I won’t be doing a calendar (I already have a habit tracker) but as with the past challenge or two this will be my outlet for sharing youtube videos / podcasts / movies / tv shows I come across that are interesting. Also probably talking about audiobooks as well since I have a huge backlog of those now…
16 Likes
Here we go 
I will listen to one episode of Nihongo Con Teppei per day. I find that doing several mini lessons per day helps me to be consistent. For now, I only do 10 new Wanikani lessons and no more than 75 reviews per day. Slow and steady wins the race.
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16 Likes
My first time joining a challenge on WK! I assume I’ll mostly be watching some animes without subtitles (so I don’t rely on reading over listening) and also some podcasts 
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16 Likes
Twelve's Winter Listening Home Post 
My Study Log
My home post in the Read every day challenge
Here we go again! This challenge is always pretty intimidating. One day I’m gonna be able to do it without subtitles!
- Nihongo con Teppei playlist - lower speed and look at transcripts to read along
- Comprehensible Japanese Complete Beginner Playlist
- PiroPito Minecraft - as a treat
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16 Likes
About time I join a challenge, gonna have to think of what to listen to now
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16 Likes
polv’s Listening Challenge of Winter Q1 2023 Home Post
I classify listening materials into 3 types.
- Visual Novels, where I can always rewind and replay the audio, accompanied with text.
- JP sub anime / J-drama, where while I can pause to read, it would disturb the flow to the animation and audio.
- Podcasts and audiobooks, where texts are entirely optional, no animation, and the flow tends to be very long. (Much shorter in podcasts.)
Personally, I count the first one as Reading (to be put in Reading Challenge), which the other two are listening. Indeed, the latter is closer to real listening. I haven’t yet count the dialogue type, where speaking tends to be short, and I can reply to explain or ask for clarification.
I would try to do my Listening Type every day.
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Resources
- Audiobooks
- Finishing かがみの孤城
- Recommended books with audiobooks attached
- 君の膵臓をたべたい
- Podcasts
- YUYU Podcast
- Learn Japanese with Noriko
- J-drama and anime
- VN
- うたわれるもの
- Textbooks
- So-matome N3-N2 Listening Comprehension
15 Likes
Right, let’s see what 2023 brings, listening-wise!
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15 Likes
I don’t usually join challenges, but my listening comprehension definitely needs a push, so… let’s try this!
It’ll probably mostly be podcasts and VTubers for me. I also have the audio book of Intermediate Japanese Short Stories (L20) that I wanted to get to forever, so this might be a good opportunity.
And I’m just remembering that I have an audio book with a collection of over 60 modern fairytales written by 新美 南吉 - although those might be too hard from a vocab perspective. (Unknown vocab during listening comprehension practice is really hard for me…)
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17 Likes
One of the (many) things I did starting out which I recommend is to read first, looking up whatever vocab is needed. So long as the new words aren’t overwhelming, listen to it next. It may help to listen and read the second time, and do a textless listen last.
I still really like reading and listening to audiobooks actually 
12 Likes
Thanks for the suggestion! Sadly I don’t think I can do that, because my brain really dislikes repeating things and stops paying attention.
(And I’m not sure it’s good listening practice anymore if you already basically know the whole text?)
7 Likes
Disclaimer: I’m not qualified to comment on listening specifically.
If there’s good to it, I think it would be in increasing the number of sounds you’re unconsciously linking to words (building pattern matching), as you’ll know more of the words those sounds are associating with.
My expectation for myself is that I would end up not hearing those sounds because my brain is already matching the existence of dialogue to what I expect it to be.
9 Likes
I dislike repeating things too. So what I’ve done in cases where there’s a lot of unknown vocabulary, is listen along with the text (rather than before or after). It takes a lot of pausing, but soon you’ll find you’ll be relying on the text less and less.
Surely you won’t remember the whole text by heart, you’ll just know what to expect. And that’s helpful. The first step to listening comprehension is matching sounds to words, so that your brain gets trained in recognizing them immediately, rather than slowly processing them, much like @ChristopherFritz said. When I started listening, recognizing almost any word took conscious effort. I’ve started processing things faster now, but I still have a long way to go. Listening while reading along, even listening/watching with English subtitles, helped a lot. I don’t consider any of that “cheating”. But of course, everyone is different.
14 Likes
I probably shouldn’t be doing this, but I think I’ll give this a try!
My plan is to watch some anime I have on DVD, which also have Japanese subtitles in existence, and use mpv to blur the subs and stop playing at the end of a subtitle’s dialogue. This creates a cycle of “watch/listen until a pause, think about what was just said, then check the subtitle to verify” and if needed, press a key re-play the dialogue’s audio. And since I’ve already seen these shows, I can opt to have mpv skip segments without dialogue.
Since mpv also can remember where I left off, I can focus on listening for a certain amount of time per day, rather than trying a whole episode or segment of an episode.
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| 8 ✗ | 9 ✗ | 10 ✗ | 11 ✗ | 12 ✗ | 13 ✗ | 14 ✗ |
| 15 ✗ | 16 ✗ | 17 ✗ | 18 ✗ | 19 ✗ | 20 | 21 |
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19 Likes
My past attempts at this challenge went terribly lol (I did like… 2 days), but I want 2023 to be the year where I finally improve my listening! So I will be trying really hard to listen to stuff every day. I will be listening to 1-3 Comprehensible Japanese videos per day until I catch up to the latest videos. Not sure what I’ll do after that, we’ll see what my comprehension’s like.
I’m actually going to start today just to start the habit early while I’m thinking about it 
一月
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note: I am no longer tracking the amount of episodes I watch since I kept forgetting to keep track 
| Listening to | Type | Subs/Transcript? |
|---|---|---|
| Comprehensible Japanese (Beginner) | youtube | no |
| Sakura Tips | podcast | sometimes |
| 極主夫道 | anime | yes |
finished
| Listening to | Type | Subs/Transcript? |
|---|---|---|
| リラックマとカオルさん | anime | yes |
I am also able to practice listening at my university (I’m in a Japanese club)
16 Likes
This is perfect for me. When I took N5, my lowest score was the listening test. I haven’t got my N4 results yet, but listening seemed more difficult than the other sections. So, if I can implement my listening in the first months of 2023, that would be a good step to take.
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I’m planning to listen to podcasts, including:
- Sayuri Saying/ Everyday Japanese
- News in Slow Japanese
- Thinking in Japanese
updates
Jan 7: So far so good. I’ve been listening to podcasts every day. I’ve been off work so the challenge is to continue the momentum next week. I have no empirical evidence but, I think it’s helping my listening.
18 Likes
I also don’t think cheating applies here… but, for my purposes, I’m keen to practice listening without reading at the same time. When people speak Japanese, there normally isn’t a prepared text, so for this challenge I want to focus on training my ear without subtitles or a similar text.
10 Likes
Thank you for organizing the challenge! My priority for 2023 is improving Listening so would love to join.
I aim to listen at least 30 minutes/day. If too exhausted days, 10 minutes to keep the streak going.
Each week, I will try to report progress of the previous week and have a more detailed plan for the coming week.
My resources
-Read-&-Listen-to-Audiobook at the same time: I tried to do this this year but my listening skill is weaker than reading, got frustrated and stopped. I want retry this method in 2023
-Anime/drama: watch first time without sub, if stuck, rewatch with JPN/ENG sub. I’m watching Flying witch without sub, so far so good so will continue it in Jan.
-Podcast: I listen to Akane-sensei and Noriko-sensei podcasts, want to explore podcasts aimed towards natives
-Youtube: I listen to book reviews (masakibooks) and Japanese Genshin vtuber (LizeHelesta); also want to explore more channels
-Situational drama CD
-Visual novels: I agree with polv above that this is nearer to reading than listening. Though on too exhausted days, I might turn into a blanket burrito playing visual novels so would cheekily count this as one of my listening activity 
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Progress Report
Week 1 (1-8/1/23)
Week 2 (9-15)
Week 3 (16-22)
Week 4 (23-29)
Week 5 (30-5/2)
Week 6 (6-12)
Week 7 (13-19)
Week 8 (20-26)
17 Likes
I’ll join the listening challenge this time. Last week I got some ebook and audiobook sets to try “reading while listening” to see if it would improve my mental voice and reading speed, and already I can feel it helping so I want to continue.
I’m not fast or smooth enough at seeing words and phrases as chunks, especially when there are long strings of hiragana, or if it’s a long verb form like causative mixed with something. Sometimes I don’t understand because I’m not separating the written words/phrases correctly, and hearing it read aloud makes it easy to figure out. Also, from reading I’ve learned a lot of vocabulary and grammar which I haven’t heard spoken, and a lot of this is stuff that’s more common in books than speech so TV shows and Youtube don’t help enough. My mental voice is halting and jerky because my imagination doesn’t have enough reference for what I should be “hearing.”
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For now I have two book/audiobook sets to work on:
Honzuki volume 2
穏やか貴族の休暇のすすめ
16 Likes
After the trauma of the listening portion of the JLPT this month, it might do no harm to make this the first challenge I do here! I have a ton of beginners podcasts I keep saving on Spotify so this might be an excuse to finally listen to them.
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Planned resources
SAKURA Tips
Nihongo con Teppei
Easy Japanese Podcast
Onomappu (Youtuber)
(…and of course, anime)
16 Likes
windupbird’s summary post
Challenge Progress and Links to Daily Posts
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= listened today
= read today
= read and listened today
= missed day
As implied by the single-month calendar template, I’m not going to be starting this challenge until February. January is going to be a busy month, so I know trying to do both this and the Read Every Day challenge will be a recipe for disaster, and I feel like I should probably prioritize the challenge I’m hosting 
That challenge is usually easier for me to keep up with anyway tbh But I’m making my home post now, so I can have it ping me on February 1st so I don’t forget I’m not sure what I’ll listen to, I’ll have to see what strikes me at the time.
Previous challenge summary posts:
Summer 2022 Challenge 
Fall 2022 Challenge 
16 Likes