I started learning Japanese due to so many people here talking about the amazing books they were reading in Japanese, it’s only right that the opposite is also true for Japanese learners. 
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Day 9:
Watched The Boy and the Heron for the first time (2h 4m) and without subs as UK Netflix doesn’t have it with Japanese subs for some reason but does have Japanese voice over.
Understood most of the first 30 minutes or so then my understanding drastically went down hill as the difficulty seemed to ramp up.
I also listened to a 10m Japanese with Shun episode and a 10m Pokémon video on Pokémon TV (no idea what was going on though )
Planned to watch Suzume as well but ended up watching a Game Gengo play through for the first part of 13 sentinels. I would say at least 2/3 of it is Japanese voice over (played twice), or him repeating each word or phrase, then breaking it down to better understand it. Not sure how to count the exact amount of Japanese from it though. At least 2hrs Japanese from an almost 3h video?
Total for today: 4h 24m
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I completely forgot that today was Wednesday and missed my Japanese Murder, She Wrote 
But the Game Gengo Youtube channel uploaded a video for Metaphor: ReFantazio, coincidentally right when I was waffling over whether it’s worth getting, so that was my listening today. But the structure of his videos is explaining every single word and grammar point in every dialogue line as it appears, in English, so the percentage of actual Japanese listening in there was pretty low.
It feels like hearing the same few lines over and over, before and after a deep dive of the content, should have been helpful…? But during the “immersion” section at the end of the video (just the Japanese scenes replayed without interruptions), hearing the lines again only triggered my memory of the explanations in English, and my brain just wouldn’t hold onto and parse any of the Japanese on its own while it had that crutch. I definitely had an easier time catching words and phrases having had all the language explained beforehand, so it was a good “hearing” exercise, but I don’t think it did anything for my “listening”.
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Fellow Game Gengo fan here. I watched his previous video yesterday: Learn Japanese with Shin chan: Shiro and the Coal Town - Vocabulary Series #40
Looks like a fun game with simple Japanese, so I might pick it up when it is released on PC.
Anyway, it been a while.
Monday 7th Oct - Thursday 10th Oct
Audiobook
Audible offered me a 99p/month subscription, so I bought レンタルロボット | L18
1.2 hours
Podcasts
The Bite Sited Japanese podcast
1.2 hours
Anime
1 hour
TV
0.4 hours
Total: 3.8 hours
Off Listening Topic - NotebookLM
I've been using https://notebooklm.google.com and it's pretty incredible. I upload notes from my lessons and it turns it into a ~10 minute podcast in English.The content is based around the topics I’m covering but it’s mostly a new take on it, with different examples. Some podcasts turn out a bit chatty and meh but sometimes it’s mind-blowing.
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Did 2 hours of Mikagura School Suite anime today. Had to submit it as a video. Unexpectedly very difficult so far. Akira was easier for me.
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Day 10:
Watched Suzume (2h 2m) and understood very little of it without reading the plot. Most of my issue was vocab I think (though I did find out there are multiple dialects used in it).
I did enjoy it though, will just need to watch it again to understand more (and might do better with the book as well).
Watched several episodes of Old enough (1h 50m, episodes 4-10). Then another 5 episodes of ダンジョン飯 (2h 6m).
I also rewatched about 2 hrs worth of an older Game Gengo N4 grammar video but was watching it at 1.5 speed so no idea how much of that was Japanese.
Total for today: 5h 58m (plus however much Japanese was in the Game Gengo lesson)
It’s weird but I feel like some days I understand a lot and other days I understand very little, not sure if the issue is difficulty level, vocabulary or just my brain not braining for Japanese 
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Updates!!
1.5 hours, 40 minutes shadowing
1.5 hours, 30 minutes shadowing
So for a change of pace I did some listening and shadowing from キクタン韓国語・上級編. For anyone unfamiliar with this fabulous resource which exists for JP → many many languages as well as the JLPT, they are big chonky vocab books with one lesson of 16 words per day for 6 days + a seventh review day over the course of 8-10 weeks (the advanced book is 10 but the others were all 8 weeks). The “method” is that each book comes with a bunch of audio tracks of someone reading the word in Korean, Japanese, and Korean again over some corny music and you’re supposed to repeat out loud to the beat while vibing. There is also a separate audio track with the word and example sentences in context. I absolutely love just memorizing a lot of vocabulary words out of a book (I know…I’m a freak and in the minority), so these are my fav! I did the first four levels of these for Korean and learned probably 3,000 words from it alone, but every time I ever start the 上級編 I’ve never made it past one week because a lot of the words are obscure and I sometimes don’t even understand the Japanese translations because they often pick whatever word has the exact same kanji that the Korean word does, and it ends up being a word that isn’t used often in Japanese.
Anyways. I did some shadowing both of the single vocabulary word and example sentence tracks, and also tried to integrate my Japanese shadowing to make some nice learning fusion happen. Basically the flow looked like: Korean (focus on hearing the word and being able to repeat it) → Japanese (focus on the pitch since I’m not amazing at hearing pitch on single words in isolation) → Korean (repeat again and focus on switching phonetic gears from Japanese). Afterwards I looked up the pitch of some of the Japanese words to do a spot check and get “feedback”/corrections on what I heard.
I only did that for about 15 minutes or so, but it felt like doing an extremely intense workout! Especially switching the muscles I use so quickly between Korean and Japanese, since they are kind of similar but then not (Korean somehow demands so much more 
too many sounds).
I’m not sure how useful that exercise is on a macro scale, but I guess training my ear for single words has some value. It feels like some agility training I can do on days where I don’t want to do long form free shadowing. Plus learning new vocabulary words is nice! 
I already recognized some in the wild when reading in Korean later.
If you ever dabble in other languages, maybe check out キクタン？ The groovy music alone makes it worth it! 
If you get the audio through the booco app, you can also set start and end points to make the audio loop if you want to do chorusing.
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For anyone with an Audible subscription they are there. I did not need to know this.
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Or for anyone with an audiobook.jp subscription, they are also there 
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I had a migraine all yesterday, so I wanted to get in some “pressure-free” listening today to be easy on my brain… but after a while of searching I gave up on finding anything I wanted to watch on Twitch, and I ended up doing more Speechling dictation practice instead Not easy on the brain! At least it’s easy to just sit down and do for a few minutes, since it’s just a stream of random sentences so there’s no decisions to make about what to listen to and no feeling of commitment to a narrative or whatever… but on the flip side, that also makes it hard to figure out when to stop, and I probably overdid it again 
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Day 11:
Watched 7 episodes (2h 53m) of ダンジョン飯, think I’ve just hit the next part of the series as the start up changed from Episode 14.
Liking it so far, noticing more grammar points today from my recent studies so what I’ve been doing with Genki and Game Gengo grammar videos seems to be helping along with the increase in listening (starting on みんなの日本語 初級2 in the next few days again), though yesterday I felt like almost nothing was understandable at times.
Watched all 4 episodes of Pokémon Concierge (1h 12m). Think it is more around my level than some of the other stuff I’ve been watching recently
And 8 episodes of Bee & puppycat (3h 13m) while writing out Kanji before and after dinner.
Total time today: 7h 18m
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Watched 逃走中 Battle Royal S1 which was 4 hours total. はじめの一歩 The First Step for 2 more hours. And another hour of ミカグラ学園組曲 S1. Total 50/60 hours.
Still having issues with parsing audio, I have no issues with subtitles. Its rather annoying still because my reading is just on this much much higher level. Making up for this is going to be hundreds of hours I think.
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I’m at 1 hour and 35 minutes. I won’t break down the times since I did a lot of material level testing. Here’s the main stuff:
I watched Lookism ep 1 twice since I got too invested to check the Korean subs the first time. Pausing on every line to break down the specific vocabulary they’re using to bully the MC was miserable. I’d rather just watch it translated and try again when I can understand it easily.
Time of You, my listening comprehension is low. However, I can understand 90% of the Korean subtitles. So I think I should push myself to bridge the gap for this one.
ChoiSusu episodes are extremely short and simple. I recommend them to anyone else who is very low level.
The NCT Dream members tend to have chill, long videos and all talk quite slowly. I’ll stick with these and look for some other slow talking groups.
On my routine: I study Japanese before work and Korean after work. Korean reading practice is done by 1 or 2 am. Lately, I’ve been way too exhausted to listen at that hour. So I’m going to try an alternating schedule again next week. That means Korean will get my good hours one day and then Japanese my good hours the next. That should help.
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You just reminded me that I watched that entire show and forgot about it immediately after - until now!
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Day 12:
Watched the last 6 episodes of Bee & Puppycat on Netflix (2 hrs 17m) as well as the last 2 and a bit hours of the Game Gengo N4 grammar list (this one was mostly English explanation so about an hour of Japanese).
Total for today: 3h 17m
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Watched a bit of a Twitch stream of Detroit:
Become Human in Japanese. It was definitely tougher catching things with something more narrative-based compared to a speed run or Monster Rancher, and the audio quality wasn’t very good, but since I’m already familiar with the story and since a lot what was being said was directly related to the choices being made, it was easier to guess from context what was being said. That felt a lot like cheating though, since I wasn’t actually understanding much and just assuming “eh she probably said this”
Twitch is turning out to be not as dependable a source of listening as I was hoping. It’s just random what games I think to look up, and going through the available videos (if there even are any in Japanese) to try to find one with someone who is talkative and clear is frustrating if I don’t land on something right away. I either just give up looking for content for the day, or I settle for something that’s bearable but with questionable listening value like today.
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Watching One Piece Season 1 without subs, mixes between easy and hard depending on the character. The audio quality can be bad in spots - and I am not relying on headphones for it. Did 3 episodes of 恋愛ドラマな恋がしたい S2 and はじめの一歩 The First Step and crossed 60 hours. ミカグラ学園組曲 S1 remains tough because of the speech, slang and is still a jumble for me most of the time. It is about over but I think the grading has sadly seemed higher than it should be. Though others will have to help on that - I just dislike all the distorted speech, the slang, and the content is not unusual I guess, but not knowing what is being talked about or with the main character’s rather disgusting lust being the joke, some of it is really cringey.
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Day 13:
I watched Kingsglaive (FF15 animated film 1h 55m) this morning and then listened to a long video on YouTube about fast food and restaurant chains in Japan in easy Japanese (2h 35m)
Total time today: 4h 30m
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day 14!
i watched a bunch of 태웅쌤 videos, though none of them all the way through, and then a 동네스타K episode, which was a first for me. i didn’t get all of it, but i did get some things here and there.
the korean subtitles helped a little but i would need to greatly improve my reading speed to rely on them. for now they go by too fast, i barely have the time to glimpse at them, and i find it really hard to listen and read at the same time. so much of my brain power is focused on hearing words, parsing them, and translating them, there’s not much left to decipher hangeul, make sense of the words i’m reading, match them to what i’m hearing and translating… i feel like when i first learnt how to drive, there are so many things to do at once, and i’m not good enough at any of it to it automatically, so everything has to be a conscious decision i make.
still very proud to have stuck through all 30 minutes of the video!
listening done these days: 1h18
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7 more hours done. Mostly One Piece season 1. Nothing too special here, but I can tell I’ve improved somewhat. Still struggling in spots. This should be normal as One Piece is a tougher show, right?
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