/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Finished up another month of listening practice. This month I also added in passive listening where I just listen to the audio while I'm doing other things. I don't have it on constantly, but only when I can pay at least a little attention to it. So if I'm reading websites, playing a game, or doing my flashcards I'll usually have it going. So, after 100 hours of active listening and 60 of passive, have I improved? I think I have, but it is not a huge amount. Improvements are so slow that they are hard to notice. The further I go in this project, the more suspicious I am of claims by AJATTers that say they can understand almost everything only a year after starting. I have read 3 VNs, 1 LN, had 7k vocab cards in the past, and have watched 500 English subbed series, so I started listening from a much higher base level than them and the gains are still so slow.

One problem I had this month was that I am getting too interested sometimes. I really want to know what is going on, so instead of just listening and moving on when I don't understand something, I constantly pause it and look at the subtitle file to try to figure it out. Sometimes I will even turn on the English subs to see how they translated it. Yesterday I spent about an hour on a 5 minute section of Hibike Euphonium because I really wanted to understand it. I did the same thing several times during Eureka Seven because there were episodes with huge info dumps. This may sound good that I was so interested, but the overall experience was much less enjoyable.

Not much variety this month since everything was pretty long.
Eureka Seven - I absolutely loved it the first time I watched it, but this time I didn't really like the end as much. Passively listening to it was pretty boring, so I don't think I'll listen to it a second time.
Accel World - Very hard to understand, but it was still enjoyable. I missed a major plot point while I was watching it and I didn't realize it until I was reading about the series later. Even after passively listening to it twice, I still never picked up anything about it.
Hibike Euphonium - I thought I loved this series, but actually I only love S1 and maybe 1/3 of S2. Lots of easy to understand parts and I love Kumiko's voice.

At some point I am going to try watching a series I haven't seen before and see how much I understand. Not sure if that will be this month or not. I'll be back next month with another update, although I have no idea what I'm going to watch this month. Kind of running out of things I really want to rewatch.