Saturday 5th Oct
I struggled through my malaise and watched the first episode of ダンダダン and a couple of Bite Sized Japanese podcasts. But I wasn’t feeling it.
1 hour
I played a bit of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth too.
~
Sunday 6th Oct
I watched an episode of One Piece and the final episode of S2 of 深夜食堂 | L29. I love Midnight Diner and it got me enjoying Japanese again.
I hope to get chance to watch this later too.
Edit: An episode of アオのハコ S1 | L30?? and 侵略！イカ娘 S1 | L19
Total: 2.2 hours
Watched stuff pretty much all yesterday long! Finished のんのんびより S1 | L20 and watched some movies ホッタラケの島 遥と魔法の鏡 | L23 and AKIRA | L32 and 思い出のマーニー | L23 Also watched the end of the first season of 侵略！イカ娘 S1 | L19 Started watching ぐでたま 〜母をたずねてどんくらい〜 S1 | L22 which is funny.
At 35 hours in total with Ippo being added to the count list now.
Day 6:
Spent an hour listening to the grammar points and dialogue from みんなの日本語初級 book textbooks then another hour listening to the Genki book 1 dialogues and some of the practice listening from the first 7 chapters.
Besides this I also spent about 2 hours listening to the dialogue on Yakuza 0 during a longer playthrough.
Total for today: 4h
The manga it’s based on only started in 2021, so no. 
I wonder if either 1) with so many remakes coming out and getting higher quality animation, if the animation style just feels remakey or 2) the story set up feels very shojo manga tropey and might be reminding you of another story.
I know it’s got a male main character and is serialized in shonen jump, but from the first episode’s vibes this is a shojo romance laundered through a sports manga. Sorry boys 
I spent a little while this afternoon testing the dictation practice feature of the Speechling app (listening to a sentence and writing out what was said), just to feel it out and see if it’s something I could continue with. I spent about 20-25 minutes with it, which was definitely way too much 
It requires a lot of concentration for me, and 2 hours later my brain still feels like soup.
But I was pleasantly surprised with how effective of a drill it was and that it didn’t frustrate me into quitting (at least not before I hit the brain-soup point). It’s great that I was able to identify yesterday that part of my trouble listening is keeping words in my working memory, because this kind of exercise feels targetted to address exactly that weakness. If I keep it down to more like ~10 minutes a session, it would be much more sustainable to do regularly, and sessions that short should be relatively easy to slot into a routine.
We’ll see if I keep it up, but I’m glad I gave it a shot (:
day 7 update:
these past few days i did manage to listen to a couple of podcast episodes, though the main part of my listening was again through 태웅쌤’s youtube videos.
i’ll admit, when i set my 10h goal i thought it would be very challenging to do, because the only input i had found so far were podcasts aimed at beginners, each 4 to 7 minutes long. i do enjoy listening to those, but i would have to listen to about a hundred of them to get to my goal, which wasn’t something i was looking forward to: these podcasts are nice in the sense that, yes, i do understand most of it, and yes, the topics are usually interesting, but i only ever listen to them with the goal of learning korean. the videos of 태웅쌤, i watch for the sake of it, i’m not worried about making out the grammar or vocab that he uses. time goes by much faster.
all that to say, i’m looking forward to getting those 10 hours of listening done, and to upping that goal for next month!
listening done these days: 3h5’35"
Bit more done - at 39/60 target hours - slowing down during the week due to work and life requirements. Mostly 異世界おじさん S1 | L28 which is still cringey in many ways.
Day 7:
Spent another 2 hours with the Genki 1 textbook audio for the dialogues and practice stuff for the last 5 sections and re-going over some of the stuff from yesterday again (gave up writing it out and spoke it instead for some listening and speaking practice).
Then at least another hour going through the first several chapters of Genki book 2.
Then an hour and 43m going back through レンタルロボット audiobook alongside reading it.
Total time for today: 4h 43m
I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been listening more recently and went through the N5/N4 Game Gengo grammar lessons several times in the last few weeks but I feel like this is all clicking into place and there’s nothing so far that I shouldn’t know enough to be able to use both when listening or when speaking.
One week down and so far I’m up to 5h 15m in Japanese and 15m in Korean. I have a good feeling about this month!
Day 8:
2 hours of Japanese with Shun podcasts, 1 hour and 49 minutes of Elementals film and 60 minutes of Bluey mini series (16 episodes at 76 minutes with around a minute of credits each episode).
Only grip is Bluey doesn’t have subs on Disney+ and the subs for Elemental were not cc subs but translating the English.
Total for today: 4h 49m
Updates from the last two days:
Korean: 1:15 listening, :20 shadowing
Japanese: :45 listening, :30 shadowing
There is some stuff going on at work this week that is taking a lot of my energy and motivation, but I still got some listening done. I’m kind of getting tired of たゆたえども沈まず | L30?? too, and that’s making it less appealing to do some listening during my morning commute. At the same time, I don’t want to quit it since I’m close-ish (I mean, three hours to go 
) to the end…
I had an experience with shadowing yesterday where at some point instead of repeating after the text, I was able to unconsciously predict the words that came next and automatically said them dramatically in unison with the narrator which was pretty cool and made me laugh after I realized what happened! It was an encouraging reminder that I’ve been able to internalize a lot of Japanese phrases to the point that my brain ejects them immediately in the right situation. I have used Japanese in my daily life before and learned speak/output way before I ever got into reading, but I’d say 90% of my total studies ever have been passive input by this point so it’s nice to see proof that reading did something to my brain to improve my outputting skills. 
In general, it’s getting much much easier to repeat without stumbling and I’m reaching 95%+ accuracy, meaning I can hear and simultaneously repeat the text at the same time without missing words. There are some tricks to it that I’m starting to get the hang of too…one is to turn my brain off and not try too hard to remember what I just heard if it’s something slightly unfamiliar that I’m not confident with/isnt 100% in my active memory. If I get it wrong it doesn’t matter, I’m not actually speaking to anyone so the stakes are low! Another thing has been to not hesitate before words that trip me up. There are a few words like 続ける (lol why is this so hard for me to pronounce when I say 続けてきた it’s as if I have to focus completely or my mouth will not cooperate) or られる verbs where I tend to hesitate a split second because I’m AFRAID of them, but when I’m fearless about them they just effortlessly flow out. Stupid monkey brain.
If I don’t KNOW a word though, there is a high likelihood that I will be unable to simultaneously repeat it…so I’m going to draw the conclusion that this way of shadowing is best for training flow, pitch awareness and reproduction, speed and accuracy, and nudging those words that are almost there but not quite from my passive to active vocabulary. I should probably do some active phonetics practice sooner or later but work is demanding and I am tired so this is it for now. 
I can’t really use the above method for Korean at all because I don’t understand enough of the words to even be able to repeat them simultaneously. At some point I’d like to work with existing resources I have with a transcript to practice with some audio I understand fully, but I don’t have time for that this month so I’m just doing what I can. Right now that looks like repeating single words or small phrases still.
I am noticing some positive language transfer from shadowing in Japanese, though! I feel more “aware” of pitch in Korean, and it’s easier to hear the difference between minimal pair consonants (싸 vs 사 for example) since tense and aspirated consonants always start at a higher pitch. I heard the word “차이“ today and, although I can’t always reliably hear the difference between ㅈ and ㅊ, I did hear the higher pitch on the first syllable clear (like a bell)! This feels like a huge lever for helping me improve my overall listening comprehension that I haven’t been taking advantage of as much as I should have until now - it’s one more piece of the sound puzzle for helping me identify what words I’m hearing and I don’t have to rely on consonant sounds alone.
This. Very much this.
させられる is like jump scare.
It’s funny you say that because られる has oddly never given me a problem, but つ followed by any of the らりるれろ sounds gives me such trouble. Your name in fact, しつれい, I always have to be careful not to stumble over 
We all have those words that we are just seemingly unable to pronounce 
Yep, あたたかかった is my kryptonite 
day 9 already, i didn’t think the month would go by so quickly 
for today’s update i have 2 podcasts episodes, Choisusu’s Korean Podcast and Cozy Storytime in Korean, for a combined total of 13 minutes. Again, podcasts are not the fastest way to get some listening in because the only ones I have found that I can listen to are very short ones, about light topics.
Luckily i can always count on my trusted 태웅쌤 - Comprehensible Input Korean to make the time go by much faster. I finished a video I had started previously, and got 1h15 minutes in one go.
listening done these days: 1h28
i’m very tempted to round up to 1h30 but i won’t.
Ohh this is a fun concept! I won’t set an exact number of hours (that’s just a recipe for failure considering how much I struggle with listening, even in my native language, APD anyone?).
For Korean, there’s an audiobook I want to finish and a series of 6 small audiobooks, so I’ll go with 7 audiobooks. All in all about 2h30, and any other listening I do on Youtube/Netflix I won’t bother tracking.
I guess technically I’ve already watched an entire drama this month though , so that’s, what, 16 hours? Not sure if that counts though, as Netflix has sadly removed that show’s option for Korean subs, so I had to watch it with English subs instead.
At 41/60 hours now. Finished up 異世界おじさん S1 and did another short series Bikini Warriors which I had to add here. Maybe because this is a smaller site, people don’t review or grade things that much, making it tough to tell what is easier or harder works. I’ve been trying to do some of the more popular works because audio is so tough for me, but I hope I am being useful to others.
There are people who set content based goals as opposed to time based ones. Or you can just plan to Listen More™.
All you kids in here with your Korean are doing the devil’s work in tempting me into a second east Asian language, btw.
Hi there! o/
Remember to rate, review, grade, and tag, everyone. 
