#Day 10: listening patterns and my first week of the 60-days Challenge

Since last week I have been increasing my studies on Japanese a great deal. I keep focusing on it more than on any other daily activity, so I can say that one of my main goals is just one step from being accomplished: and it is to study Japanese every single day. What I want the most from this challenge is to keep in mind that I must study Japanese every day. I want that to be natural to me, like it is to eat and to breathe. My main focus is improving my listening comprehension, because that skill is a must for someone that is going to visit the country in less than two months and that is planning to live there soon. And in order to improve a lot my comprehension, I need to study every single day. No exception. I need to surround myself with Japanese like I was in Japan, and I definitely want the Challenge to work for this cause. Therefore I will keep doing my best from now on and try to keep studying Japanese in a daily basis.

My results until now are being quite good, even though they are still far away from perfection. However, one thing that I am proud about is my new listening patters. They consist from watching 20 minutes of Japanese grammar videos, 20 minutes of random Youtube videos and 20 minutes (one episode) of the anime Death Note. That combination is not casual, and has a reason to exist. I will explain what those activities represent:

• Grammar videos: through them I can listen to a more foreign-friendly Japanese while learning new grammar structures and vocabulary;
• Youtube random videos: those videos are in general made for native speakers to native speakers, so they consist of natural Japanese. Also sometimes they are so fast spoken that they stay far away from my comprehension (especially the ones from Ari Keita). That difficulty is good and productive in language learning because through them I can exercise my brain to comprehend the language in its most complex form. That is the part of the studies that I like the most, even though it is the part I understand the least.
• Death Note: that is also Japanese for native speaker, but because it is a fiction it is frequently easier to understand than normal Youtube videos. Also I have already watched Death Note more than 5 times so I already know the story, which can be incredibly useful to help me grasp the context of sentences I am not familiar with.

            That listening studies’ pattern seems to be working for me, so I want to keep it for a while during the 60-days Challenge.

To talk about my results in details, it was all working well from the first day of the Challenge (August 31) until September 3rd. I was struggling to complete the goals (one hour of listening, reading some grammar notes and reading a chapter of manga), but I was overcoming this. The problem was that September 4th it was Graduation Ceremony day, so I was busy from morning to night and was unable to complete any of the tasks. I tried to chase the game during the weekend, but I was just able to complete the one hour of listening task. However, this Monday everything was bring back to normality, so I am looking forward to my results this week!