Choosing Raora as your target for listening practice is like going straight to the final boss

Cat to cat communication

Two people being friends despite not sharing the same language and learning a language to communicate with each other is such a beautiful thing. Okayu is such a sweet person.

"Your... Rs and Ls sound like Ws..."

"Weawwy?"

"Find an Italian friend"

This one weird trick to learn English that Duolingo doesn't want you to know!

She just needs to eat powder that makes you say "real".

She puts so much effort into pronouncing the "r" sound that she bends her whole body?  My heart!

remaining battery life as a metric for learning english cracks me up

"R-Mode" sounds like a trick used by Super Metroid speedrunners.

If Okayu can conquer Raora's accent, she'll either have some exceptionally strong English-speaking powers, or some very unique pronunciations (probably both).

When I lived in Japan, people like Okayu were the best, we always had so much fun learning and teaching each other. Making an effort to learn another language opens up your world to so many new things

The near perfect English at the beginning caught me off guard, I thought I randomly understood Japanese now

Cats of a feather flock together.... Wait a minute....

Makes me smile when I hear about a JP hologirl learning English as the EN girls learn Japanese

It's particularly hard to japanese to actually learn fluent english because for some reason the pronunciation they're taught in school is nothing like actual native pronunciation, it's heavily filtered through japanese syllabaries.

Having a motivation to push through learning a language is a huge help though. Having learned 4 languages on top of my native one, that would be my biggest advice to anyone trying to learn a second language; you have to set yourself a need to use it frequently, otherwise you lose motivation and eventually you stop being able to speak it entirely.

I think you can even hear that she got better than she used to be. I'm super happy for them, I think speaking with a non-native speaker, especially for a beginner can even be easier. Because even if they are very fluent, they tend to talk a bit slower, and use less slang and figures of speech.

However if Okayu ends up with an Italian accent in English from this I will laugh my ass off.

And on the R/L front it seems like the trouble is if it's at the start or middle of a word. She seems to be doing fine when it's at the end of the word.

raora is gonna give her the permanent italian accent 😂

English speakers and Japanese speakers both don't like to end their words with consonants, but they solve the problem in the opposite way. The English tend to not say the final consonant, or heavily understate it. JP speakers add an extra vowel, essentially emphasizing the consonant. No wonder it's hard to hear the opposite language!

Incidentally, this is why Pekora was baffled why her "do omo" sounds like "almonds" to English speakers. We basically just say "almons" while they say "almondo."

Holy crap her pronunciation is adorable.  You can tell she's trying really hard to use actual English syllables, but that little sliver of accent left behind is cute af.

Okayu : Speaks english

Raorer : nonono