Quite a bit of listening yesterday.
Did the TRY N5 listening practice exam. 50% not as bad as I thought but there were a lot of questions where I thought ‘I have literally no clue what they are talking about’ - always seems to be the ones with teachers talking to students funnily enough.
Then I relistened with the text to the first section of five. Will do more of that today.
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October 14 
In search of (not too) scary stories, I happened upon this Japanese Ammo with Misa read aloud of 二口女. Not scary in the least, and very simply told, but I still had to pause and look at the text several times, because the moment I miss a word I lose time trying to make sense of it instead of continuing listening. Turns out I didn’t need to pause, because she reads the story twice, once at “normal” speed (still very learner-friendly) and once excruciatingly slowly.
Edit: Also completed the first (and only free) lesson from here: https://pitch-demo.migaku.io/, a pitch trainer recommended by Tofugu. I feel exhausted. I’m really so bad at listening it’s not even funny. 
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Where do you listen to NHK TV Japan? On the TV in Japan? Or are you somewhere else?
I’m trying to figure out if I can stream it.
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Oh, you’ll probably want the second video in the series then (which I haven’t watched yet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6lmsyb7Tik
Since it’s specifically about how and why she left judging from the title
The first video was more about a very general overview of the cult, how her mom got into it, her family’s reactions, and so on.
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Day 14, 14th of October 
Today I watched an episode of Comprehensible Japanese. It was about the weather and I really liked how she went through it. She not only explained what the weather is called, but also constructed basic sentences and questions. I think I’ll have to go through it again later and maybe do a bit more shadowing and also pay attention to pitch.
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Oct 14, Fri of Week 3 of Fall 2022
Today (after the first post), I listened to 3.5 episodes of Nihongo SWiTCH on Podbean. I can understand well by listening (around 70%, I think), but the transcript definitely helps (also, the Kanji part).
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とる (a verb) – Yeah, different Kanji’s as well.
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神無月 which is well… , October – I listened to around half of this one.
There are two episodes every month, and the next one would be Oct 18, Tue, I think.
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On October the 14th I’ve listened to
- Today’s NHK Easy News
P. S. This post should have been a reply to this post:
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I’ve been bouncing around a bit. Listened to the second cult video, found another one about a different cult, listened to a quite easy video of someone summarizing poll results from Twitter on ‘best mystery’ books, and started watching a video on police misconduct. I also downloaded the audiobook for 双頭の悪魔 | L35 which was mentioned in the video as I had a 500円 credit on audiobook.jp that was going to expire.
Found something maybe of interest to @fallynleaf too!
I haven’t watched it yet but I have it on my list to. It’s about someone who transitioned F → M and was/is? a pro wrestler going by the title?
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Yes!! That is Yu Ishino, who was a former wrestler for World Wonder Ring Stardom, where his ring name was Kagetsu. I believe he was one of their trainers for a long time? He was a joshi wrestling legend when he was an active wrestler.
He came out as trans earlier this year, and actually made a brief appearance at a wrestling show, though he didn’t wrestle a match. He was at the second Hana Kimura Memorial Show on May 23, and he briefly reprised the Kagetsu role to do the Oedo Tai dance (he found a way to show off his post-top-surgery bare chest haha) with his former Oedo Tai factionmate and tag partner, Hazuki (who is now back with Stardom after retiring for over a year), as well as joining in some other shenanigans during the matches, like helping Kyoko Kimura (Hana’s mom, who retired years ago, but she came out of retirement briefly for her daughter’s memorial show) cheat during her match haha (Oedo Tai is a heel faction, but obviously the fans are going to cheer them no matter what they do here).
Yu Ishino’s last match was at the first Hana Kimura Memorial Show in 2021, where he briefly came out of retirement to wrestle in the main event, facing a wrestler named Asuka, who is a trans woman. We didn’t know it at the time, but that show was actually main evented by two trans wrestlers, which is really neat, even though the actual wrestling on the show was largely overshadowed by everyone’s grief at Hana’s passing.
It’s unlikely that Yu Ishino will unretire, unfortunately, because I believe he chose to retire due to lingering neck injuries, but I’m so proud of him for publicizing his experiences as a trans man, and I believe he has done some LGBTQ activism? He’s just a really cool person who had a great career as a wrestler, and who has gone on to do really cool things after that, too! 
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October 14th!
I had a lesson with my tutor today so I’m counting that as most of my listening practise today - but I also had a 2.5h car journey that I spent listening to japanese music too.
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softlyraining’s leaf pile listens 
October 14th:
Ended up listening to an episode of Nihongo no Teppei, so the cult videos will have to wait until tomorrow. Teppei discussed the things he looks forward to when it comes to the winter season.
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Yesterday I just went over the first section of TRY N5 practice exam section 1.
Dunno how I only found 5minutes in a day of 24hours long to do the one thing I wanted to.
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October 15 
Supernative 2346 → 2356
Migaku Pitch Trainer
Some more Supernative today. I also subscribed to Migaku for this month, cause I really liked their Pitch Trainer. I mean, I don’t really enjoy being shown how tone-deaf I am, but I do feel like it’s helping me slowly grasp what this fabled beast called pitch accent even is. Some times I surprise myself by how well I seem to hear it, and other times it’s as if I’m being asked to spot a ghost - it’s not there, or if it is I just can’t perceive it.
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Interesting app, I tried the demo. I can do the questions where you can hear the different renditions of the choices (i.e. I can hear that there is a difference) but my success rate at the questions where you have to identify just from audio without comparing seems like it can’t be much higher than random-guess level…
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On October the 15th I’ve listened to
- Nihongo Con Teppei for beginners episodes 627-633
P. S. I confused myself for a moment, because it turns out that both my post on 13th and my post on 14th were a reply to my post on 12th, while the 14th should have been a reply to my post on 13th.
This is the disadvantage of the system where I reply to my last post – I have to remember to add new bookmark and remove the old one. Anyway, I’ve now fixed it.
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Yeah it takes a lot of getting used to if your ears are untrained as mine are. The first stage where you can hear the same word in various pitch accent patterns certainly helps understand the difference. Then in the next lessons each pattern is tackled one by one, and this really helps differentiate them. I’ve completed the single words lessons successfully, but now that I started word combinations and phrases, I’m completely lost again. 
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October 15th!
I’ve been at a wedding all day so I’m super tired, but I still managed to squeeze in an episode of Nihongo con Teppei for beginners. It was about chocolate, and had a bit about various flavours of Kitkat.
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I started a new show, not done with episode one because of course it’s an hour long episode and I got home late. It’s called Silent and seems to be a romance drama where I’m highly hopeful someone will get cheated on in a deeply dramatic and emotional way. I have my popcorn and tissues ready as needed.
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Missed posting for a couple of days but kept on listening.
Let’s see, I remember I listened to a bunch of random bits and some Nihongo con Teppei on Wednesday. Pimsleurs Japanese Level 2 lessons 5 and 6 on Thursday. Then lessons 6 and 7 yesterday.
Listened to some random stuff during the day today but in the evening I went to see Melt-Banana in concert! That counts as listening to Japanese right?
Listening practice will be more difficult tomorrow I’m certain. My ears are shredded.
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