Continuing on our challenge to ourselves to boost our listening skills, the May challenge is ready for signups! Set whatever number of hours feels like a reasonable goal for you and feel free to share the things you’re listening to, your successes and setbacks. We’re in this together
All languages welcome!
This post will be a wiki so you can add and update your own hours.
Goal: 10-20 hours. 字幕なしアニメ = 15 min per ep now. Not counting anime with subs towards total, tho I’ll still log just for reference. Audiobooks with text are still fine. May’s Challenge.
June’s goal according to my carefully crafted plan is to get to 15 hours, helped by the “audiothon” I plan on doing at the end of the month (I’ll be setting up a thread and posting about it here if anyone feels like joining me.)
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
What sort of impossible things, you may ask? Actually completing a listening challenge, of course! It’s been a long time, but I think I’m up to participating again!
I’ll set the bar close to the ground: 15 hours for Japanese and 5 hours for German. I count anything without English subs. Surely I can do that much!
I’m going to try something a bit different this month and make 15 hours my base goal instead of 30. I’m mostly concerned that work is going to leave me with very little time or brainpower for much else, so as a precautionary measure I’m just going to aim for 30 minutes a day instead of my usual hour. Finishing https://learnnatively.com/book/a554e042b9/ with @shitsurei will likely be my main priority.
I am coming in late but after thinking about it, I think I’ll participate in the challenge this month. I am aiming for 36 hours of Kyūshū dialect. I am mostly interested in Hakata-ben but I am also seeing a fair amount of Miyazaki-ben content on YouTube that I want to check out.
Right off the bat, I am starting with 1h of italki and 44mins of YouTube. Let’s see how I’ll fare for the rest of the month.
I haven’t updated my tables yet, but so far I should be at 12 hrs of anime. Will start conversation-only lessons this month - so I might count those in the overall count? Would be 4 hrs at most, but since I’ll be speaking some of that time, I’ll probably log it at 30 min per lesson, if I do
Reduced my goal to 20-40 hrs (10 non-anime) b/c I have heavy reading plans this month
Yesterday, I started going through 博多弁 - Wikipedia, sorting out what is actually used by people in their 20’s-30’s nowadays, with the help of an italki teacher native from Fukuoka. We’ve only combed through like a quarter of the entry and just as I had expected, there are already so many things that are not applicable anymore. It is easy to fall into the trap of taking the info written on the various Hakata-ben pages at face value and assume everything is still regularly used, when it is pretty much always the wrong move the do.
Once we’re done combing through the article, I might leave a write-up of what I’ve learnt in a blog post or something. Not sure whether to write it in Japanese or English though
I’m thinking of actually changing my listening challenge to be audio only at this point (tho maybe I’ll still record stuff I do with subs). Text + audio is still beneficial, but I think it’s not really a challenge in the same way. Maybe for audio books I’ll still count it, since those are soooo text dense, and unlike with anime, I don’t read faster than the speech… and I space out enough that it’s audio-only half the time anyway
Also considering whether to reduce the time for anime eps to like 15 min… Actual speech density for different series/eps is really variable (which I think is true of any TV/movie). So that seems like a fair amount. I have some dialogue-only clips of SAO eps on my phone, and they’re 15-16 min of audio each
So with all that, I should probably reduce my hours. I think I’ll make it 10-20 for now
Weekly update (for the “week” from 2025-06-05 to 2025-06-08 included).
Conversation
1h of free talk with a teacher from Fukuoka-ken
Podcasts
54 min of manual transcription of 「#1 博多弁談義と天神での思い出 - 博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ」 (and yet I only managed to transcribe 2.5mins of podcast runtime before I gave up )
Podcast name
Episode title
Number of (re)listens
Total listening time
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#1 博多弁談義と天神での思い出
3
1h09 (outside of listening while transcribing)
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#2 超新星を懐かしむ会
2
34mins
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#3 ウチらの冬支度
2
34mins
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#4 再会と事件
1
19mins
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#5 結婚についての今の考え
1
17mins
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#6 25歳目前！ビジュアルに関するビジョンの話をしたかった・・・
1
22mins
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#7 ヘビーリスナーからのコメントを頂戴
1
16mins
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#8 ただの長電話。我々の思い出話は公共の電波に載せ難い…
1
43mins
博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ
#9 なんだかんだで幸せになりたい2人が2022年上半期の指針についてゆるっと話す
1
10min (partial listen out of 27mins of runtime)
I love the way the hosts of 博多っ子のバス待ちラジオ talk but it is a very hard podcast to understand. Their microphones are bad quality, sometimes the connection cuts, they use a bunch of private jokes and reference to specific places in Fukuoka that I simply do not know. Furthermore, they’re both K-pop fans so they sometimes throw one or two phrases or names in Korean for the fun of it.
I think I’ll try scouting other 博多弁 podcasts (not that there is a lot of choice though)
By the way, my teacher said that the ウ音便 of いadjectives as in 寒くなる→さむうなる isn’t used anymore but I’ve heard one of the hosts say 「ようしらんけど」 (as in 「よく知らないけど」). Although I have to admit that this is the only case of a く turning into a う so far, so the phenomenon might be gone from most adjectives with the exception of 良い？
(Respect to the guy/gal who transcribed 1 hour of zatsudan while I gave up after only 2 minutes)
I also watched a few videos from the 博多華丸・大吉 manzai duo following a recommendation of my italki teacher but from what I’ve seen, they aren’t using much dialectal speech and I felt like I was understanding only 10% of what they were saying and whitenoising the rest. Consequently, I won’t count those minutes into my challenge.
I was looking for something fairly easy, enjoyable, and light, and found this gem:
I even wrote a review, because I found it so easy and nice and relatable.
My total for the month currently stands at 3 hours, which is nothing to write home about, but at least I’ve been consistently watching 1h every week. Slow progress is still progress
I listened this day, but didn’t hit the hour+ mark.
Bonus Spanish listening:
Bonus Mandarin listening:
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