn’t posting here, but I was listening to an origami video every day. And I do mean listening, as I often was looking at my paper rather than the video, and still knew what I was being asked to do just fine. I need to stress that the vocabulary was necessarily limited and the voice slow and clear, but still, it was a great feeling to instantly process Japanese in real time, without mentally translating or getting stuck on one unknown word and missing all the next known ones. I’ve definitely made progress. It may not be spectacular, but it’s there. One step at a time.

Still haven’t watched any of those indie movies I linked to. I’ll report back with my impressions when I do.

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Did you post links to the origami videos and I missed it? I’d like to watch some of them too, I love origami!

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I believe I posted one way back, but not recently. They’re all from the same YouTube channel. You can find them all in this post, in a Christmassy table under the title Origami Advent Calendar. Each icon links to a different video, and I’ve been following one video a day and posting the results.
Here’s the channel I got them all from:

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After reading along with ユージニア I’m going to conclude that ばぁば is grisly ex-detective who took up folding cranes to stop smoking :joy:

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She might well be! And to be perfectly honest, the idea for an origami advent calendar came up just because of said detective and his cranes! :joy:

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Dec 24, Sat of Week 13 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

Yesterday, かがみの孤城, March [6/10].

Today, かがみの孤城, March [7-8/10]. 2.5 hours left now. Also, a podcast on Podbean to try out (because of some flashy naming).

I feel like I can now mostly keep along with the flow of the story in audiobook form. However, in some ways, I might not really learn some things (learn from mistakes / learn of lack of understandings); so revisit the text later? I have bought the text (下) too.

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Finished Re:Zero. That was a great show omg. Pretty tough vocab wise but I could understand about 80% of what was being communicated with context. Even learned some new words.

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I feel I sort of am… cheating with this challenge for everyday either during the morning preparation or after my wife returns from work I hear her and my daughter speak Japanese to each other. Recently, and after our trip to Japan for two weeks at the end of November, my daughter has been speaking more of her mother tongue at home. Also, almost every morning they listen to either ウルフルズ or ビギン. Any tips though on how to be more actively listening?

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Dec 25, Sun of Week 13 of Fall 2022 :maple_leaf:

かがみの孤城, March [9/10]. Perhaps it’s not hopeless? I also resumed reading a little of February, but it is hard to get into enough speed.

Half an episode of EP.3 of 緊急取調室. Even if I am not paying full attention, it’s getting too heavy for me. On Netflix and does have episode title in the video, the episode description doesn’t have any title.

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I’m ~2/3 of the way done with the audiobook 本を守ろうとする猫の話 | L30?? and I love it so far. It’s a kids book, but it’s charming and interesting. It’s telling moral stories, but it’s not grossly heavy handed with them. I think this would be an absolutely lovely film. Basically about what it means to ‘love’ books.

Light fantasy, talking cat :sparkles: :cat2:

@Naphthalene if you’re still looking for audiobook reccs this one has my vote. Quite short though - only 5 hours or so.

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Sure, thanks for the recommendation.

Speaking of which, I recently listened to 火花, and it was pretty nice. It’s about a struggling 漫才 artist’s friendship with another 漫才 artist (it’s kinda hard to describe, but it’s a series of episodes covering ~10 years). It’s funny at times and emotional at others. The book is really short too (~4h)

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Aaaand… that’s another tick for you in The Akutagawa Prize Reading Challenge :tada: Are you now binging literature instead of light novels? :grin:

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Kinda, there’s a list for the winners of the 本屋大賞 available on audible, so I was just picking from there. I am listening to 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 from the same list right now.
It’s just a coincidence that 火花 won both prizes.

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I found a difficult podcast and I’ve been listening to a few episodes here and there. It’s called GLOBIS知見録, and they host live events where they interview 3-4 guests from the same field, and they also have an audience and 質疑応答 at the end. Very useful to learn some keigo phrases.

I listened to an episode about the tourism industry and what Japan needs to change to become more attractive/sustainable, one about the social sector where they interviewed people from NGO‘s, and a third one where they interviewed Buddhist priests about the pandemic, mindfulness, and children who don’t want to go to school.

All episodes were interesting, but I found them rather difficult to follow. When the news become difficult to follow for me, I know it’s a vocabulary problem, but with this podcast, the difficulty (for me) lies in following the reasoning of the guests and what they are trying to convey, what position they are taking. Do they think the world needs more NGO‘s, or are they arguing that they are becoming obsolete, and what are their arguments? And it’s really uncomfortable to be in this 曖昧 position where you’re listening but you can’t quite follow the speaker, where you can’t quite summarize what they just said. Of course speed might also be a limiting factor here. But that’s why I think it’s a really good podcast to practice my listening.

And it’s also really useful to pick up some new words that people in certain industries are using recently, especially abbreviations. For example, they talked about Special Interest Travel (SIT) in the tourism episode. For a more universal one, there’s ディー・エックス (DX) = digital transformation.

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In the iOS app there are also categories for Akutagawa and Naoki prize winners, but I couldn’t find them on the website. (It sometimes feels to me as if the app and the website belonged to two different companies… :woman_shrugging:)

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Those are also things I struggle with so adding this to my list. Good find! :pray:

Oddly I already knew about this because of the Netflix show based on it. I never got into watching it though.

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I am using the app, but couldn’t find those :thinking: 本屋大賞 is the only prize I see in the category list.
I can get some stuff by just putting the name of the prize in the search bar, but I guess that’s not what you mean?