Started “My Neighbor Totoro” and its quite easy to understand as it is meant for kids. Not really enjoying it per say but its at my level I would say (of course they speak quite fast so I miss a lot and have to go back and listen again).
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I am a quarter of the way through ハウルの動く城 Howl’s Moving Castle. I gotta say the English voices are way better than the Japanese (I dont normally say this). Howl sounds so young and young Sophie sounds so old in the Japanese voices. But it is my favorite Ghibli film so watching in Japanese with Language Reactor is a good input method.
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January 28 
Home Post
Didn’t really listen to anything yesterday, because I don’t quite count playing Bustafellows for myself, because I don’t try to listen without following along with the text.
That said, I find myself actually being able to follow along with some of the longer textboxes and catching more or less everything said, when they only say words I know (or close enough). I kinda feel like that is a listening achievement. Because it doesn’t happen that often. I always read the text again after, but now I’ve found myself multiple times going “huh, I didn’t miss anything”. So while I feel like the listening isn’t pure enough to count, when they talk fast I can’t really read quick enough to truly read-along, and even then I’ve found myself getting everything.
So yeah, pretty cool to me. ^^
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That’s tangible progress, well done! I’d definitely count it, because it’s definitely still listening. You may not actively try to focus on listening, but you’re not actively ignoring it either, and your brain is starting to process it without you even noticing it. Learning without even noticing I’m studying is my favourite method! 
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For the purpose of this challenge and what I’m trying to do with it, I’m not counting it. Because I’m trying to work on pure listening for eventual speaking practice, and real people don’t come with subtitles. 
(They really should, shame on them. 
)
But yeah, I’m super stoked. And if this was more than like 1-2% of my experience with Bustafellows, I might count it, but mostly my head is stuck in my dictionary app, looking up the 0-3 words per sentence that I don’t know. I don’t know what the average is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked up 1 word on average per sentence.
So true! I’ll take this as sign of improvement at least.
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Jan 29, Sun of Week 5 of Winter Q1 2023
So-matome N3 Listening Ch.5 [2/5]. Listening once feels more natural and is possible, but may need a little more practice.
ガラスのうさぎ [8/18].
吾輩は猫である Ch.2 (Track 3). I repeated for 1 more round, and glimpsed at the text.
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January 29
Home Post
Sayuri Saying Everyday 
Listened to 3 episodes and part of one, until I realized she meant to spend the whole episode playing shiritori by herself. And it was 8 minutes long. 
So skipped the third one too that was about another word game. I don’t care that it was called magic banana, I’ll look up somewhere else how to play that if I feel compelled.
Instead I had three short episodes about シュークリーム, plastic bags, and Canada day. I hope slightly more interesting stuff will be in later episodes, because as it looks now, I might drop it for being a bit boring.
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Wanted to just relax today, so I picked up 「君の膵臓をたべたい」, the live-action adaptation.
Also I wanted to finally see what the story is about, since I haven’t read the original novel that the movie is based on.
Trailer link, if anybody is interested 
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Last night’s movie was: 山椒大夫「さんしょうだゆう」- the English title being: Sansho the Bailiff.
This movie is from 1954, and was directed by the same guy who directed Ugetsu - Kenji Mizoguchi. It’s the same high quality as Ugetsu too - great camerawork, sound, acting and such, but I didn’t think the story was quite as good in this one - still a really great film though. I just preferred the ghost-story elements and psychological play of Ugetsu better, that one felt a bit more light-hearted even if it was a tragedy, this one was a pretty heavy tragedy all the way through.
It takes place in later 11thC Japan and is about a governor who’s family is banished into exile, the children are kidnapped on the way and sold into slavery. The story is about them growing up as slaves and their plan to eventually escape to be reunited with their mother and bring the slavers to justice.
This was pretty brutal to say how old it is, there’s no blood or explicit violence on screen like before, but there’s several scenes that felt like they pushed the barrier pretty hard for the time it was released.
Japanese-wise, it follows the pattern that seems to have formed - I can understand women and children for the most part, but guys are difficult, and the older the guy is, the harder it is to understand. There was also some scenes with people speaking up to nobility - very emotional, very fast, very polite = impossible for me to understand.
There’s only one more film available (though I’m not sure if it’s actually a film or a long documentary), then I’ll have to venture into other pastures for something to watch. Feeling that watching media is the most effective way for listening practice for me at the moment, I’m seeing a lot more success with this than previous efforts.
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January 29 
I watched the first episode of Quartet on Netflix today. It’s…strange. A string quartet forms when four string musicians meet each other by apparent chance in a karaoke corridor. However, we know from the very beginning that at least one of them has been paid to befriend one of the others. They all have their quirks, and there’s some Tarantino-like conversations about lemon on karaage and the proper way to ask others whether they’d like some lemon or not… There’s some mystery, so I will continue with the next episode and see how it goes. Speech is relatively clear, which is good.
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January 29th!
I watched the Teasing Master Takagi-san Movie today.
I was watching with my husband so we had english subs, but I was able to understand a fair amount without looking at the subs, which was pretty cool!
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January 27
Teppei for beginners #32
January 28
Teppei for beginners #33 and #34, plus over 1.5h of BU$TAFELLOWS
January 29
Teppei for beginners #35, and over 1h of BU$TAFELLOWS
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Jan 30, Mon of Week 6 of Winter Q1 2023
ガラスのうさぎ [9/18].
Death Note EP.17-18. Now, I intend to finish the series. At least, watching should precede reading. Not really fully listening, and I probably won’t rewind, using JP subtitle along, focusing on the flow. (Today, I paused a little though.)
So-matome N2 Listening Ch.1 [1/5]. Pronunciation understanding exercise. In my mind, it’s pretty easy if vocabularies are known.
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I too really suck at comprehending numbers, dates and times. It’s just too quick, if I’m caught unaware, they are already on the tens and single digits… hangon hangon what were the thousands and hundreds again…
Have you come across this site for practicing listening to numbers?
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I’ve been doing some of my podcast playlist but without any transcribed audio.
Been doing the teppei spotify playlist a bit.
Started a bit of the shikanzen master n4 listening book. Listened to the audio of some low level graded readers… Trying to mix it up a bit which is quite difficult to do at a low level of ability.
Why is language learning such a bloody emotional rollercoaster? The elation of hearing and recognising a new word or phase, and the depths of despair at not understanding a sausage of the last few seconds (minutes!) of dialogue.
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January 30
Home Post
Comprehensible Japanese, Intermediate 
ドラえもんのひみつ道具 episode
I think could count the unknown words in that episode (that wasn’t explained) on one hand. That is pretty cool, but it also means I’m getting to the stage where I need more entertaining material. I noticed that with reading too. As it became less laborsome to understand, the content became more important.
I guess it is a good problem to have, but also, it usually means finding new resources, ones that are at the right level. *le sigh* (Also yay!)
Well, I’ll keep with comprehensible Japanese until I finish the playlist I think. It is currently the only listening I do at the computer (everything else I listen to when out for walks and such). I just know this is like a signal to myself that when I go looking for new material, I will really need to look for stuff that actually interest me content-wise, as well stuff at the right level of difficulty.
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January 30th!
Today I listened to an episode of Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners.
I’ve also been playing a VR game recently called Noun Town so I did a little bit of listening practise through that too.
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Same same. And by “harder time” I mean “I understood almost nothing”. But in typical マタタビムービーラボ fashion, it was still amusing.
Why… why would anybody think that’s a good idea? 
Oooh, that’s really nice, thanks for sharing! The only thing missing there are phone numbers (so lots of single digits read quickly after each other).
How was it? I’m usually pretty disappointed by language learning games and their attempts to make language learning “fun”, but this one actually might be pretty nice from what I can see on Steam?
The last few days:
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Friday:
- 8 Minutes of a Hololive stream (【作業】ホロライブ運動会の会場をみこちと作る！【マイクラ】 - YouTube, 18:07 - 26:00) I was curious about. Pretty fun, and I feel like I understood a lot - certainly enough to follow and enjoy what was going on - although a good amount of details were probably lost on me.
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Saturday:
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1x Comprehensible Japanese Beginner. I wasn’t really motivated, so I chose a random short one, and I got so bored by both the content and the difficulty level that I was barely listening. That’s what I get for trying to slack off.
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マタタビムービーラボ - fun, but I barely understood anything.
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Sunday:
- I tried to watch a Hololive audio manga video that I found coincidentally (【 漫画動画 】しらないこと研究会 第三話「ていさつ！」#しらけん【ホロライブ/不知火建設】 - YouTube), and I got the gist sometimes… but absolutely none of the details.
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Today:
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A few minutes of Japanese Numbers Listening Practice.
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1x Comprehensible Japanese Intermediate.
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Listened to some Teppei episodes during lunchtime. Included an episode plugging his patreon. Signed up as I’ve been listening a lot to his podcast recently and it’s only fair. When I looked at my emails this morning, actually had a message from the man himself thanking me. 
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January 30 
Just a few random booktuber videos that I started but never finished. I’ll still count it, but just barely.
January 31
A couple more book videos, and a couple of hours of かがみの孤城 audiobook. This was very much passive listening as I was working on something that didn’t require too much brainpower. I was therefore very surprised that whole sentences entered my brain uninvited, while I wasn’t even paying proper attention! I think this is a major breakthrough: brain officially processes Japanese input in the background, and lets me know, just as would happen with other languages I understand. I’m so happy that regularly bombarding my ears with Japanese works in the long run, even without any conscious effort to decipher what I’m hearing, or, you know, hard work…
(I’m still not at the point where I could just leisurely listen to an audiobook and get most of it, but I’m definitely on the way there)
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