sure thing! As I’m new to BL (started in July??), so far everything I’ve seen are recommendable since I haven’t watched that many. Also using this as an opportunity to write down how I started watching BL, thanks!

My first BL anime was 異世界の沙汰は社畜次第, I was interested since the title had 社畜 (しゃちく) which is kinda a popular word for jokingly say that you spend too much time working for a company.

And then ユーリ!!! on ICE started their 10th year anniversary event so it is free to watch on YouTube for 30 days. Some people think this is just another sports anime, but I’d categorize it as BL too.

This became the turning point from consuming content to learning, as YouTube started recommending me ボイスコミック, simply put as voice actors reading the manga. This is when I realized I actually don’t need native language subtitles and can still understand the story by listening and reading the manga. Here are the three channels that specifically publish BL ボイスコミック:

• アンジェンテ
• GUSH_&.Emo公式
• CIELフルールチャンネル

From then on, most of what I watch just comes from YouTube recommendations.

Anime:

• 佐々木と宮野 – kinda funny to see them talking about BL, good for BL education too
• 黄昏アウトフォーカス – started with the characters trying to make a BL movie
• 30歳まで童貞だと魔法使いになれるらしい (Magic Cherry) – also adapted to real-person show
• パーフェクトアディクション (Perfect Addiction) – this is like 3 minutes per episode, good material for learning in a sense

Manga:

• たまらないのは恋なのか – it has a special anime episode, that’s how I knew about it
• 黄昏アウトフォーカス – there are many titles around it which I don’t remember at the moment
• パーフェクトアディクション – just wanted to know what would go on further in the story, but this one feels a bit too much for me
• スモークブルーの雨のち晴れ – this one also has a real-person show

There is another one that I’ve seen a lot of people talking about it, and it’s in my list: Given

Also if anyone has anything to recommend, please let me know too ❤️

listen without subtitles and then try to transcribe what you hear, then go back and double check with subtitles

This is basically how I’m doing it with the help of AI so it works even if I can’t find the subtitles. The process goes like this: since an episode is usually around 20 minutes, I usually only focus on phrases that I absolutely don’t understand and skip through the parts I “kinda” understand to keep the process bearable.

1. Listen to the sentence that I don’t know what they’re saying
2. Write down the “sounds” I hear
3. Explain the scene to AI and what I heard
4. Check what I guessed right/wrong and then listen again to see if it sounds like what the AI suggested
5. Put down my list here (which I’ve only started recently 🤣)

And if I’m reading manga, then I have to add an extra step of looking up the intonation of the word in Japanese.

I’ve been watching/listening to a lot of BL lately and unfortunately/fortunately it’s not as popular as “mainstream,” so it gives me tons of opportunity to be on my own since it’s harder to find stuff about them in any other language.

Also the vocabulary that BL uses are actually quite specific as they’re mostly around romance, so you’ll keep hearing the same vocab over and over again even when watching different works.

For example, words I keep seeing:

• 照れる (てれる) – shy/embarrassed/害羞
• 挙げ句の果てに – “in the end,” “finally,” or “to top it all off”. It shows a negative final result after a long time, a lot of trouble, or a bad process.
• 人の言うことを聞かないし – you never/don’t listen to what others say
• からかう (揶揄う) – からかわないで don’t tease me 不要鬧/笑我
• 惹かれる (ひかれる) – to be attracted/drawn to someone

Not sure if I’ll end up with a very weird set of vocabulary, but at least this keeps me “studying” for at least 1 hour per day, which I couldn’t do before.

Ultimately, as there are no shortcuts to training my ear, I think spending more time with Japanese is what I’m aiming for at the moment as I haven’t passed the test yet to prove anything. At least I’m enjoying the process which I think has been one of the hardest thing of language learning once I get into an awkward intermediate level.

I’m also still working on this and on my end I think the key for me is “practice.” With AI around I usually ask it to give me 10 questions on the sentence I got wrong. For example, I’m really bad with the particle に. When I get it wrong, the sentence sometimes mean something completely different. For example:

留学している妹に、母が手紙を送りました。

弟に宿題をさせました。

I kinda get confused who was the person that did the action to whom. And if that’s messed up, it changes the meaning of the sentence a lot.

I think it would help if you share some sentences that you had trouble identifying. Maybe I’ll struggle with it too 😅