Summary post
I meant to check in last week, but totally forgot 
. I’m going strong with the challenge so far! Haven’t missed a day yet with either Spanish or Japanese!
My recent big breakthrough with Spanish was realizing that I can watch Bob Esponja (Spongebob) in Spanish without any subtitles whatsoever and actually follow along with it pretty well! My former coworker said that she grew up watching that show in Spanish, haha, which gave me the idea to try it. I’ve sort of been alternating between that and Frontera Verde (which I’m watching with Spanish subtitles because it’s much harder).
With Japanese, I had a really amusing experience translating stuff for Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling’s December 3 show.
Kamiyu teamed with the visiting British wrestler Millie McKenzie against Shoko Nakajima and Suzume. The backstage comments to this one were hilarious because Millie spoke in English, and then Kamiyu translated for her. I wondered how faithful Kamiyu’s translation was, and, well…
I had a bit of trouble with Kamiyu’s middle chunk of lines there, but I understood enough of it to laugh, haha! Fun bilingual bonus with this one!
Here’s a photo from another match on the show. Raku (in yellow) employed some psychological warfare by bringing a pillow to the match and interrupting Hyper Misao’s opening promo on the mic by falling asleep in the middle of it. Yuki Aino, sleeping next to her, is one of her regular tag partners. Yuki is in love with Raku, a fact that Raku has exploited in the past, but their relationship is a lot less unrequited now.
I also translated TJPW’s December 10 show, which was short and sweet and didn’t come with any Japanese breakthroughs in particular for me.
Here’s a photo from that one, featuring Haruna Neko doing the おにゃんぽ, where she walks on top of the ropes (it’s a 猫 pun on お散歩). Her opponent is Hikari Noa.
The other thing I wanted to mention was Chris Brookes and Drew Parker’s anniversary show, Baka Gaijin + Friends on December 13, which is one of the few (maybe the first?) independent produce shows in Japan to be arranged and booked entirely by non-Japanese wrestlers.
I was going to link the youtube video in here so that folks could watch it, but youtube took it down because they “played the Chainsaw Man theme one too many times” (according to Chris). So instead, here’s a bootleg link (which Chris himself shared on twitter, so I feel like that’s about as sanctioned as you can get ). Chris vs Drew gets a bit intense, so heads up for that, but the matches before that are easier to watch.
It’s a fun show that made for some pretty pleasant listening practice for me! It’s like a standard ChocoPro show in that the commentary is a mixture of Japanese and English. I noticed that I was actually able to understand quite a bit of the Japanese, and that made me happy!
Might backburner this channel for low energy days.
Whelp, I was planning to watch スマホを落とした tonight anyways 
