🔉 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge (Summer Edition) 🏖

I always knew I wanted to start doing the audio quiz using the self study script, and I’m using this as an excuse to do it! I’ve used it 3 days in a row now, after my morning reviews/lessons.

I noticed in conversation, I would have no clue what a word would be, and then after having it explained to me, I realized I could read the word just fine because I had learned it on wanikani. But my brain never connected the audio to the reading/kanji. So i’m hoping that the self study quiz will help me be able to actually recognize all these vocab I’m learning when people say the words, instead of just reading…

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Summary post

I know I said I wasn’t going to update every day, haha, but I wanted to check in again. So far, the challenge is going well! I watched the second episode of La Casa de las Flores and still feel like I’m able to understand 80-90% of it, and I also watched the second episode of 夢プロレス-dream on the ring- (These episodes are delightfully short for a language learner! This one was just over six minutes. Just a warning, 凛咲子 talks about her past doing gravure, and there is some footage of that in this episode, so it might not be the best choice for watching at work, haha).

I couldn’t resist trying to understand a little more of this episode because I wanted to find out more about 凛咲子 and why she wants to do wrestling, so this time, I watched it all the way through without pausing, then went back through and paused on most of the subtitles so that I could read more of them and look up some unknown words.

I didn’t look up everything, and there was some unknown grammar that I didn’t even try to parse, so I feel like I understood maybe 70% at best, but it was cool being able to understand as much as I did without really trying. I’m still very far from being able to understand even a fraction of that without subtitles, but I feel like reading along and listening to the audio is maybe helping at least a little?

One thing that I’m definitely sure about, though, is that there’s no way I can do the listen every day challenge in both Spanish and Japanese and the read every day challenge in both Spanish and Japanese at the same time. I’ve been neglecting my reading in both languages ever since I signed up for this challenge (though, arguably, the practice I’m getting by watching shows with subtitles is more reading practice than listening :sweat_smile:).

I think I’m going to tentatively stick to doing the listening challenge on the off month, and then focusing on the reading challenge during the main challenge period.

There’s also a chance that I’m going to get more hours at work over the summer, so that might further limit me, but I’m going to try my best!

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Home post

Today and yesterday I listened to a few episodes of Sakura Tips, a podcast for JP learners with over 500 3-4 minute episodes featuring slow simple Japanese :slight_smile:

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Yesterday I’ve relistened to episodes 115 – 147.

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I’ve been studying Japanese for a while now but listening has always been something I’ve neglected T_T so now I’m really trying to buckle down and improve my listening comprehension.

For active listening I’m using Satori Reader. The site has really helped me with my reading and now I’m going back and listening to stories I’ve already read (without looking at the text).

For passive listening I found this weather channel on YouTube WeatherNews. They broadcast daily and it’s really easy just to put it on in the background. Since everything they talk about revolves around weather they end up using a lot of the same words which is very helpful.

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I’m just coming back from a 1+ year hiatus from studying japanese (aside from the occasional podcast) so I really need this as I’ve forgotten so much. I’ll be listening in June but I won’t start tracking because I’ll be focusing on reviewing for the rest of June.

Jul
01 02 03
04 05 06 07 08 09 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Aug
01 02 03 04 05 06 07
08 09 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30 31
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Listening over coffee today: 傑作から新作まで、最近読んだおすすめ本4冊を紹介!

Honestly pretty difficult for me. Sometimes I was understanding everything and other times there’d be multiple words in a sentence that were ??? for me. He also spoke fast enough that attempting to read the words on the screen (あらすじ mostly) while listening was hopeless.
I added a couple of the books he mentioned to my wish list - we seem to have similar tastes. I think I might put this channel into my regular rotation as it’d just past where my comfort level is so would be a good growth opportunity.

Side note: I was kind of giggling how he kept calling 異邦の騎士 a 古い作品 because it was written in…the 1980s. :joy:

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Well, you set yourself some different standards, it seems :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Thanks for your suggestions btw! I’ll try to follow a few of them (although my listening ability is quite poor, so let’s see how it goes…)

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Thank you, Beyond Sleepy for telling us about Sakura Tips. Her writing in Japanese is very good for me! Edit: huh… I had listened to the mp4 off her website, but her Sakura Tips TouTube videos are even better, because they show the text as she is speaking, karaoke style. I subscribed to her You Tube channel. This week be good for my

  1. Listen,
    2… Study the transcript and
  2. listen again until I catch all of it.
    Plan that I follow for intensive listening. Yay!

I also subscribed to the Weather News YouTube channel that @jvepperson1 linked.

Weather News vocabulary notes:

As far as I can tell, these are the cities listed along the bottom in a video I watched
田島 Tajima (looks like a tool company?)。沼の沢 Numanosawa (is in Hokkaido?)。小宝島 Kodakarajima (an island in Kagoshima District)。島羽 Shimahane (May be an incomplete name)。渡嘉敷 tokashiki (in Shimajiri district of Okinawa)。北方 Hoppū (北方領 means Northern Territoryほっぽうりょう For islands located in East Hokkaido?)。本部 Honbu (is Motobu Okinawa 本部?)。

安次嶺 Ashimine (in Naha, Okinawa)。荒屋 Araya or Kōoku (? stone age site in Niigata, Hokoriku region??)。土別 Shibetsu (city in Hokkaido)。青ヶ島 Aogashima (an island with a population of 170)。佐喜浜 Sakihama。西興部 Nishiokoppe。那覇 Naha。小野新町 Ononiimachi。笠取山 Kasatoriyama。胡屋 Goya。

Crud! That’s annoying…I thought they might be cities “worth learning”…

These could be wrong, I didn’t check them; I hand wrote them into Google Translate.

はっきり clearly. うっすら slightly. 見えない can’t be seen. ポツポツ scattered, drops. パラパラ falling rapidly in big drops. サー (??). ザーザー raining heavily. ゴォーー (??). ベチャ (??) みぞれ sleet mixed rain and snow. チラチラ fluttering light snow. フワフワ floating, drifting. シゾシゾ (??). ドカドカ mostly? incessantly?. バ チバ チ (??). ブワァ (??) 吹雪 (ふぶき snowstorms).

Just to say that I do watch on You Tube from time to time Takashi from Japan Mostly, he uses too much English for Japanese listening practice. It’s nice when he switches back and forth.

I found out that the automatic translation on YouTube does work now. 1. Turn on CC (closed captioning); 2. In settings, turn on “automatic translation” and select the language.

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Just another little update, besides my usual things, last night I watched half of the film スーパーの女. Normally I don’t split movies up much, but with Japanese they get tiring and sometimes it’s hard to find the full time block with all the other stuff I want to do. It was on the Criterion Channel (with their baked in English subs I have to block :angry: ) so I can’t share a way to watch unfortunately.

It’s a really charming movie! Just takes the small scale occurrences of a little grocery store trying to get by and blows them up for comedy. Yet another that I watched the very beginning of some months ago, but bailed on early cause I was annoyed at following basically nothing. This time I got through that portion better, but I’m still teetering on the edge of missing so many lines that it makes me dissatisfied with the viewing. Definitely progress, though. There are some real mumble-y men in this movie. I’ll probably try to continue it later? Certainly like the movie, just have this thing where the feeling that I’m missing out too much through the lines I don’t understand accumulates over time until I bail on movies early, heh. Not like this one is hard to follow what’s happening for what that’s worth, but there can be a big gap between knowing the literal events occurring and actually getting what you want from a movie, y’know?

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That’s me at the moment. I can read a lot of Japanese subtitles, but they go by so fast, I seldom get all of them read.

Last night I tried watching and listening to different TV programs, ones I haven’t seen before. I watched “Chumi Dondon” (I think it was called), and it seemed to be about a girl who kept cooking different foods and trying them out on various people. I know I didn’t catch it all, but I got the main idea (I think). Also watched a few news programs and one on Japanese mountains.

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Jun 12, Sun (A comtemplation for improving listening) :cherry_blossom: calendar post

I don’t want to see sentences (subtitle), and audio follows; and it is probably impossible for a resource to make audio first, then writing follows, in real time.

  • Death Note EP.2-3 – No subtitle. Corresponding to first few chapters on the book. (Around up to Ch.3-4 I think.)
  • やがて君になる EP.2-3 – This one has subtitles, and vocabs not so hard. However, I don’t really follow along and rewind every sentences.

I also listened to Samurai Champloo (EP.1-2, no subtitles), which is quite gory to me. I planned to catch up to EP.4. Black Jack OVA (1993) is also planned.

Gotta admit, though. Watching without subtitle loses much of the messages, which I think is pretty bad. Gotta manage somehow. Subtitle directly on the image is also troublesome – which is pretty much the case of Visual Novels.

Planned:

  • NHK News, perhaps involving Japanese politics, because why not?
    • Listening, although bad, might be easier than reading at this point (or perhaps reading not exceedingly difficult, but I haven’t tried yet.)
  • Japanese culture. Recently I saw food poisoning because of sashimi worms, on Youtube; which also double as news.
  • I have audiobook.jp Android app on my smartphone, but yet to try it. (No account yet.)
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Yesterday I’ve relistened to episodes 148 – 151 and listened to some of the newer episodes on my phone; don’t remember the numbers.

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…it’s been bugging me because I missed it… episodes of what, trunklayer-san?

I have put in a few references and updated the resource wiki summary post in this thread where we list listening resources by proficiency level … Thank you, @KJules and @JenK .

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https://nihongoconteppei.com/

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あああ、:link:リンクありがとうございました。とてもいいです

一緒に勉強しています友達は、鉄平先生と直接レッスンを受けていました。A friend who i study with used to take in-person lessons with Teppei-sensei.

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I watched this video today, which was a nice exercise of some science/health vocabulary. Use it or lose it, as they say. 【要約】トップアスリートが実践 人生が変わる最高の呼吸法【パトリック・マキューン】 - YouTube

Basically a voiced over manga which is in turn explaining the main points of a book about how to ‘breathe better’. I like these videos because when it talks about science-y topics it’s usually at a high enough level where I can follow along but still strengthen some vocab like 二酸化炭素, 排泄, and the like which I otherwise only encounter rarely.

Because all the dialogue is in the speech bubbles and you can adjust the speed of playback in youtube I’d recommend these videos for anyone with intermediate grammar and a base in science words (or you can look them up as you go along, but I hate doing that while listening :sweat_smile: )

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Yesterday I’ve relistened to episodes 152 – 194.

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Setting the playback speed at 0.7 allowed me to more or less read along with my audiobook, but I still need to pause a lot to look things up. I’m not sure whether it’s better to let things go or look up everything when the goal is listening comprehension. More than a couple unknown words can cause me to lose the thread completely, and the fact that I tend to drift off while listening doesn’t help much either. However, these are still very low energy and low concentration days for me for unrelated reasons, so maybe it will get better.

For now I thought I’d try shorter texts and so I dug up my neglected Read Real Japanese book, bought back when I had no hope of reading real Japanese at all. It’s accompanied by an audio CD so I listened, read, read+listened, then just listened again to the first short essay by Haruki Murakami. Even after such intense study of this short text, I still tended to tune out after the first couple of minutes of listening. I wonder if I just need to accept that listening is just not my forte. I mean, I even prefer watching movies in my native language with subtitles on…

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Home post

Yesterday and today I continued listening to Sakura Tips, as well as to あらB.fm (a hours long podcast about various things, one host + new guests every episode, but my jp is not strong enough to really parse what’s going on most of the time).

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