Which web novel did you finish reading?
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Ohhh, this is super interesting. I’ve been hearing ㅇ sounds on certain words and wondering whether I was just imagining things, but now it all makes sense. 千円 for example, 千円札 in particular sounds a lot closer to 생앵札 than to せんえん札 to me.
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It was a BL series! I’ll DM you the title because the cover is bit nsfw so I don’t want to share it on the forums. 
Korean web novel covers go hard…
I’m looking for a new series to start now, so if you’ve heard of any good romance web novels in Korean let me know! 
ㅇㅇ Yup yup! That makes sense! Let’s introduce ㅇ to Japanese! 
I’d say it’s maybe even more like 생옝札 (well the ㅇ kinda makes the 예 glidey sound happen anyways). You know how 円 starts with え but is romanized as Yen with the y? The fact it sounds like that after 千 and 万 must be why. 
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This is slow-burn, but 유언 때문에 죽는 건 잠깐 미뤘습니다 is really good! I’ve been reading the webtoon version, since the web novel is a bit too difficult for me at the moment. There’s a R15 and an R19 version of the novel. It’s a combination of BL + the action fantasy “hunter” subgenre, so it has both larger plot and more exploration of emotions and mental health than you might otherwise see.
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Oh thank you for the recommendation!! I’ll check this out! There are totally different fantasy genres in Korean BL (like hunter) that I’m pretty unfamiliar with, so I’m still figuring it out. It’s funny because I don’t like Japanese fantasy BL that much and prefer slice of life or office romance type things, but I’ve enjoyed Korean SoL/office romance way less (like, why does one of them always have to be a chaebol heir or the most elite guy that ever existed…just no 
), so I am looking forward to branching out into fantasy!
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I have read before that that’s the exact reason why
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November 17 
Dear language diary…
Did a mix of things this weekend according to my mood that seem like they will define my study plans for the next week. It looks like some more Japanese reading and Korean review is in store for the next few days!
Korean Listening: .5 hours (383.04/500 hours)
Vocabulary: キクタン韓国語上級編 Days 21 - 25
Grammar: 口を鍛える韓国語作文 Days 17 - 26
All-Purpose Textbook: 本気で学ぶ韓国語上級 5.2(Transcription)
Dictation: 4色ボールペンを使って学ぶ韓国語パワーアップドリル Lesson 10
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Japanese Literature & History Studies
I finally finished reading Contemporary Japanese Literature! 
It took me around 3 months to read both volumes, so that’s a happy milestone.
Both books were slightly dry, but they provided a comprehensive overview of all the major literary movements from the Meiji restoration up until 1968 when the book was published and were very worthwhile for me. I feel like I definitely have a better understanding and appreciation for certain authors I’ve already read, and there were tons mentioned in the books that I look forward to reading at some point when my Japanese improves further. 
There was a quote at the end that is originally from the book 小説神髄 that I really loved and wanted to share here:
Whoever has ever wished to be a writer in the literary world, should always make the criticism of life his primary purpose, and then write….Fiction is that which makes us see what is difficult to see, clarify what is vague, comprehend within a small book the endless passion and desire of human beings, and makes the readers who trifled with it reflect in a natural way. Among the many pleasures in life, nothing is more interesting than piercing the secrets of human nature, and being able to understand the reason of cause and effect.
Indeed!
Japanese Reading
I haven’t been reading in Japanese so much lately because I’ve been focusing on Korean, but there are a few things I went to finish reading before the end of the year so I’m going to try my best! In order to increase my odds of successfully balancing both languages, I’m going to timebox my reading sessions to 25-30 minutes for now until I finish my current book, 夏の終り | L35?? . This will give me a low barrier of entry to read some harder Japanese stuff (when I’m more in a Korean mood Japanese books that aren’t popcorn fun reads are just like ugh no, and vice versa 
) since 25-30 mins feels like no big deal to commit to.
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Korean Vocabulary
I’ve been so excited about learning vocabulary the last few days and seeing stuff I’ve learned in books or out in the wild that I think I’m starting to creep towards “overdoing it”! 
I blasted through the last few days in キクタン韓国語 and am already nearly through week 4 (which I just started last Thursday). My enthusiasm for learning vocabulary never ends, but my brain power for memorization does, so I’m going to prioritize reviews of week 4 as well as words from prior weeks (especially verbs). Always reminding myself that it’s a marathon and not a race. 
Time to slow down a bit before I have to go and relearn a lot of things - that’ll be demotivating, boring, and take up time.
Korean Grammar
I am still having so much fun with 口を鍛える韓国語作文! I went through all the lessons up until day 26 and it’s been a fabulous grammar review so far. There hasn’t been too much that I wasn’t already familiar with already, but I flipped ahead to the next few days and saw some stuff upcoming that I’m not really familiar with at all. HYPE!!! New grammar dropping soon! 
The sentences are still hilarious btw. Today I came across this one:
旦那に内緒で、ヒョンビンさんと夢で会ったりします。/ 남편 몰래 현빈씨와 꿈에서 만나고는 합니다.
Like. Girl, same?!? I told my husband about this sentence (he is also a Hyun Bin fan) and he was laughing too.
They all have just the right amount of humor to be memorable. 
10/10 resource, going to remember the construction for 〜たっりします forever. If you’re learning Korean and Japanese at the same time this book is super solid for learning colloquial constructions in both directions.
Well, that’s all for today. I’m off to go meet Hyun Bin in my dreams or something. ㅋㅋㅋ
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I have also, so I did a bit of googling.
Which seems to place things down to there being different え’s in old Japanese, (and portuguese spelling perhaps)
The footnotes point to this 橋本進吉 国語音韻の変遷 linguistics paper
Too complicated to me to understand much! but I believe it’s this bit that’s relevant about the え’s
第一は、「え」の仮名に相当するものであって、これにあたる万葉仮名には、
衣依愛哀埃……………（甲） 延曳叡要……………（乙）
のような文字を用いているが、奈良朝においては、これらは無差別に用いられているのではなく、「
得 」「可愛 」「榎 」「荏 」などの諸語の「え」には衣依愛哀埃など（甲）類に属する文字を用いて延曳叡要などを用いず、「兄 」「枝 」「江 」「笛 」「越え」「見え」「栄え」「崩 え」等の「え」には延曳叡要など（乙）類の文字を用いて（甲）類の文字を用いることなく、その間の区別が厳重である。すなわち、当時は、この二類は、それぞれ別の音を表わしていたのであるが、後世の仮名にはこれを混じて、同じ「え」で表わすようになったものと認められる。
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None of the characters 円、￥ 、圓 show up in the paper you linked tho, so it seems more like a distortion from an English missionary who had never been to Japan, as opposed to "this particular word sounded different in older Japanese)…
By the middle of the 18th century, /e/ and /we/ came to be pronounced [e] as in modern Japanese, although some regions retain the [je] pronunciation. Walter Henry Medhurst, who had neither been to Japan nor met any Japanese people, having consulted mainly a Japanese-Dutch dictionary, spelled some "e"s as “ye” in his An English and Japanese, and Japanese and English Vocabulary (1830).
I could be jumping to conclusions, but that makes it sound like he was writing it out with convenience rather than precision in mind.
In any case interesting paper excerpt, tho it’s a bit over my head, particularly just starting in the middle like that (well it would probably be a bit over my head anyway )
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I guess I read the bit preceding to mean that
Portuguese missionaries had spelled as as “ye” based on the [je] sound. Which then trickled down into English dictionaries (despite the fact that at the time the English dictionaries were written the [je] sound was no longer in common use).
You’re right, still arguably down to the English missionary’s mistake, but that mistake doesn’t sound entirely at random, rather based on an earlier sound that was used for modern え.
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that’s such a lovely quote, I really gotta pick up these books
Not quite sure what the discussion about 円 is about here, is it about the actual sound in 万円 sounding more like a “yen” or is it about the history of the english writing it as “yen”?
For the pronunciation stuff, the sound change that’s happening isn’t actually in the えん, which might be why you’re struggling to find things on it. It’s the ん in the preceding word being changed to be closer to the place of articulation of the following sound, in this case any time you have an ん followed by a vowel, it actually becomes a nasal vowel [ɰ̃]. It’s part of a category of sound changes called assimilation, or 同化 in japanese. There may have been some historical way to represent this orthographically, but the sound absolutely still exists in modern japanese.
Can happen across word boundaries like in 万円, but also within words like 単位. If you listen to someone use either of them in normal speech, you will never hear their tongue actually touch the roof of their mouth to articulate an /n/ unless they are doing very careful speech
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English writing
Cool to know the term for it
Ahhh so that’s how you make the sound!
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Fun discussion about the English spelling of “yen” here.
I actually got curious about it based on everyone’s replies and googled it in Japanese and found conflicting results?!
It appears many websites with info in listicle form about this topic (like this one) mostly have these three theories and are copy and pasting from each other:
① The number one reason according to the Bank of Japan apparently?
「EN」という表記だと、外国人が発音すると、「えん」よりも「いん」という発音に近くなってしまうために、「EN」に「Y」をつけ、「YEN」にしたというものです。
Umm…is this true? And which 外国人？ All of the ones on earth who collectively speak the language 外国語？ Weird statement for the Bank of Japan to make…
② Number two
オランダ語、スペイン語、フランス語に「EN」という単語が存在したため、別のことを表している単語との区別のため、というものです。
Maybe? But seems unlikely? lol
③ Number three
1円銀貨を東アジアに流通させるためというものです。中国南部では、もともと圓が「YEN」と言われていたため、そこで使われていたメキシコ・ドルの代わりに流通させようと考えられました。
Naming it yen to match yuan kinda makes sense, but was the yuan always the currency in China?
I also found a quora post that matched what @urikk2npg shared:
https://jp.quora.com/なぜ-円-は英語で-EN-ではなく-YEN-なのですか
And a chiebukuro response:
yen [1875.＜日本語「円」; en でなく yen となったのは「ゑん」を表すほか,当時 Yedo(江戸), Yezo(蝦夷)のように「え」を ye で綴(つづ)る習慣があったため] ◇日本語から借用された英語 ランダムハウス英語辞典からの引用
It is funny that there is so much conflicting info about this, but I think I would believe the “え” was written as ye theory because it also matches with what urikk2npg shared.
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Gonna drop my Swedish plans for next year and pick up the universal 外国語 instead 
Seems very useful
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Isn’t that just Esperanto
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It reminds me when characters in video games speak the language “common”. I wanna learn common! It seems useful!
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I can’t see myself ever seriously learning a conlang I need more history and culture and jungle traps of weirdness to fall into
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Oh me neither, lol, but that technically was (is?) the goal of Esperanto.
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Replying way late because I get stressed out about writing replies on my phone
Ooh. I don’t think I’m quite ready for level 42+ at this point, but I’ll stick it on my 憧れ pile… Those other titles sound very interesting too! I did like the 推し book , so I might check out their other book too! I kind of want to see if it will get picked up by the nonfiction book club, but I also want to go ahead and make that my “new level” book for bingo… but maybe that’s not a good idea for an audiobook
Absolutely! I love Japanese specifically as a language, but I also love the process of language learning and having fun experimenting with different ways to acquire language. It gives me new ideas and renews my own motivation to see other people having fun with it too!
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November 24
Dear language diary…
Life can be unexpected. Or at least, the past week was! Some things came up that completely messed up my study plans and routine. It’s ok, though! The nice thing is that I’m studying for fun and don’t have any tests or deadlines looming ahead of me this year so there are zero consequences for not doing what I had planned…except my sadness for not being able to spend fun time with my hobby! 
About planning, though…the things that came up this week and messed up my schedule were completely unavoidable. However, they have me thinking about the short to mid-term future and wanting to do some light planning so I can have some good structure and get some nice study wins while still enjoying time with my family during the holiday season. The dopamine from those wins keeps me going, but sometimes when life gets busy you need to plan your for next fix.
So! I’ve formulated a bit of a schedule for my vocabulary acquisition efforts using キクタン韓国語上級編 until end of year:
Right now, I have finished up to the end of week 4 out of 10 and was planning to use the last week to do a sloppy review of all the content, which didn’t really happen. When I picked the book back up today and was flipping through it, it occurred to me that if I do one more week and get to the end of week 5, I’ll be halfway through the book!! After taking a moment to pat myself on the back for already almost being halfway through the book, I also took a moment to do some of the fill in the blank activities at the end of each chapter and promptly got around half of them WRONG 
(past me was certainly onto something when I decided to take a week to review the material)!
Now - I really still need to take some time to review the past material, but I think if I tried to take another review week after this past “failed” one, I would start to get bored and unmotivated from doing the same thing for so long. Plus, I really like the idea of being halfway done with the book (who CARES if I haven’t actually committed half of the material to my long term memory yet?! I want to be halfway done!). So, I’m going to proceed as usual and learn the material from week 5 for the next week, and once December starts I will use the entire month to go back and review weeks 1-5 in depth focusing exclusively on the example sentences since they cover things like figures of speech, set phrases and the nuances of the words (versus just the dictionary meaning which I’ve focused on up until now). Doing some shadowing, chorusing, and review should be a great way to really drill everything! I also own the physical version which comes with one of those clear red sheets that cover up the answers, so I will use that to quiz myself while channeling my inner Japanese high school student studying for entrance exams at McDonald’s - except I’ll be in my living room.
This will also give me time to catch up to where I am in the book with my new cards in Anki! It’s gonna be great! Great!! Love this plan.
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Anki & General Textbook Studies
Other stuff!
I’ve been proceeding very slowly with 本気で学ぶ韓国語, but I’m still sticking with it! I’ve now done reading, listening, dictation and shadowing with sections 1 and 2 of chapter 5 and today I looked at the entire vocab list again and did a sweep for words I still don’t feel confident with. I ended up writing down 28 words which I turned into Anki cards right away (by hand - typing in Korean is kind of weird so it’s good to practice…or at least I’m telling myself that to excuse the horrible inefficiency). I’m quite happy with that result since sections 1 and 2 together had well over 100 vocabulary words and I was worried about whether or not it made sense to make Anki cards for all of them. By engaging with the material in a couple different ways I managed to internalize the majority of the words and identify the ones that Anki could really help me best one instead! From the words I am not putting into Anki, there could be some that I forget, but I’ve now spent over 3 weeks on this chapter and in some cases haven’t looked at the vocabulary words in 1-2 weeks, so there has been some element of natural SRS going on already. I think I’m ready to turn those words free in my brain and wait to encounter them in native materials.
Textbooks in General?
As I mentioned, I have now spent almost one month on just one chapter which I wanted to touch upon since 1) it’s kind of crazy and 2) there has been lots of great discussion on the forums lately about how to use textbooks.
I don’t think I’ve ever used a textbook so slowly before (I certainly did not go so slowly with the intermediate version of 本気で学ぶ韓国語), but I am finding a lot of benefit from taking a slow approach with this one. I’ve mentioned it before, but each chapter has hundreds of vocabulary words and the reading passages are quite difficult, so it isn’t the type of book that I can speed through. The format and audio make it great for creating my own study session based on my mood, though (it’s like one of those choose your own adventure books but the study session version!), so it’s a great general supplement to all the other more specific textbooks I use and the 5-10 hours of reading in Korean that I do behind the scenes every week.
I personally can’t get the same targeted listening or reading practice just by extensively interacting with native content at an upper intermediate/lower advanced level like I am right now (and I know myself well since I’ve been through this in Japanese and German before - my Japanese is at a point where I can turn anything into my own study material now, but I only got to this point by using structured materials as a stepping stone), so being able to do this kind of training is the biggest benefit of textbooks for an upper intermediate learner in my opinion. Becoming advanced is all about filling in the gaps over and over again. It’s like doing a puzzle with thousands of pieces. Or like running an ultra marathon! Or like climbing a mountain starting in flip flops and shorts and you progressively have to find better clothes and gear (or make your own) the higher you get or you will get stuck/die? Or…ok I will stop. Does anyone else have an awful analogy to share? I’d love to hear haha!
Ok, I think that is enough pontification for one post. Let’s studying and having a fulfilling week!! 
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