🔊 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge - Winter 2023 ❄ 🧤

[Zakarius]

Day 4 of Japanese horror!

Last night’s film was: クロユリ団地, or simply “The Complex” in English, released in 2013 so it’s a little newer than the others.

This one is by the same director as リング - I wasn’t expecting it to be quite as good since リング is a classic so it’d be hard to beat, but I wasn’t expecting it to be bad. Which is was, it was really pretty bad. It’s weird how after 15 years of film making from the director the film somehow feels way more amateur than one of his first films.

The premise was that a girl (uni student) moves into a new apartment and the neighbouring apartment appears to be completely absent yet there’s weird noises every night coming from the walls. It starts off with enough creepy and such, but then it resolves what felt like was supposed to be the main plot quite quickly and introduces several other themes and characters and mish-mashes between it all without really focusing on any.

Honestly felt like there was three scripts for three different films, it has many scenes that just seem to be cut in at random. As if there was an assistant guy who goes off to the printer to collect the freshly printed copies but drops them all and they get all mixed up, scared that he’s going to get told off he just grabs as many pages as he can, mushes them into a pile and rushes off to present the script. Filming goes ahead and no one questions a thing despite how disjointed everything is. At least that’s my explanation for what happened.

There was a few cool scenes, but so many empty scenes, it was hard to stay that invested when everything felt so… lacking. I wouldn’t say the acting was bad but the characters weren’t that great. The lead girl is either walking around moping, crying, or just staring at the other characters without saying a word when saying something would be really, really helpful.

Detective guy: “Is there anything that you could mention that could help us (especially since there’s evidence that you where at the scene)?”
Girl who knows everything that happened: intense moody staring
Detective guy: “I see, you must be completely innocent and know nothing about what happened, thanks, bye then”
(then he disappears entirely from the film, like what happened to the investigation?)

The plot twists were all extremely obvious (I think in about the first 5 minutes I guessed exactly what was going to happen about an hour later), obvious plot twists aren’t always a bad thing, they can work really well, but here it felt like you weren’t supposed to know the twists and it was supposed to be a big shocker.

I feel bad for being harsh on this one as people obviously worked hard on it, but it was just too much of a mess. It had potential if it had kept to one or two of the ideas they had… and also if they gave the lead more lines and less sulking.

Japanese-wise the kid was easy to understand (think he was about 6 or 7 again), but the lead girl was very quiet and mumbly so it was difficult. The support guy who is shoehorned in spoke pretty clear.

@jrmr50

It’s fine, it’s a really enjoyable read.

@omk3

And please continue to do so! I’ve been enjoying your write-ups a lot, and all these films get noted down so I can watch them when/if I get the chance!

Thanks, happy to hear! And I’d recommend the first three (リング especially if you’ve never seen it before), just not this one.

Though that’s all four JP horror films that Amazon’s Freevee channel has right now. There may be some later as the catalogue is always changing. I’ll have a look into what other Japanese films they have in other genres once I work out how to navigate the user-unfriendly interface.

But I’ll probably do that Saturday night, I want an early night tonight
I’ve been wondering why I’ve felt so tired recently, could it possibly be that I’ve been staying up watching horror movies until 1am every night despite the fact that I have to be up early the next morning?

[omk3]

@Zakarius

Detective guy: “I see, you must be completely innocent and know nothing about what happened, thanks, bye then”

@Zakarius

I’ve been wondering why I’ve felt so tired recently, could it possibly be that I’ve been staying up watching horror movies until 1am every night despite the fact that I have to be up early the next morning?

Totally unrelated, I’m sure.

[softlyraining]

softlyraining’s listening corner

January 6th

Finished Mrs. Noisy! I still spent most of the time only getting the gist of what was being said, but I still enjoyed what I did get out of it. There’s a perspective change later in the film, and we rewatch a few scenes from the perspective of “Mrs. Noisy.” I went back to compare earlier scenes, and I liked how the differences key you into each woman’s point of view. There’s a dark turn toward the climax of the film, though the movie ends on a happy note. Part of me thinks the ending is a little too clean, considering the level of mess the characters are in during the climax, but overall I think it’s a good film.

[lucylavelle]

January 6th!

Today I listened to episode 101 of Nihongo con Teppei for beginners, and felt slightly called out when he said that anybody who has 100% comprehension should be listening to a tougher podcast I’m not planning to advance to the original Nihongo con Teppei podcast for a while yet, because I like listening to something I can actually understand properly in between other things.

I watched 2 more origami videos today, and made a bell and a heart.
The heart is really cute, so I’m planning to make more to use for valentines cards this year!

I also had a class with my tutor. We talked about New Year, Chinese zodiac signs and my birthday.

(Home Post)

[TobiasW]

Today I tried some new podcasts:

• Momoko To Nihongo: First episode seems good, and apparently there are more difficult episodes. And transcripts, nice.
• Sakura Tips: I tried this one before. Back then I easily cleared the first episode, but got stuck on the second one because I wanted to listen to it while being outside (without a dictionary) on the move. This time I finished the second episode - well, using a dictionary, and there were a few words I never got. I guess I should get used to listening to podcasts while sitting… Also, it seems there are transcripts starting from episode 14, so there’s that!
• Let’s Learn Japanese with Movies: I really like the concept, but the podcaster puts artificial pauses between. Every. Single. Word. If she’d just speak slowly I could speed it up, but there’s nothing to be done here - I tried the “remove pauses” feature, and it sounds as awful as one would expect. Hard pass.

Off topic

@lucylavelle

It was 予言の島, there is a reasonable chance I misunderstood what I was hearing though

@omk3

It’s at 5:47, the book called 予言の島. (Not that I need any more books to read right now, but I have it on my watch list. If you’re interested in reading it, give me a shout)

Thanks, you two!

And I might be interested in reading it, but not for another year or two. Especially considering that it’s something I might want to re-read… I’d need sufficient speed to be able to do that without getting bored.

@omk3

No, I mean something that totally changes the perception of what had been happening. But it’s been done before, so would these reviewers be impressed by it?

Yeah, I’d assume so too! I think I’ve only encountered that concept once so far, and that was in a video game (and it wasn’t about replaying it, just about being slightly horrified in retrospect).

I wonder how much you can still enjoy the book knowing that it has that kind of twist though. In said game, the reveal of the true nature of a certain thing took me completely by surprise. If I had know about it beforehand, I think my reaction would’ve been a bit more dulled.

That being said… are there any books like that which you recommend (in any language)?

[pocketcat]

I listen to the first ‘Case’ in the audiobook for 天久鷹央の推理カルテ. It was fine. I feel like 知念実希人 has two styles of books:

• Standard issue adult novel, with a lean towards high tension
• Light novels for adults

This is another light novel for adults. What I mean by this is that it doesn’t feel like a traditional light novel as I know them because the characters are all well into adulthood, the settings are normal adult settings (…all hospitals, actually), there’s not really the plot tropes I associate with LNs. And yet…the characters feel like LN characters in a way. They’re too exaggerated to feel quite real.

It’s fine, it’s just not what I am looking for. But on the flip side, if you like LNs, but want more adult settings - I have recommendations for you!
Anyways, here’s the cover for this one. I suspect if I hadn’t already read 3 of this author’s books I wouldn’t have picked it up:

[Sylph]

January 5

Listened to Teppei for beginners #7 - #8.

January 6

Played BU$TAFELLOWS for 1h so today I’m counting the voice acting from that.

[jrmr50]

Listened to my spotify playlist for 90mins yesterday. Podcasts really fit into my life-style much better than other mediums, as I can potter about, take the dog for a walk etc and still get some studying in.

Definitely getting to the point with the episodes that I’m listening to, that there are bits I understand and bits I still don’t understand even after multiple listens. So I’m going to go over them at my computer and try to understand those sentences/phrases that my brain just ‘nopes’ over time and again.

[lucylavelle]

January 7th.

Today I went to a Japanese Conversation exchange meetup in a nearby town.
I met lots of other Japanese learners and we did conversation practise together and also talked about resources we use to study and that sort of stuff.
It was a lot of fun, and good to get some speaking and listening practise outside of my usual lessons.

I also watched another origami video and made a penguin. He came out a bit chubbier than intended, but I think that he’s pretty cute that way

(Home Post)

[Twelvewishes]

Day 7, 7th of January

Back to my Home Post

Missed yesterday because of migraine, but today I managed two more episodes of Teppei (#6 and #7). The material was at a stage where I didn’t have to keep reading along to understand it! Very happy with how the lessons keep building up on each other.

[omk3]

January 7

One more top 20 book list for today:

【おすすめ小説20選】2022年読了本マイベスト【BOOK OF THE YEAR】

There was little overlap between the three lists, but these three books appeared in all three if I remember correctly: 黒牢城、 赤と青とエスキース and 汝、星のごとく.
Oh, and this lady’s number one was a book some of us recently read and enjoyed: おいしいごはんが食べられますように! I wish I could understand better what she said about it…

[TobiasW]

Today I listened to three short podcast episodes - I think maybe about 12 minutes in total? That might not sound like much, but since it was content that I struggle with, that’s plenty for me.

• Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners Ep. 95 & 96 - half a year or so ago I stopped at episode 95, because I couldn’t continue without a dictionary while walking around outside, and probably because it got rather hard, actually, lots of grammar constructs in a short time. I wanted to push past that, so here I am, sitting, pausing, repeating parts, and having jisho.org open.
• Sakura Tips Ep. 3 - after ep.2 was rather challenging for me I wanted to see how this would go. Answer: Rather okay! I looked up words and had to repeat parts too, but it wasn’t harder than the last episode. Maybe 2 or 3 words that I completely didn’t get.

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@omk3, there was a question hidden in my last post at the end of the “Off topic” details tab. I guess I hid it too well

[softlyraining]

softlyraining’s listening corner

January 7th

Today was a Satori Reader kind of day. It’s actually been a while since I’ve used the site. Even though I’ve been working my way through Akiko’s American Foreign Exchange, I decided to give The Jam Maker a try. Unlike Akiko, this one has sound effects, which I actually kind of like! It feels immersive enough without being too distracting. I was thrown off a bit by the way the narrator spoke: it’s quite different from Akiko, like having something read to you versus a friend telling you the ups and downs of their life. I got used to it by the end, though.

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@lucylavelle I think your chubby penguin is absolutely adorable!

[omk3]

Reply

@TobiasW

That being said… are there any books like that which you recommend (in any language)?

Sorry, I had seen your question, but left it for later when I would have had time to think. The only thing that instantly comes to mind (mainly because it’s recent) is an anime episode, but I feel certain there are books that use the same kind of trickery. I will let you know if I remember any. I feel like we’re most probably talking about the same thing, anyway, from the way you described it.

[polv]

Jan 8, Sun of Week 2 of Winter Q1 2023

Yesterday, a little of of 緊急取調室 EP.5 and then, 君の膵臓をたべたい Ch.3 [2/2].

Today, 君の膵臓をたべたい Ch.4 [1/2]. I realize that a strategy is letting myself peeking at the transcript (LN from Bookwalker) once in a while, but not really reading it. Also, I have noticed for a while that BGM is good. かがみの孤城 too.

Then, So-matome N3 Listening Ch.1 [5/5], which are summary questions. I got 22/25, with the problem being あげる・くれる・もらう. At least I would keep that in mind when exposed to more listening.

[NicoleIsEnough]

@omk3

Oh, and this lady’s number one was a book some of us recently read and enjoyed: おいしいごはんが食べられますように!

I was really surprised that it did not appear in the first video already… which makes me think that I’d love to see the list of all the books these reviewers read (because while I love to read books that other people recommend, an even bigger driver for me is to avoid books that others thought are bad ).
But she said that she wasn’t really planning on reading this book in the first place (I think because the title did not appeal to her?) and that she only picked it up because she already knew another book by the same author and thought it was really good. I wonder how much this applies to the other reviewers as well

[omk3]

January 8

More book recommendations today too…

この人、またメチャクチャ読んでます！【2023年1月】

I don’t know why I’m watching these videos. I have already more than enough to read, and I can barely understand what they’re saying.

@NicoleIsEnough

But she said that she wasn’t really planning on reading this book in the first place (I think because the title did not appeal to her?) and that she only picked it up because she already knew another book by the same author and thought it was really good. I wonder how much this applies to the other reviewers as well

I’m sure no one reads all the books there are to compile their lists, they just choose what they think they’ll like (or possibly they have deals with publishers about what to focus on). The first two reviewers had a stronger focus on mystery, too. In any case, I had already bought 水たまりで息をする the moment I finished おいしいごはんが食べられますように because I liked the author’s way of writing, and the title and premise appealed to me. Not that I can read it any time soon, I’m way over my head already.

Edited to add: Also watched an episode of Alice in Borderland. Much easier to understand than those book videos. (I mean the dialogue, not the plot, which isn’t easy to understand at all )

[Sylph]

January 7

Just one Teppei for beginners podcast today (#9).

[NicoleIsEnough]

@omk3

I’m sure no one reads all the books there are to compile their lists, they just choose what they think they’ll like

Oh yeah I’m sure about that. That’s exactly why I thought it would be interesting to see the whole list of books they read, because now I don’t know whether they didn’t like it or simply didn’t read it.
I would expect a general-purpose book reviewer to include at least the Akutagawa and Naoki winners (if not the prizes’ shortlists) so I was a bit surprised that the book did not appear in the first review (as it had a focus on mystery but was not only mystery from my understanding), but if the first reviewer shared the sentiment that the title is unattractive, then that might hint at a strong reason why he maybe didn’t pick it up in the first place.

[Twelvewishes]

Day 8, 8th of January

Back to my Home Post

Only one episode of PiroPito (#3) because I was feeling down.