Sep 8, Fri of Week 11 of Summer Q3 2023 
YUYU, 2 new episodes
Sep 9, Sat
Kurzgesagt 2 episodes
Sep 10, Sun
YUYU, 2 new episodes
Perhaps more amount and quality for the next month (challenge). Anyway, more time and resting is important. Also, I wouldn’t just fill with anything even if I have some time.
Watched the latest video from Speak Japanese Naturally:
About visiting a zen temple! The scenery is real pretty and the temple is super impressive so it was a little distracting 
I could follow some of it well and other parts not so well, I think I found the first part the most difficult to follow with all the place names.
I rewatched 消えた初恋 (for the 4th time) with Japanese subtitles. 6 episodes yesterday and the other 4 this morning. While there are still tons of vocabulary I don’t know, I have definitely improved my listening and while my speaking is shit I am still proud of this fact.
I watched the latest vid from Akane:
About conversing and ordering stuff at a cafe. At first I was like, yeah let’s do this! But then not even a full minute in and the cafe person starts speaking and I am hopelessly lost. Though the second waitress that served the food was a lot more understandable. I guess the first woman was the rare secret boss to rival the old mumbly men - the lv.100 Mumbly Cafe Woman.
I understood mostly what Akane was saying about the food though.
Not Japanese related, but that steep, tight set of stairs that leads to one small table that can only seat two people is so random, not sure if it has some sort of special meaning or they just wanted to use every available space in the cafe, but that’s like the ultimate safety spot to eat your lunch, you have the higher ground to beat back anyone trying to steal your spaghetti 
Also watched Ep.7 of cute shark 
Sep 11, Mon of Week 12 of Summer Q3 2023
YUYU, 1 new episode
本好きの下剋上 1 : 紙、入手不可能 (16 min)
Sep 12, Tue
コンビニ人間 (13 min) with reading along. IBC primer Week 13.
YUYU, 1 new episode
Sep 13, Wed
YUYU, 2 new episodes. Both are short ones, today.
本好きの下剋上 1 : エジプト文明、レスペクト中 (19 min)
Yesterday, I watched two episodes of “The Way of the Househusband” without subtitles.
Sep 14, Thu of Week 12 of Summer Q3 2023
YUYU, 1 new episode. Latest one.
Sep 15, Fri
Some YouTube on Japanese consonants, the recently shared ones. So I looked at the creator and playlists.
YUYU, 2 new episodes
Sep 16, Sat
YUYU, 3 new episodes
Sep 17, Sun
本好きの下剋上 1 : 冬支度 (17 min). Also back to the previous chapter, エジプト文明、レスペクト中.
YUYU, 1 new episode
softlyraining’s old summer radio 
Long time no update! Happy to report I’ve been keeping up with listening every day: lots of Sayuri Saying, some SBSの日本語放送, and 古見さん, which I finished last week! (I’m both happy and sad because there still is no news of a new season, and there may never be…)
Today I finished watching the first episode of a reality show called オオカミちゃんには騙されない (Is She the Wolf?) on Netflix. I literally said OUT LOUD “It better not be Julie because her and Robin have such good chemistry.” 
Also surprised that they revealed the wolf in the first episode, but then one of the hosts mentioned the possibility of there being more than one wolf, so we’ll see.
Sep 18, Mon of Week 13 of Summer Q3 2023
YUYU, 2 new episodes
Sep 19, Tue
A livestream from 日本語の森. Longer than my usual watchings.
YUYU, 1 new episode
Sep 20, Wed
YUYU, 2 new episodes
Sep 21, Thu
本好きの下剋上 1 : 石板GET! (23 min)
YUYU, 1 new episode
Sep 22, Fri
YUYU, 2 new episodes
Sep 23, Sat
YUYU, 1 new episode
Sep 24, Sun
Kurzgesagt from the club, with JP sub
YUYU, 2 new episodes
本好きの下剋上 1 : 古代エジプト人に敗北 (21 min)
The thread for the Fall Challenge is up! Feel free to continue posting here until its official start, October 1st!
Sep 25, Mon of pre-Week 1 of Summer Q3 2023
YUYU, 1 new episode
Sep 26, Tue
YUYU, 1 new episode
本好きの下剋上 1 : 冬の甘味 (23 min)
Sep 27, Wed
YUYU, 1 new episode
日本語の森, 1 vlog
Sep 28, Thu
YUYU, 1 new episode
Sep 29, Fri
YUYU, 2 new episodes. Player FM bug brings me the first EP, 4 years ago.
Sep 30, Sat
YUYU, 2 new episodes
I have started listening to some native podcasts like this
Looking up the words I don’t know I actually understand quite a bit. Yesterday, by listening only to another podcast of hers I understood a lot too. It really depends on the topic and my headspace.
I ended up not having any time at all to update this thread, haha, oops! 
But on the plus side, the reason I didn’t have time was because I was busy listening to and reading Japanese!
Here’s how September went for me:
| Sept | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 35 | |||||||
| Week 36 | |||||||
| Week 37 | |||||||
| Week 38 | |||||||
| Week 39 |
= Japanese
= Japanese and Spanish
Perfect score! Since I wasn’t counting the Japanese I listened to during wrestling shows and while doing my translations, things got a bit dicey at points haha and I only got in a couple minutes of listening practice those days, but I did manage to listen to at least something every single day.
I finished a lot of Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling show translations! I finished translating their experimental 8.17 Inspiration show, their 8.26 summer show, some various other shows: 9.03, 9.09, 9.10, 9.16, and the 9.18 Nagoya show with Reiwa AA Cannon’s last match. (I also just finished the 9.23 show, though technically in October, haha, so I’m not counting it in this roundup).
The wrestling stuff is more exciting than the podcasts and 新完全マスター 聴解 exercises, so I’ll talk about some of the fun things I’ve encountered there over the course of September.
Here’s a photo from the Inspiration show on August 17. This was Shoko Nakajima and Miyu Yamashita’s 10th year debut anniversary, so they did a singles match to celebrate it, then talked for a while on the mic afterward.
「 赤井沙希選手の言葉を借りるなら、花は美しく咲いたまま終わるって方もいるんですけど。私はもう枯れて土に還って腐葉土になるまでやってやろうかってタイプなので。私は腐葉土を目指すレスラーなので（笑）。長い道のりの中間なのか、まだ序盤なのかもしれないし。そんな気持ちで見ててほしいと思います」
“If you take a leaf from Saki Akai, it’s better for the flower to end while it’s beautifully in bloom. But I’m the type who intends to keep doing it until I’ve withered and died and become humus. I’m a wrestler who aims to become humus.” (laughs) “I might be in the middle of a long journey, or I might still be at the opening stage. That’s how I want people to see it."
Wanting to keep her metaphor intact, I made the mistake of translating 腐葉土 as “humus” instead of a word like “mulch” or “compost” or something, and then I learned the hard way that most people are not soil enthusiasts and “humus” is not in fact a word in most people’s vocabulary… 
Another fun translation experience was the August 26 show. The show overall had a summer theme, and the match pictured below had a stipulation where the wrestlers were allowed to use outside items as long as they were summer items. Here’s Mizuki pinning Pom Harajuku in a pool with a watermelon on her face and Shoko’s soft vinyl kaiju toys strewn about the ring… (Shoko argued that the kaiju counted as summer items because they would often show kaiju films in the theater during summer).
The wrestlers in the match after this discovered the “お疲れサマー！” pun, and I was like “oh no how on earth am I going to translate this?” only to then find out that the opposing team independently discovered the same pun…
Thankfully, the WaniKani film club discord helped me out, and someone, I believe it was @DIO-Berry, came up with a translation for “お疲れサマー！” I also discovered that wordpress supports ruby, so I was able to manually code in the pun as furigana on my translation blog to make it a little more obvious:
“Thank you summer for your hard work!”
As far as listening I was doing specifically for this challenge goes, I listened to a whole bunch of episodes of 日本語の聴解のためのpodcast (totally didn’t keep track of the actual numbers…) while going on walks, though didn’t end up listening to any of them a second time.
Overall, I think my listening comprehension of that podcast did in fact improve over the course of the month! It’s still kind of hit or miss, and some episodes that touch on subjects where I’m missing more vocab tend to be more “miss” than “hit”, but it’s getting easier to catch the parts that I do catch.
I also didn’t quite finish the 新完全マスター 聴解 N4 book, which was my go-to listening practice on the days where I couldn’t go for a walk. I’m close, though. For the most part, it’s pretty doable and is solidly below my level, but sometimes I’ll get tripped up over random simple stuff . It’s wild how I can sometimes listen to a wrestling promo in native media and comprehend it pretty well and then get tripped up by an N4 trick question…
I’m hoping to finish that book soon-ish, and then will probably do the N3 one in December for the off-month after the fall listen every day challenge.
I didn’t count any wrestling stuff for the purpose of this challenge, but I did actually have better listening comprehension for the last DDT show I watched, to the point where it surprised me! I think maybe I might’ve just fried my brain by doing too much wrestling translations…
As far as listening in Spanish goes, there’s really not enough to report to bother hiding it under a cut. The month went very well! Radio Ambulante is just getting easier and easier to understand, and Bob Esponja is now very doable, to the point where I’m considering moving on. Though I dunno, it’s also kind of nice to have an easy, low-effort show, haha!
I’m not joining the fall listen every day challenge for the main challenge period, but I’ll be over in the fall reading challenge, once I get my home thread set-up there!
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