The August listening challenge went really well, and it was fun to see what everyone was listening to and cheer each other on to make progress towards our goals. This thread is for signing up for and participating in the September challenge. Set whatever number of hours feels like a reasonable goal for you.
All languages welcome, I know we have a lot of Japanese language learners here but we’ll cheer you on no matter which one you’re learning!
This post will be a wiki so you can add and update your own hours.
I won’t give myself a hour goal since I blasted through the one in August, but I will try to keep listening everyday. Only has to be a couple of minutes but the daily habit I think is very useful to me. I have the habit tracker on my phone that cat also uses. Let’s see how many days I’ll manage this month. It doesn’t matter if I actually manage everyday. Any day I do something with Japanese, is already a win. Very low key, very low stress, very low maintenance.
I came close (47.7/50) for August, but will set a September goal of 30/40/50 hrs. Meaning 30 is my initial goal, and those are my two stretch goals. I think I’d like to concentrate more on audiobooks and non-ガルクラ material (tho I will still do plenty of that!) this time
Audio with text counts, but I’m not counting I started counting some anime w/ subs, for challenge purposes
i was initially going to sit this out since my ears are actively working against me, but i think it’ll be good to give it a shot at least. my goal is 30 hours, so i’m hoping to average around 1 hour of listening per day. my updates will likely be irregular, but i’ll try to update at least once a week . i’m looking forward to this!!
I’m in again!
I’m on track to finish up 35 hours in August. I decided that I wanted to do a slightly more focused challenge next month because I usually defaulted to watching a ton of anime. Not a bad thing, but it’s not as dense as an audiobook or podcast.
For September I’m dropping my goal down to 30 hours, but 10 of them need to be a more language dense source (so an audiobook, podcast, vlog, 実況プレイ, etc). I’m going back and forth on if I want to make that 15 hours, but I’m worried I’ll burn out if I make it that high. So my stretch goal is for half of my hours to be from non-anime.
Changed my mind
Goal stays at 30 hours, I’m upping it to 15 hours of language dense sources but up to 10 of those hours can be with subs or reading the text along with an audiobook. I was neglecting some of my harder reading materials in the last challenge and that feels counterintuitive. This gives me a listening goal but also makes sure that I keep engaged with the content that feels like pushes my abilities the most.
I was hesitant to join because I am such a beginner at listening and my goal will be less exciting than others, but it looked like fun last month so I want to try it out.
My main goal is to develop the habit. So I set my goal fairly low at 23 hours because that is about 2 episodes of anime per day, which I think I can manage. I plan to allow JPN subs for myself because I am still really bad at listening. If things go well, I might try to watch a show with no subs as the challenge goes on.
I primarily plan to watch anime, but the YouTube algorithm occasionally shows me cooking and exercise videos in Japanese so there might be some potential there too.
Since my August listening challenge went SO well (I didn’t even make half of my goal), I’m doing it again! I’ll aim for 15 hours this time. Maybe I can develop a good habit this time?
Hi everyone. I don’t know very well how this works but I’ll try to listen for 10h. I’ll try to listen to one Nihongo con Teppei episode a day. I don’t have a lot of practice listening, I mostly read and occasionally watch a Japanese art streamer (but don’t understand much).
I’m in! Going to try to do more listening in September. It should be doable, I just need to sort out a proper routine and then stick to it
Will also be trying to complete so many hours per week instead of daily, as Fridays are quite stressful and difficult to focus after such a long shift.
Going to try to do longer focused sessions if I can. Might need to build that up.
Managed to listen to 24 videos of Comprehensible Japanese playlist. Most are under 10 minutes with a few just over 15, comes in at 168 minutes (2 hours and 48 minutes). Alongside my language exchange where I had to listen and answer questions for about 40 minutes (quite sure it’s safe to say at least 12 minutes of just listening within that) total comes in at just over 3 hours for today.
I know the playlist above is super easy Japanese but since most of my listening so far has been trying to just pick out what I can, I thought it best to try something easier to train my ear then start working up to stuff more my level as my tolerance gets better for so much active listening in one day.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll switch back to Japanese with Shun podcasts and see if I can do another 3 hours minimum.
today i listened to didi’s korean culture podcast for about 96 minutes. i watched her live stream from last night for 63 minutes, and a video about generational differences in korea for 33. i found myself getting a little bored during both, but i think that’s because i usually listen in shorter bursts. in the evening, i started watching bee and puppycat – which is a very cute show btw – and finished episodes 1 and 2 (27 mins each). i did get bored during either episode, so cartoons may be the key to me getting through this challenge without a daily hour of boredom.
I upped my goal to 30 hours and I’m going to not use subs for first viewing of anime anymore. I realized that I have room to be more ambitious and I want to make some progress in getting out of my listening slump.
For todays listening I did 1.5 hours:
2 episodes ふたりはプリキュア - I understood a lot, shoutout to formulaic magical girl shows!
2 episodes ゆるゆり S2 - missed a lot of jokes today, this show just goes too fast for me
I also looked into audiobooks today because this challenge seems like the perfect opportunity to try one. But I am still trying to figure out which sites offer what and how it all works. Speaking of audiobooks, do people typically track books they only listen to as being “read” on Natively?
I have an audible us subscription (I listen to both English and Japanese audiobooks) as well as audiobook.jp’s 聞き放題 which I think after conversion into USD was something like $60 for the year when I bought it - quite a deal!
Audible has more titles, but audiobook.jp will have ones they don’t, or their own production of the same books for others.
I should mention that the interface for audiobook.jp is entirely in Japanese, so reading comfort there is a must, whereas naturally on Audible purchases can be made in English.
There are other audiobook sites but none I’ve been impressed with.
As for tracking:
I just list them like regular books and track by % finished, but it’s worth noting that I keep track of my read pages and listening hours in a personal spreadsheet (and have since before Natively existed) so my solution won’t work as well for people who rely on Natively for their learning stats.
I have been changing the number of pages to 1 (you can’t change to 0) and marking as reading. It’s janky, and you can’t track percentage. I’m actually considering trying to track percentage as I go and then just change the page count to 1 when I’m done to see if that does what I want it to do. But I’m also very much considering moving my data into a spreadsheet/database because I’m more and more often wanting to have more freedom to mess around with it than I get in Natively. If/when I do that I’ll just do what @cat does.
I’m gonna check out the free trial for audiobook.jp. That should be enough time for me to figure out if I find it useful for listening practice. I’ll probably just skip Natively tracking for now unless I get really into it.
I have the habit tracker on my phone that cat also uses. Let’s see how many days I’ll manage this month. 
It doesn’t matter if I actually manage everyday. Any day I do something with Japanese, is already a win. Very low key, very low stress, very low maintenance. 
. i’m looking forward to this!!
