I really like reading all of your updates. You’re so much more advanced than I am so just the books you’re reading are interesting (it must be nice to get out of high school harem LN hell). But also the kinds of things that you’re noticing that you need to spend time on as you go. It’s like a nice realization that I probably would have the same things coming up and maybe I don’t need to study all the things at once and just trust to take care of things that need to be taken care of later. 
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Oh 
Thanks for the kind words!! This makes me really happy! 
Sometimes I worry about posting because I don’t want to seem like I’m bragging or make anyone discouraged, I just love talking about learning Japanese so much and want to share where I’m at in my journey too, so I’m glad it’s helpful for you!! 
I’ve been learning for a really long time in total now and my biggest realization throughout the years is that there is no “end” to it. Sometimes that’s made me discouraged or caused me to hit unexpected roadblocks (I got to a point before where I could read most modern books easily and was like what now?! Identity crisis!), but now I try to just have fun, follow my intellectual curiosity, and enjoy the ride because there’s no deadline for any of this. Since a language is a vast thing, it inevitably means progress will be uneven and there will never be a point where you hit perfection (I still have an accent, I still struggle to express myself, I still look up words, I still miss things when watching without subs - but none of that matters because I can keep improving and enjoy what I’ve achieved so far), but there’s no need to stress like you said! 
Learning to trust the process and accepting imperfection, even in your own learning methods and language abilities is hard but necessary to become “advanced” imo haha. 
With that said, I hope all of us can keep having fun learning and leveling up our Japanese together! I love reading everyone else’s updates and get so much inspiration and drive here everyday.
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I also love reading all your updates and findings and general geekiness; I hope you never feel discouraged from posting! There’s so much to learn, so many things to consider that don’t even enter my mind; it can get a bit when considering how the journey never really ends, but then I ponder and realize it’s not like I’m perfect in English either, and I don’t lose sleep over that. I still find words in regular books I have to look up in English; it is how it is. 
Anyway, pitch accent is way past my pay grade, so literally anything I learn about it is exciting and new, haha.
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Just chiming in, some of the stuff you’ve posted has encouraged me to expand and explore how I interact with the language as a whole, so has stuff that others have posted. I like to see what others are doing and how they are coming along, whether it’s the struggles they face (that I usually also face) or the highs they gain from their study (that I can learn better practices from), I find it all fascinating to read. I also like to see the things others are reading and listening to as it gives me more insight into what’s out there and how to find things I maybe wouldn’t have stumbled upon otherwise.
And your shadowing info and how you’re analyzing and improving it is making me think of things that may help once I’m looking into pitch accent and improving my speaking by shadowing correctly.
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Cheers to geek life! 
Learning is the coolest!
I’ve pretty much ignored it for a long time since I care way more about my reading and listening skills than I do about my speech, but eventually the different areas kind of start to converge. 
I’ve done so much listening I can hear a lot of pitch now, and want to understand when I run into things that sound weird or vocab words that I don’t catch immediately even though I understand them when they’re written. T:sob: I’m glad it’s helpful haha!!
I’m glad to hear it!! Noticing what you need to improve on is its own skill so maybe we can all level up with that together. 
Hope you’re feeling better btw!
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Very true. Helping each other improve
Thanks, getting there. It has given me plenty time to review my studying practices and more time to spend listening so that was a silver lining 
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Did 90’ today. Tomorrow I have a trip, so hopefully during the commute I can score at least 2 hours. We will see how concentration plays.
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ちょびっツ S1 | L26 and スーパーカブ S1 | L22
= 1.2 hours
Thoughts from episode 1 of ちょびっツ (minor spoiler)
If I found an android in a garbage pile that I decided to take home, I would spend the first day scrubbing it clean! 
京都寺町三条のホームズ | L29 - 84%
= 0.8 hours
Today’s total: 2 hours
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Day 8:
Managed an hour today of Japanese with Shun - episodes 43-48 (inclusive).
I also managed about 5 hours of passive listening where I was getting little snippets here and there while I was going back through grammar from みんなの日本語初級１ and typing out example sentences using each grammar point but I’m not counting that towards my 50 hour active listening goal.
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I haven’t been posting as much since my daily routine has been pretty quiet. I’m rewatching ウチの娘は、彼氏が出来ない!! S1 | L34 with the goal to actually finish it this time - it’s a great show, but the tension got me and I couldn’t finish it out last time. Each episode is ~50 minutes so doing one daily has put me just under an hour. Then joining the Ghost Hunt stream on Saturdays + Prince of Legend on Sundays. I’ve barely listened to any audiobooks since the last challenge ended - I think I’m burned out on them for a little while.
Currently at 217h 12min (for the year) so just a smidge behind schedule, but I’m sure I’ll catch up
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This weekend I did 1 hour of listening to 池袋ウエストゲートパーク | L31 while doing some chores. I did a lot of crocheting this weekend and normally listen to Japanese audiobooks while doing it, but this weekend I enjoyed the sweet sound of silence. 
Last month was a bit too much for me and I’m still recovering. Tomorrow is a new week, though.
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I figured out I could autoplay my VN, which meant I could do other things whilst I listened to it…so:
マブラヴ VN
= 2 hours
京都寺町三条のホームズ | L31 - 90%
= 0.7 hours
Today’s total = 2.7
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Day 9:
Re-listened to レンタルロボット audiobook at 0.9 speed since I can sort of keep up with that speed. 1 hour and 54 minutes
Understood a lot more this time though there’s still about half of it where I can pick out the words or grammar individually but I’m unsure exactly what’s going on. Definitely adding the book to my next order so I can try to read it as well.
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Today I did 1 hour and 15 minutes of listening and 50 (!) mins of shadowing!
I did 30 minutes this morning and had so much fun with it I did 20 more minutes in the afternoon. The afternoon session didn’t feel as fruitful so I’ll probably not continue with them in the interest of pacing myself and not going overboard.
Some things I noticed today:
I am still working on き！I noticed that for words like 聞いた that I’ve probably said a bunch of times in my life, the old muscle memory automatically takes over (pretty expected but interesting). The chapter of the book I was listening to had the word 聞き込み a lot, and it’s actually a little hard to pronounce quickly.
In general, repeated kana were kind the focus of today since I noticed it was difficult pronouncing words containing them at the same speed as the narrator without losing some level of phonetic accuracy. Special shoutouts to 「低く」and 「無駄だろう」. I went down the rabbit hole with pitch again since I wondered if it had answers for me about why my pronunciation sounded weird/awkward and it kinda did.
I think with 無駄だろう、I defaulted to pronouncing the だだ part at the same pitch even though I know it shouldn’t be, but it’s actually LHLHH, so more like だ↑だ↓。低く is similar at LHL, with me being too flat making it sound weird. Having some variation between the two sounds makes them easier to say, so I feel like I solved my own little mystery again today.
Another random thing I noticed today is something that’s always bothered me about my own accent. 
I always felt like the た verb ending at the end of sentence or the copula だ just didn’t hit right! I thiiiink it’s because I just always exhaled the rest of my breath out together with the sound the end of the sentence, so the vowel sound just got drawn out and kind of died out with the rest of my breath. However, the sound is a lot more of a burst made with the breath engaged and then the air cuts off almost at once. Not like a glottal stop っ, but almost a mini version of っ (using some scientific made up terms here). If anyone here knows anything about singing, I think this will make more sense. I think the breath control you need when speaking other languages is different from your native language, but it’s hard to learn and kind of an obscure topic… I just plan to stay curious about this.
On the pure listening front and my mission to better internalize compound words and their diphthongs, I came across another one today! 座椅子！Which I somehow always read as ざ・いす in my head (ザ・チェア anyone? Ok I’ll see myself out), but I heard it pronounced and was like duhhhh it’s ざい・す. Later on I was reading a paperback and came across the word 黄土色 which I’ve always subvocalized as おうど・いろ, and paused for a second like, wait, could it be?! Could this also be one of those? And sure enough when I checked an audio clip of it it was おう・どいろ! So, there is hope that I can internalize this stuff and not have to rely on hearing every single word like this pronounced in an audiobook before being able to know the correct way to say it.
Ok, those are my random auditory related thoughts of the day.
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Small update for me. Logging time for the last 3 days.
audiobook: 2.25 hours
anime: 3.75 hours
total for month so far: 17.25 hours
Still using the same series. My comprehension is still up and down but it feels like I am carving out larger sections that I do understand. Getting close to finishing my audiobook and trying a brand new one for the first time.
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01:07 today, 12:09 for the month.
I’m really bad at updating because I pretty much keep on watching or listening to things right up until I get into bed, and by then I cannot be bothered to update on my phone.
Anyway, I started watching ワカコ酒 S1 | L24 today. I don’t know why I keep on going back to the genre of “person eats delicious Japanese food that I do not have access to” but it’s one of my favorites. And makes me so hungry.
I’ve noticed I’m pretty comfortable in listening up through about level 25 with no subs recently. I started out this year watching 17-19 with the hope of maybe, just maybe making it this far by the end of the year. So I’m proof that all this listening is not for nothing!
You know… I think I’ve had a realization that either I have internalized some pitch accent or… something like that. I think I assume heiban by default, but I definitely find new words that somehow don’t feel like they fit right. I’m starting to feel like I even if I know the reading I feel like I still don’t know how to pronounce it correctly. Which… doesn’t make sense if you have the reading, right? But there are definitely words and sometimes even phrases where I’m going along reading really quickly in my head and then I’ll hit a wall and a lot of times I even know the reading, it’s just that I think I haven’t internalized the pitch accent?
The two dictionaries that I have on my phone both have audio, although unfortunately the one that’s easier to look up from Google lens uses tts. It’s still better than my made up pronunciation in my head I think, but not ideal.
Anyway, I don’t really plan to do much with this information, it was just an interesting realization that I had when I was reading without an audiobook the other day.
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I did 2h during my trip yesterday. I could have probably done more, but there was a child on the way back which shouts leaked through the earphones and made me not be able to concentrate, and I had to switch to music
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There was a short on YouTube that I stumbled across the other day and it was talking about this exact thing, the guy was trying to explain to a Chinese native speaker why he was unable to speak English correctly and it was due to the breath control differences between the two languages. I don’t think this is limited to just two though, I think each language has it’s own rules and figuring those out can help us speak it more naturally.
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This is what I love to see!
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Same with me today!
Today’s menu:
Midnight Diner S2 - 1.2 hours
The Kamogawa Food Detectives - 12% - 0.8 hours
Random YouTube (sometimes food related) - 0.3 hours
Today’s total: 2.3 hours
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