Day 46, 15th of November 
So sleepy… but watched episode 9 of あかがみんクラフトclassic.
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November 15th!
Today I listened to an episode of Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners, and then watched the first episode of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure with Japanese Subs.
The story didn’t capture me at all - everything seemed really rushed and disjointed - but since its super popular I’m going to try to give it a chance before deciding I don’t like it.
I also listened to Lesson 6 of JapanesePod101’s Upper Beginner Season 1 podcast. It was about catching a bus.
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Interested what you make of Jojo. I felt the same and watched a few seasons, then gave up on it.
Listened to a bit of Teppi when walking the dog, and did a few N5 drills. Also did some dictation practice where I get sent a small audio recording in Japanese and try to understand it. But it can be kinda annoying spending 10minutes to understand a 30 second snippet of Japanese.
@omk3 just had a go at the pitch trainer! It’s tough. I’m not sure I’m at the right place to benefit from it at the moment though.
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It felt tough for me in the beginning too. Actually for quite a long time. But I did a little every day and it really helped. Whether learning to distinguish pitch accent early on is beneficial or not is a matter of passionate debate apparently, and I don’t think I can comment on that - it certainly depends on your priorities. Speaking for myself, I’m definitely glad I stuck with it. It certainly feels good to be aware of an aspect of Japanese that used to go completely over my head, if nothing else.
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Speaking of pitch, one of the youtube videos I watched recently had a live-action demo of “native speakers hear pitch accent differences and I don’t” in the first minute.
The episode is about some event the podcast hosts organized and went to. When one of the hosts introduces the episode topic, the other host picks them up on the accent pattern they used on the event name, and they have a bit of back and forth about it. For me this is very hard to distinguish the difference – I can only just about tell with multiple listenings and the aid of the on-screen visuals, but (unsurprisingly) for the second host this is not only something they can hear but something where their brain will go “wait, what?” when they hear an unexpected accent pattern even if they weren’t consciously thinking about accent. (I say unsurprisingly, because of course I can do that with English stress accent; I’d notice if you said “blackboard” as “black board” or whatever.)
(edit: seems like every forum I use has a different syntax for hyperlinks. Sigh.)
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Listened to Chanmina while I cleaned, and then watched a few Japanese vlogs I follow. I really need to get serious about my daily listening but it’s difficult lol
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Nov 16, Wed of Week 8 of Fall 2022
I watched 1.5 episodes of ブラックジャックによろしく with generated sub. As great as ever, only that sub generation took 1 hour (45 min audio). I fear that I can’t live with sub, even if it is a not so good one.
I listened to Nihongo SWiTCH. It appears to be her last episode, explaining どうも. Her Patreon will also stop collecting fee soon. Then, I listened to the latter half episode of YUYU on Okinawa. Podcast are probably easily to listen and focus for me (and perhaps also fail-fast).
Although I don’t concern much about pitch accent at the moment (or speaking in general), I remember quite well that some wrong pitch on speaking can cause misunderstanding, especially when combined with other phonetic components such as bad Kana pronunciation (or expectation on the other side).
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For Discourse at least you can highlight the text you want and paste the link into it. No need to remember the syntax…unless you’re on mobile where things are a bit more fiddley.
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Day 47, 16th of November
Relistened to Nihongoconteppei. Did it go better than last time? No. I’m really just missing too much vocabulary.
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If it gets too frustrating, try finding something that’s been transcribed, then you can get a better comprehension - though typically you have to pay for these unfortunately.
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Anything on youtube has auto transciptions. No need to pay for those.
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November 16 
Today I watched one episode of Paranoia Agent, then tried some Supernative, which went okay, some hits, some misses, until it got too noisy (construction work nearby) and I had to stop. Then later I thought I might as well watch another episode, so, erm, I actually watched to the end of the series. It was just as crazy and magnificent as I remembered it. Well worth a rewatch, and I suspect I’ll watch it again in the future. If only I could remove the English subtitles I’d watch again tomorrow.
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November 16th!
Just a tiny listen today - one episode of Nihongo con Teppei.
I had planned to do more tonight, but I hadn’t called my dad for a few weeks so I thought I should call him for a catch up, and we ended up chatting for 2 hours!
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Watched Chainsaw Man and an episode of Pokemon last night. Feel like my listening is finally getting to the point where I use subtitles to check if my hearing was correct and not reading as much. It’s nice to finally start feeling myself graduate off of them.
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I watched a handful of videos today on true crime. Nothing really note worthy. I also tried watching a video that went over some Buddhist stuff (cause my vocab there is weak) but fundamentally my vocab is weak there…because the topic doesn’t interest me 
So that went about as well as expected.
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November 17
I watched the first episode of Great Pretender on Netflix. I had tried it twice before, but could never get past the (bad) English in the beginning. I tried again today, and thankfully it changes to Japanese soon, even if the action takes place in LA. Theoretically it would be exactly the kind of thing I would be into (con men are fun to watch), but somehow it didn’t convince me and I don’t think I want to watch another episode to make sure. Which leaves me again with nothing very engaging to watch. I need to find a long-ish series I’ll want to come back to every day, or I just waste too much time looking for something to watch/listen to.
I also did some Supernative, but I feel I’m making no progress there at all. I’m sure it has its benefits, but the amount of points you lose for one mistake is very discouraging. I know I shouldn’t care about that, but strangely I do.
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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
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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Day 48, 17th of November
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.
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