🔊 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge - Winter 2023 ❄ 🧤

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

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No, you got that alright. He said that because the second time around you understand the meaning (I think that means that you know in advance what it will lead up to, I guess?), it turns into horror. Very intriguing!

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January 6 :arrow_forward:

Another day, another top 20 book list for 2022!

While this was a shorter list, it was a much longer video. :eyes:
He expands on the books much more, not that I caught all he said of course…
Several books appeared in both lists, and of course many were unique to this list. The previous lists’s number one didn’t make this list at all, but the mystery-turns-horror 予言の島 did!

I can sort of suspect what may be going on just by that mystery turns into horror description, but I may be wrong of course. Would still be fun to read. Maybe a good fit for Halloween?

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Oh great idea! We should nominate it for that club. (And of course we need to read it twice then :rofl:)

You mean something like the first time around we just see Little Red Riding Hood walk through the forest, but the next time around we already know there is the wolf hiding in the bushes which adds much more to the tension? :thinking: That would be my expectation at least. Anyway, interested to see how the author pulled it off!

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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? Anyway, not saying anything more, in case I spoiler a book I haven’t read and didn’t even know about before yesterday! :sweat_smile:

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Jan 6, Fri of Week 2 of Winter Q1 2023 :snowman::snowflake:

So-matome N3 Listening Ch.1 [4/5]. Just some conversation, I manage to get all correct, but with rewind. Concerning about hunch speed.

Then, 【2022年決定版】今年読んで本当に良かった本Best 20!! - YouTube which is recommended by Youtube, about book recommendation. I only got to around 12 minutes, though. I might have mentioned somewhere I find it hard to read long books, but audiobooks are probably OK. (Perhaps it’s also the question of my language level.)

Then, latter half episode of 緊急取調室 EP.5. Even one knows police is at least partially dirty, anyway.

Then, 君の膵臓をたべたい Ch.3 [1/2], and a little of JP-CN podcast on Podbean about horoscope.

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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.

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. :sweat_smile:

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 :laughing:
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? :thinking:

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:rofl:

Totally unrelated, I’m sure. :eyes:

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:loud_sound: :snowboarder: softlyraining’s listening corner :headphones: :mountain_snow:

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.

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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 :sweat_smile: 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)

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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

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.

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)?

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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! :smiley:
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:
image

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:headphones: :desktop_computer: :sound: :snowflake: January 5

Listened to Teppei for beginners #7 - #8.

:headphones: :desktop_computer: :sound: :snowflake: January 6

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

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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.

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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 :grin:

(Home Post)

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:snowflake: Day 7, 7th of January :snowflake:

:headphones: 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.

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January 7 :arrow_forward:

One more top 20 book list for today:

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…

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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.

@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 :ninja:

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:loud_sound: :snowboarder: softlyraining’s listening corner :headphones: :mountain_snow:

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.


@lucylavelle I think your chubby penguin is absolutely adorable! :smiling_face:

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Reply

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.

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