Day 29:
Watched 6 episodes of Terraced House (3h 18m). Understanding is fluctuating between understanding quite a bit and understanding not much. I can’t tell if it’s the speed, the vocab, the grammar or just me not understanding in general. So I’m just going with the flow and trying to understand what I can.
Also watched How to train your Dragon 2 (1h 42m) since I couldn’t find the first one in Japanese.
Total for today: 5h
Day 30:
Watched another 5 episodes of Terraced House (2h 38m).
Working til late so this will be all I get done today except a bit of reading during breaks.
Total for today: 2h 38m
Broke 100 hours! Just right now, finishing up the last episode of 恋愛ドラマな恋がしたい S3 | L23 which has been boring. The actors have been shown to cry for the acting scenes and then they do this acting for the ‘real’ parts that have the same cues and such - cementing this entirety as all just bad acting. One member of this season just fake bugs out his eyes almost randomly, but it goes to show how none of this is serious at all. The entire show tries to sell you that this is real and frankly it is starting to irritate me now. 90 Day Fiancée is more real.
Hello everyone!
I’ve been pretty silent on here, but I have been doing my bits of listening.
Total so far 14h45m (and I’ll do a bit more listening later, so I’ve ended up fairly dead on my 15h goal 
)
7h 50m of コーヒーが冷めないうちに | L27
I found this a bit boring tbh, which I think didn’t help me listening through it.
In hindsight maybe I should have given up and switched earlier.
2h so far of 殺した夫が帰ってきました | L28
This in comparison I’m really enjoying, it’s got me hooked waaay more that コーヒー。
A few random youtube videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twkS9pJ3Uhw
26m
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceYj1Fa1t5A&t=1261s
41m
35m / 1 Episode of Voice of Food podcast - this was interesting, around Food in China, and how it’s changing for young people living there etc.
3h / 6 Episodes of 4989 American Life podcast.
These can be a bit slow, but I enjoyed listening.
Something I struggled with for the rest of the above, if I was out and about, background noise of traffic, trains, etc. would kill my comprehension/ability to follow any plot.
This podcast was OK in those scenarios, apart from some particularly noisy parts of the London tube, where listening to anything is pretty impossible.
I found these three little videos very enjoyable, if anyone’s looking for a final few mins.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qabOrVV3DQ ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xQfOvRfWno&t=2s ,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUou0rghddc ,
They’re 5 min interviews(maybe?) from Criterion for Hideo Kojima, Koji Yakusho, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi about films. (There are hardcoded english subs, but I just covered the bottom of my screen).
I just wrapped up my October goal!
I broke down the numbers into categories to see what kind of media I spent the most time listening to.
Children’s Cartoons (214m)
Idol content (127m)
Learning Podcasts (120m)
Dramas (118m)
Everything else was shoved into Other. Next month, I think I’ll do less drama listening. The dead air in a show I was uninterested in was painful and pausing to parse subtitles in a drama I was interested in was more painful.
Idol videos feel the most effective for me. The vocabulary and grammar transfer well from video to video which is good for my motivation. The same can be said about the children’s cartoons. Rainbow Bubblegem does the same magical girl transformations every episode and they say the exact same thing. Which is great for me.
Well, I had all the good intentions in the world to update, but I ended up listening for a whopping 2 and half hours this month. I don’t even think it’s necessarily burnout, but just finding a better balance in my life among other recreational activities and being happy with that. I probably won’t be joining the November challenge; perhaps if there’s one in January I’ll join.
Day 31:
Watched another 4 episodes of Terraced House (2h 11m).
Total for today: 2h 11m
Didn’t think I would get as much done this month as I have, definitely didn’t intend to do as much listening as I have done but it has had a larger impact on my Japanese language skills than I thought it would.
I managed some more Cardcaptors over the past few days, but there’s road construction happening right outside my apartment that’s super noisy and vibrates the whole building, which kept me from making more attempts at listening |':
And now the month is over, so time for the challenge post-mortem!
3+ days / week of listening
Listened to content I didn’t hate
Motivated to keep trying
I’m really happy with what I achieved this month! I kept my expectations low, which helped make this feel like a success 
But listening has been an uphill battle for me for years and it’s become really daunting after spending so long avoiding it, so I’m proud of myself for both keeping to my commitment and gaining enough motivation to take on next month’s challenge, too.
In terms of content:
I also learned some valuable things about my listening skill this month, like how much stamina I have, and how I struggle to keep things I’ve understood in my working memory long enough to figure out the main idea of what’s being said. And I think this is where working with subtitled narrative content will really help, because the overall density of the dialogue is lower than pure listening drills or Youtube monologues so it doesn’t feel exhausting, and being able to follow a coherent story through the subtitles gives me enough context to latch onto that I’m not immediately forgetting everything I hear. For where I am in listening, this kind of content feels perfect for keeping me engaged and motivated while gradually building confidence and endurance.
Looking forward to continuing to improve in November! 
Well, I finished off at 22/30 sadly, but already have a lot of listening material for November, and should have more free time this month. So I’m pretty sure I’ll hit my goal this time around!
October in retrospect:
I ended up doing a lot of listening on youtube, but not very attentive listening. I think tracking my listening is more than I’m able to handle right now, so I think I’ll sit out future months, at least until I can figure out a more purposeful way of tracking.
Time for a final count!
Japanese: 17h 30m
Korean: 1h
German: 3h
I’m happy how my Japanese listening went this month, but my other languages, not so much. Even though I failed my “10 hours in any other language but Japanese” I don’t feel that bad about it. Onward to November!
Even if not tracking hours, feel free to post what you’re listening to if you think it’s interesting or fun!
Having hit over 100 hours and generally improved my listening ability sometimes it feels like it was only a small step forward depending on source. I know it is but a drop in the bucket to fix my imbalance, but I really do enjoy how I can understand One Piece and Hajime no Ippo better than when I started for sure. Podcasts and things are more understandable but comprehension of audio is a tricky thing - sometimes it is good and sometimes it is not.
Monday 28th - Thursday 31st.
I stuck to my plan of focusing on doing a couple of things, rather than trying to keep up with everything, and it’s been great.
Anime
Chobits - 3.3 hours
Podcast
Bite sized Japanese - 0.2 hours
Total: 3.5 hours
Monthly Total: 26.95 hours
My belated wrap up post for the month
Why yes, I did spend too much free time yesterday coding up this heatmap and didn’t have time to post, why do you ask?
My final month total was just under 22 hours. (Since I count 30 minute tv shows as 15 mins of listening input, you can see the number of shows I watched each day if I didn’t do any other listening, which is most days 
) I didn’t make it close to an hour most days, and had a few days where I didn’t listen at all. On the other hand, I had a few big days (usually finishing up a show, or catching up on simulcasts).
As I mentioned earlier, I’m not bothered by my month’s totals since I spent a lot more time reading this month than listening. I’m planning on joining November’s challenge, but with a much more tailored goal of listening to things other than scripted television. Onward! 
Late with my final update, but I ended the month with:
12:30 hrs listening, 5:20 hrs shadowing 
10:20 hrs listening, 4:20hrs shadowing
I had a goal of 10 hours each per language, so I’m really satisfied with my results! 
For Japanese, I really notice the improvements from all the shadowing I did already. The amount of 5:20 hours doesn’t seem like so much, but shadowing often for shorter amount of times still adds up. I feel a lot more confident pronouncing words and speaking now, and feel like I can say a word how it should sound versus before where I tried to say a word correctly and could only hope that it was close to how it should sound (but was not always so sure).
For Korean, my main goal was listening to get back into the language and I’ve started studying it again, so I’d say this was a success!
I won’t join in the November challenge since I think I need a break from listening goals, but I’ll still be doing listening and continuing with shadowing.
