I wanted to do one more update before the end of the challenge, but that totally didn’t happen, so I’ll just include it in the wrap-up post 
.
This post is a bit late, but I completed the challenge!
| Jun | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 22 | |||||||
| Week 23 | |||||||
| Week 24 | |||||||
| Week 25 | |||||||
| Week 26 |
= Japanese
= Japanese and Spanish
Most of my biggest gains over the past month have been in Spanish, not Japanese, but I did get a fair amount of both languages listened to! I finished two Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling translations: one for their June 11 Korakuen Hall show, and one for their June 18 show.
Here’s a photo from the Korakuen show. This is from the beginning of Pom Harajuku vs Himawari, who is one of TJPW’s new rookies this year. I love Himawari’s hairstyle here and want to try it out on my own hair someday, haha.
In non-wrestling news, I also watched my first Takarazuka Revue show when they made one available for international streaming (with English subtitles as an option)! Unfortunately there’s no VOD, and it partially overlapped TJPW, so I missed the first half hour… I did end up catching the re-streaming, though I had to miss the end of that stream to go on a walk for the walking challenge before the All Elite Wrestling/New Japan Pro Wrestling crossover show, Forbidden Door, haha.
Takarazuka was a lot of fun! I definitely want to watch more of their shows if I get the chance! Hopefully as my Japanese improves, I’ll have more options for watching them without having to wait for such limited opportunities as that stream. The Japanese honestly didn’t seem as difficult as I was expecting, though I definitely still needed the subtitles. But there were times where the subtitles were a bit off or mistimed, and my listening comprehension helped me out there.
I’m also almost done with the Oyasumi Japanese With Shun podcast, and I think my comprehension has definitely improved over the course of it! I’m undecided on which podcast I’m going to attempt next, but I’m contemplating trying the 日本語の聴解のためのpodcast again, since it was a bit too fast for me when I first attempted it, but it might be easier now.
Listening in Spanish
I listened to like 30 episodes of Radio Ambulante, and my comprehension definitely varies from episode to episode, so some of them I feel like I understand frustratingly little, and others I feel pretty good about. I think my initial estimate of understanding about 70-80% of it is accurate.
Two of the episodes were a multi-part account that was titled “Doctor: ¿Esto es normal?”, which was about plastic surgery in Colombia, and one girl’s surgery that ended in tragedy. I was really surprised at how good my comprehension was for this! I ended up googling a detail of the story afterward because I wanted to check that I’d understood it correctly, and I found this article by NPR (in English).
(spoilered for depressing stuff and also gnarly medical details)
I was particularly amazed that I understood what exactly the injection had done to her body and why it had killed her. I wasn’t even entirely sure that I’d remembered the word for lungs, but unfortunately I did hear correctly that the stuff she’d been injected with did in fact end up in her lungs…
Warning, listening to the episodes is particularly harrowing because they include audio recordings from the girl’s conversations with the “doctor” as she was slowly dying from the surgery.
It was pretty hard to listen to, honestly (emotionally, not language-difficulty-wise)! It was especially depressing to hear how big of an industry plastic surgery in general is there, and how a fairly high percentage of the surgeries happening there are done by unlicensed practitioners who are basically exploiting poor people. We don’t even know the true number of victims because many people are too embarrassed to come forward. And when these “doctors” do end up killing someone, they tend to be given pretty lenient sentences… The whole thing is just really sad.
On a lighter subject, I ended up not going on a walk for the last day of June because I’d already finished my walking challenge, so instead of listening to Radio Ambulante, I watched an episode of Bob Esponja.
I was amazed at how much my listening had already improved since the last time I’d watched any of the show! The podcasts have absolutely been helping my listening comprehension improve. It really made me want to double down on the Japanese podcast listening, too, because I could see how many gains I’d made with Spanish.
For the time being, though, I’m recommitting to reading practice for the next couple months instead of listening. I started doing the summer read every day challenge, though I haven’t formally made a post for it yet, haha.
I’ll probably be back for the summer listen every day challenge during the off month again!