I think, from what I’ve heard, the magical powers are related to talking 
. 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.
That’s my luck, get magical Japanese talking powers and no one will be around to hear it. 
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! 
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? 
Anyway, enough about my health problem, have fun! Excited to hear what you watch and how that goes.
July 2 
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 
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 
It’s still a generally comfortable watch, though there are specific characters I have particular difficulty with for sure 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
Oh no, I hope you feel better soon! Sending you good vibes 
July 1 
July 2 
So I decided to color code my listening days.
would mean passive listening in the background, very low to nil comprehension
would mean somewhat active listening, some comprehension
would be active listening, adequate comprehension
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. 
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.
Home post 
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.
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.
Watched a couple episodes of PreCure (dont judge xd), and listened to ~1h20m of 安達としまむら.
(Home Post)
I tried Old Enough on Netflix with Japanese subs and I understood less than 5% 
Only way to go is up 
July 2nd
What did I listen to?: Miura Ayme talking about Obey Me! cafe merch on Youtube 
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 I mean, it’s more listening practice 
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 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 ). 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
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 
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 
Things I learned from doing this:
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 xDlol, 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 
2022
Today, I listened and read aloud to 杉の木、百本
It’s about this guy.
Yeah, he’s the previous mentioned キッチョムさん.
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.
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.
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.
Day XII: 大きさが違う 
Listened to today’s Edo tale, about Mt. Fuji!
Sorry, forgot to update my post last night!
I ended up watching Porco Rosso, I thought I’d try watching something that I’m familiar with and see how I fair with no subtitles. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, but I think a lot of that is down to that I could fill in the blanks with vague recollections of what everyone says. If characters spoke for too long though I did get a bit lost.
It kind of feels that all the words I can pick up on are always the same ones, and it’s like, when do I start learning any new ones?
I can’t say that the sake gave me magic comprehension powers 
But I think it did help a bit with just rolling with it rather than second guessing everything, but I worry that this may sounds like I am advocating using alcohol as a Japanese learning aid 
Please, do not use alcohol as a Japanese learning aid.
Sorry to hear about your problem, didn’t even know that covid could cause such things! I hope that it’s just a temporary side effect - after hearing about your other problems from the past thread I really hope the best for you - you deserve a big break from it all!
Might play some more Yakuza 6 later too, will see how it goes.
Additionals
Yakuza 6
Episode of Pokemon
July 3
Another episode of Stranger Things today. This one had a lot of arguing, and I just couldn’t keep up. So while I listened perfectly actively, comprehension was rather low, even knowing what was being said. Oh well.
july 3 
home post
Yesterday and today I’ve been listening to Nihongo con Teppei (starting from episode 27 of the beginner podcast since I listened to the ones before a while ago). I can understand quite a bit of it, the problem is that my mind keeps wandering and I stop paying attention to what he’s saying and this podcast doesn’t exactly have the most interesting topics, even if the host is really charismatic. But I’m viewing it like a graded reader: not exactly what I want to listen to atm, but it’s a stepping stone so I can understand the things I actually want to listen to
I’ll probably switch back and forth between Nihongo con Teppei and Comprehensible Japanese. That way I have something to listen to without visuals and something with visuals (no subs though)
Home post July 3rd
・SKM N2: Did the exercises on page 27–39.
Doing these were surprisingly fun. One phrase I realized I’m not very familiar with: どうぞ、お構いなく. A polite way to basically say “no, thank you”. Got several questions wrong because of it 
July 3rd!
Today was the JLPT, so that involved some listening!
As well as that though, I listened to Episodes 8-10 of Nihongo con Teppei (Beginners).
I also did a bit of semi-passive listening to Lesson 11 of JapanesePod101’s The 800 Core Words and Phrases series while I was writing my daily diary 
| LEDC | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | |||||||
 |
1 | 0 | 0 | % | |
July 3
Nihongo con Teppei Z: episodes 8 and 9 → 27 min.
古見さんは、コミュ障です。: episodes 21 and 22 → 40 min.
Week 1 completed
Work done:
Videos
Final Fantasy 14 Live Letter → 2 h.
Podcasts
Nihongo con Teppei Z, 2 episodes → 27 min.
Anime
古見さんは、コミュ障です。, 4 episodes → 1h 20 min.
Total listening time: 3h 47 min.
First week down. It being short has been great for a nice little push to start the challenge. I think I’m really going to like this new weekly planning. On to the new week! 