Congrats on being able to come back easier this time 
Oooh that’s perfect - thx!
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A quick end-of-the-week update: I just snuck in 13 minutes of an episode today and… that is my total for the week 
I was hoping to get more done this weekend but I ended up being fairly busy.
Maybe next week!
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I took the last few days to catch up after falling behind.
Mostly using Nihongo Con Teppei and Yuyuの日本語 for Shadowing, with ゆるコンピューター学ラジオ for insensive listening. With my intense ADHD, this many podcasts have been proving a challenge for sure, and I’m not sure its the most efficient as I keep getting distracted, but you practice makes perfect and all that.
I am currently sitting at 20h 18m for this month. I shoukd be able to get 45, but I’m not going to blow past it.
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I am on a nice streak of 1 episode a day of 사내맞선 S1 | L29, which on the one hand is way above my level and not my favourite series genre, but on the other hand I have watched it a few years back with English subtitles so I know what is happening.
I still use the translation feature of Language Reactor liberally though, because what I am, serious about improving my listening skills? 
Still, I’m at about 7 hours of my 10-hour goal, with half of the month left to go. Plenty of time to actually finish the series (plural) I started, found interesting, and dropped, instead of, you know, watching something I have already seen and did not love 
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Been super busy with reading lately… so haven’t gotten much in, but did get to watch an episode 1 of おとなになっても S1 | L30?? on YouTube, and I really wish I had access to the rest 
Anyway I’ll probly catch up with listening more next week
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Randomly stumbled upon this YuYu video about 聴解 (listening comprehension):
He breaks it down into 3 difficulty stages:
- Just listening for word recognition (even if you don’t understand meaning)
- Understanding the words, but having trouble imagining what the person is trying to say
- Thinking you probably (should) understand the meaning, but aren’t quite sure
On point 1 - he mentioned that you can use basically anything for this. The point is just hearing and distinguishing sounds over and over (he put it better than that)
On point 3 - he pointed out that this is a 2 way street - both speaker & listener have some responsibility for comprehension, and in real conversation if something is important, the speaker will clarify. He mentioned that something like the JLPT is unrepresentative bc there’s no way to check understanding along the other way… My thought: true, but that’s also the case for tv or audio without subs - which is my largest use case
Anyway it’s not really very novel info to me, but hearing it explained in Japanese is great - and much more precise than I could out it in English. I’m thinking I might want to listen to the video again, and write down some key phrases to add to conversation anki deck
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I did 30 minutes of passive listening today, which I won’t be counting in this challenge, but it got me curious: are there people here who regularly do passive listening? If so, how do you do it? I just put a podcast in the background as I was working, without paying much attention to it. Is that what passive listening means? Are you supposed to pay attention but not try to decipher - whatever you understand, you understand, and the things you don’t, you leave them be?
I’m curious what people here think!
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I always understood it as comparable to having TV or radio on in the background. Sometimes you’re paying attention, sometimes you’re just picking up things in the background. I do it with music a lot - just put a playlist on all day, or for however many hours I feel like. I’m not really doing it as an exercise or anything though
If I was gonna do it with some intent, I’d do for a compressed audio thing - like extract just the speech from anime episodes or something, and leave those on repeat.
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Interesting, I sometimes put on youtube in the background, I’ll try to pick Korean videos more often and see if it helps. I thought maybe passive listening was supposed to be more, well, active, but I guess it’s as it says on the tin 
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This almost describes very well, how active listening works for me. I am paying attention. I try to understand and decipher in my mind on-the-go in case s.th. is not super clear. But if I don’t understand, I let it be.
In case I come across a specif pattern or phrase or vocabulary over and over again and the context while listening does not help in understanding, then I am googling this afterwards (just because I remember it and really want to grasp it).
I am not sitting down and analyzing each sentence. This is not working for me.
Same here for passive listening. I put on japanese music for the background while doing something else. Also I like to put on a podcast in Japanese which level is too high for me to understand easily, but has nice voices, and then it feels the same as “listening” to music 
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Been too exhausted to do much reading today, so I got some listening to 声優ラジオのウラオモテ #02 夕陽とやすみは諦めきれない? | L28 - and to my surprise, when I’m really exhausted, I can listen much better than I can read. Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising, but I was expecting my comprehension to dip a lot, and that hasn’t been the case.
Otoh saw 魔女の宅急便 | L21 in theaters, and without the subs that would have been very まだまだ. A lot that I got, but enough that I didn’t.
Also listened to the rest of of マリア様がみてる drama cd 3 - tracks were 11-12 min each, and here my recognition was actually worse than 声優ラジオ, maybe due to speech pace? To be fair, it is somewhat harder material (and I’m very sleep deprived due to a クソな隣さん)
Anyway that encourages me to listen to 声優ラジオ 2 more now
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I officially reached my goal of 10 hours today! Challenge completed
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Congrats! 
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I need to set my monthly goal a bit lower. However, I am happy that of today I listened to more stuff than last month 
a whole 20 minutes more 
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I’m definitely not coming anywhere near my monthly goal this month (that’s fine, it was a reading-heavy month)…
Anyway July is up: June 2025 Listening Challenge
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Finally something worthy of an update!
Netflix wasn’t working earlier so I started watching a new show on… not Netflix, and could choose either English subs or no subs. So I watched my first ever raw show episode!! I turned on subtitles a few times but mostly I made do.
It was a bit tiring to be so focused for an hour, but hey, now that that’s out of the way I’m sure I won’t have that big of a mental barrier when it comes to raw content.
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Well, we’re a couple of days from the end of the month, and due to vacation I’m at 21 hours out of 30. I could technically still make it, but I think I’ll just call May here. This is the first month I haven’t been able to make my 30 hour goal, unfortunately, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.
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Super impressive that you managed to keep that >1h a day streak for so long! Seems like a well deserved vacation
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Thank you! I won’t lie that a small part of me was hoping to have an unbroken streak for the full year, but it’s probably better to miss that relatively early, so that if something comes up again it won’t be as hard as having to break a perfect streak.
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I ended this month at 12h07 minutes, so above my 10-hour goal. Pretty happy with myself! Now to start June 
