Mm 気分転換. The character is シノン from:
GGO arc (not to be confused with ソードアート・オンライン オルタナティブ ガンゲイル・オンライン | L29)
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Usually my language learning stuff is all done on my days off work, before work or after I get home and it’s basically all my free time is spent doing stuff in Japanese 
I switched all my hobbies in English for the same in Japanese whenever possible (which is basically just reading, playing games, watching stuff and music).
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Oof. I am not off to a good start this month. I’m at 4h in Japanese and 2h in German. I finally started to get back into the habit of listening to German news podcasts at the end of last month, so that’s good. The first part of this week was pretty good, but I fell of midweek. I’ve been spacing out a lot and doing things that are absolutely not language learning (scrolling through the English internet, etc.) I’ll be more productive next week.
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Month’s First Week in Review (1-7 Nov)
Unfortunately I only managed the first four episodes of Japanese with Shun’s Podcast (5:08 + 7:32 + 6:32 + 10:07 = 29 minute + 19 seconds). What’s ticking me off is that I am getting almost all the vocabulary and the conjugations but it takes me way too long to process what’s being said.
I should try some other podcasts to see if this is a problem I have with his for whatever reason. Could be that his speech patterns or just his voice is causing me trouble.
This week I’m going to return to Comprehensible Japanese with minimal subtitles, slightly sped up (she’s a little slow for me).
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Getting a tangible reward (50 coins toward an audiobook) every day I listen to an audiobook for 15 minutes or more has been an excellent motivator to build a listening habit 
This is the fastest I’ve ever gone through audiobooks in Japanese. I guess I’ll have to adjust my listening goal! I don’t want to go too big and burnout, so I’ll just add enough to my goal so I can meet it if I average about 15 minutes per day for the rest of the month.
Previous goal: 15 hours
Current total: 17h 34m
New goal: 23h
Progress:
| Title | Total Length | Time Listened |
|---|---|---|
 成瀬は天下を取りにいく | L29 |
6h 43m | 6h 43m |
| ちょんまげぷりん (小学館文庫 あ 19-1) | L30 |
6h 44m | 6h 44m |
| 成瀬は信じた道をいく | L29 | 6h 18m | 4h 7m |
| Total | 17h 34m |
Potential reads for later:
| Title | Notes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| たとえば、葡萄 | L30?? | qualifies for audiobook.jp challenge | 7h 50m |
| ちょんまげぷりん 2 | L30 | second volume of ちょんまげぷりん (小学館文庫 あ 19-1) | L30 | |
| ティアムーン帝国物語 | L32 | also own ebook | 9h 15m |
| おいしいごはんが食べられますように | L31 | also own ebook | 4h 17m |
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Audiobook jp should run this promotion permanently for all of us Japanese learners only! 
How was ちょんまげぷりん (小学館文庫 あ 19-1) | L30? I’ve always seen that book on the app and been curious about it, but never started it for some reason.
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I would ditch audible for audiobook immediately 
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Seriously I’ve enjoyed that it’s helped me find new audiobooks too. For some reason, I always get emails about sales and promotions on self-help and nonfiction books, but it’s been hard to find fiction just by browsing (and more often than not they don’t have specific books I want to read). I don’t know if it’s that audiobook.jp 読み放題 doesn’t have a big selection of fiction, or if it’s just hard to find them unless you know what to look for…
If anyone has tips, I’m all ears! It seems that Audible may have a wider selection, but I’m not ready to figure out the Amazon stuff at this point.
It was fun! I think it’s a good choice for extensive listening while doing other things - it isn’t the most deep or artistic story, but entertaining enough to keep you occupied and forgiving if you don’t catch every word. I thought the voice acting was nice and helped with following the samurai talk (but the kid’s voice was a little annoying sometimes).
A samurai ends up in modern day Tokyo, silliness and shenanigans ensue. I haven’t read 極主夫道 1 | L24, but it seems like they might have similar vibes. I’ve never really studied samurai language before, but it felt like I could follow the dialogues pretty well after a short adjustment period.
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American Audible (and some other non-Japanese Audibles, though I can’t speak to all of them) has a pretty wide selection of Japanese titles, there is just no 聞き放題 model comparable to what I hear the Japanese one has. You also have to jump through more hoops to ‘own’ the files once you buy them since they have DRM.
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Oh, that’s great to know! I was thinking I’d need to have a Japanese Amazon account. Maybe I was getting that mixed up with Kindle stuff.
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I am sure you already tried, but do you use the search function? If you click on the magnifying glass in the top right and then go to 文芸・落語 and then 絞り込み and then 聴き放題作品のみを表示する…then you can find all the fiction books and there are tons. Audiobook has a lot more pulp and low quality stuff than audible does (I feel like audible has a lot more recent best sellers or popular books), but I’ve definitely found some gems by listening to random things they have.
Some books that I just listened to because they were on the 聴き放題 and ended up enjoying:
- イクサガミ - historical battle royal type adventure story, kind of has shonen anime vibes
- 残月記 - unsettling, dystopic sci-fi stories that are interlinked
- 奇跡 - sort of a semi-fictional, semi-tell all biography of the authors friend, the wife of a famous kabuki actor, who had an affair with a famous photographer
- ロマンシエ - love story set in Paris with LGBTQ / non binary representation, lots of info about art
- 教場 - dramatic mystery short stories all happening at the same police academy
- 旅ドロップ - easy listening, little vignette style essays about travel
There are tons of LNs on audiobook too that I haven’t really ventured much into yet, but maybe you can also find some good things there!
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Note: not for people with a fear of bugs
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Yeah that one story definitely traumatized me…
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Wow, thanks! I have definitely used the search function before, but I tried again and it does seem like there are more options than I remembered. I wasn’t as confident at the time to listen to things that didn’t have a level on Natively, so maybe that was why I remembered being limited in options . I’ll have to check out some of your recommendations too!
Well maybe I need to read this Probably some of my favorite Ghibli characters are the オーム in Nausicaä
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That’s totally fair, it’s really difficult when audiobooks are too hard 
the good thing about 聴き放題 is you can just drop any book at any time without guilt
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Only at 13 hours so far because of my focus on reading. Been watching ロマンティック・キラー S1 | L25 and a few other things. I need to play catch up obviously - but I have had a bit of Japanese from youtube with no way to track it on the site.
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I haven’t really been tracking by month, but I do see I’ve fallen behind my yearly goal again 
83% of my goal done, 86% of the year over.
Today I decided to buckle down and finish an audiobook that I have had sitting in nearly finished for weeks. ブスの瞳に恋してる | L28?? is finally done! 
I don’t really recommend it unless you’re really into fat jokes and toilet humor. If you are though - you’ll have a blast, I’m sure. For me it was mostly more interesting in a ‘views on marriage and love I don’t usually see’ because I don’t typically read nonfiction about relationships.
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I started a new audiobook, 白砂 | L30??, which seems to be a standard murder mystery, in the police procedural vein but not sticking hard to the genre. I’ll see how it pans out before tagging the book.
It’s a good level for listening while walking or doing chores, but I do have to make myself pay attention a bit more as I find myself drifting a bit listening to it. I’m around an hour in and plan to listen more on my walk today so hopefully will make good progress.
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13/34 episodes
As predicted, I wasn’t able to keep up watching a Cardcaptors episode a day and skipped Friday, but I made up for it by watching 2 a day each day this long weekend 
We’re just over a third through the month and I’m just over a third of the way to my goal for episodes watched, so I’m on track so far.
The most recent episode I watched was the first one that I had to stop and spend time looking up and translating more than one line of the subtitles to make sure I thoroughly understood what was going on; it really highlights how easy the show is compared to my (reading) level that it took 25 episodes before I spent any significant amount of time looking things up. On the one hand I think this has really helped me use it as a listening practice activity, because I’m able to focus more on recognizing what I’m hearing than decoding the meaning, but on the other, it makes me look forward to finishing this one so I can try some content that’s a little more challenging.
Also as predicted, it felt like too much work to prep material over the weekend to listen to on my walks to work, so it’s back to the content-search struggle tomorrow morning. I did, however, find some “audiobooks” from the Japan Foundation Library for picture books that are all about the same length as it takes me to walk to work (~10 min), so at some point I’ll test those out and see how they compare to the textbook listening practice I’ve been doing already.
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So I was going to start たとえば、葡萄 as my next book for the challenge, but I decided to try some nonfiction and ended up knocking out two this weekend, as well as finishing the second 成瀬 book. The nonfiction reads felt unexpectedly easy to follow, perhaps because they were very predictable and had lots of repetition.
I picked the 推し book thinking it might help with reviewing/talking about books in Japanese. A lot of it ended up feeling like basic writing advice, such as being mindful of organization, not including irrelevant information for your audience, etc. But I did appreciate some of the advice about broaching the subject of your 推し with friends.
The 聞き９book offered lots of sage advice such as “make sure to say そうだよね〜 to let people know you are listening to them” Next time I pick a nonfiction book, I’m going to stay far away from the self-help genre and books where the author directly addresses the reader… this one really gave me the ick.
And just like that, I blew my new listening goal out of the water… don’t know if I should keep moving the goal posts out or just call this month a win For now I’ll just keep recording my listening hours, without pressure to hit a certain number.
2nd stretch goal: 23h
Current total: 28h 03m
Table of Progress
| Title | Total Length | Time Listened |
|---|---|---|
| 成瀬は天下を取りにいく L29 |
6h 43m | 6h 43m |
| ちょんまげぷりん (小学館文庫 あ 19-1) L30 |
6h 44m | 6h 44m |
| 「好き」を言語化する技術 推しの素晴らしさを語りたいのに「やばい!」しかでてこない | L23?? |
4h 35m | 4h 35m |
| 人は聞き方が9割 | L25?? |
3h 20m | 3h 20m |
| 成瀬は信じた道をいく L29 |
6h 18m | 6h 18m |
| ちょんまげぷりん 2 L30 | 5h 55m | 23m |
| Total | 28h 03m |
Table of Potential
| Title | Notes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| たとえば、葡萄 L30?? | qualifies for audiobook.jp challenge | 7h 50m |
| ティアムーン帝国物語 L32 | also own ebook | 9h 15m |
| おいしいごはんが食べられますように L31 | also own ebook | 4h 17m |
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