Small update from me: we’re about halfway through the month (somehow), but I’ve done very, very little listening this month. I think it’s just generally connected to me feeling a bit more burnt-out in general lately.
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Day 14:
Haven’t done my homework for tomorrow (I forgot til now 
) but did manage to watch
ハウルの動く城 (1h 59m) as well as the full 13 episodes of リラックマとカオルさん (2h 40m).
I know I’ve watched it umpteen times by now but I noticed several new grammar/ vocab points in ハウルの動く城 that I hadn’t picked up on before, and I also found it easier to follow along with at normal speed.
Tomorrow will probably be back to ダンジョン飯 after my lesson though I still need to figure out what to talk about in it as well
Total for today: 4h 39m
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70 hours watched now. 賭ケグルイ S1 is just too tough without subs for me. Did きんいろモザイク S1 for 3 episodes, much easier, but the English in it is hilarious at times. I really have tried to get more into Non Non Biyori 2nd season, but it is tougher because I am aware of how ridiculous the voices are. れんげ in particular is just grating at times.
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Day 15:
Listened to an hour of a long N4 listening practice video on YouTube. Then listened to 11 episodes of Japanese with Shun (episodes 55-66, 1h 45m).
I also listened to an audio book (spoken Japanese made simple, 33m in Japanese only).
Then later watched 4 episodes of リラックマと遊園地 (1h 3m)
Total for today: 4h 21m
I noticed both with my homework last night and my speaking lesson today, I found it easier to produce sentences correctly, even when using more complex sentences. My speaking is still a little broken in parts but I am getting better which I think is due to the increase in listening over the last few months.
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hello fellow october listeners! i have been horribly busy lately and even thought about abandoning the challenge although since i don’t think i’ll be able to reach my goal this month without losing my sanity in the process. however, i decided to at least get a little listening in today since it’s been a few days without any listening, and my spirits have been lifted. i think i’ll stay in the challenge regardless if i’m able to stay at that 1hr per day average i was hoping for. a few minutes of listening is still listening 
!
i’ll tally up the total listening i’ve done tomorrow. for today specifically, i listened to 디디의 수요 낮디오 ep 9 and understood much more than i expected to. she speaks at a perfect pace for my ears, and the topics aren’t anything bizarre either. her content is truly the key to me getting my listening in. she mentioned wanting to make a japanese podcast one day too and ohouhouhoh i hope she does!! i would undoubtedly tune in.
a few days ago, i was listening to one of my favorite artists, 예빛, and the lyrics just… clicked? i’ve read them before and understood, but usually my brain still lags behind her voice and gets lost. but i could hear and understand each word this time around! it was a great feeling 
! i’ve been listening to it on repeat ever since
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Thurs 10th - Tues 16th
Audiobook: レンタルロボット | L18 = 0.7h
Anime: https://learnnatively.com/season/49fa9caa8d/ and https://learnnatively.com/season/5c7cfa2e70/ = 2.2h
TV: 深夜食堂 S3 | L29 = 1.9h
Game: Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - sat through a 45 minute cut scene, so I’m counting this.
Total: 5.55h
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Did 3 hours of anime watching - mostly One Piece. Also started learning Korean, but haven’t counted any of it.
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I missed Murder, She Wrote again this morning since I had an appointment |': Catching that on TV on Wednesdays has been the one activity so far that I’ve enjoyed enough to actually want to make a routine out of listening to Japanese content, but 1) it’s way above what I’m able to understand and isn’t really contributing at all to my skill atp, and 2) when I start a new job in 2 weeks I won’t be able to keep watching, so I really need something else.
Instead, today I did about 10 minutes of dictation practice with Speechling, and then tried randomly searching on Youtube to see if I could come up with anything. I found the Japanese dub of a Camp Snoopy minisode and watched it through twice. That one felt like about the maximum amount of difficulty my brain was willing to work with before tuning out, and watching it a second time helped, but I was still only getting maybe 3/4 of it.
Then I got the brainwave to just look up “Japanese listening practice” instead of wasting energy trying to think up search terms that would give me videos of people speaking with clear voices. I landed this video of a guy just wandering around his neighbourhood speaking easy Japanese, and it was so exaggeratedly easy that even without the subtitles I probably would have gotten nearly all of it. All it did was remind me how much I hate “comprehensible input” type content, though, because what’s being said isn’t interesting and I just feel condescended to the whole time. I couldn’t even feel good about understanding 100% of a 10-minute video because the format is just irritating ):
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Day 16:
Watched the last 4 episodes of リラックマと遊園地 (1h 12m) this morning, then 借りぐらしのアリエッティ (1h 34m).
Also did at least an hour of listening from モンスターハンター ストーリーズ game (the movie cutscenes (no ability to be paused) are voiced as are the active cutscenes (ability to continue the dialogue at your own pace), the normal gameplay stuff isn’t voiced unfortunately, nor are tutorials.
Later watched となりのトトロ (1h 26m), then listened to the last 2 chapters and epilogue of ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂 book 4 (58m).
Total for today: 6h 10m
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I wonder if maybe interviews aimed at learners may fit you better? Something like this:
Because it’s two natives talking to each other it tends to be more natural even if they slow down their speed and avoid slang for the sake of learners
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Thanks so much for the suggestion! I’ve never really listened to interviews before (even in English) so I wouldn’t have thought to look it up. I’ll try this one the next time I can sit down with something!
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I haven’t logged at all this week since it’s been hectic, but here’s a consolidated post and mishmash of stuff!
Japanese: 45 minutes, 15 minutes shadowing
Korean: 2 hours and 30 minutes, 1 hour(!) shadowing
This week has been a super failure for Japanese and I’m doing way less of it than usual. I’m just kind of bored of たゆたえども沈まず and don’t feel like listening to it, but also don’t feel like dropping it since I’m nearly done with it. A shame since I was enjoying it so much, but the last 3rd has dragged…I started listening to this at 2x speed and then 2.5x, which I understood very little of at first. But, the longer I listen to it at 2.5x, but more it becomes easy to understand in a weird way. I found myself concentrating very hard on the rhythm of the Japanese at high speed and the “peaks” of where the pitch was falling which was interesting as a random exercise.
I think it was @caramelcrunch who mentioned this resource, but I started listening to some episodes from Didi의 한국문화 Podcast and I’m obsessed! 
It’s like the perfect resource for my level! Last time I was training my Korean listening, there wasn’t anything around like this so I’m really happy to have found it!
The speed and vocabulary used is just within that comfort range of 90% comprehension, and its letting me really flex my listening ear to try and pick up words that I’ve learned and remember passively when I hear them but am not super familiar with. Since my comprehension is higher I’ve also been able to do some good longer free flow shadowing sessions and am just very pleased. 
I think I’m going to listen to every single episode available.
Lastly…a general/English update?!
Doing all this shadowing has me thinking so much about air and breath, namely how the air in my lungs comes out and turns into sound and shapes the quality of it. I did get a book about vocal anatomy last month that I just haven’t had time to read yet since work and private have been busy (luckily I do all this listening in the car, so that hasn’t been impacted), but I’m trying to do some experimenting and pondering about it in my own.
Doing shadowing in Korean now, there are a lot of consonants that are aspirated like ㅅ,ㅍ,ㅌ,ㅋ,ㅊ!, so the points where I need to use more air and force feel more obvious than when shadowing in Japanese.
I posted last month I think that I often feel like the last syllable of Japanese words I pronounce feel off, especially with words ending in a lower pitch た like 行った or words ending in a long vowel like 行こう, because of how my native English brain works. I’ve been experimenting with a more staccato type of breath control with kind of an even tension across entire words with kind of goodish to mixed results.
However, I’ve had the biggest “breakthrough” with understanding how to utilize my breath when speaking just by listening to people around me speak English this week. Something I noticed was that the stressed syllable of a word had more breath behind it and was louder (duh, that’s why it’s called stressed I guess), and the rest of the word would kind of be sighed out with the rest of the breath. I think that’s something I’ve always subconsciously applied to my Japanese too - just kind of sighing out the air in my longs with the last syllable, when the sound should be a little bit more tense and cut off neatly (not quite with a glottal stop but with some form of my vocal folds closing faster than they have been). I think I mostly successfully avoid applying stress to Japanese words (watáshi, anyone?), but maybe my flow of breath has still carried relics of that?
I think I could dive into that topic better by actually looking at waves on a program like praat and recording myself, but I do all this stuff during my commute sitting in traffic currently because it fits into my routine so I probably won’t. 
This trial and error method is pretty fun for me right now! I am really diving into some obscure topics related to output that I’ve never focused on (or even though about tbh) in my 10+ years of language learning.
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Day 17:
Listened to 23 short Nihongo Learning videos (N5/ N4 level - 2h 49m).
And all of ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂 book 5 (2h 39m), I’ll re-listen to each chapter as I read it but still have the last part of book 4 to read.
Total for today: 5h 28m
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Thanks again for this suggestion! I watched this video through this evening and the interview format was definitely much more enjoyable for me than the other stuff I was finding, with people just narrating their day in easy language or addressing the audience in a patronizing way (feels patronizing to me, anyway).
I was able to catch most of it with the subtitles to help, but I definitely ran out of stamina about halfway through. From that point I started hitting my same working memory issues, where even with the reinforcement of the subtitles I just wasn’t holding onto what was said long enough to combine multiple utterances into a coherent topic, so I found myself pausing and repeating a lot even on parts that I understood fine.
The subtitles made a big difference with my endurance & comprehension, though, and I should probably be searching specifically for subtitled content instead of just randomly picking things. I’ve just been scared to put restrictions on the kind of content I’m looking for, because I’m bad enough at finding things I want to watch/listen to as it is without avoiding the 90% of Japanese content that doesn’t have subtitles.
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Over halfway through the month now, I’m at nearly 11 hours in Japanese and 1 hour in Korean. I’ve almost made my goal for Japanese! My 10 hour “any language other than JP” goal…not so much.
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Day 18:
A short easy video (12m) on everything day stuff then a very long video on cooking and simple recipes in easy Japanese (really liked the onigiri recipe in it - 2h 41m).
I also listened to more grammar lessons (N5 from Melon Ojisan) 1h 19m.
Next 6 episodes of ダンジョン飯 (2h 35m)
Total for today: 6h 47m
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Almost three weeks in, and only now have I tried subtitled anime 
I was trying to avoid more narrative-focussed media that I actually want to understand, because I worry about missing parts of the story, and then my media player being too clunky for me to have the patience to seek back and forth trying to repeat the lines I missed. But since I was thinking about subtitles yesterday, I started looking at my options, and I found what’s hopefully going to be a big game-changer for me!
The media player PotPlayer allows seeking by subtitle line, looping by subtitle line, and setting those functions to hotkeys – making it super easy to repeat dialogue I didn’t catch and practice listening, without having to manually navigate to and set A-B markers around the dialogue. It seems like such a minor feature, but that ease of use makes a huge difference to my willingness to just sit down and watch anime, since all I have to do if I don’t understand is press a button to hear the exact part I missed again. Skipping back and forth in the video by dialogue line is intuitive and fun, so while I was watching I found myself looking forward to each next piece of dialogue instead of dreading the possibility that I wouldn’t catch it and be too lazy to navigate back.
I watched episode 1 of カードキャプターさくら | L20 (Cardcaptors), just as a test because it’s one of the few series in my library I could find Japanese subtitles for. It was lovely, though; nostalgic, and the language was very easy to follow by using the subtitles and repeating lines on-demand (even the Kansai dialect, which I’m not used to at all). Not sure if I’ll continue watching it or experiment with some other anime I have instead; I also discovered that Subtitle Edit can generate subtitles using speech-recognition, so I’ll be testing if it’s viable to make my own subtitles for the ones that don’t have official subs online 
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In my experience anime from about 2010 and on have subtitles online. Things before that depend on popularity. Live action is harder to find, but hopefully with jimaku.cc some of those gaps will start to be filled in.
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At 83 hours now from continuing with shows. Still having a hard time with the casual slang and accents in some shows, I can clearly hear some variations which are not the Tokyo accent - and some of the cast say so. They even have subtitles pop up fairly often which makes it easy - but I haven’t quite put together as to why the subtitles where there before. Dialect seems to be the reason I’d decided upon.
Doesn’t happen in anime or more clear dramas because its professional and clear. Getting used to it has been rough, but the show is just not keeping my attention sadly so it feels like I am tuning out far more than I want to. 恋愛ドラマな恋がしたい S2 is the show. Naomi Watanabe and the rest of the hosts keep distracting from the show and it makes it obvious the entire show is a sham.
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Alas, I’m still living in 2008 and I apparently have unpopular taste I have a few options in my library I found subtitles for, but it’s pretty sparse. (I also don’t watch really any TV to begin with, let alone anime, so I’m already working with a small pool and I’m completely ignorant to everything outside it.)
I’m pretty impressed by the accuracy I was able to get from auto-subtitling with Subtitle Edit, but I’m not sure it’s perfect enough for me to be comfortable diving in to a whole series with only speech-recognition subs. They would definitely be serviceable for someone less picky than me, but the time I spent manually cleaning up the auto-subs for my test episode to catch all of the bugs and missed lines and messy word breaks was much longer than the episode itself If I ever get over myself enough to just leave them as-is, I’ll keep them in mind as an option.
All that time editing subtitles was also great listening practice, though!
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