February 10th!
I had a lesson today, which we started with a bit of listening comprehension practise before moving on to some conversation practise.
I also listened to an episode of Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners.
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February 10 
Home Post
ミステリと言う勿れ 
Addition to February 9: ロマンティック・キラー (anime) 
I did watch all of Romantic Killer on Netflix (yes, all 12 episodes in a row… ops?), but they were talking very quick so I didn’t get very good listening practice—too quick! I relied on the English subs for understanding. (I was not up for it actually being work, so Eng subs it was.) It was a ton of fun. Can highly recommend.
As someone who read a lot of romance and read a lot of slice of life (and I’m finally getting into otomes), I can guarantee I have seen all/most romance tropes more than once, and this one has a lot of fun using and abusing them. Basically, tropes/stereotypes done right and used to make the story more funny. Plus, I liked the humor. I don’t think there was even one instance of humor coming from someone being stupid. I find especially rom coms have a tendency to depend on their “hero/heroine” being stupid for the comedic effect (aka embarrassment because that is so funny, hahahaha… no.)
So yeah, recommend this. And it feels complete enough as a first season that if there is never more I won’t feel like I missed out on the end of the story. 
Right, about yesterday. I took @omk3’s recommendation of ミステリと言う勿れ and started watching that TV series. Watched the first three episodes. Once again, I had English subs, also because I completely lack mystery/crime/police domain vocabulary, so JP subs would have left me about as clued in as no subs at all. Again, not entirely sure about how effective the listening practice is, but for now I feel like easing the pressure a bit in some areas.
Can also say it is a lot of fun. Definitely have some Sherlock Holmes vibes. After all, someone that perceptive who also can’t help but talk about what they notice or hammering on those spots (even if for seeming good), well, they are not gonna be particularly liked, are they? So him being a loner makes sense.
Will keep watching the show since it has been good so far.
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Last night I watched two more episodes of 仮面ライダー BLACK SUN
This show cannot decide if it wants to be great or if it wants to be terrible. The story is everywhere, the pacing is everywhere… everything is everywhere. 
At times I question why I’m watching this and yet others it’s like yes this is very awesome. Like the last episode I watched, it felt like it was meandering along to nowhere, then suddenly massive reveal and plot information and super action packed pacing… then incredibly lame fight sequence, random mumbling fizzling into nothing then BANG insane ending out of nowhere.
I think this is the show with the most understandable characters so far though, there’s like two very mumbly guys, and one I’m not really sure if I understand him or not, but everyone else I’m not having too much trouble with - until they start to say a lot all at once, but thankfully that doesn’t happen too often.
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February 11
Home Post
とある科学の超電磁砲 
Decided to try とある科学の超電磁砲/Railgun on Netflix today. I was about to give up after two episodes, but gave it one more and then one more after that, but I’m noping out. Could have been a fun series, but fanservice seems important to the creators, and also having one of the main characters being a stalker-y pervert just doesn’t work for me. (Part of the fan service.)
Just because the person is a girl/woman, doesn’t make it any less creepy and disgusting… >_>
I guess it was supposed to be played for laughs too, but I didn’t find it funny either.
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I don’t count listening with English subs as listening practice for me but still, I am currently rewatching 恋はつづくよどこまでも Love Lasts Forever. I am actually listening to the Japanese intensively and picking out phrases I understand. The first time I watched it, I disliked the female lead up until halfway through but this time around I appreciate seeing her growth more, so liked her from the jump.
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February 11th!
Another tiny listen today - one episode of Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners.
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I didn’t quit the challenge, I just didn’t want to post 
I mentioned this in the reading thread too, but it was nothing personal to anyone or anything, I was just in a very “don’t look at me” mood the whole week 
Work is very busy so I might not post here super often, to keep my stress at a manageable level while still doing the challenge. Trying to make sure I don’t fall into the trap of “I don’t feel like posting about the thing, so therefore I’ll just avoid doing the thing.”
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been listening to while I’ve been not posting
February 6th
What did I listen to?: Onomappu’s video about Exo
How much time did I spend listening?: ~14 min
This was pretty comprehensible for the first 2/3rds but then I stg he started talking 50 times faster all of a sudden and I didn’t understand anything for the rest of the video 
February 7th
What did I listen to?: The Midorikawa videos that basilsauce linked
How much time did I spend listening?: ~24 min
Me the entire time:
But it seemed like they were having fun and that was enjoyable to see
February 8th
What did I listen to?: Atashin’chi episode 1
How much time did I spend listening?: ~6 min
February 9th
What did I listen to?: Atashin’chi episode 2
How much time did I spend listening?: ~9 min
February 10th
What did I listen to?: Atashin’chi episode 3
How much time did I spend listening?: ~8 min
February 11th
What did I listen to?: Atashin’chi episode 4
How much time did I spend listening?: ~8 min
I didn’t know how I’d feel about this animation style, but it’s grown on me quite a bit. Man, these little episodes are easy to just throw on after a day of work. My level of comprehension is pretty variable, sometimes they talk quite fast or in a panicked way which makes it more difficult to understand xD But overall I’m enjoying them and will continue them for sure!
Extremely belated replies
Who has that kind of time 
Literally just break it into shorter episodes, I don’t understand why the majority of podcasts seem to default to these ridiculously long episodes. I assume the majority of podcast listeners must prefer it that way because it’s so common but I can’t for the life of me figure out why Even if you listen to it at 2x speed (which I’ve heard of people doing, though I couldn’t do it myself), a 10-hour podcast is still 5 hours
This is something I always lose sight of, I feel, so this is a good reminder that it’s ok to not do it “perfectly” the whole time. Like, some listening is better than none, and none is not the end of the world either. I feel like me giving myself permission not to post this week was a positive step toward that kind of mindset. I realized it’s not always the listening itself that’s the problem, but a desire to avoid the stuff around the listening that holds me back from listening. Removing those unnecessary pieces can help me actually do the thing, which is the goal all along.
This is something that weirdly never occurred to me as a thing I could do. I think part of me assumed that non-learner-focused Japanese podcasts would be in some weird inaccessible place but from the list you linked it seems like there must be a pretty decent selection on Spotify? I don’t use Spotify and generally disapprove of Spotify’s entire existence but I would begrudgingly use it for that purpose as long as I don’t have to pay for it lmao I’ll check out some of the Youtube channels you linked, too And when I have more time I’ll definitely be searching out the Japanese side of K-pop Youtube - I can safely say that if I can find content about my boys I will have no trouble sitting through it regardless of how much I understand
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I’ll admit it’s all pretty nonsensical but I hope it was at least a little funny 
I like BTS (in addition to visual kei) but usually when I watch stuff about them on Youtube it’s performances, interviews, or crack, which are all subtitled. If I’m reading subtitles I’d rather do it in English.
But this got me wondering if there were things like unboxing and reaction videos in Japanese, because those are more likely to have a lot of speech. It wasn’t hard to find, once I actually looked for it. Apparently the keywords are 開封 and リアクション, and maybe 初見 too.
A 14 min unboxing video for BTS’s “Proof” by a young woman unpacking 4 CD sets hoping to find Namjoon and Hoseok trading cards. She likes some other kpop groups too and I saw videos about TWICE and others in her video history.
A 13:30 BTS reaction video by two professional dancers to a “Run BTS” rehearsal video. I actually watched a few reaction videos to various BTS songs today (lol) and this was the best one I saw, in terms of language practice, entertainment, and also just seeing what they noticed about the dancing/choreography. They also have reaction videos about other kpop groups and Johnny’s.
I’ve gotten a little further in listening/reading Honzuki 2 this past week. Honestly watching junk on Youtube is more fun though.
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February 12
Home Post
シャーマンキング
とある魔術の禁書目録
I ended up trying とらドラ! last night too, and I think I actually finished the whole first episode, but already knew it had some tropes I don’t enjoy at all. Aka the I can’t communicate well so I just beat everyone up trope. Plus almost everything else didn’t work for me either.
Then today, I tried Index and couldn’t even finish the first episode before I had made sure that yeah, it seemed to have some of the same tropes as the spinoff that I don’t find enjoyable.
And then, hoping maybe I could find something interesting to watch, I tried on the Shaman King anime, remembering that I did like the first few volumes of the manga when I read them as a teen. But… I barely got through the first episode. The story around the samurai ghost would have been so nice, if it actually got to take up the whole episode and you actually got to engage with it, but nah, barely 5 minutes at the end of the episode and the rest of it felt very meme-y/trope-y. I don’t remember that at all from the manga, but then I read it a decade and a half ago, so my memory is probably faulty…
Does anyone have recommendations for anime on Netflix? I’m currently looking for the easy way, so, since I have Netflix I’m sampling their anime. My overall taste is a bit everywhere. I have certain tropes that I find annoying, but even those I’ll overlook if the rest of the story elements/characters/plot is good. Like Food Wars had fan service for sure, but since the rest of it was so darn good, I could ignore it.
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Feb 12, Sun of Week 7 of Winter Q1 2023
おいしいごはんが食べられますように [1/12]. This one has male and female narrators. Audiobook is free in 聴き放題, but not the text (Bookwalker). A little expensive, in fact.
So-matome N2 Listening Ch.2 [7/7]. Various question types.
Death Note EP.34.
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The impression I get from podcasts is that they’re popular among people with long downtime at work, drivers/truckers, people with long commutes or people whose work doesn’t require a lot of attention and therefore can multitask. For those people long episodes make sense, I guess. There are people who consume podcast episodes like it’s nothing everyday. In my case in particular, the longest podcast I’ve ever listened to was like 1h something of one of the Japanese podcasts for natives I’m subscribed to, which I divided into two sessions of half an hour or so. If the episode is too long I just stop in a spot I consider alrightish and just resume it some other day. In the case of language learner podcasts it makes sense that you don’t want to overwhelm people with too long episodes when they’re starting. But I agree, super long episodes automatically make me go “oof”, and also when I see a podcast that there is no way on earth I could ever catch up because of the sheer amount of content they put out 
. I’m not too deep into podcasts anyways so it doesn’t bother me too much in the end, but I would like to eventually catch up if I commit to something.
They should be available everywhere, Spotify just retrieves them from each podcast’s website just like any other podcast app. The person making the list might be using Spotify for them and that’s probably why they chose it to easily compile the links, but you can use pretty much any podcast app. I use AntennaPod, personally.
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Last night I watched one episode of 仮面ライダー BLACK SUN
Two episodes left! Not sure if I’ll watch both tonight as there’s some other (non-Japanese) films I want to watch before my sub runs out (gotta get as much as possible out of that 99p ), but I’ll try to get at least one in.
I had a browse at the other Japanese stuff, there’s another series but I don’t really have the time left nor does it really look like it’d appeal to me, and they also seem to have every single Gamera film ever, not sure if those really appeal to me either, they do have the Evangelion rebuilds but I don’t think I have the time to view those either… and that’s kind of all they have… I think. There could be more lurking somewhere, it feels that they’ve made searching on Prime as counter-intuitive as possible so you just end up scrolling mindlessly until you find that which you’re after. I’ve tried filtering by language (which is awkward to get to in the first place) but sometimes things appear and then they don’t. So who knows.
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Day 43, 12th of February
Wow I didn’t do a lot this week, huh? Hopefully the coming week will leave me less congested, because it’s really ruining my beautiful checkboxes.
I listened to some more Minecraft. I know, what a surprise. But I decided to finish the videos of あかがみんクラフト that have English captions in Captionfy (by user flashofaurora). Sadly they left out the majority of videos, so I only watched episodes #13, in which they futilely searched for a desert for cactus for green dye (not knowing you could craft it from blue and yellow dye), episode #14, in which they race to see who can harvest the most, and episode #15, where they visit someone’s secret base and go to the nether.
The next episodes translated are #48 and #50. I don’t think I will watch any more. These people were fun but I’m used to a better production quality for my videos from watching so much Hermitcraft, so this is barely keeping my attention. Thankfully I still have PiroPito.
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February 12th!
Today I had a lesson with my tutor. We’ve been practising making my speech more natural recently, so it was an hour that was focused entirely on having conversations.
I also listen to the next lesson in JapanesePod 101’s Upper Beginner Season 1.
It was another one focused on announcements you might hear on trains. Today’s was about a train being delayed by snow, and also explained the use of 拝見する.
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February 12th
What did I listen to?: Atashin’chi episode 5 + 6
How much time did I spend listening?: ~16 min
I feel like I understood a bit more of these episodes, they were funny xD Probably helped that there was less talking involved in the jokes lmao
Replies!
The shouting was quite fun I’m sure the videos would have been more funny if I’d understood more words but alas my listening comprehension was insufficient
OMG yes, you get me This is exactly the type of content I was thinking of, and now I even have keywords 
I don’t watch a lot of that type of thing in English (I also tend to watch more performances/practice videos/interviews) but they would certainly be interesting enough as a way to practice my Japanese. It would actually be interesting to watch unboxings for groups I don’t follow, too, it’s fun to see all the pretty packaging and inclusions that I probably wouldn’t get to see otherwise (I’ve already seen all the pretty packaging and inclusions for my group because I own all their albums in all the versions because I HAVE A PROBLEM)
Anyway, I am 100% going to watch those BTS videos tomorrow, I don’t really follow BTS terribly closely but I love dance-related videos and I’m curious to see what all they put in those Proof albums
See, in all those situations, I would just listen to music, but to each their own I guess Regardless of that, couldn’t they just…make shorter episodes and put all those episodes in a big playlist to get the same effect? While simultaneously not alienating the people who take one look at the length and nope out? The idea that I could pause somewhere in the middle of a 4-hour audio-only thing and actually remember where I left off is kind of laughable to me tbh, I would absolutely forget (either my spot, the majority of the context and content that came before it, or both) and just never finish it. I already have enough trouble keeping track of what episode of things I’m on. But I guess that’s a personal problem
Is that how that works?? I didn’t even know Don’t ask me what I thought, because the answer is I did not I could not name a single podcast-specific app, so I’m glad you named one, I forgot those exist too
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To my knowledge, YUYU posts mostly in Spotify. I believe creators have to post to Spotify themselves; and not sure about creators’ income / encouragement.
Another one I have been using is Podbean, where can switch region to Japan. UI can be much better, imo.
Certainly, length chooses people and eventually, followers. Measurement of loyalty and dedication too, perhaps.
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Miku Real Japanese and The Stranger by the Beach/Shore. I…was not expecting them to show so much but I’m not mad at it (if you know you know). I understood maybe 80% because there were some parts I couldn’t figure out because there were some grammar points I am missing seeing that I am still mid N4.
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February 10 
February 11 
February 12
It seems I haven’t updated here in a while. On two days I watched an episode of Heaven and Hell. It’s a fun watch, but not my favourite. The supernatural element bothers me a little, and it generally feels very simplistic in many respects. Not saying that I won’t watch it to the end though 
On the 11th I had a bad cold and low energy, so I took the かがみの孤城 audiobook to bed with me and listened to it while half-asleep. Poor thing, it never gets the attention it deserves, it’s always when I’m too tired or sick that I turn to it.
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Podcast discussion replies
People usually use podcast players and they automatically save the spot you stopped at ^^ . I guess the podcasts that have websites mostly use them as a repository but I’ve no idea if people use them as their main way of listening to them. They’re certainly super inconvenient .
Actually you’re right, YUYU doesn’t seem to have a dedicated website. But it’s also weird, because the description of his YouTube videos says “Spotify” and yet the links redirect you to Google podcasts .
I like AntennaPod because it’s open source and privacy focused, and it’s great if you know what you’re looking for but it’s not good for new discoveries because there is no discovery function at all. I’ve used others in the past but some seemed very nosy in terms of privacy. I wonder if there’s like a website or something in Japanese with rankings, genre subdivisions and so on that doesn’t just list a few of them but like a whole library 
.
But yeah there’s like a million podcast apps out there.
Edit: Actually nevermind! There IS a discovery function in AntennaPod it just doesn’t seem very extensive… at all.
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