Ten days in! I thought maybe it was a good time for another update.
Kind of a neat milestone for me is that I’m getting into La Casa de las Flores enough that I keep finding myself wanting to watch more episodes past my daily minimum haha. Usually watching/reading in Spanish or Japanese is really exhausting for me (if I’m aiming for as much comprehension as possible), so it’s really cool to realize that I’ve gotten far enough with Spanish that I can watch episodes of that show and understand enough of it without having to pause and look up things, and that it’s not too tiring for me to watch it.
More La Casa de las Flores thoughts
I mentioned to my coworker, whose native language is Spanish, that I started watching this show, and she said it was a good choice, haha, because she likes it, and it’s her brother’s favorite show. She told me that one of the characters in particular has a way of speaking that’s considered stereotypical for upper class Mexicans, so I’ve been trying to pay attention to that to see if I can notice a difference between her speech and that of the other characters.
The plot of this show is structured so that pretty much every single episode introduces at least one significant twist, and I feel like I’ve been able to understand just about all of them, though I do often lose the nuance (like, one of the characters got arrested, and my comprehension wasn’t good enough to understand exactly why, because a lot of the legal stuff is just beyond me).
I am really enjoying it, though! It’s a genuinely compelling show. I really appreciate the strong focus on LGBTQ themes. It’s also a very visually appealing show with really colorful sets, though since my eyes are on the subtitles most of the time, I don’t get to appreciate the visuals as much, haha.
As far as Japanese goes, progress has been generally slower, but that’s not too surprising. I read/listened to a few more of the 童話, and I’m continuing to enjoy them. I feel like my reading comprehension without Yomichan is okay, my reading comprehension with Yomichan is somewhat decent, and my listening comprehension is… abysmal 
.
I ended up looking up a few of the stories on wikipedia, just to double check my understanding, and it was a relief to realize that my comprehension was completely fine, actually. I feel like those are a pretty good example of where my grammar is at now, and usually there are only a handful of unknown vocab words in them (though naturally the words I don’t know tend to be the ones that are pivotal to the story).
I got some pure listening comprehension practice in the form of CyberFight Festival, a huge crossover wrestling show (it had English commentary and some live translation on twitter, but both were of course at a delay, so it still counts for listening practice), as well as a TJPW VOD show that I watched a few days before it.
I also watched part of a TJPW press conference that I talked about in the pro wrestling thread. Mostly I wanted to see how one part of the presser that was described in the transcript actually played out. I turned on the youtube autocaptions for help, though they’re riddled with mistakes (really looking forward to the upcoming “タイトル町”).
And I watched the third episode of 夢プロレス－dream on the ring－. It was fun to learn more about 上原わかな! I thought it was sad that she faced opposition from her parents when she wanted to get into the entertainment industry. She seems like she has a decent skillset for wrestling, with experience in cheerleading and kickboxing and working as an idol. She also really loves food.
All in all, even if it’s not the best for strictly practicing your listening ability, I think one benefit of listening with subtitles/transcripts is that it’s forcing me to practice processing the language at the speed it’s spoken at. That in itself is a skill that has to be built up, I feel .
About two weeks of the challenge left for me!