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 
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 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:
- 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
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