February 3rd 
Dear language diary…
Hello hello! Did you miss me? I certainly missed you!
Life Updates
Lately I haven’t been the most diligent student of Korean. It is just not giving me the energy and enjoyment I need in my life right now, so I’ve decided to set it down for a month or so and purely focus on Japanese, which is giving me that sweet energy and enjoyment, instead. I’ll re-evaluate in a month or so and go from there. Until then I will be giving my undivided attention and freetime to Japanese media!
While enjoying said Japanese fun time the last few days, I’ve also done a lot of listening, lip watching, and making weird experimental sounds with my mouth as I practiced, you guessed it, shadowing! It’s been a while since I’ve written about this topic in my study log, but it felt like a good topic to dive back into as I look back on my progress and review the realizations I’ve had lately.
Japanese Shadowing Update
I set a goal of hitting 50 hours of shadowing back when I started this study log (I think…? Hahaha), so where am I now? Let’s check in!
As of today, I’ve done a cumulative total of 22.6 hours since I started keeping track in September. That means I’m almost halfway! 
Now you may be thinking, only 22.6 hours?! If you did 1 hour a day for less than a month you’d end up doing more than that! How has bungakushoujo only done 22 hours since September?!
Well, have you ever tried shadowing!? Your throat gets all dry and feels weird! Your mouth and tongue start hurting! You feel like a weirdo and its actually kinda psychologically difficult to try and speak in a different way! Not to mention the fact that it’s very tiring and sometimes you just want to relax and not do the hard study things sometimes (a lot of the times).
I am sure none of you were actually wondering why I’ve only done 22.6 hours. I just wrote all the complaints above to share some of the challenges I’ve experienced since I started dabbling in all of this. It is physically involved and uncomfortable in a way that reading is not, and that’s been a really cool thing to tap into and add to my Japanese life - in small doses.
Good news, though! Just because the dose is small doesn’t mean it’s ineffective! I’ve noticed big changes in the way I speak Japanese just from the amount of time I’ve put in so far and I’m not even halfway to my goal! I mean, I guess I don’t actually have any proof because I didn’t record myself when I started this (note to self, maybe I should record myself now so I have some kind of benchmark for when I hit 50/50 hours), but speaking just feels different.
I’m much more aware of and in control of the airflow in my mouth/nose in general when shadowing now, have an easier time pronouncing things that tripped me up before, and I can hear and control the pitch of my voice better than before (honestly before I was just praying and hoping it was all correct but could not really hear myself - that feels different now).
Interestingly, I did not shadow in Japanese for pretty much all of December and January, but I didn’t feel like I regressed that much either. It seems I built up some good muscle memory and I guess what I would call “sound muscle” connection, or how it “feels” physically to shape my mouth and tongue to produce a certain sound, back from the months I was shadowing more. This is a really encouraging sign to me and gives me hope I won’t need to spend the rest of my life talking to myself forever every day to maintain whatever growth I achieve (ugh I hate things that require a lot of maintenance). 
Tongue Position and Face
I’ve written about it before, but there have always been a few words that have always sounded off to me while speaking. One of them is actually the word 「です」, which, yes, I know. So basic!! So basic!!! It’s one of the first 10 words you learn in Japanese and is basically just one syllable. But, I’m telling you, it always felt off when I said it.
I ended up doing a lot of experimenting with it and found success when I had my tongue further back in my mouth and generated the sound/air flow out of my mouth from further back, which got me wondering, where should my tongue really be? I turned to google to see if I could find one of those nifty images linguists use with the head cut in half to show the tongue position specifically for 「で」.
I did not specifically find what I was looking for, but I did find a fascinating random blog post by a Japanese person about English pronunciation from the year 2017 that contained info and diagrams about the contrasts between English and Japanese tongue position and face muscles and
! Several things I’ve experimented with and noticed about how native speakers talk suddenly became clear to me and I’d like to share them here for self improvement science.
All credit to the original poster of the blog for sharing these online!
First, this diagram about the resting position of your tongue in each language.
This sounds funny, but if you are a native English speaker (or even if not, try this with your native language) and you force your tongue into the Japanese resting position and then try and talk, does it sound different? Can you feel the difference in the sensation of speaking and how the words sound off compared to normal? Now keep that position and try to say a sentence in Japanese? How does it sound and feel now? I’d be interested to hear!
For me, I found that actually visualizing and then holding a much higher tongue position with the blade of my tongue curved down when shadowing immediately made a huge difference. Like, I knew the tongue is on other parts of the hard and soft palates when speaking Japanese and the sounds were coming from further back, but there were sounds that I still wasn’t able to transition cleanly into because I didn’t have the whole picture of what “neutral” was in my mind, so my tongue would drop back down on sounds I didn’t have the exact phonological placement of internalized 100%. I think that is basically what led to my です always sounding funny - because I basically had my tongue in the neutral resting position for English as shown on the right: really low in my mouth and with the tongue blade curled upwards, instead of slightly down/flattish and tapping behind my alveolar ridge.
Now, this image of the facial muscles used for English and Japanese.
Do you ever watch jdramas or youtube videos and notice the difference in the way native speakers move and hold their mouth and lips? Next time you watch something, try and see what you can notice?
This was another thing I had subconsciously noticed and also applied to my speech because I found it gave me more natural results, but I didn’t really realize what was going on or how it affected how I sounded. Now that I am consciously aware of it, I have been able to better control my muscle movements and improve my results when shadowing.
If you want to test this one out too like the tongue position one above, you can put your hands on the side of your cheeks where the muscle circled in blue is, and say a sentence in English, noticing how the muscle feels and moves. Then, say a sentence in Japanese, trying not to use those muscles. How does it sound? If you say the same sentence in Japanese again using the check muscles, are you able to hear the difference? How about English without the cheek muscles? This is a small and easy thing to implement that could improve how your speech sounds, so experiment with it and see if you can make it yours!
Conclusion
I don’t know if anyone else have ever looked, but it’s hard to find good info online about Japanese pronunciation that doesn’t look like the Japanese phonology wikipedia page. I am interested in linguistics (of course I am, I am a language nerd), but the format is not meant for an audience of people like me who are self-learning a language and want to memorize how to make the sounds or find tips that make the phonology more intuitive. As it would seem though, there is a whole bunch of info online from Japanese native speakers trying to learn English that DOES present English pronunciation in that way. I’m not trying to learn English (
), but it still seems like there is some good knowledge to harvest there by working backwards from EN → JP, so I’ll try to keep exploring resources like the one I referenced today and sharing here, of course, if relevant.