Postby golyplot » Tue Jun 09, 2020 4:53 am
When I started Nihongo con Teppei with the player.fm app, the episodes were numbered starting at #367, so my "first playthrough" was approximately episodes 367-470. However, I realized today that for some reason the RSS feed for the intermediate podcast only includes the 100 most recent episodes, but there are actually 470 episodes to date! It's just that they don't show up in the RSS feed for some reason, so most apps will only play the most recent 100 episodes.
However, Castbox does have the entire list, so I decided to try using Castbox instead of player.fm. The player.fm was a bit buggy for my tastes anyway. Overall, it seems to work well so far, though there are some downsides, like the lack of a skip button in the player controls, which would be useful since I discovered that the early episodes include a couple minutes of loud music and silence at the end of every episode for some reason. Oh well.
Anyway, this evening, I tried reading my second article with Satori Reader. I was impressed with how detailed the grammar explanations were at some point, though to be fair, they probably tried extra hard on the articles aimed at new users and those may not be representative of everything on the site. Still, it seems great so far.
It also of course shows just how far I still have to go, particularly when it comes to grammar. Grammar has long seemed like a weak point to me, but I haven't been able to find a good way to study it. Hopefully, it will sink in through repetition if I read enough articles on Satori Reader. I was hoping that all my audio immersion would help as well, but it's hard to tell if it is helping. On the occasions when I manage to understand something while watching TV in Japanese, it mostly feels like I'm just picking out a word or two and then inferring the rest based on context.
Speaking of which, I continue to do quite a bit of Japanese immersion by watching stuff on Netflix. Tonight, I finished watching Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online. I'm also up to episode six of Cardcaptor Sakura.
Now that I've finished SAOA:GGO, I figured it was time to finally take the plunge and try watching Terrace House, the one show everyone constantly recommends to Japanese learners. However, I quit only six minutes into the first episode of Terrace House: Boys and Girls in the City, since it's boring to watch when you have no idea what's going on and can't understand anything. Instead, I decided to watch the first episode of The Dragon Prince in Japanese. I already watched it in English back when it came out, so I'm already familiar with the story, and the show is good enough that I probably won't mind rewatching it sans comprehensible dialog. I considered watching She-Ra: Princesses of Power, which I've already watched before, but I found it a bit boring the first time around, so I'm not eager to rewatch it!
It's hard to know if/how much I'm wasting my time, but I suppose at least I'm making good on the initial promise of this blog.
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