July 4 
I got my listening in early today. Many thanks to @Naphthalene for the idea!
I watched these two NHK videos on various animals. The photography is just beautiful and the narration very clear. Some parts I understood perfectly, and some not at all. It may have to do more with (lack of) vocabulary than listening skills? A very enjoyable listening session, anyway.
Oh yeah so at the start they usually chat about this and that. I didn’t listen from the start of the series (nor do I fully understand everything) nor did I read any description but I think the host lives in San Francisco? So he somehow sounds like he’s craving for news from back home ^^ OTOH it’s usually about very recent things so I find that actually quite interesting as well.
I tend to listen to the podcast while I do other things that are not too noisy (e.g. cutting veggies or something) which works well enough for me.
I need to find something like that to keep me busy. As it was, I was just shaking my mouse pointer to make it larger (a nice feature on mac OS) and trying to keep it like that for as long as possible 
That made me frequently zone out to the point of not being able to really follow the conversation.
I’ll try it again tonight (either the same episode or another one)
Home post 
July 4th
・SKM N2: Did the exercises on page 40–46.
Heh, the amount of times I had to replay the recordings… sigh. Mostly because I couldn’t process some of the words, which leads to perceived traffic jam in my brain and I miss whatever comes next.
・Also watched 36 min of NHK news and while I was at it, this video about birbs (14 min). There were crabs too. Cute 
There are apparently only 6000 left of this dinosaur-looking birb right now.
I see birb 
Will add to watch list :3
Moving ahead with the usuals. I’ve been rather liking listening to the aforementioned Sakura通信 while going out for a walk. Doing that as opposed to just sitting keeps me a little more focused anyway. What I’m finding is I still miss a lot of important words like I said before, but for whatever it’s worth, I’m following the overall… flow of the conversation? Like I have the basics internalized enough that I used to start losing the thread of what was being said and then everything would turn to gibberish, but now it’s not that hard for me to return to comprehension where possible and at least have an idea of the big picture. I think that’s pretty good.
Nihongo con teppei Shinjuki style. Its for the intermediate learner, of which I am not so I cannot do as much listening as with beginner as I start to get a headache just to try to understand like 20% of what is being said…but I am going to power through.
Its a holiday and I am bored AF as well so
July 4 
Home Post
I watched three more episodes of ハイキュー！！ It’s been a lot of fun 
interacting with native-speed spoken stuff more consistently is good, pushes me to comprehend stuff faster which always has room for improvement for sure. It’s so easy for me to get sucked into ハイキュー！！ and suddenly it’s an hour later 
that’s the trick huh!
Day 4 update, progress on listening challenge :
Day 1: 30 minutes of Gackt music from youtube.
Day 2: 2 short stories from Japanese short stories for beginners vol 2. 大掃除、年賀状。
Day 3: 1 hour of Gackt and Stereopony mp3s. 神様 by Hiromi Kawakami.
Day 4: 30 minutes of Gackt music from YouTube, re-listened to 神様 several times, 2 short stories from Japanese short stories for beginners vol 2. 化粧品、日本映画。
Listened to 2 more chapters of 殺人ライセンス and honestly just want to straight binge it but I should probably read the book I’m trying to finish instead of indulging myself in trash.
Please enjoy this video of me finding books to read.
So far the vocab has developed to the point where I’m putting it on par with スマホを落としただけなのに in terms of difficulty. For those who don’t mind (or even like!) spoilers, the plot so far is that a high school boy nicknamed Kyuu was playing an online game called Murder License, and the next day saw on the news that a man with the same name as the target in the game was found dead. The man was known to be a stalker, a detail noted by the game and the news. Kyuu went to check for the game again, but it had been taken offline.
The same night Kyuu played the game, two of Kyuu’s classmates heard a strange voice coming from their TV and were talking about in in school next day. The father of one of those girls was laid off (in his mid-40s) and is trying to find a way to support his family again, so has somehow landed on ‘I will be a private detective!’ as the answer and is bothering his old classmate, a cop friend (coincidentally working on the stalker murder case!) for advice on this. Based on the summary of the book, this will eventually lead to him helping solve the murder game mystery, but we’re not that far yet.
Most recently the game came back up online and this time with a target who is a 15 year old boy, noted for bullying his classmates. Kyuu ponders that the targets are people who are a menace to society, but unable to be jailed for the things they’re doing.
July 4th!
Most of today’s listening was Fruits Basket with subs, I watched 3 episodes.
But I also listened to Episode 11 of Nihongo con Teppei (Beginners)
July 4th
What did I listen to?: Obey Me! VAs visit an Obey Me! café thing parts 2 and 3 (videos on Youtube)
How much time did I spend listening?: 23 min
I finished off this series of videos today - there was, indeed, karaoke 
Each of the main Obey Me! characters has an original song (sung by the character’s VA), so each VA picked one of the character songs to sing (not the one that they sang for their character originally). My favorite moment (which I got the gist of on the first listen, but then rewatched with pauses so I could try to read the captions better):
Kada: Why am I here, you guys are all good singers and I’m so bad
Yaguchi: But do you like to sing?
Kada: Yes xD But I’m so nervous~
Ayme, the professional singer: Let’s just enjoy karaoke together!
Kada: Yes! Ok! Let’s have fun singing together.
Ayme: But also this will be on youtube later
Kada: screaming
Kada acts all shy but then somehow also has the guts to do Ayme’s character song right in front of him, like sir, you chose the hard road But Ayme’s just grooving along and lip-syncing supportively, it’s very cute xD Until we get close to the end and everyone starts laughing because the song gets a little bit too far outside of Kada’s vocal range He tried 
A for effort
I was low-key about to riot at the end of part 2 because I thought Ayme was going to be the only one who didn’t sing - they showed the other three singing, but then they cut to a segment about merch for the end of the video, so I thought the karaoke part was over. But then in part 3 there was more karaoke and he did sing, so it was fine xD
So far, I’m having a much easier time sitting down and listening daily-ish than I thought I would. I’m not sure my Japanese is really improving, but at least I’m having fun xD
Also, this is somewhat random, but I got some unexpected Japanese listening practice while I was watching a k-pop vlive today - they were mostly talking in Korean (which I understand essentially none of) but they were throwing out some Japanese phrases in part of it (because they’re in Japan currently, so they were like telling a story of something that happened while they were there) and I was like hey I understood that part :o So that was neat.
Nooo, I like this birb and his spoony beak, save him D:
I enjoyed the mini-anime that they made for the game, even though I’ve never played it . What’s the name of the YouTube channel you’re watching the videos on?
They’re on Miura Ayme’s channel! Here’s a link to the first video in this karaoke series, you can find parts 2 and 3 on the same channel:
ありがとうございます！ 面白そうですね。私は見てみましょう！
Bah, in the end, I didn’t listen to anything yesterday (except the radio in the morning, but since I’m really not paying attention and it’s mostly music anyway, I won’t count that). You see, I started reading 聖女の魔力は万能です 1 and it’s great and I couldn’t put it down (I read half the book in that one sitting ). Odds are that I will read another half of that book today. They said so on the weather forecast.
#literally 三日坊主
Jul 5, Tue of Week 2 of Summer 
2022
Today I listened (and read-aloud) to 海坊主, a 怪談話 from りっきぃの夜話.
Watching the YouTube avoids my eyes from reading the Kanji and the Kana for the story, until I really want to study in-depth… (So I read after listening.)
Apparently, not only the story (i.e. the language) sounds cool, the sfx are too, and can be found here – 音の園. (It’s hidden in the description.)
Yesterday, I watch an episode of やがて君になる anime (with JP sub), and watched NHK Special (from omk above). tbh, I am not sure if I have improved yet. Probably trying around 1 month isn’t so visibly changing. Also, the practice drill wasn’t really in place yet. (1 more month would still probably be too short. How about the end of the challenge?)
Comparing with reading, didn’t I step up from Graded Readers? While I believe Graded Readers also has audio, YouTube Kids is far more accessible and has more collection. (There is also Satori Reader.) (And interesting factors still count.)
While reading can be slow, and takes forever, listening speed can be altered globally, like x1.25.
Nonetheless, YouTube Kids isn’t necessarily so easy…
I decided to join the challenge late~ I’m going to fill in the days I did so far as well. 
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Series:
未来日記 S2 (9/9 ep) 
Terrace House Boys and Girls in the City (10/47 ep)
はじめてのおつかい (3/ ep)
Audiobooks:
魔女の宅急便 (11/11 ch)
Podcasts:
The real Japanese Podcast (?/?)
Games:
Nightshade/百花百狼 (4/5 routes)
News and informational content:
世界をわかりやすく - Kurzgesagt (1/5 vid)
Learning content:
JLPT
Random YouTube/short videos:
Booktubers
Sanbonjuku
Informationals
Conversation
Tandem
No specific Listening
July 1-10
July 11-17
July 18-24
July 25-31
| 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
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July 5
Today I watched the Tokyo waterbirds video @Redglare linked to yesterday. (thank you, Redglare!)
It was lovely seeing all the birdies, such a relaxing experience. I really miss the days when I lived near water and I could get to casually watch them every day.
I found it surprising that apparently in Tokyo you can find more or less the same birds as in Europe. I’d expect different fauna for some reason (for example, why aren’t there tanuki in Europe?)
Fun fact: ひな means chick, young bird. But in Greek, the exact same word means goose. It was very strange seeing ducklings being referred to as ひな, I had to stop myself thinking the narrator didn’t know what she was talking about, as it’s very common for people to confuse ducks with geese.
Comprehension-wise, I understood about half? Maybe less? But watching the birds was so nice and relaxing, I didn’t even care. 
