Hello everyone! Wishing all of you a very Happy New Year! I’m already participating in the Read Everyday Challenge and enjoying it so far, so was excited to find that the challenge had a listening counterpart too! My current goal with Japanese is to immerse myself in the language as much as possible, so I’ll try to be active in both the challenges (though I realise I might end up missing some days in either because of my hectic schedule at uni). Anyway, I’ll try to do my best for this challenge and my immersion journey, and I hope to interact with you all and have some great discussions in the process.
がんばります!(◍•ᴗ•◍)
Videos on the Comprehensible Japanese channel (I was so happy to see so many posts with videos from this channel - it’s one of my favourite YouTube channels for immersion! )
The Activate Your Japanese series (it has Eng subs embedded in the episodes, but I’ll try to focus on the audio only)
Shirokuma Cafe on Animelon (I’ve always wanted to watch this anime with only Japanese subs only, so I’m thinking of trying that for this challenge!)
This list of resources is not exhaustive, so if I end up using any resources other the ones I’ve mentioned, I’ll update this list as well as include the resource in my log.
Last night I watched 仄暗い水の底から, the English title is just “Dark Water”, I think the Japanese title sounds cooler and more ominous. Not heard of or seen this one before, but I enjoyed this one too! It was pretty similar to リング in setup and themes, both dealt with a single mother and a child (with broody divorced husband in the background) and the presence of a curse-spirit. But the subplot of this one dealt with the custody of the child rather than a potential reconciliation of sorts like in リング.
The tension and creepy was also good in this one too, I like the camerawork and minimal scoring of these films. It works really well. I didn’t think the lead character was quite as good though, she seemed to be a bit too hysterical at times. I like that it felt like the film was wrapping up but then there was a little more at the end, it had good closure - I think the opened endedness of リング worked but it’s nice to watch a horror movie that actually has a conclusion for once and isn’t just open-ended or extremely random plot twist for the sake of it.
Japanese-wise I could understand everything the children said (like last time, they were all about six years old) but struggled with some of the adults - again, the ex-husband man is mumbly. And I had no idea whatsoever what the apartment caretaker man said at all, pretty sure every sentence he said was somehow condensed down into two syllables conjoined together with a single, thick string of mumble.
Onto tomorrow’s film! (well, tonight’s really but I’m too tired after to write anything)
Today I watched a Comprehensible Japanese video about playing a spot the difference game (#10). Really nice content that is similar to Tadoku books in that you don’t need to know the vocabulary to understand what’s going on.
Two more episodes of ミステリと言う勿れ! One included some fun kanji practice too, and quick number recognition. Not that I managed to follow that too closely.
Totonou really is adorable.
I’m watching with English subtitles too. I try to not rely too much on them, but I’d get horribly frustrated if I couldn’t follow the plot properly, and possibly give up watching altogether, so I reckon that’s a good compromise. Have them there, glance at them as little (and as late) as possible.
Today I watched 3 episodes of Cells at Work, with english subs.
I’ve been reading the manga of this series with the ABBC and finding it really difficult, so I thought watching the anime might help me out a bit with all of the biology related vocab.
I decided to give this a try as I don’t watch much fashion stuff. I got like 80% but there were a few ? moments. I was a bit baffled by some of her outfits, but a couple were pretty cute.
First time joining a challenge! A few days late but that’s okay!
I’ll mainly be listening to podcasts and watching youtube videos (w/subtitles in either japanese or english)
And the 1h 45min Holotalk episode I started 2 days ago is finished! Wohoo! That was hard, but fun.
I have a few more Holotalk episodes I’m interested in, but for the next days I definitely want to do things that aren’t quite this long. There’s a lot of podcasts I want to check out to see how I like them, and maybe an episode or two of Comprehensible Japanese can’t hurt either!
It wasn’t much, but I listened to some songs and tried to discern lyrics and make sense of them. Having trouble finding stuff to do that is interesting tbh.
Listened to an episode of Sayuri Saying. She discussed her goals for the new year: doing voice over work and improving her driving. I can relate to that second one: I only have my learner’s permit, rather than a full driver’s license. I grew up in a city with extensive public transit, so a car was never a necessity. Where I’m living now, however, is a different story…
I started Crayon Shin Chan 2 days ago and how is this a children’s show I. DO. NOT. KNOW. I am enjoying it though. Watching with Japanese subtitles, understanding about 5 %, going through it a second time with language reactor and then a 3rd while writing down all the vocabulary I do not know which is quite a lot. I think I might go through each episode this way and on the 4th watch I will do it after reviewing the vocabulary I have written down.
Also I am going through Bite Size Japanese and Nihongo con teppei for beginners, but I do not enjoy podcasts as much as shows although they are easier to understand.
Checking my clockify stats tell me yesterday I listened to podcasts for 1h13mins and spent an hour transcribing a couple of podcasts such that I might understand them better. A lunchtime dog walk really helps boosts those minutes as my usual route is about 40 minutes long (depending on how many other dogs there are for mine to play with)
I’ve only had one coffee this morning so far so the memories are coming back slowly. I vaguely recall an episode of Noriko where she’s talking about a Japanese phrase that’s a variation of ‘little by little/bit by bit’. I do remember feeling grumpy about not understanding as much as I’d like but there we go, that’s why I’m practicing!
funny! made me laugh, you’ve really captured that male Japanese grumbling/mumbling dialect. I was watching ‘Tokyo Vice’ and the Yazuka boss spoke like that. I love to do impressions of it with my italki tutor, it really amuses me, mmmm… not sure she finds it as hilarious
Only very few things were said about most of the books, and I understood about half of that, but it’s still much better than I did with such videos in the last challenge, so it seems I’m definitely making progress Noted down some books to check out too (based more on covers than his comments, I’m afraid )
Definitely true, but I’m not choosing books by how beautiful a cover is. I mean, beautiful or unique covers do catch my eye of course, but what I’m trying do to is try and understand what the cover is telling me. You can usually tell if a book is romantic, funny, scary, a mystery or horror or historical fiction or whatever, just by glancing at its cover. However, it seems that cover language is different in different countries, and I’m still not very good at interpreting Japanese covers. So many covers look like a scene from an anime, for example. Does it mean that the book is fantasy? For a younger audience? Or do the Japanese just really like this style for everything?
Thanks, very interesting video!
A pretty crazy (and of course totally unrelated) detail for me was 硝子 (ガラス) - didn’t know at all there is a way of writing this in kanji plus it means “child of the nitrate” which is crazy, weird and fitting, as is so often
By the way did you catch the horror books (especially one where he said it’s really really horror) he presented?