I will! It’ll probably be next week sometime… I’m anticipating it like a kid waiting for Christmas! 
Oh you wonderful person! 
3 Likes
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
Finished this week
includes a written review
read along with audiobook
audiobook only
adult content; not currently on Natively
format not currently supported on Natively
TV Show
Podcast
- Nihongo con Teppei 301-350
Drama CD
- 嫌いでいさせて
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… 
I watched ジャックフロスト S1 | L23, 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 | L34 and ４月の東京は… | L30 being the others). 
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!
I happened to listen to the BLCD of 嫌いでいさせて | L22, 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.
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 
).
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. 
5 Likes
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
September Review
This was a month full of listening practice, apparently! 
2 books
6 TV seasons
8 ratings
5 reviews
35 gradings
48 books contributed
116 videos contributed
742 pages read
22 hours watched
Notable
- Listened to 386 Nihongo con Teppei podcast episodes
- Listened to 2 BLCDs (嫌いでいさせて and 凛！ ～RIN～)
4 Likes
Finished this week
TV Show
Podcast
- Nihongo con Teppei eps 351-387
Drama CD
Review
I listened to 凛！ ～RIN～, another manga (凛-RIN-! (series) | 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 
). 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. 
The vocab deck is based on 美しい彼 | L30, ranked by frequency. Whether it’s picked as the next read for the 👨❤️👨 BL Book Club | Reading: 今日からマ王! or not, I’m planning to start reading it before the end of the year, so I want to prep a little first. 
4 Likes
October Goals
Experimenting with goal tracking! 
| 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 anki |
|||||||
 manga |
|||||||
 drama |
|||||||
 teppei |
Week 2 (9th-15th Oct)
| Week 2 | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| anki |
|||||||
| manga |
|||||||
| drama |
|||||||
| teppei |
Week 1 (2nd-8th Oct)
| Week 1 | 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| anki |
|||||||
| manga |
|||||||
| drama |
|||||||
| teppei |
Days Listened
Anything audio-only: podcasts, radio dramas, etc.
| 月 | 火 | 水 | 木 | 金 | 土 | 日 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4 Likes
Is this one you made yourself, or found somewhere?
1 Like
Self-made, so can’t confirm the accuracy! 
1 Like
Finished this week
Legend
podcast
drama CD
condensed audio
re-read/watch/listen
Manga
TV Show
Listening
- Nihongo con Teppei eps 388-533
- 嫌いでいさせて 1
- 嫌いでいさせて 2
- ジャックフロスト S1 | L23
- ただいま、おかえり
Review
I just realised it’s been about six months since I started learning Japanese! 
(Not that I’ve been particularly diligent about studying… ) 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. 
I received my latest Mandarake order with a whole bunch of manga and BLCDs! 
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. 
I read a couple of volumes of 嫌いでいさせて (series) | L22 and ただいま、おかえり | L18 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! 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 
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. 
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).
I’ve been collecting (hoarding? 
) 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.
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/)!
I made condensed audio of ジャックフロスト S1 | L23, 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
8 Likes
Man, you’ve only been studying for 6 months? I assumed you’d been studying for much longer than that. 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
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.
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. 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…
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.
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… 
4 Likes
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…
(In comparison: I had done Mandarin Chinese the semester before and there was 0 advantage to knowing Japanese. )
7 Likes
Finished this week
Legend
Manga
Listening
- Nihongo con Teppei eps 534-614
- Sakura Tips eps 1-13
- 夜明けの唄 1
- ひだまりが聴こえる
- ひだまりが聴こえる-幸福論-
Review
It’s been a week of manga and BLCDs it seems…!
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!
5 Likes
Finished this week
Legend
Manga
- ハニー! ハニー! マリーミー! | L21
- ケサランなにがしとスープ屋さん 1 | L19
- チーズスイートホーム (series) | L15 vol. 9-12
- スーと鯛ちゃん (series) | L11 vol. 3-5
TV Show
Listening
- Nihongo con Teppei eps 615-623
Review
Lots of manga this week - 9 volumes finished, 12 partially read, and many more from my BW stash dipped into…
7 Likes
October Review
I’m going to try doing monthly reviews rather than weekly, posting my goals at the start of the month and updating my list with items as I finish them. Although I liked my checklists, I fell off using them as the month progressed; I’ll keep using the goal progress bars, though.
I achieved my goals of reading 20 manga volumes and watching 40 TV episodes a month, but stopped listening to Teppei towards the end of the month (distracted by non-Japanese content ), so only reached 235/400 episodes. I should point out, though, that my original goals were 10 manga / 10 TV eps / 100 Teppei eps, but I reached those easily and ended up revising them… So I surpassed my original Teppei goal, at least.
Finished
Legend
Manga
- ふしぎねこのきゅーちゃん | L15
- 嫌いでいさせて (series) | L22 vol. 1-2
- ただいま、おかえり | L18
- 夜明けの唄 1 | L23
- 魔法少年なつき×らびっツ 1 | L24
- ひだまりが聴こえる (series) | L22 vol. 1-2
- ハニー! ハニー! マリーミー! | L21
- ケサランなにがしとスープ屋さん 1 | L19
- チーズスイートホーム (series) | L15 vol. 8-12
- スーと鯛ちゃん (series) | L11 vol. 3-5
- ふくふくふにゃ~ん (series) | L10 vol. 1-6
TV Show
Listening
- Nihongo con Teppei eps 388-623
- Sakura Tips eps 1-13
- ジャックフロスト S1 | L23
Stats
24 books
3 TV seasons (+1 rewatch)
27 ratings
12 reviews
635 gradings
642 books contributed
1 video contributed
4950 pages read
18 hours watched
20 hours listened*
* approximately, based on podcasts + BLCDs + condensed audio.
5 Likes
Niceee, always impressed by how much immersion you get in when you update your logs! 
3 Likes
November Goals
| Type | Goal | Progress |
|---|---|---|
| Read | 20 manga volumes | ▰▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ |
| Watch | 20 TV episodes | ▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ |
| Listen | 200 Teppei eps | ▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱▱ |
Finished
Legend
Children’s
Graded Reader
Manga
TV series
Listening
- Nihongo con Teppei eps 624-
3 Likes
November was a very quiet month for me language-wise, as I was focused on other things, but hopefully everything returns to normal in December.
Saying that, I’ve been having fun with Week 3 of 소리를 보는 소년 👁👂 Korean Fiction Book Club 🇰🇷, both the story and researching various historical topics that crop up, as is obvious from my very long posts!
I’ve merged my Korean and Japanese logs to make it easier to keep track, and in anticipation of dabbling in other languages…
So that’s my disappointingly short update. 
4 Likes
Oh, what do you have in the pipeline? Something new, or something you’ve been learning for a while?
1 Like
