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)
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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!
January 3rd and 4th
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.
softlyraining’s listening corner 
January 4th
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
January 4
Listened to Teppei’s for beginners #6 and played some BU$TAFELLOWS (so I listened to the voice acting).
January 5 
:
Today I watched this top 30 novels of 2022 video:
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 
)
If people didn’t judge books by their cover then there’d be a ton of artists twiddling their thumbs
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?
I did, they were among the ones I noted down
I’m more intrigued by his top 1 though. From the cover I would dismiss it as a YA book, but from the description and reviews it seems it’s not? Those cover designs still perplex me a lot after more than a year of reading.
My impression is that usually means “this is a light novel” – eyeballing my booklog shelf, the anime-style covers are pretty much all LNs, and the non-LNs are different styles.
Jan 5, Thu of Week 2 of Winter Q1 2023 
Today I listened to 君の膵臓をたべたい Ch.2 [2/2]. There might be some drama, but still in evaluation period whether I like the story.
Then, So-matome N3 Listening Ch.1 [3/5] about Keigo. I manage to get it correct at 8/10. Explanation is just on the paired page, or by listening carefully in addition to seeing answer keys.
Then, half an episode of 緊急取調室 EP.5. I avoided opening transcript side-panel, but Language Reactor is helpful to make Netflix pause without resting screen (as well as rewinding from next chapter preview and credits).
Then, I listened to JP-CN podcast on Podbean, about horoscopy. It’s a little puzzling when I look up Kanji forms.
There are also other unspoken ones, like 午年 (the year I think I am born in), and 戌年.
Mmm, one of the more common of the kanji-for-loanwords words. Reminded me of 硝子のハンマー, which is a pretty good locked-room mystery by the author of 新世界より.
Sorry of the off-topic, I should probably make a different thread, but would you say that this is a light novel then?
. 
I immediately thought “light novel” and “romance”, but judging from the blurb and reviews it’s probably none of those things…
Interesting, never seen it until now.
In the video it also appeared in the title of a book: 硝子の塔のなんとか
Yep, exactly my impression. I guess we need you to read them now, in order to find out
Mmm, that’s not quite the ‘light novel’ style of anime art but it’s still kinda anime-ish. Maybe they just wanted to stand out a bit in the bookshops compared to other stuff with more ‘sober’ covers? Or the author liked the cover art for a previous book and wanted the same artist again, or some other random reason. 
The only true way to know for sure 
Good points, random reasons like that need to also be taken into account.
I made a separate thread on the matter so as to stop being so off-topic here.