📚 bibliothecary's bibliophilia 📚 language log 🇰🇷 🇯🇵 🇨🇳

All Languages
81

Finished this week

:memo: includes a written review
:headphones: read along with audiobook
:ear: audiobook only
:underage: adult content; not currently on Natively
:x: format not currently supported on Natively

Graded Reader

TV Show

Podcast

  • Nihongo con Teppei 1-130 :x:

Review

I think the book club has got me back in the groove with Japanese - I actually have things to include in a weekly summary! :triumph:

I finished my first non-anime TV series, and no surprises, it was a BL! If you don’t mind a bit of angst, https://learnnatively.com/season/1d2c771e01/ is a great watch. :two_hearts:

I was underwhelmed by https://learnnatively.com/book/3702f1580d/, although I’ll probably continue the series just for some extensive reading.

For some easy listening practice, I started Nihongo con Teppei. Each episode is only a few minutes long, but still, I was a bit surprised to realise how many I was able to get through!

As for 本好きの下剋上, I’ve found myself thinking this seems like the type of book I would have loved as a kid; I would have fallen into the world head-first like Alice in Wonderland. Alas, I don’t foresee myself reincarnating as a 5-year-old Japanese girl in order to truly fulfil this dream. :face_holding_back_tears:

There’s a lot of unknown vocab and grammar, but having the Korean copy to reference has been a big help (although I often find myself ‘reading’ kanji in Korean… ㅠ_ㅠ). I think I’ll have to be more discerning about what I choose to look up, though - intensive reading is slow-going, and there’s too many pages to read per week to look up every little thing.

Plans

Much the same as last week:

8 Likes
82

Finished this week

:memo: includes a written review
:headphones: read along with audiobook
:ear: audiobook only
:underage: adult content; not currently on Natively
:x: format not currently supported on Natively

Graded Reader

TV Show

Podcast

Review

In an attempt to speed up my 本好きの下剋上 reading, I’ve been reading a page at a time this week: first in Korean, then Japanese (ttsu + yomichan), followed by rereading the Japanese along with the audiobook. I can’t read it as closely as I originally planned, but I can get through the weekly reading and still have plenty of time for other books and TV shows. :grin:

I ended up falling head over heels for 美しい彼 | L27 and binging all the episodes… And then immediately bought the first volume of the light novel, a couple of manga volumes, the photo books for the drama series and the movie (just released; will be watching that as soon as I can!), the drama/movie script books… and Yusei Yagi’s photobook. I’m a fan now! :laughing: :heart:

Plans

I seem to have settled into a nice little routine, so I’ll just continue with it. :smiling_face:

7 Likes
:tulip: 美しい彼 :baby_chick: My Beautiful Man :camera_flash: Home Thread
83

Enjoy! All of them are really fun reads and even better than the drama (although it comes close :face_holding_back_tears:)

2 Likes
84

it was our monthly pick a while back in a club I am in and you are definitely not alone in becoming a fan. :rofl: Though, personally, overall it’s not quite my thing, I enjoyed the LN more than the drama. I was cringing so hard while watching the drama and only made it through because I had a group to vent with how cringe it was. :see_no_evil:

4 Likes
85

Please be sure to take pictures when it all arrives in! I want to see all the goodies! :smiley:

Ah, and I was doing some research; 美しい彼’s publisher Chara regularly publishes bonus stories and such for their series throughout the year. They’re mostly just fluffy additions afaik, not anything containing important plot or anything, but if/when you wanted to see what’s available for 美しい彼, just let me know I and I can take pictures/scans of any stories I have!

(Oh, I just realized the above may sound kind of sketchy. The bonus stories are printed in “not for sale” booklets and pamphlets the publisher distributes every year, not in paid books. Well, they may be reprinted in paid books, but if they are I wouldn’t provide a copy, of course.)

6 Likes
86

:eyes: :eyes: :eyes:

3 Likes
87

I will! It’ll probably be next week sometime… I’m anticipating it like a kid waiting for Christmas! :rofl:

Oh you wonderful person! :face_holding_back_tears: :heart:

3 Likes
88

Just a quick note for @bibliothecary and other 美しい彼 fans: looks like a special 12-page booklet’s going to be included with preorders for the third manga volume over at animate:
https://twitter.com/chara_tokuma/status/1704322145000821173

4 Likes
89

Finished this week

:memo: includes a written review
:headphones: read along with audiobook
:ear: audiobook only
:underage: adult content; not currently on Natively
:x: format not currently supported on Natively

TV Show

Podcast

  • Nihongo con Teppei 301-350 :x:

Drama CD

  • 嫌いでいさせて :x:

Review

I’ve struggled to really concentrate on anything this week, so I’ve mostly been watching TV and doing a bit of listening. I’m blaming my lethargy on the changing seasons… :yawning_face:

I watched https://learnnatively.com/season/3e7a554799/, which I really loved. I don’t know whether I’ve just been lucky or Japan just produces amazing BL series, but all the ones I’ve watched so far have been amazing (美しい彼 | L27 and ４月の東京は… | L27 being the others). :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

I’ve also started グッド・プレイス S1 | L30 which I’ve watched half a dozen times in English. It’s so weird seeing the characters speak Japanese! :rofl:

I happened to listen to the BLCD of https://learnnatively.com/book/bfca09819c/, and was shocked to realise I could actually follow it! I’ve read the series a few times in English, so I know the story pretty well, but understanding the audio and being able to picture the scenes was a nice little confidence boost. :face_holding_back_tears:

I have a modest collection of drama CDs, but I assumed it would be a long time before I’d be able to understand them, so I hadn’t even tried listening to them until now. The combination of a familiar story and pure dialogue made for a relatively easy listen, so I’ll be on the lookout for BLCDs of manga I’ve read on Mandarake (buying new is… expensive :flushed:).

My plan for listening so far has been to work my way through Nihongo con Teppei’s beginner and intermediate podcasts (~1.5k episodes), followed by more beginner/easy podcasts. It’ll be nice to have some easyish native material to add into the mix.

Plans

Catch up with book club reading! I’ve given myself some slack this week since I was so tired, but I don’t want to fall behind too much. :persevere:

5 Likes
90

Any recommendations you have on BLCDs would be awesome; I really need to work on my listening, but I don’t have much as motivation atm.

1 Like
91

September Review

This was a month full of listening practice, apparently! :smile:

2 books
6 TV seasons
8 ratings
5 reviews
35 gradings
48 books contributed
116 videos contributed

742 pages read
22 hours watched

Notable

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4 Likes
92

Finished this week

:memo: includes a written review
:headphones: read along with audiobook
:ear: audiobook only
:underage: adult content; not currently on Natively
:x: format not currently supported on Natively

TV Show

Podcast :x:

Drama CD :x:

Review

I listened to 凛！ ～RIN～, another manga (凛-RIN-! | L24??) I’ve read (several times) in English, and I really enjoyed it! It’s a sweet and pure 初恋 story set around a school archery club (there’s something therapeutic about the thuds of the arrows hitting the targets… and I kept imagining Cupid hitting his marks, the MCs :laughing: ). I particularly liked Katsura’s voice, which was very cute. Only the first volume has been adapted, which is a shame, but like the manga, it can stand on its own as a complete story.

I’ve been using Anki regularly again for the past couple of weeks - I used it for a couple of weeks when I first started learning Japanese several months ago, just to pick up some basic vocabulary so I could dive into extensive reading. I feel like I’m at a place where I’d like to do a little bit of studying, so I’ve started a vocab deck and a DoJG sentences deck. I can get carried away with anki, so I’m gonna try to limit it to <15 minutes a day for now. :nerd_face:

The vocab deck is based on https://learnnatively.com/book/411987162d, ranked by frequency. Whether it’s picked as the next read for the 👨‍❤️‍👨 BL Book Club 🎓 BL University 📚 Next: 妖魔と下僕の契約条件 or not, I’m planning to start reading it before the end of the year, so I want to prep a little first. :smiling_face:

4 Likes
93

October Goals

Experimenting with goal tracking! :notebook:

Type Goal Progress
Read 20 manga volumes ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
Watch 40 TV episodes1 ▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
Listen 400 Teppei eps2 ▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱

1. Includes 6 eps rewatched.
2. Starting at episode 387.

Daily Checklist

Week 3 月 火 水 木 金 土 日
:bar_chart: anki
:orange_book: manga
:desktop_computer: drama
:radio: teppei
Week 2 (9th-15th Oct)
Week 2 月 火 水 木 金 土 日
:bar_chart: anki
:orange_book: manga
:desktop_computer: drama
:radio: teppei
Week 1 (2nd-8th Oct)
Week 1 月 火 水 木 金 土 日
:bar_chart: anki
:orange_book: manga
:desktop_computer: drama
:radio: teppei

Days Listened

Anything audio-only: podcasts, radio dramas, etc.

月 火 水 木 金 土 日
4 Likes
94

Is this one you made yourself, or found somewhere?

1 Like
95

Self-made, so can’t confirm the accuracy! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

1 Like
96

Finished this week

Legend

:memo: includes a written review
:headphones: read along with audiobook
:ear: audiobook only
:studio_microphone: podcast
:cd: drama CD
:speaker: condensed audio
:repeat: re-read/watch/listen
:underage: adult content; not currently on Natively
:x: format not currently supported on Natively

Manga

TV Show

:x: Listening

Review

I just realised it’s been about six months since I started learning Japanese! :open_mouth: (Not that I’ve been particularly diligent about studying… :sweat_smile:) I feel like I’m comfortable with reading stuff up to about L24 (with furigana and/or audio, not ready to leave the training wheels behind yet) - higher levels are still doable, but need more time, attention, and dictionary lookups.

I’m doing about 15 minutes of anki a day, and however much immersion I feel like. :slightly_smiling_face:

I received my latest Mandarake order with a whole bunch of manga and BLCDs! :heart_eyes:

It strikes me as a bit old-fashioned to still be producing CDs since technology has moved on (audible for BLCDs when?) - I’ve had my current laptop for a couple of years and only realised a few months ago that it didn’t have a CD drive, so I had to buy a separate CD player (player! player!)… Like it’s the 90s. :joy:

I read a couple of volumes of 嫌いでいさせて | L23 and https://learnnatively.com/book/eb1d446c58/ while listening to the drama CDs. Some parts were removed, edited or shuffled around, but the audio matched the manga about 85% of the time. It was nice reading and listening concurrently - I’m not used to reading without furigana, so the audio definitely helped. It occurred to me that free talks might be a useful measure of language progression - I didn’t understand much of what the actors were saying, but may listen again in a few months to see if I can pick up more.

I listened to the first track of the 本好きの下剋上 audiobook again (first 6 chapters) to see how much I could follow. Turns out, not much! :rofl: Well, I could follow certain scenes, but it was difficult to pick up the thread of the story again once I dropped it, somewhat like Myne when someone tries to talk to her when she first wakes up: “$!*%^?” internal screaming :crazy_face:

Haven’t done the reading for this week yet, though. I always start off with the best intentions: “I’ll do the reading at the start of the week to stay ahead of the game”, “I’ll just read a few pages a day to make it easy to keep up”… Never works, though! Being behind seems to be the best motivator to make me actually sit down and read. :melting_face:

Listened to so much Teppei this week, including 15 episodes in a row about onomatopoeia, that’s almost an hour of him just making various noises (starting at ep. 514 if anyone’s interested). :sweat_smile:

I’ve been collecting (hoarding? :eyes:) BookWalker’s free manga since I started learning Japanese (mostly 女性向け; the 男性向け covers didn’t exactly convince me of their merit: the male protagonists seem have dreams and ambition, and the women have boobs) - so far I have about 1.2k volumes across 750+ series! And how many have I read? …None. :rofl:

Since I primarily started learning Japanese to read manga, may as well start burning through my ebook stash (and all the freebies on https://www.mangaz.com/)! :laughing:

I made condensed audio of https://learnnatively.com/season/3e7a554799/, but listening to it made me really, really want to rewatch the show… So I did! My revised review is basically “11/10 Ritsu Best”. I may need to watch a third time :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

ezgif-4-e51cbf63b6

8 Likes
97

Man, you’ve only been studying for 6 months? I assumed you’d been studying for much longer than that. :open_mouth: Kudos on all your progress!

How do you decide what BLCDs to pick up? Ones that you’re familiar with previously?

I’ve never tried that before. I wonder how well drama CD matches up with text on average?

3 Likes
98

Thank you! I think studying Korean definitely helped. I distinctly remember feeling like my brain was melting the first time I tried to read a full Korean sentence - even though I had learned the alphabet, the individual words, and the grammar concepts, trying to understand all these new ideas condensed into a three-word sentence felt super overwhelming. :laughing:

I didn’t have that with Japanese, thankfully. Learning one new language probably makes the next one easier, but Japanese and Korean having so much in common has meant it’s been smooth sailing so far. I just went straight into immersion because textbooks and other beginner materials (excluding graded readers) spend so much time explaining things that I already understood from learning Korean.

@bungakushoujo has experienced it from the other direction of learning Korean while having a background in Japanese and mentioned similar benefits.

I scroll through the cheapest CDs and toss any I recognise into my cart. :rofl: I’ve read a lot of BL in English, so if there’s a BLCD of something I’m familiar with, I’ll just pick it up along with the manga (if I don’t have it already). I’ve also bought some random 50-yen ones just because I liked the covers… :sweat_smile:

I’ve saved some more expensive ones in my favourites for now. Although I am enjoying the ones I’ve listened to, when I weigh up whether I want to buy 1 BLCD or 20+ manga for the same price, there’s no contest. :smile:

The changes I noticed were understandable given the different media - one of the manga jumped back and forth between different scenes happening at the same time (which is fine when there’s accompanying visuals, but would be confusing in the audio), and it was edited to become one scene followed by the other. Other times they edited out bits of the narration, but in general, the dialogue was the same in the manga and BLCD (in the ones I’ve read anyway).

From what I’ve seen so far, drama CDs generally seem to be based off manga, LNs, anime, VNs, etc (although I wouldn’t be surprised if there are original drama CDs, too), and the ones I’ve listened to so far have followed the original work pretty closely. I’d imagine some (especially those based on anime) may be completely new stories using the same characters, though… :thinking:

4 Likes
99

can confirm. I only took a semester of Korean at uni and I can’t even read anymore but I distinctly remember everyone struggling with the grammar concepts and me just going…
Tea Good GIF - Tea Good Morning GIFs

(In comparison: I had done Mandarin Chinese the semester before and there was 0 advantage to knowing Japanese. :face_holding_back_tears:)

7 Likes
100

Finished this week

Legend

:memo: includes a written review
:headphones: read along with audiobook
:ear: audiobook only
:studio_microphone: podcast
:cd: BLCD
:speaker: condensed audio
:repeat: re-read/watch/listen
:underage: adult content; not currently on Natively
:x: format not currently supported on Natively

Manga

:x: Listening

Review

It’s been a week of manga and BLCDs it seems…! :smile:

I’ve already surpassed my goals of watching 20 tv episodes and listening to 200 Teppei episodes this month (which were originally 10 and 100 respectively, but I had to bump them up when I reached them too quickly), and I’m just 1 manga volume shy of my goal of 10 volumes. I may have to double all those goals again since we’re only halfway through October! :rofl:

5 Likes