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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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 
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 
I’m counting the fact that I did anything as a victory, considering my track record lately 
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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
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 
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 
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 
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It’s much easier to do animation at that quality level if you only need 30 seconds of it 
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” 
(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
(it’s 人狼 - werewolf - by the way).
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Day 49, 18th of November 
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!
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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.
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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
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.
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November 19 
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.
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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:
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Starts with all the factory workers standing to sing the company song…
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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
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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?
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goods for shipping still being loaded on board as individual boxed TVs; containerization would I think arrive within ten years
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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 
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November 19th!
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!
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