One thing that is cool is when you see words you recently studied come up in the wild.
Yesterday morning, I noticed Noriko use the words sunahama and arai when talking about wanting to go visit the ocean and it being hard to surf in rough waves, and a bit later, odayaka (calm), a word I recently forgot the reading for when it came up for review.
荒い (arai-rough) is also a word that has given me trouble in the past on WK, mainly due to the difficult of keeping it straight with 嵐 (arashi-storm) and so on. I unconsciously just put them both in the "stormy ara" bucket, so I've often gotten them wrong in review.
Sunahama is one of the words that initially caught my intention and when I heard it, I immediately thought "sand dune" and was happy that I immediately understood it, until a little while later when I thought about it and realized that sand dune is sakyuu and it must actually mean "sand beach" instead. Still, I got the "sand" part right, and the two kanji are even written almost the same! (砂丘 vs 砂浜)
Occasionally, I'll even manage to learn new words purely from context. For example, I noticed that in her recent episodes, Noriko said "ochikomu" and variants many times, and deduced its approximate meaning from context.
I rarely actually pay attention to podcasts, but sometimes a word will jump out and get my attention. For example, last night, I thought I heard Noriko say "patto", a word that I had previously only ever known from the refrain to
the Fireworks song. However, I looked up the transcript and it turned out she just said パターン instead.
This was a "season 2" episode (17) so looking up the transcript was a bit involved. Unlike the earlier "season 1" episodes, the transcripts aren't public. Instead, you have to go to her Patreon to get the password, and then put it into her site to see the transcripts.
SR:
「コナ、起きて!」リリーの声にびっくりして飛び起きた
「リリー、一体何が起きてるの⁉」
起 is confusing because it normally means "wake up", but it sometimes means "to occur" as well. I
thought I had that down, and it was 起こる that meant "to occur" instead of "to wake up", only to get blindsided by this. I actually went back and checked both sentences carefully to look for the difference, but it turns out they were using the exact same verb! Apparently, 起きる can mean
both "to wake up" and "to occur" (in addition to 起こる, which just means "to occur"). Arrrgh!
僕は後ろを振り返ってみた
Here's another example of a confusion that really bugs me. How do you tell when -temiru means "to try" versus "to see"? I initially interpreted this sentence as "I tried to turn around", but the translation says "I turned and looked behind me." Arrrgh x2 combo!