My learning goal this year is to get an hour a day of solid listening practice in with native material and this was definitely a great series to start with for my first attempt at listening to native content that isn't part of a deliberate educational tool (up until now my sporadic listening was Satori Reader audio and sporadically listening to Japanese with Noriko).
This series reminds me a lot of Tonari no Seki-Kun which has a similar premise of one student starting a strange game and the other trying to foil it, but where that series is based more around absurd feats and Rube Goldberg-style contraptions, the pranks and teasing here are more realistic and grounded, which means you won't really have esoteric new vocab pertaining to a different theme each episode. The vocab is all pretty common, daily life stuff and I'd say that watching this with Japanese subtitles I generally got 90-95% of what was being said, and I always got what the punchline or twist was without having to think too much. I'm not sure how much of my comprehension was from listening and how much was from reading the Japanese subtitles, but I think even reading along while listening will likely have some benefit even if I do have a tendency, regardless of language, to always glue my eyes to any text on screen.
Since the stories all follow a basic formula (Takagi starts a prank, Nishikata knows he's about to get played and overreacts to try and stop it, then he ultimately plays into Takagi's planned outcome), there's good repetition of certain vocab and phrases. The plotlines are very cute and in addition to the stories with Takagi and Nishikata, there are some occasional side-stories involving their other classmates who I think might be even funnier. It's charming all the way through and there weren't any duds for me, so I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the series.
My learning goal this year is to get an hour a day of solid listening practice in with native material and this was definitely a great series to start with for my first attempt at listening to native content that isn't part of a deliberate educational tool (up until now my sporadic listening was Satori Reader audio and sporadically listening to Japanese with Noriko).
This series reminds me a lot of Tonari no Seki-Kun which has a similar premise of one student starting a strange game and the other trying to foil it, but where that series is based more around absurd feats and Rube Goldberg-style contraptions, the pranks and teasing here are more realistic and grounded, which means you won't really have esoteric new vocab pertaining to a different theme each episode. The vocab is all pretty common, daily life stuff and I'd say that watching this with Japanese subtitles I generally got 90-95% of what was being said, and I always got what the punchline or twist was without having to think too much. I'm not sure how much of my comprehension was from listening and how much was from reading the Japanese subtitles, but I think even reading along while listening will likely have some benefit even if I do have a tendency, regardless of language, to always glue my eyes to any text on screen.
Since the stories all follow a basic formula (Takagi starts a prank, Nishikata knows he's about to get played and overreacts to try and stop it, then he ultimately plays into Takagi's planned outcome), there's good repetition of certain vocab and phrases. The plotlines are very cute and in addition to the stories with Takagi and Nishikata, there are some occasional side-stories involving their other classmates who I think might be even funnier. It's charming all the way through and there weren't any duds for me, so I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the series.