Continuing on our challenge to ourselves to boost our listening skills, the October 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, I know we have a lot of Japanese language learners here but we’ll cheer you on no matter which one you’re learning!
This post will be a wiki so you can add and update your own hours.
This will be my first time joining the challenge, so I’ll add my initial goal at 60hrs. This is the minimum I’m trying to achieve, and my stretch goal is to get as close to 120hrs as I can. I’m trying to get as much listening in as I can since I’ve been ignoring it while trying to get a solid B1 level in reading comprehension (since reading is my main hobby), but since I’ll be traveling to Korea in a year’s time I want to play catch up on my listening so I can use the language as much as possible when I’m in the country.
I’ll probably update in chunks since my memory is terrible, but this will be a good exercise to be more aware of the materials I’m focusing in and also to get some recs from others. I’ll also update my total of hours of listening so far before the challenge starts, since I’ve coincidentally started a personal listening challenge of sorts a few days ago.
120 is a wild goal! If you hit it please report your impressions of if you can “feel” the difference. I know as you get through higher levels it takes so much longer to notice improvements (it’s me, I’m there ). I personally haven’t done more than ~50 any month that I have tracked. I lean so hard into reading
I will definitely report back! If nothing else I will fail spectacularly and we can all laugh at how I thought I was doing something there
I also lean super hard into reading, especially because I have a hard time concentrating on just listening to something (hello ADHD, my old friend), so this will be super challenging for me. But I’m trying to lean into the momentum of finally finding A1-2 level material that doesn’t bore me to death and using my “you can’t waste your money by going to Korea and not taking every opportunity to use the language that you can” self-induced panic as motivation, so we shall see!
Keeping my goal at 30/40/50 hours for October. Counting both audio with text, and anime with subs, even though I know it’s different than pure audio… ultimately they both help my listening comprehension anyway
I’m on the fence if I’m joining in October. I plan to do a ton of listening, but I’ve found that my goals are getting in the way a bit of what I think is working the best for me right now (namely reading with text and pushing into harder tv shows with subs). Plus my ADHD also makes it hard to just listen (oh hi @TheWoman).
I could just join @暁のルナ in counting listening with text as good enough for my challenge, but darn it, rules exist for a reason (says my ASD ).
I can’t even imagine how nice it must be to not have to plan your whole life around your brain’s unwillingness to cooperate.
Though I cannot keep up with everyone else’s pace of 30h/month. I’ll be starting at 10h and that already seems pretty challenging to me
I won’t be counting any drama that I watch because I absolutely need english subs, so it will most likely be: podcasts (even if i end up reading the transcript after the first listen, still counts!), and youtube videos with or without (korean) subs.
I’m not sure there was ever a rule against it tho? (unless you mean your own personal rule).
Anyway rules do exist for a reason. So the question for me is: what’s the reason for the particular rule(s), and does it align with my goal(s)? If not, then the rule’s irrelevant, imo (assuming disregarding it doesn’t negatively impact others). Almost any system has a mechanism for revising rules, as well.
Not saying you should switch, but that’s my approach for deciding, personally
And the reason for my above approach is… Exactly this
Rigid adherence to the rule(s) of a challenge may be the most beneficial… but if I abandon the whole thing cuz my brain got dysfunctional, then what was the point?
Now, these were @cat 's rules, but this has been my guiding principle in the last two months.
With one more day my September numbers are 28.5 hours of challenge approved listening (which I already fudged a bit for this month by letting myself include reading with audiobooks), but 44.5 hours overall (the rest of that coming from subbed anime/TV). I feel like I’d get the most out of trying to run up the 45 hours towards 50 or even 60 for October, instead of concentrating on the 30ish without subs.
I suppose, if I take a critical look at what I’ve decided, is that I will be cheating by using subs. So in my head I will be negatively impacting others.
But on the other hand, I know I’ve gotten a lot of joy and motivation out of this challenge for the past few months, and I will 100% follow this thread in October. So, I suppose I’m in for 50 hours with a stretch goal of 60 for any listening. Unless anyone says no, which I know isn’t going to happen, but I still feel… guilty? about bending the rules this hard. Yes, this is what it’s like to live in my head all the time.
To confirm, my rules are for myself and can serve as a guide for others, but they’re not requirements nor expectations.
I personally find that it’s easy for me to follow nearly any captioned listening content but for some things once the TL (target language) captions are gone, I flounder on vocab I should know, but isn’t in my “listening brain” yet.
On the other hand, if I’m watching something with tons of new vocab, the captions give me a kanji hook where I can guess the meaning and continue on without needing to stop and translate, so I too would bend my own rules in that situation as it’s serving to improve a weak area.
I made my goal (for the most part) for September, so I’ll join again for October! I’ll do 15 hours for Japanese again, but I would like to actually go above my goal this time. While my main focus is Japanese, I do dabble in other languages as well (and trying to regain my poor, poor faded German…come back!). My unofficial goal for the month is 10 hours combined in something not in Japanese.
As always, I set lofty goals for myself only to see myself fall painfully short. But tomorrow is another day to try again!
I managed just short of 39hrs logged last month (I did manage more but the last few days I was quite ill, still recovering so didn’t log those extra hours).
Hoping this month I can hit at least 40hrs, would love to get more than this. I do have another weeks holiday later in October so hopefully will get more listening in then to pull my times over that 40hrs mark.
I will be counting game voice overs if there is a sufficient amount of talking during game play (cutscenes, long dialogue etc), as well as audiobooks (will probably be re-listening to a lot from the last few months), comprehensible YouTube videos N5/N4 (and maybe N3) alongside podcasts from Japanese with Shun, maybe Nihongo con Teppe and possible others. I will only be counting all Japanese language content though, so not any of the study videos where they have both English and Japanese in them.
I’ve been lurking in the September challenge thread, and it was really interesting and inspiring reading everyone’s updates, so I’d like to try a challenge for Japanese and see if I notice any difference by the end of the month.
No goal for a number of hours, though. I’m here to lower the bar I’m committing to hearing any amount of Japanese at all, from any source, Japanese subbed or no subs, at least 3 days a week.
The goal is simply to not hate listening and to feel motivated to keep trying real time audio/visual content in Japanese after the challenge is over, because boy do I just despise listening. It’s frustrating and it makes me feel stupid, so I avoid it, so I never improve, so the gulf between my reading & listening skills gets even wider, making it even more frustrating and making me feel even stupider. I don’t really have any illusions of improvement from this month, I’m just hoping that committing to a challenge will push me into finding some form of audio input that’s bearable for my ego, so I can build a habit and break the cycle.
This time I’m going to add in Korean as an experiment, and plan to do 10 hours each of both Korean and Japanese! I’d like to do more but I have company staying with me for a good number of days out of the month and don’t want to subject them to my language learning lifestyle.
I’d like to continue shadowing for fun and learning in Japanese but don’t have a fixed goal yet for the month.
I am around TOPIK 6 level in Korean (I guess that is around N1ish in Japanese terms?), but haven’t touched it all year so I’d like to gently get back into it and add some variety into my language learning life. In particular I hope to:
have a lot of moments where I hear a forgotten vocabulary word and remember it again, moving it deeper into my memory
ponder on how listening comprehension works and observe myself both understanding and not understanding a language I’m a comparatively lower level in, and seeing what insights I can get
do a bit of light shadowing of individual words or phrases to check pronunciation and ability to remember chunks of speech on the fly
There are plenty of level appropriate J-dramas that I’m excited to watch. When it comes to Korean though, historical dramas are the only thing that hook me. It’s an issue when I am basically a beginner. This should motivate me to try something I can actually understand.
Even with a low goal, I feel very reluctant to sign up since I know I will actually do it. But this is me taking my very bitter medicine.
(4:45 hrs listening, 1:55 hrs shadowing) + 
(4:30 hrs listening, 2:00 hrs shadowing)
1/3
). I personally haven’t done more than ~50 any month that I have tracked. I lean so hard into reading 
).
It’s time for another month!