I am Finally Listening

It feels embarrassing to note the gulf between every individual aspect of a language you have to learn. To have to study listening and reading and speaking seperately, as if none of them touch at all. But it feels that way, often. Being able to read just doesn't mean I can hear. It seems like a joke, knowing hundreds of words and missing even the simplest ones when you listen, but this incongruous sense of... the senses is constant in language-learning. It's frightening.

Quistis greets Squall. What is she saying?

So I've decided to finally force myself to do something I've been saying I should do for a really long time: do some dedicated listening in my target language, so that I might maybe understand it on some level. Okay cool, great idea. This is easy enough for French - there are French YouTube channels making hour long videos about the ins and outs of Nintendo history, and stuff like that. Done. Japanese however, has been more challenging for me.

Exactly the kind of video I need.

You'd think maybe I could just watch tons of anime and become a big anime freak, but it's weirdly hard to find Japanese subtitles. A lot of recommended Japanese learner-appropriate podcasts are either pretty boring to me, or have no transcript to follow along with. I realised that I really wanted a visual component. Rather than relying purely on text, seeing images just provides so much context alongside subtitles. But where French YouTube is pretty similar to its anglophone counterpart in terms of general available content style, Japanese YouTube seems very different.

There are plenty of vlogs, people taking trips and showing their day to an audience, but a lot of those are very quiet videos that use subtitles instead of talking. Where, I'm asking, are the quirky videos detailing all the glitches in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in this language? 

I don't know the answer, nor how to locate Japan's prickliest video essayist, but I think I've found what I need: A lengthy let's play series for Final Fantasy VIII. This is an 81-video series made by someone called "GAME COMMENTARY SISS", which will keep me occupied for at least a month. And then I'll just watch that sort of thing until I accumulate a thousand hours or something. And in theory, I'll start to understand better. We'll see. I'm not sure learning a language is a real thing that actually happens to people. I think it's made up.