🔉 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge (Summer Edition) 🏖

Japanese Language Listening
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Double-posting because I just watched a really interesting interview with TJPW wrestler Yuki Kamifuku (or Kamiyu as she typically goes by). The interview was produced for a Chinese program, and it’s half in English and half in Japanese. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.

There are English subtitles for the whole thing, but I’m pretty sure they’re machine translated. It’s kind of neat, though, because they helped me understand what she was saying, while still requiring me to understand what was happening in the Japanese in order to fully comprehend haha. It was good listening practice for today :blush:.

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I wish he was taking beginners still, because he would be an awesome conversational tutor.

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:sound: Listening Room: Date 20220630 :loud_sound:

Day IX: 野ギツネ :fox_face:

Listened to today’s folktale, about a fox doing what foxes do best… transform and cause mischief.

One thing I love is the grammar rule that when speech is in the middle of a sentence it is followed by と, I really like how it’s pronounced softly.

「ココン、ココン！」
。。。
≪と≫

Also realised that playing games and watching shows in Japanese (even if there is subtitles) counts as passive listening, so now that the challenge will be starting ‘officially’ tomorrow I’ll start listing any other Japanese listening adventures with some of those fun little boxes.
:package:

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Hello! :durtle_hello: I’ll be joining the listening challenge with y’all~

:beach_umbrella: Redglare’s home post :beach_umbrella:

July 月 火 水 木 金 土 日
Week 26
Week 27
Week 28
Week 29
Week 30
Aug 月 火 水 木 金 土 日
Week 31

Plan:

  • Do the exercises in SKM N2 Listening textbook. Already passed N2, but I left the N1 book at other place. Haven’t really been using this book, so why not durtle my way through it anyway. I guess this will count as intensive listening.
  • Listen to Hiiki Biiki podcast. Extensive listening. Currently on episode 145.
Link to daily updates

July                  01, 02, 03,
04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31.

Aug 03,

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Jul 1, Fri of Week 1 of Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

七月ヘようこそ～

I listened to 子育て幽霊 just now. [1] This one is classified as 百物語, which I see resemblance to 百鬼夜行 (but not sure of the relevance); and the URL does say 怪談(かいだん), so 間違いない. (Also, read-aloud.)

This one is also on YouTube.

And yeah, there are also translations in the website. And in the Japanese version, there are illustrations too.

Vocabularies:
  • アメ(飴) – candy – At first I thought this one is rice because of 水アメ and can be poured.
    • I wonder if 水アメ is popular during that time period, that アメをください is sufficient to know what she meant?
    • Also, is that stuff even OK for 赤ん坊 ?
  • 雨(あめ) – of course, rain :sun_behind_rain_cloud: . I noticed vocal differences from the earlier vocabulary later on, when I listened to the vocabulary’s recording on Yomichan; but not sure if I will be able to remember respective patterns in the end…

If I got as far as making my own 演説や作文, I would try reading them aloud too.

  1. Read aloud :studio_microphone:

    • Probably the first time that recording goes beyond 10 minutes.
    ↩︎
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Summary post

And that’s it! June is over, and so is this challenge for me. I managed to complete the rest of the month with a perfect score :blush:.

Jun 月 火 水 木 金 土 日
Week 21 ・ ・ ・ ・
Week 22 ・ ・
Week 23
Week 24
Week 25

= Japanese
= Japanese and Spanish

The listening I got done in Spanish:

I listened to… a bunch of episodes of the Duolingo Spanish podcast. I’m not exactly sure how many :sweat_smile:. Doing the math, probably nine?

I also watched 14 episodes of La Casa de las Flores (all of season one, and the first episode of season two), all with Spanish subtitles.

The listening I got done in Japanese:

I watched four episodes of 夢プロレス－dream on the ring－, listened to ten 童話 stories, and watched miscellaneous other things (Japanese wrestling shows, press conferences, and assorted other videos)

All in all, it was a very successful challenge! I made a lot more progress with Spanish than Japanese, but that’s understandable, considering the fact that I’m further along with that language.

I wasn’t exactly sure how much I’d get out of this, because I feel like my Japanese isn’t far enough along to benefit terribly much, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to take my Spanish to the next step, but I’m really glad I ended up going for it anyway. I’m especially glad that I took the leap and started watching La Casa de las Flores, which I wouldn’t have done without this challenge as an incentive!

I did actually see noticeable improvement in both my Japanese and Spanish listening, even though I didn’t even do this a full month.

I’ll probably be back at the end of the official challenge period to participate again during the off month :sweat_smile:. In the meantime, I’ll be doing the read every day challenge :blush:.

Good luck to everyone starting the challenge, and to everyone who started already!

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I decided to listen to the opening of an audiobook I got off Audible, 殺人ライセンス and was honestly surprised by how easy it felt. I have my audible app sped up to 1.15x at the moment because 硝子の塔の殺人 is honestly a bit slow for my tastes (doing a read-along with it), and even without resetting the speed I had no trouble keeping up. It’s probably not going to be the most challenging book, given the summary:

高校生が遭遇したオンラインゲーム「殺人ライセンス」。ゲームと同様の事件が現実でも起こった。犠牲者の名前も同じであり、高校生のキュウは、同級生の父で探偵の男とともに、事件を調べはじめる

DeepL English for those who want it:

A high school student encountered the online game “License to Kill”. The same incident as in the game happened in real life. The names of the victims are also the same, and high school student Kyu, together with his classmate’s father, a detective, begin to investigate the case.

It was published in 2002. That kind of plot line was part a whole vibe in the early 2000s. I’m here for it.

I also relistened to a few chapters of 謎解きはディナーの後で and found it’s no longer at the upper edge of my listening abilities, so that was neat. I feel like I slack so much on listening after reaching a decent-ish level, so when I realize I’m still making progress I’m somewhat :surprised-pikachu:

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:sound: Listening Room: Date 20220701 :loud_sound:

Day X: 耳なし芳一 & 浦島太郎 :guitar: (just imagine it’s a biwa)

Listened to two today, while sewing to see if it works any better while concentrating on something else. Both of these had fun videos I could put on, and neither had text so I couldn’t get distracted with that either, just focus on the listening while stabbing my fingers with a needle.

It feels easier, but I’m not sure if I’m actually learning more or if I just think I am :thinking: I’ll have to do this a few times to see how it goes.

Also realised that reading the story afterward to find out what it was about has made my brain lazy with the listening. Since it knows that it’ll find out what the story was about after it hasn’t been bothering to listen properly. So I won’t be reading after and force brain to actually put some effort in, even if it does throw a mard on the floor because it wants to know what the story was about. If you want to know what the story was about brain then you’ve gotta put in more effort to listen.

Magic box for filling later (depending on what I decide to do):

:white_check_mark: Yakuza 6
:white_check_mark: Episode of Pokemon

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Home post

It begins! I watched some of that Twitch speedrunning restream I mentioned with my coffee this morning – they were playing some Shovel Knight spinoff that I didn’t even know existed, and then I saw a bit of Satisfactory. Shovel Knight itself was a fun game anyway. I’m pretty… mixed to not-good on comprehending a lot of this, but I think the games/runs require a lot of vocab I’m not ready for, probably. Late last night I listened to another audiobook chunk and that went from understanding the gist pretty well to understanding the vast majority of it fully after having read it, so that’s nice. My listening ability is all over the place but that’s probably normal. There are just so many factors that go into whether something is easy or hard and they’re not always easy to identify.

If nothing else, I’m pretty sure I’ll listen to the next audiobook segment today so I can get started on reading it.

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I decided to combine @omk3 's Netflix dub watching with an old suggestion from somewhere else about turning on audio descriptions* and started watching We Love Cats. It’s amazing. Highly recommend. I’m not sure how much I’m learning but I’m loving it. A man rapping about cats being translated into Japanese is just what I needed this week :heart_eyes_cat:

*副音声 if your Netflix is in Japanese

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July 1st!

I listened to 4 episodes of Nihongo con Teppei Beginners today and was pleasantly surprised to be able to understand basically everything other than a few seconds where my attention wavered a bit and I didn’t listen properly.
I’m hoping to improve my listening stamina during this challenge, since at the moment I disappear off into daydreaming unless I concentrate really hard on listening!

(Home Post)

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Watched a few episodes of this sol anime (まちカドまぞく), feel like I’m picking up a lot of new vocabulary from it, which is great :slight_smile:

Also listened to roughly 1 hour of the 安達としまむら audio books during my walk. Currently on volume 6!

(Home Post)

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Home post :guitar: July 1st

・SKM N2: I went through 問題紹介 5 & 6 (did 1–4 yesterday), and then the exercises on page 16–26 (did page 14–15 yesterday).

I already like this textbook. I discovered one thing I’m struggling with: double negatives. Specifically this structure: できないんじゃないでしょうか which means できないと思う. And then there’s stuff like intonation, which is usually easy to understand (question vs assertion etc), but double negatives like mentioned can make things confusing (did it happen or did it not?).

・Also listened to Hiiki Biiki podcast episode 145. Topic: Shopping. Length: 1 1/2 hour.

Long time no hear, Sakota Daichi-san, Kimura Haruka-san! It was fun to hear unknown words and try to figure out what kanji they’re supposed to be spelled with. Like 実店舗 (じってんぽ) “physical retail store (rather than online)”, never heard it before. Also 無印 (むじるし) “unlabeled, unbranded”, really had to pause for a minute to look it up because I couldn’t accurately pick up the sounds.

Today was kinda intense, went all out on the first day hahah :see_no_evil:

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July 1 :blossom: Home Post

It begins! :tada: I’ve been anything but consistent with listening so today was kinda chaotic figuring out what I wanna do; I had some lets plays on in the background and that went reasonably well, definitely didn’t understand everything but enough to get some goofs and such. I don’t have the stamina to do listening like that for very long yet though :sweat_smile:

The main thing I want to do consistently is watch at least an episode (probably mostly anime tbh) a day, which I’ll probably mostly do with Japanese subs since I think that’s still most beneficial to me at this point. And that means ハイキュー！！ right now! I always forget just how much I love ハイキュー！！ until I watch it haha, it’s just so much fun :grin: I’d watched through the first few episodes of the second season in Japanese a while back and fell off for one reason or another, so it’s good to be back. It’s a pretty manageable watch for me at this point too - I paused a couple times to look up a word, but for the most part I just let it go at normal speed and kept up just fine. I’ve consumed enough media with shounen-esque speech to be unfazed :joy:

I guess listening to Japanese music could also count as listening, and if that’s the case I guess I’ve been practicing listening every day :joy: It’s different though, definitely more passive than what I’m going for for this challenge, but it all helps!

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Making a note to come back to this later, thanks for the suggestions everyone!

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Home post

LEDC 月 火 水 木 金 土 日
Week 1

July 1
Final Fantasy 14 Live Letter: 2 hours.

Here we go again. The timing of the presentation was pretty useful for the start of the challenge! These live letters are presentations where they announce adjustments and upcoming new content for the game and they are usually lengthy. This one was two hours long, and as usual very fast paced and quite hard to catch at times, but that was really fun as they usually don’t have English translations for many of the Live Letters.

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Well, I ended up listening to something random yesterday. So random, in fact, that I can’t remember the details. (Okay, no, I just remembered, it was about how stainless forks, spoons, and knives are made)

Not sure what today will bring.

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july 1 :sunflower: home post

I listened to Kona’s Big Adventure on Satori Reader today… or at least, I tried. I caught a little bit here and there, but overall I struggled to understand what was happening. I’ve read this story before so I was expecting to be able to follow along a bit better! Tomorrow I’ll probably go with something a bit easier like Comprehensible Japanese or something

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Jul 2, Sat of Week 1 of Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

Today’s story to be listened and read aloud is お月さまのお使い, which is a 民話 from 高知県.

There is a singing song in that story, that I can’t really sing. Probably this one.

I’ve got a new meaning for ぺったんこ today. If you can’t familiar with a colloquial meaning of this vocab — try googling for images.

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast about an interview with a successful Japanese learner, but it’s in Japanese, so I don’t really understand much. Also, watched a YouTube on foreigners living in Japan, like their food. Actual answer varies, though. Also, some people’s speaking got a voiceover. Probably that isn’t Japanese.

As I have tried reading aloud for about a week, I am thinking about memorizing pitch accents somehow; and what I trust most, is memorizing.

I now see communication skills as having two parts – understanding well, and being expressive (and expressiveness itself covers being understood well); while writing does have some separate points from voicing.

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Well I’m not starting the official challenge very strong, I ended up having a medical issue and I spent most of the last two days sleeping. Theoretically I could have put on some japanese on in the background, but I did not. I’m still feeling under the weather, so I don’t know if I will listen to much this weekend, but once I’m feeling better I will! I’ve been doing well in June, although I haven’t updated here. I keep a physical study journal, and if I can make it over to my desk today I’ll update my log here.

I have been reading people’s updates, its cool to see what everyone else is listening to! Good luck to everyone starting the official challenge!

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