🔉 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge (Summer Edition) 🏖

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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I really hope you’re feeling better soon :crossed_fingers:


Home post

Might be a little light on listening today, I accidentally dragged myself out of bed late and I see I’ve managed to pile my reviews a bit too high again. Oops. All the same, back to watching a little bit of speedrunning, right now it’s The Wind Waker! Great game. I listened to the next part of the audiobook for スマホを落としただけなのに and I’m happy to say I’m still usually catching the gist on my first, blind listen! Missing loads of details, sure, but I’m pretty pleased, especially since the last one was about the detective characters (the perspectives change with each section), who at the beginning I couldn’t follow at all.

Also, last night I happened to catch a little of Amano Pikamee playing The Quarry. She’s a vtuber so that’s not for everyone, but in what I saw, I thought her speaking seemed relatively simple, so I wanted to share.

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:sound: Listening Room: Date 20220702 :loud_sound:

Day XI: お月さまのお使い & 歌うガイコツ :skull:

Listened to two, one about rabbits, monkey and mochi, and the other about a skelebob.

I feel the problem of picking out select words but not the rest of the sentence still persists, and I fight with myself figuring out the context and miss the next sentence.

I have some sake for later and will see about watching a Japanese film, hopefully the sake will have magical listening ability powers. :sake:

This is from a different story but have a cute deer:
Deer

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I think, from what I’ve heard, the magical powers are related to talking :wink:. But I hope you prove me wrong.

I can’t really have alcohol anymore, but I used to love sake. From my understanding a lot of it is actually considered best to have chilled, but get the right kind and I found it super pleasant to drink warm.

Now that you mention it, if I could still drink, it might do wonders to shut up the part of me that always stops movies halfway through because I feel like I’m missing too much, haha.

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That’s my luck, get magical Japanese talking powers and no one will be around to hear it. :laughing:

Sorry to hear you can’t have it anymore. I’m not a super fan of alcohol, I only really like whisky and wine, but I’ve found sake to be a really nice drink. Usually, depending on the size of the bottle, I’ll have part chilled and part warm another time, but I feel my preference is to have it warm every time. I feel it brings out the flavour more, plus it provides extra cosy feelings.

There are non-alcoholic sake, but I’ve never tried one so not sure how good they are, but could be something! :sake:

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Oh good to know! That might be worth a shot sometime. My problem is so nebulous I can’t even be sure what it is without experimenting more – basically, after I caught covid, I developed sudden bad reactions to drinking even small amounts of beer or wine. The best guess I have is it’s related to histamines, but if that’s true, then I guess the alcohol content wouldn’t really matter. I need to do more testing with specifically low histamine alcohols, or there’s something you can use in wine that allegedly removes them? :person_shrugging:

Anyway, enough about my health problem, have fun! Excited to hear what you watch and how that goes.

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July 2 :blossom: Home Post

I’m doing okay so far I think! I watched a couple more lets plays and that was pretty fun; definitely understanding more than I have in the past so that’s cool. Stuff like that is good for listening practice without subtitles, since I don’t feel as strongly about catching every single nuance as I can get with actual plot :joy:

On that side, ハイキュー!! is powerful; I got caught up in all the transformative stuff happening and ended up watching three episodes! Love training camp arcs :grin: It’s still a generally comfortable watch, though there are specific characters I have particular difficulty with for sure :joy: Like Nekomata especially says a lot of weird stuff, and Takeda can get kinda metaphorical, that kind of thing. Other than that it’s pretty smooth sailing! ハイキュー!!'s always a fun time :grin:

Oh no, I hope you feel better soon! Sending you good vibes :sunny:

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July 1 :orange_square:
July 2 :yellow_square:

So I decided to color code my listening days.
:red_square: would mean passive listening in the background, very low to nil comprehension
:orange_square: would mean somewhat active listening, some comprehension
:yellow_square: would be active listening, adequate comprehension
:green_square: is the goal: active listening, satisfactory comprehension (I’m being realistic here, I don’t expect full comprehension any time soon)

So the first two days fell right in the middle of this range. Yesterday I listened to some かがみの孤城 at bedtime, and it was going really well, until, well, I fell asleep. :sweat_smile:
Today I decided to listen to something before bedtime, and watched three Onomappu videos. I really like his style, very easy to deduce the meaning even when I don’t know, or don’t catch, the words. I was actively watching this time, and didn’t fall asleep (!), so I can say it went better than yesterday.

I really want to get back to the audiobook though. I probably need to find some totally mindless tasks to accompany it with. Too bad it’s too hot for walks at the moment. :sunny:

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Home post :guitar: July 2nd

・Hiiki Biiki podcast episode 146. Topic: Outer wear. Length: 1 hour.

There were also mentions of Star Wars and 合コン.
Was tired, so no shinkanzen master today.

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Home post

LEDC
Week 1

July 2
古見さんは、コミュ障です。: Episodes 19 and 20 → 40min.

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July 2nd

Taking it a bit easy today as I’m trying to chill out a bit pre-JLPT tomorrow!
So I took a bubble bath and I watched the first 4 episodes of Fruits Basket Season 2 (with subs), which I’ve been meaning to watch for ages.

(Home Post)

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Watched a couple episodes of PreCure (dont judge xd), and listened to ~1h20m of 安達としまむら.
(Home Post)

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I tried Old Enough on Netflix with Japanese subs and I understood less than 5% :smiling_face_with_tear: :smiling_face_with_tear:

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Only way to go is up :wink::muscle:

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Summary Post

July 2nd
What did I listen to?: Miura Ayme talking about Obey Me! cafe merch on Youtube :rofl:
How much time did I spend listening?: 41 min

So, funny story, I was looking for this one specific video that I had watched a while ago (with English subs) because I remembered the ending being funny - my original plan was to watch that video again without subs and leave it at that. But apparently there were more of these videos than I thought there were, and I ended up watching 4 of them until I finally found the one I was thinking of :rofl: I mean, it’s more listening practice :woman_shrugging:

I got ramble-y, sorry but not really

Basically these videos are him promoting the various Obey Me! themed pop-up cafes that have been done in the past. He usually gets something to eat/drink, shows off the merch you can buy, and does some of the random draws (for like keychains and stuff, you buy them in opaque envelopes so the character you get is a surprise). I love that he always tries to gets things of the character he voices, idk, it completes a weird part of my heart when that happens :rofl: It’s the same feeling as when voice actors cosplay their characters (which he also does, like really well, because he is actually a cosplayer and honestly his every-day look is kind of halfway to Asmo already :laughing:). It cracks me up when he’s in a room with all the other voice actors for the game because the rest of them pretty much just look like…average Japanese men, and then you have this smol blonde dude with lenses :rofl:

Can we all just appreciate the random little braided section on the side of his head in this video, like it’s so cute to me for some reason :confounded: I hadn’t seen this video before, he was like peak adorable lmao (it seemed like he was talking faster in this one though, I felt like I understood less xD Though there were a lot more captions in this one and I was trying to read those at the same time, so maybe that was part of it)

Anyway - back to talking about listening :eyes:

Things I learned from doing this:

  • I can’t read fast xD I had the subtitles off, but these videos have some words that pop up on the screen (you know, as they do in a lot of Asian variety shows…what are those actually called, captions?) Anyway, I was trying to read those to help me catch more of what he was saying, but I was not doing very well at it xD Speed reader, I am not. I think I actually understood less when I was trying to read and listen simultaneously than when I was just watching him do whatever he was doing while listening.
  • I rely a lot on visual cues to understand spoken words. Like when there’s something visual going on to complement the spoken words, I can hear and process the spoken words so much better. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not :joy: Is the ultimate goal to be able to listen and comprehend without any sort of visual context? I guess so, though I feel like that situation wouldn’t come up terribly often for me? Not going to worry about it too much either way at this point, just thinking out loud xD
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lol, yeah. Still, gaming dialogues are lovely.

I can confirm. Listening with eyes-free tones down some cringes.


Jul 3, Sun of Week 1 of Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

Wrap-up

  • The highlight, for myself, of this week is probably be listening (of less than 10 minutes), then read aloud with sound recording, of Hukumusume collection. (thanks Zakarius)
  • While I did listen to some YouTube, I am not sure if I should put in my progress, since I feel I don’t catch enough messages.
  • Anime with subtitles, and anything else with matching caption, is doable for listening practice, but have to be done with caution.
    • So, naturally, I would try to find and adapt to something without visual hints, like podcasts (Podbean)
  • Not sure how much this is related, but I also try writing; so as to make language learning more active.

Today’s progress

Today, I listened and read aloud to 杉の木、百本

It’s about this guy.

kichomu-san

Yeah, he’s the previous mentioned キッチョム(吉四六)さん.

Story's review

Indeed, he tricked everyone to giving more donations, but is him giving 50 pairs of chopsticks appropriate? (Well, at least, they aren’t つまようじ .)


Yesterday, I passed by a shopping mall with a Kinokuniya bookstore. Unplanned, and I don’t exactly have a book in mind. Nonetheless, for chance opportunity, I asked the driver (my family) to drop me off.

I bought three books.

  • 聞いた覚える話し方:日本語生中継!初中級編1
    • 日本語能力試験N4レベル以上
    • The book is provided with CD, so I had to find a DVD player for PC. Went to 2 shopping malls (not counting the first one, where I didn’t find the books I need), just to buy one.
    • Then, the CD was ripped and uploaded to Google Drive almost immediately.
  • the Japanese Language by Haruhiko Kindaichi (translated to English by Hirano)
    • Of my first concern would be pitch and intonation. Of course, only what matters to the first survival bar…
  • Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication by Taeko Kamiya
    • I feel this is needed for Sentence Every Day Challenge.

As an extra, while shopping and on the way home, I listened to たびラジ on Podbean. (Total of a little more than 1 hour, I think, because I have too much time.) The speaker mentioned Korean, and spoke some Korean; but I practically have zero knowledge in Korean language…

There are also things like Teppei and Noriko on Podbean, but what I would listen to regularly (when handsfree, eyesfree) is to be decided.

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I listened to another 2 chapters of 殺人ライセンス and I just…love it. Let’s be clear that it’s a junk food book / airport novel / pulp trash / whatever you want to call it, but it’s very easy to listen to and if I didn’t have such a busy weekend ahead of me I’d binge the whole thing pretty quickly. I’d put it at about the level of スマホを落としただけなのに, or perhaps even a smidge lower because as yet the vocabulary has been narrower.

I’ve been needing some pulpy trash to binge listen to to bring up my listening hours for the year and so am delighted that Audible has several titles by this author. :joy:

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