I finally got around to watching "Queer Eye: We're in Japan!" The four episodes took me longer to watch than most shows because I found myself rewinding to 書き写す (kaki-utsusu, transcribe) the Japanese language in the show.
Netflix didn't provide Japanese subtitles (Japanese subtitles over Japanese audio is a great study method), so transcription was a helpful technique to shake the rust off my listening skills and ensure I was catching every という (to iu, a connecting phrase loosely equivalent to "such a"), など (nado, et cetera) and すごく (sugoku, incredibly) that helped connect or modify phrases. The language used by participants was also a fascinating crash course in talking to others clearly and openly about who you are as a person, which isn't always easy to do in any language, let alone a second one.
One interesting commonality between the participants, who couldn't be more different from each other, was how they described the changes they went through during the show using the word 自分 (jibun, self/myself/me), which was incredibly prevalent. This isn't a surprise given that, in Japanese, speakers rarely use pronouns to discuss themselves.
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