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 😅