all of my listening so far came from 태웅쌤 on youtube, specifically the untitled goose game series.
i had a very long and very intense day at work yesterday, so i didn’t expect to get much listening done. as it turns out, watching a dude play the goose game is exactly what i needed. i love how silly this game is. you have to make a picnic by stealing everything from a distraught farmer, then you switch a boy’s glasses, and find a way to break a broom. why? because you’re a goose, and chaos is how you thrive (apparently).
anyway. it’s a nice way to practice listening, i really enjoy 태웅쌤’s way to speak and make sure you understand, while never using anything other than korean and body language. i look forward to making my way through the rest of his videos, and hopefully see some improvement! for now, i’m in the A2-B1 series, and some of the videos are still not easy to me (i tried the ones with the cat, milo (?), and couldn’t finish the first one).
Did 極悪女王 S1 | L30?? today, got the final episode left and 5 episodes of 恋愛ドラマな恋がしたい S1 | L30?? . My brain is overloaded for sure now, but 極悪女王 is fairly tough and while 恋愛ドラマな恋がしたい is a fair bit easier it is just a rather boring show with a kind of a bad concept. Its leaving Netflix at the end of the month so I am trying to binge it just because it is a drama. The main ‘acting’ part is repeated basically 5 times which helps in understanding, but there are no Japanese subs and the whispering voices and such are tough to make out. 6 hours done today. Total 12.1 hours now.
i thought i was going to do more listening than i did yesterday and ended up not updating here because i didn’t want to write a post prematurely (i did not do the “more listening” mentioned). i did, however, watch 6 episodes of 꼬마버스 타요 and thoroughly enjoyed it. 피넛 is my favorite bus! today i was very busy and have completed a grand total of 0 minutes of listening, but i think tomorrow i may binge 꼬마버스 타요 both because i’m enjoying it lots and want to catch up to a one hour a day average with listening. my only issue with the series is that some of the voices are too high pitched for me so i have to rewind and focus harder to understand certain parts.
the past two days : 72 minutes total : 1.91h / 30h
The episode of 라디오 북클럽 I listened to was an interview with the author of a book called “인타뷰 하는 법“ which is about how to interview people…it felt very meta but it was interesting. I’ve never interviewed someone before, but I think the tips and ideas about attitude when talking to someone are useful for a wide variety of situations that involve one on one conversations where there are expectations of getting a certain type of response. My comprehension was probably at about 60-70% with shadowing allowing me to catch more since it kept me focused. Even with focus there is a lot of fuzz so I’m just trying to focus on the bigger ideas.
On the Japanese side of things, I am stiiiilll listening to たゆたえども沈まず | L30?? - I didn’t realize how long it was before starting it. It’s around 400 pages! I’m actually still really enjoying it but it is almost slice of lifey which is unexpected for a historical novel about Vincent Van Gogh lol (or expected because I’ve read 原田マハ by now and should know….), and there is so much happening spread over so many pages. I feel very attached to and close to the characters by now, though, and love starting my morning with some passion for art and art history.
In particular, the word for paint 絵の具 comes up a lot and it’s something I’ve always “heard” completely differently in my head for probably two different reasons:
Because it has の in it, it looks like two separate nouns and a particle (umm ok it literally is though but stay with me here…), so I always just cut the words up in my mind to be separate when it’s treated as an entire unit pitch wise
Due to poor pitch habits based on ignoring it for 10+ years (better late than never though ) I tend to default to a 中高 low high low pattern for words I don’t know the pitch of well OR words connected with の since I’m not naturally comfortable and as tuned into pitch changes after a particle. This is actually something I suspect a lot of other non-natives (from the anglosphere at least) do based on years of of hearing other foreigners talk…
It turns out that 絵の具 is LHH though, so the first dozen or so times I heard it said out loud in my life I didn’t even recognize what I was hearing even though I knew the word, just since I didn’t expect it to sound that way. I guess it’s an example of what is “valuable” about learning some pitch accent basics…it’s harder to hear things accurately. Staying high on that last syllable of 絵の具 just feels so dang unintuitive though, gotta keep retraining the brain.
I shouldn’t have had much time today but ended up being unable to do much at work when I started getting really sick again and I’m back off ill for a few days (thought I was getting better but this came back and bit me again ) so instead I’ve listened to the rest of また、同じ夢をみていた from chapter 6 part 3 to the end. I picked up parts here and there but with how I’m feeling I think a lot is just outside my understanding even if I can pick out certain parts.
I discovered by complete accident that Monster Rancher for the PS1 was re-released a few years ago on Switch/PC, so I looked it up on Twitch and found a video of a Japanese guy playing it. It was about an hour of him going through the same 2-minute gameplay loop, so even though I understood next to none of what he was saying, I had lots of opportunities to catch the words for the stats he was grinding and such.
But today kind of highlights my main problem with listening, because if I hadn’t randomly happened to be reminded that a nostalgic video game exists, and if there hadn’t happened to be a Japanese guy who had recorded it, and if he hadn’t happened to be very chatty with a clear voice – I wouldn’t have done any Japanese listening at all today. Listening to things (in any language) just isn’t a part of my routine; I don’t listen to music, I don’t watch television, I don’t have any interest in podcasts or Youtube or streamers… so there’s no regular “listening time” during my day that I can simply replace with Japanese content, and I don’t have any idea of what content is out there even if I did. If there isn’t a big stack of coincidences leading up to me engaging with audio content in Japanese, it takes a lot of conscious effort to add it to my day and decide what type of content to try and think up search terms and actually find something suitable – and if any part of that effort isn’t fruitful, it feels like a waste of time and I’ll just give up on doing it.
I really need to have a catalogue of dependable options for media to consume in order to make listening a habit, and I just don’t… which is why I wind up with stupid things like train announcements when I force myself to get some listening done
Done my first bit of listening this month: I listened to the full hour and 17 minute 氷の魔物の物語 drama CD. It went pretty smoothly all around; I’m familiar with the story, which helped a lot, but the voices all sounded really clear as well. Comprehension was maybe… At least 70%? A bit hard to tell since I went through some noisy areas just as the voice actors started to whisper.
The last 13 minute track was a free talk section, and while I couldn’t follow the conversation all the way through, I was able to pick up bits and pieces, which I’m pretty pleased with.
I’ve had this drama CD for a while, so I’m happy to have had the chance to finally go through it. ^o^ Honestly I’d like to go through it again, and I may later in the month.
Did an hour of listening while playing Yakuza 0 (actual hour during a longer play through) as well as a few bits here and there from Shin chan and the professor and listened to at least another 2 hours total through multiple Game Gengo grammar and vocab videos (the vocab video in particular is about an hour and a half with only a one here and there in english to give meaning to the vocab word only, not the examples).
Total for today: 3h
Still off work and listening is about all I can focus on atm even if it’s not for long during the day since most of it has been resting again.
Decided to try Twitch again this evening, and watched about an hour and a half of a Japanese speedrun of Tomb Raider. Again, it was pure luck that I found a Japanese stream of a game I was interested in, and with someone who was chatty and clear, but if I can figure out the secret to consistently finding videos that meet that criteria, this kind of content would probably work well for building a habit with. Because there isn’t any story to follow or anything, I feel less pressure to understand, so I can spend more time listening before I get frustrated and give up.
I found myself at a really weird place, though, where at the level of individual utterances I was understanding a surprising amount (still only maybe 1/4 or 1/3 lol, but I was at least catching some full sentences) and it felt really good how easily I was recognizing what words and phrases I was able to – but at the big-picture level my comprehension stayed at 0. It was like I was understanding things effortlessly in the moment, but then my brain discarded them immediately and none of it went into working memory. The next second after celebrating having “understood” what was said, I couldn’t remember what I had just heard, so I couldn’t string more than 1 sentence together into a coherent topic and follow along.
Which was really discouraging every time I stopped to notice that nothing I was “understanding” actually contributed to my comprehension at all ): But if I don’t stop to notice, the feeling of triumph I get for recognizing random individual phrases is really motivating (for the 3 milliseconds they last in my brain )
I finished up the last 4 eps of the first season of my problematic fave 世界一初恋 S1 | L28 and started the next season. I also watched the first episode of アオのハコ S1 | L30??. I haven’t read the manga before, so I’m going in cold. So far it seems like it can live up to the hype.
OT Pitch Accent Musings
I was listening to an (English) podcast the other day and it was talking about Shakespeare and iambic pentameter and how it’s a really good match for English. The host mentioned that English has a usual stress pattern of stress-unstressed-stress-unstressed as you speak. When people started composing poetry in English they had initially tried to match Latin poetic meter but it really didn’t work because Latin was way more concerned with syllable length.
This all got me thinking a lot about pitch accent (and to some degree vowel length), and specifically that maybe us anglophones might have issues with pitch accent because our own language has a lot of ups and downs that I don’t think any of us perceive. This has led me down a bit of a rabbit hole but I’m not sure what exactly I’m looking for. One of the things I am actually curious about is if there are any non-native English speakers who hear the English pitch-yness that can maybe key me into what to look for. Probably non-Germanic based languages since I think the podcast was saying that the stress pattern is at least partially preserved from very long ago.
Well, I got sick and took several days off of work this week, which sucked, and I fell way behind on my reading and anki practice.
On the other hand, sitting on my couch trying to get some rest, I watched nearly 20 hours of Hololive 実況.
So… good I guess? Maybe I should change my goal to be less about total hours and more toward listening to something that is a bit more quality/value to me.
I’m actually still really enjoying it but it is almost slice of lifey which is unexpected for a historical novel about Vincent Van Gogh lol (or expected because I’ve read 原田マハ by now and should know….), and there is so much happening spread over so many pages. I feel very attached to and close to the characters by now, though, and love starting my morning with some passion for art and art history.
) I tend to default to a 中高 low high low pattern for words I don’t know the pitch of well OR words connected with の since I’m not naturally comfortable and as tuned into pitch changes after a particle. This is actually something I suspect a lot of other non-natives (from the anglosphere at least) do based on years of of hearing other foreigners talk…
