Day 15:
Watched the rest of Ni No Kuni (42m)
First 3 episodes of season 2 of Old Enough (12m, 14m, 15m)
Japanese with Shun N5-N4, Easy listening practice (11m)
N4 Do you understand Japanese? (8m)
Total for today: 1h 42m
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I’ve been off doing things besides Japanese this weekend, but I did manage to do 1.5 hours of listening and 30 minutes of shadowing on Friday!
I started listening to たゆたえども沈まず | L30?? which is fun. I enjoy 原田マハ books that are about art or France (which luckily seems to be like 1/3 or 1/2 of her books?? Haha). IMO her plot development is slightly slow but all the art info makes it fun and worth it for me!
While shadowing I again focusing on “feeling” pitch. There were actually a number of words/phrases that I really struggled to pronounce, almost as if they had a tongue twister quality to them. One sentence that stuck out in my mind was:
猪口を呷った→ちょこをあおった
The problem was that it is like o o a oっ and that combination of vowel in a row is kinda hard to say nimbly.
Other things that gave me problems were the words 認める(したためる) and 瞬く(しばたたく) which coincidentally both feature a double た. 
I think both double consonants and long rows of おs are “weak spots” for me where I experience failure trying to produce the sounds at full speed. I don’t really have a good strategy for improving that besides to keep trying and babbling to myself when alone or in the shower, but it will be interesting to monitor and see if I’m able to produce them more easily the more I shadow.
On a kind of related note, all the thinking about how my throat feels when I talk and how it feels different than when I speak English has made me quite curious about the vocal apparatus in general, so I ordered an English book called “The Anatomy of the Voice” by Theodore Dimon that appears to be filled with diagrams and explanations. 
This is far beyond the scope of listening or shadowing now, but I want to follow my curiosity about how sound is made and the differences I’m perceiving. Let’s see if I learn anything new from it that I can use for Japanese. 
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For context, this is from Reddit’s language learning sub in a thread about what people regret skimping on while learning a language. Also, “CI folks” refers to comprehensible input proponents. Thread link for those who want it
Thought it was interesting and maybe good motivation for some people…I say as I haven’t done any listening today 
(I’m still ahead of my yearly goal tho!)
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so much this.
not about Japanese but I have plenty of experience with non-natives in my own country and it makes life so much easier for all involved if they at least understand the majority of what is being said around them. natives can parse together the correct meaning from very little correct output, but when we constantly have to repeat ourselves or dumb down everything we say, it gets really exhausting and we will just switch to English as that’s easier or if that is not an option, stop engaging. Have seen it happen plenty of times. 
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The search results you linked list books containing たゆ; is that correct?
Ack, I’m getting called out. @.@
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lol that is not correct, that’s what I searched to add the book to my shelf in the first place. I guess the link didn’t update even when I copied it from the books actual page? 
I’ll update my post now!
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I’ve missed a few days I think…
14th - 16th
Anime
2.7hours
Games
Light Fairytale Episode 1
Our World Is Ended
1.4 hours
Podcasts
Bite Sized Japanese
0.9 hours
Total: 5 hours
(I really didn’t fudge the numbers to make this a round number 
)
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Day 16:
I listened to ふしぎ駄菓子屋銭天堂 book 4, chapter 2 = 32m 26s
Mochi real Japanese N4 listening = 9m 22s
ダンジョン飯 episode 1 & 2 again now that I’m reading the manga. The episodes seem to match up to the chapters, I think. Approx 26m each = 52m
Total for today = 1h 34m
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Today I did 40 minutes of listening and 30 minutes of shadowing!
I don’t have much to share today except the audiobook I was listening to had this line in it and I felt SO CALLED OUT.
語学は使ってこそ意味があるんだ。外国語の本が読めるようになったところで、実際に使わなければ一語知らぬも同然だ。
I am just trying to do some listening practice and my media shames me for not outputting?? Hahahaha
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Ugh. Rude.
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It’s been several days since I posted but I have been logging the total hours.
Since my last post:
Finished the また、同じ夢を見ていた audiobook (1.5 hours). I experimented with speeding up the audio towards the end because I already knew the story so I could really focus on the listening.
Watched 10 episodes of anime from 僕だけがいない街 S1, プリンセスコネクト！Re:Dive S1, and ふたりはプリキュア.
Started listening to the audiobook for 最弱テイマーはゴミ拾いの旅を始めました (1.25 hours). I’m getting the gist of the plot so far but my comprehension is a bit blurry.
I attempted some casual shadowing today by repeating small parts of the audiobook while I listened. I would only repeat the stuff that I could hear really clearly, usually short phrases or sentence endings. I felt that it helped me stay more focused which was an unexpected bonus.
Total for month so far: 29.25 hours
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So It’s been a couple days of not listening to an audiobook per se.
I wanted to catch up with the anime where I stopped on the 本好きの下剋上~司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません~第二部「神殿の巫女見習い3」 | L31 book before jumping to the next one, so that’s been quite a hold.
While I could probably count the anime as listening time… something tells me is sort of cheating, and also not much training since I just went through that material not long ago.
In the end, I did 2h today while I was doing stuff around the house. Lowered my listening hours to something more realistically, with the current job overtime, a lot of days I don’t have the strength to sit even 1h.
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Day 17:
Watched ハウルの動く城 (again) = 1h 59m
I want to watch it again after reading the oversized picture book. Hopefully the vocab in there will help with listening. I know the English lines (even though I’ve only seen it twice in English) but I know the Japanese lines are different in some parts so want to understand those.
I want to read the novel series too, but I’m not quite at that stage yet.
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I LOVE the Howl’s Moving Castle novel in English (I’ve read it like 8 times). However, I wonder if it would translate well for a Japanese learner. It’s pretty different from the movie and contains a lot of overlapping plot lines in a way that I could see being confusing.
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Yeah, I’ve the 3 book set in both Japanese and English but I haven’t read either yet as I want to read the Japanese one first. I’ve heard about a lot of the differences as well so a little unsure how I will find it. 
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I forgot to post it here since I started 
I’ve watched/listened to 3h49m so far this month.
I’m been trying to listen to one episode of Nihongo con Teppei everyday plus some other random video everyday (about 0.5h).
Nihongo con Teppei I, なんとなく, understand most of what he says in most episodes (I think). The other’s are a bit more frustrating 
I watched some drawing youtuber videos, I think I understood the main points, but there were a lot of stuff that I didn’t understand.
I sometimes leave a drawing stream in the background during work, but it’s really hard to understand. My goal for this year was to watch one video from 文学YouTuberベル channel, but she speaks a bit too fast for me and the content is a bit too hard as well heheh
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Otoh, that seems like a very fitting challenge for me rn, and I might even be interested in the content! Thx for mentioning
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Day 18:
Japanese with Shun podcast episodes 49 - 53 = 45m
I also did some listening this morning while playing “Learn Japanese RPG: Hiragana forbidden speech”
It’s pretty basic speech so far but it was fun to play.
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I did 3 hours of listening and 1 hour of shadowing over the last two days!
I’ve been listening exclusively to たゆたえども沈まず | L30?? and am really hooked on it! 
But I’m having a few thoughts about it as listening shadow material.
It is historical fiction that takes place in France during the late 1800s and has a lot of info dumpy sections about art history. On the one hand, this is very great for me to listen to personally. A few years ago I randomly did a deep dive on art history in Japanese because I wanted to practice talking about hard things™ with italki instructors, and a lot of the art related vocab I learned I haven’t used since. I remember them well enough to understand passively, but it would’ve been hard to produce them quickly and accurately in a conversation. So, by shadowing out loud and actually saying them I feel like I’ve both reviewed them and lodged them further into my long term memory (and now I have good muscle memory associated with saying the words too, so the brain links get stroooonger). Who wants to talk about Impressionism with me in Japanese now?! 
On the other hand, I’m finding it hard to shadow たゆたえども沈まず for pronunciation or accurate pitch practice, since it takes a lot of concentration to even repeat all the passages about art stuff out loud. That is somewhat obvious and people do indeed recommend shadowing with easier or shorter passages, but I wanted to prove it to myself!
In conclusion, I think I can further break down my focused shadowing practice efforts into committing vocab I’m not familiar with to memory versus aiming for improvement of sounds. I’ll probably cycle back and forth between everything based on my mood and what I feel like I want to work on that day. Arriving at my own conclusions like this through trial and error is very fun, satisfying and motivating, since it’s as if I’m making mini hypotheses and testing them.
Another unrelated realization I had - I always felt weird about the pitch accent of words that are only one syllable. If it’s just one syllable the pressure to get it right is stronger since you basically have a 50/50 chance right?! (Ok, maybe it’s more than that if we consider that there is also some kind of rule determining if the following particle after is high or low, but let’s forget that…) The pitch of just one syllable was also way harder for me to hear or produce before. However, in the last few days of listening closely it became really obvious to me that 目 is high and the following particle is low. I could suddenly hear the contrast very clearly, which is an encouraging breakthrough because I’ll hopefully be able to hear and notice other one syllable words clearly soon too!
And finally, one more “compound word that isn’t pronounced like I read it in my head” for the list: 油絵、which I somehow always read like あぶら・え…but no, duh it’s like あぶ・らえ. Thank god I won’t embarrass myself next time I go to an art museum with Japanese people and discuss paintings.
That’s all for today! Little by little! 
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tl;dr 56 min today, 19:05 for the month, exactly on track to make my goal
I’ve been slacking for the past few days. I don’t think I’m burnt out, but I’m tired of a lot of what I’ve been listening to for the challenge and I’m in the middle of so many things already that I really don’t want to start anything new on a whim. I also was reading a book that I didn’t like very much and instead of just dnf I got stubborn and read the last 100 pages to be done with it. So that’s where at least a fair bit of my Japanese time went this week. 
I’m still plodding along through Wedding Peach. I’m down to 12 episodes of the show, so I’m hoping that I’ll hit some exciting plot that’ll speed me to the end, but it does not seem to be in any sort of hurry, at the moment.
I finished up 放課後ミステリクラブ 3 a few days ago and decided to give the series a rest, so I’m listening to 時間割男子 1 わたしのテストは命がけ! | L23 . I had started it a while back and I’m sure dropped it because I was in the middle of too many things. It’s aggressively fine as the better of the kids bunko books tend to be. Since I listen to it while doing chores it’s better than nothing.
I’m trying to also remember that YouTube is an option for listening and watched a cooking video while I waited for dinner to finish cooking (very meta of me).
All in all, things are going well enough now that we’re heading into the last third of the month (!!!).
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