🔉 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge (Summer Edition) 🏖

Sep 19, Mon of Week 13 of Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

I watched an episode of Yurucamp S1 with JP sub, and it was much less tiring than かぐや様は告らせたい.

I also watched an episode of HUNTER x HUNTER with no sub. It now almost catches up with my manga reading.

Now, I should mention about resuming watching a series on Netflix - JoJo (Stardust Crusaders) - with Subadub Chrome Extension (I am on Brave browser). Unlike Language Reactor, I can use this extension to hover on JP sub and add vocabularies (and Kanji) to Anki with Yomichan. Also, press edit and add tags, or copy contents from other related entries. Other ways I am using to get videos on my laptop cannot be hovered by Yomichan. [1]

Subtitles can be wrong too, so I would then just type in with Google Japanese Input IME and search in Yomichan directly.

About JoJo, I have read a little of Part 3 Stardust Crusaders in free period in Bookwalker, and also most curious about Steel Ball Run that I saw in my teenage years.

The only con is, Netflix doesn’t allow screenshots, which would anyway only slow down my watching and sometimes hamper comprehension. (In contrast, Bookwalker allows.)


  1. Maybe they can, with some research? Also, Netflix on web browsers can be screenshot’d in Linux, afaik. ↩︎

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Sep 21, Wed of Week 13 of Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

Today, I watched an episode of Yurucamp S1 with JP sub.

Lots of tasty anime grills

タン(しお)

(ぶた)バラ(にく)

(とん)トロ

ロース ハラミ

ホルモン (シロコロホルモン)

(くし)

ハンバーグ

I was also tricked by to 1 minute or so of 嘘 explanation at the end…

I tried to watch an episode of HUNTER x HUNTER with no sub, but it’s getting ahead of my reading (although flows of the story (directing) are different); so I am not sure if I should continue before reading.

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imagen

I’ve been terrible at keeping up with this :sob: . I needed a break after all and have been progressively resuming reading, already settled with it, but I admit I haven’t done any proper listening since the start of the month. I plan to resume it at some point soon, but for now I probably won’t be using this thread much, unfortunately. Lately I’m trying to balance the amount of pressure I put onto myself, and even though I keep listening here and there, I’m not sure if I want to add daily listening again just yet, at least in an imposed manner.

Also unlocking the thread so that polv can keep posting (max number of posts in a row is 3 if I remember correctly?).

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I am not sure. Perhaps within 24 hours as well?

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Sep 22, Thu of Week 13 of Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

Yesterday, I went to a fitness center, but failed to book a class, so I listened to more かがみの孤城 (1 track = 1/4 chapter), as well as watching (on smartphone) an episode of JoJo on Netflix with JP sub. For both of this, I didn’t really pause to listen deeper. (And I still question very much whether I really understand かがみの孤城.)

Because of JoJo, I am using Language Reactor again, to see translation of the names. Also, seeing English translation (interpretation) might not be so bad.

Today, I also watched an episode of HUNTER x HUNTER with no sub. Whether I watch ahead of manga or not is confusing, because the story line is slightly different (and shuffled).

About the value of listening, in order to be able to really listen, I am thinking about the concept of Tadoku (so, Tachou, in this case). Perhaps something like, listening at my limit of understanding and tolerance, in order to raise my limits, and be able to listen to more things.

However, I consider listening with or without visual cues, and listening with read-along subtitle (transcript) a little different, as subtitle can be read perhaps about a second before hearing. (While with visual cues or not does much less difference.)

There is also a thing about pausing. Pausing very little, and pausing and reconsidering a lot, would be a lot different, both have their own benefits.

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Summary post

I said I was going to post updates in this thread and then totally didn’t, whoops! :sweat_smile:

Been a bit of a wild month for me, in both good and bad ways. I have managed to keep up with listening every day (in both Spanish and Japanese), though!

One thing I did want to talk about is the most interesting translation experience I’ve had thus far!

Dalys and Stephanie Vaquer, luchadoras from the Mexican company CMLL, recently wrestled in a one-off match at Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling on September 11 (here’s my post about translating this show). Naturally, they did their post-match comments in Spanish! So when translating their comments into English, all that I had to work with was the video footage in Spanish (without a transcript), and then a Japanese translation of what they said.

Listening challenge hard mode!

I really wanted to translate directly from the Spanish, so I started off by transcribing the interview, and then I asked a friend of mine who’s fluent in Spanish to double-check my transcription. After that, I translated it and then got that same friend to look at my translation, haha, to make sure I wasn’t off-base.

I missed a few things when transcribing it, but otherwise did decently well! I was very surprised! Listening comprehension is absolutely my biggest weakness with Spanish as well as Japanese. But thanks to this challenge, I’ve been practicing a lot more this year, and I think that really helped me get to a point where I’m capable of translating something like this.

In the other thread, I’ve been including photos from matches so that my posts are more interesting, so here’s one from this show, haha. This is Yuka Sakazaki and Mizuki vs Pokotan, a mascot from DDT Pro-Wrestling, and Demonio Uno (not pictured), who is a zombie (?). In the photo, Yuka is hitting one of her signature moves, the Magical Merry-Go-Round, on Pokotan.

Some day, I will be trilingual and fluent in all three of the pro wrestling languages, and then I will be unstoppable :triumph:.

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I randomly was suggested this video and thought it was fun, short, and easy so recommending here:

I love that goal. I’m actually making tentative plans for a year or two from now to pick up another language and it’s being determined by two things:

  • It needs to be a category one language (excluding the romance languages which I studied years ago and didn’t click with)
  • It needs to have good detective / mystery fiction

Passion really does drive the learning process :joy:

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It truly does, haha! It’s funny, I learned Spanish in high school and didn’t click with it at all at the time, but several years ago, I decided I might as well try to revive my long-forgotten high school Spanish, so I got Duolingo and recovered most of what I’d learned, but didn’t really get any further.

Then I got into pro wrestling, and it was the first time in my life I actually had Spanish-language media to watch that I was genuinely invested in. Japanese wrestling is still my favorite, but there’s just so much global crossover (particularly between the US, Mexico, and Japan), I found lots of opportunities to practice my Spanish as well.

Then after that, it turned out that knowing Spanish is really important for my actual job, so it was really great that I’d started to work on it and make progress again. But needing it for work alone was really not enough to motivate me, haha :sweat_smile:. So in a weird way, pro wrestling is helping me learn a very important skill for my actual job.

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Sep 27, Tue of Week 1 of (post-) Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

I watched two more episodes of HUNTER x HUNTER (1999), with generated JP sub (for 1.5 episodes), and it now catches up with the recently finished manga volume. So, time to read further again.

I also watched an episode of Yurucamp S1 with JP sub (found in 狐っ子).

I played around with audio transcribing software for HUNTER x HUNTER (1999), and found openai/whisper to be demanding for a decent transcribing speed. Also, dedicated GPU RAM > 4 GB is required for the recommended medium and large models. small model doesn’t only suck sometimes, but also refused to transcribe for some time segments.

The generated results are of *.vtt format, and previously used Aegisub doesn’t support this (although I have another script to convert to *.srt first). Also, Aegisub development was discontinued for like 8 years.

Looking at the content of *.vtt (with a text editor), and finding that *.vtt can easily be edited with a text editor or simple text processing scripts; so I want to be able to visualize *.vtt directly. I found Subtitle Edit, which is actively developed to present time.

The real pro of this app though, is that it can generated subtitles from movies (not only audios, which are indirectly movies). Of course it can generate ones from audio files as well, with timing, and good GUI for proofreading. I also found other audio transcriber softwares, like CLI ones, in Github.

Doesn't use GPU, but isn't slow.

Transcribing quality is sometimes worse than openai/whisper, but at least it doesn’t generate texts for silent segments, or repeated same texts whether (unrelatedly) spoken or not, as well as generated texts are well-timed.

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I’ve not been doing much wanikani, but I’ve been listening a ton! It’s true that passion can really drive you…

I’m just popping in to say I’m not sure if I want to host a fall challenge, so I’m putting it out to anyone else who wants to make the thread. I would join if someone else wants to take charge!

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I could do that, unless someone else is very keen to do it themselves. It might even motivate me to actually complete the challenge this time :slight_smile:

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Just tossing this in here as I’m not sure where else to put it:

Kinda cool to see a loosening up around CBD + a bit of education. I remember just a year ago mentioning to a JP friend that I sometimes take it to help me sleep and getting a very shocked response. :sweat_smile:

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Listen Every Day Challenge - Fall 2022 is up!

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Sep 29, Thu of Week 1 of (post-) Summer :beach_umbrella: 2022

Yesterday I watched an episode Yurucamp with real JP sub, and indeed collected a lot of vocabularies.

Today, I watched an episodes of HUNTER x HUNTER (1999), with generated JP sub (after reading half of manga volume first). Indeed, generation is quite inaccurate, but I have files from both GPU method (whisper) and CPU method (SubtitleEdit). GPU seems to be more accurate even with less-than-recommended small model, but some signficant senseless segments, so CPU needs to complement.

So for now, speech recognition doesn’t help that much. I need to know (or able to guess) vocabularies first somehow.

This one isn't really that inaccurate, but I find it funny.

Perhaps I should learn more about 大○ (not that shopping mall)'s constituents.

Some text written on screen, and I can guess.

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Summary post

I wanted to post about a few more things and then make a wrap-up post, but got too busy at the end of the month and ended up not having the time! :sweat_smile:

I had another small listening comprehension victory last week! I was working on translating Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling’s September 16 show, and for the first time, I was able to actually figure out a puzzling bit in the transcript of a wrestler’s comment by watching the video!

A couple sentences into Miu Watanabe’s comment, the shupro transcript had this: “そこで海外の方とシングルの経験を積めるのはすごいことですし、逆に英語の人…ですかね? 日本語じゃない人と闘ったことがないので。でも語源? 言葉じゃない何かで勝ちたいと思います.” I could not for the life of me figure out what “でも語源?” was referring to. 語源 just seems to mean “etymology”!

But then I watched the video, and I think what happened is that Miu says “言語(げんご)” (language), then corrects herself to “語源(ごげん)” (etymology), then gives up on trying to remember the correct order of げん and ご in the word she wants and just says “言葉(ことば)” (words) instead, haha!

Here’s a photo from the show. This is the rookie Moka Miyamoto, who has a karate background, fighting visiting guest wrestler Mei Suruga, who came last minute in as a replacement for All Elite Wrestling’s nonbinary zombie Abadon, who unfortunately was not able to make it to Japan due to visa issues. Mei took her role as Abadon’s replacement very seriously, haha, and she bit Moka several times during the match.

I also finished the show I was watching in Spanish (La Casa de las Flores), so I struggled a bit trying to find something else to watch in the last few days of the month because I didn’t want to start anything new.

I ended up choosing a netflix movie for the very last day of the challenge. It’s called Elisa y Marcela, and it’s a period piece about a real lesbian couple who managed to get legally married by tricking a priest over 100 years before gay marriage was legal in Spain.

I thought the movie was decent, and the dialogue was a lot more sparse than La Casa de las Flores, which made it a much easier listening experience!

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Summary post

I was extremely late to updating this chart and the day counter at the start of the thread, but here we are at the end of the second half of the challenge for me:

Sept
Week 35
Week 36
Week 37
Week 38
Week 39

= Japanese
= Japanese and Spanish

Perfect score once again!

It’s interesting doing this challenge two months apart (June and September). I truly cannot believe how much progress I made on listening since the beginning of June. I don’t remember what I said in my reflection post after the June portion, but I seem to recall talking about how listening was very hard for me and progress was pretty slow and I didn’t think I was learning all that much from it.

Well, I definitely have been learning something somewhere! :sweat_smile:

I’ve made definite gains in being able to transcribe audio and follow along with a transcript/subtitles, including interpreting small bits of audio that did not make it into the transcription. With Japanese, I’d credit my translation work for the vast majority of my improvement, haha. I’m not sure how well my abilities hold up in a non-wrestling environment where I haven’t SRS’d a lot of the vocab and spent hours interpreting sentences.

I’m not participating in the fall challenge during the main challenge period, but I will probably be back for the off-month again! I’ll be listening to plenty of Japanese in the meantime still, haha.

Hopefully I’ll see you all in the other thread in December!

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While I can’t test this error when over 24 hours, when I am not OP; thanks for the help.

I should accept this one as a possible error. Testing would be a little rude for the actual OP.

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It was my first thread on the forum, if i screwed something up I’m sorry. Tbh i have no idea what you’re talking about though, I’d appreciate it if you’d explain it to me.

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Nothing wrong, don’t worry :slight_smile: . We were just talking back then about how WaniKani doesn’t let you make more than 3 posts in a row in threads where you are not the owner / OP. The rest of us weren’t posting for a couple days so I made a post to “unlock” the thread for Polv so they could continue if they wanted.

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