Earwen's Japanese study log (no more German edition)

earwen · September 17, 2025, 1:08pm

I decided to test it out and it actually works for the latest version for me. One thing that annoys me is that I can’t mass mark kanji as known, I mean I see the option but it doesn’t seem to work. That’s kind of annoying but not the end of the world. Card creation works and I like that it lets you see vocab from your decks. This seems really useful when I start mining again. Thanks.

I think the only feature I would want to add (besides mass marking known kanji…which seems to be available technically just not working for me) is noting down phonetic components on the cards as well.

edit: after some fiddling I managed to get it to mass-mark as known I had to delete the generated deck and mark them again for it to take. Otherwise it just kept the already created cards as unknown (which meant a lot of really basic kanji…)
For now I set up to level 20 of wk to known…which is a bit low (I’m at level 42) but I figured I’d rather review those once than wrongly mark as known a few. Below 20 is the really common stuff so I’m not concerned about that.

earwen · September 18, 2025, 1:31pm

I have been trying out migaku kanji god. My mined deck is a bit of a mess so I decided to test it with a jiten deck.
Downloaded マリア様がみてる3 deck since I want to get back to it soon. Although it filtered out any words I have set as “known” in jiten still a lot of words I do know. Which is both good and bad. It’s obviously good I know more words but I need to find a way to add those back lol. I thought of putting known words in a seperate deck so I can upload it back to jiten but this occured to me only after deleting a bunch. I guess I’ll just suspend them so I can filter them out later and make a list.
Anyway I had some confusion in the migaku settings but managed to get it to work.

Positives over wanikani:
glad I didn’t mark everything as known bc even though I have no trouble with 優 it’s a good example of differences

vs

I like the way it breaks down kanji better than wanikani does. Using 優 as example the latter is much more useful to me
I also like that it shows what kanji it is a primitive in something that’s not in wk at all.
I like that it pulls vocab from your decks if available
The general card set up is nicer and more compact. Most important content can be seen without scrolling down.
the order of kanji in wk is sometimes odd. going by the example above again 憂 is a level 55 kanji whereas 優 is level 23. It makes sense as the latter is more common but I’d prefer it the other way around since I intend to learn both sooner or later anyway.
the cards are just really well made i can go with one click to the example words, it opens in anki browser if the word is in my decks or jisho if its not.

negatives:

the vocab isn’t integrated by nature and I don’t love having separate decks.
Since it’s generated from another deck it can mean some kanji can have no examples. In the example I shared 優 first showed me 憂 which I also had in my mined deck but there could be a scenario where I didn’t encounter 憂 on it’s own before. It still has example words but they’re not from my decks. I don’t think this is a big deal though since…I feel like it’s likely it will be in my mined deck anyway.
To get the most out of the vocab search function which i like a lot I have to not delete old decks. I like deleting stuff I’m done with it’s satisfying I guess I might move the cards to my mined deck and delete jiten deck when I amdone.

overall definitely more positives than negatives. Though this is just first impressions time will tell how useful it actually will feel in the long run. For now I plan to finish level 42 of anki (almost done anway) and then switch focus to this. We’ll see how well it works

shitsurei · September 18, 2025, 2:52pm

I’m pretty sure they (at least originally) came from Kanji Damage, or at least are drawing very heavily from that. Mr. T (and a lot of other, even less relevant American celebrities) feature prominently in KD.

earwen · September 19, 2025, 1:17pm

Another quick update: I am having so much more fun with migaku kanji god plus jiten (and my mined deck) that I decieded to just quit wk. It might just be that its the shiny new thing but even so I’ll take it, it makes me actually want to go through my flashcards instead of just being a chore.

earwen · September 22, 2025, 8:04am

changed my kanji learning method and gave up on wk. The last 2 days I was focusing on fine tuning this over reading or anything else. Also reset my mining deck completely to go over each card again, not sure if that was a good idea or not.
かがみの孤城 finished. reading marimite3 now while also doing the jiten deck. I am mostly just doing this deck to test, I don’t think it’d generally be worth it to do this for each book I read. Especially because im marimites case the difficulty for me is more the sentence structures than vocab (though having less lookups does help with focusing on that). I can safely say this is the easiest time I had with marimite so far but I’m not sure how much of that is the jiten deck vs just general progress. I’m around 10 percent into the deck and it’s not sorted chronologically so I am not willing to give it too much credit.
also reading ぐでたまの『資本論』お金と上手につきあう人生哲学 which is cute but I think the difficulty is way over 27, provided you actually want to read the direct quotes included. Which granted isn’t strictly necessary since the point is to simplify and cute-fy it? idk
mostly focused on ふゆから、くるる this week. Enjoying it but hard to quantify how much progress I made. Still not done with the demo section. This is a longass demo…
Watched some どれみ. And by some I mean just 2-3 eps.
Read a bit of 百合オタに百合はご法度 but was not a huge focus

Since I am going to be focusing more on mining from now on I wonder if its worth to try game sentence miner to use with vns. Mostly unsure because most people seem to use it with texthooker and I’m unsure how well it works with ocr. I probably won’t try this right away though since I feel like I wasted a bunch of my time already trying to set up the migaku extension. It was eventually worth it but don’t want to go through a similiar process again.

stats

jp:
~~wk deck: 42/45~~

One issue with my new kanji method is that it is not as easy to note down linear progress. I guess I can attach a stats screen instead.

100+ new kanji are kind of a lot since I used to do 30 at most but around half of these are kanji I know more or less but didn’t want to completely mark as known. It still might be overkill though we will see.

manga: 83/100
books: 10+1/12
vns: 1/2

de:
books: 7 /12

暁のルナ · September 22, 2025, 12:41pm

Hope it works out well for you

Ooh excited!! Feel free to post thoughts in マリア様がみてる & お釈迦様もみてる Home Thread (I guess you know that already)

I think I did the jpdb decks for the first 8 or 9 (except vol 1), but in a rather weird way of just speed running through the decks chronologically (and then Abandoning failed and due, if the count for too high for the next book). It felt worth it for me, since the reduced lookups meant I could focus on sentence structure more. I’m guessing around 8-9 I either got my Kindle, or just became so absorbed that I couldn’t put them down long enough to do vocab reviews anymore

That’s awesome, and my bet is the latter

I feel a little bad I’ve been neglecting this. Maybe I should try for a chapter a week, since that’s small enough that it won’t exacerbate my “too many things” mini-crises . It would help if we had reread functionality here, cuz then I could get the dopamine rush of seeing the bar go up… I mean I guess I could set to reading, and reset the current page, hmm

earwen · September 22, 2025, 3:38pm

This is probably more doable than doing it “properly” with reviews and such.
Tbh I might end up continuing marimite from the anime after 3, even though I prefer the novels, I don’t think I will realistically read all of them at my current speed. I might just check out the arcs of the story that I think is interesting after watching the anime, and then continue the unadapted portions.

TBH me too, I really am enjoying it when I read but rarely end up reaching for it. Also haven’t posted in the thread at all (I read 2 chapters of vol2).

I think this is the biggest flaw of the site as it is currently. In a language learning environment rereading stuff is common and should have been accounted for before a lot of other features imo.
The way I would deal with it right now is remove the book completely and readd it as if reading for the first time. Not ideal but I’d rather see my number go up for this year than have prev years data be correct.

暁のルナ · September 22, 2025, 4:01pm

Yeah, it’s basically cramming, and it worked well for getting through the books. Some of the vocab I retained afterwards, some of it not… Which would be the case for anything. And of course there’s plenty of repeat vocab

That’s fair. I finished the entire anime before I even touched the novels, and it’s overall a very excellent adaptation imo.

Cool plan. Fwiw there’s a scene in S2 (I forget which ep) involving Yuuki (Yumi’s brother) that the anime handled very terribly. It’s in Book 5, and I was so relieved when I read the novel version. I don’t remember having any real issues besides that. (Well S4 is fairly condensed, but some of what it skips are side stories anyway. It’s my fav season regardless)

Fwiw if you post, it will probably motivate me more to read it

It’s better to just erase the dates, reset the page count, and set it to reading. If you remove the book you’ll lose your previous data, and any reviews (but not gradings). Whereas this way you’ll get the new dates & progress, but still have the old data.

That said, this is having technical issues rn… So I had to do it in 2 phases:

Change status to Reading & change date
Go to Dashboard > Update > set current pg to 0

Anyway I’m gonna go report that issue now

mic · September 22, 2025, 4:35pm

I would edit the page number and make it double the number of pages of the book.

暁のルナ · September 22, 2025, 4:45pm

Wouldn’t your progress percentage (shown on the dashboard) be off then? I guess you could do it at the end, to avoid that

mic · September 22, 2025, 4:47pm

It would start at 50% and run up to 100 again, I‘d expect.

earwen · September 25, 2025, 9:28am

I ended up trying to set this up after all. Iniality I had some issues with region (I had to change the date time format to get it working) and for some reason installing and uninstalling it multiple times to try to fix it (which didn’t work) broke owocr instead?? I did manage to fix both but it was a bit of a pain.

After that issue though it was smooth sailing and worth it. I use it together with JL still.

The ocr function works better than owocr, though it supports it and you can use it together something abt the default configuration in gsm just works much faster. Also much less repeat lines. I didn’t test the texthooker bc I have no interest in it.
You don’t have to mess with commandline since it has an ui tool. While I’m comfortable using cmd it’s just more convenient to not do that. I just launch gsm and jl (and jl is optional you can just use the browser it’s just my preference), then I attach the game and I don’t have to mess with it again.
Card creation is easy and it’s really nice to have audio and context image. It will make the file sizes bigger in the long run…which is a bit annoying since I sync across 3 devices but worth it imo.
The stats page is really nice. It gives you a lot of statistic, kanji you have encountered, whether that kanji is in your anki collection, ability to set goals, also lets you search across every single line you came across. Honestly really motivating to see all these stats. I only have played 1 session (abt 1 hour).

screenshot_2025-09-25_12-21-231247×6011 346 KB

The goal stats above are the default and a bit unrealistic for me maybe if reading vns is all I did and I didn’t read novels or manga. I haven’t decided what to change it to though.

tl;dr: if you’re interested in mining from games at all, I highly recommend it. Even if you dont mine but just want to use it for lookups, or even just for stats, it’s a nice tool.

earwen · September 27, 2025, 11:55am

Some Changes

I’ve been having a period of extreme apathy towards most things I pick up again so I am focusing on setting up tools and going through my anki decks, it is easier to focus on such “mechanical” or routine things. This isn’t just about japanese either, I decided to stop doing a lot of the stuff I am in the middle of that started feeling like a chore.

マリア様がみてる 3 → this would be second time I am pausing it so I decided just to drop it. Clearly it is not grabbing me for whatever reason. I will continue from the anime.
百合オタ vol2 → I still think it is really good but I am not in the mood for fluffy cute yuri. I think it’d be a disservice to the series to force myself to continue right now, on hold.
any sort of anime goal → I still intend to finish my current watches (marimite, madoka movies, skip and loafer, doremi) but they’re not calling to me right now. Maybe I will pick up something more fast paced? Honestly what I really want to watch is the new chainsawman movie but that’s not an option.
monthly goals / tracking what I read → I can check end of year stats without tracking them so religiously. Goals and stats are useful when I need structure but I need the opposite of it right now.
trying to aim for a minimum amount of japanese a day → I generally end up doing more than 1 hour lately which is good but I really want to give myself allowance to do whatever for a while

Continuing:
fuyukuru → although I probably am not enjoying it as much as I would if I wasn’t in such a weird mood, I still like it enouhg to keep going.
ぐでたまの『資本論』 → I kind of stopped this to focus on marimite but just doing one page or two at a time with focusing on economy vocab might be fun.
social media limits → In fact I am making them stricter lol.

On another topic…

visual novels I love them as a medium and now that I setup gsm they feel like such a good way to mine new words. I also love having all the stats to look at and see progress.

Yesterday Fuyukuru was added to jiten. I had thought about requesting it but didn’t as it wouldn’t be much of use to me at this point. However, seeing its actual stats is interesting.

I have 91 percent coverage which is higher than most vns added, especially if you ignore the super short ones. This explains why the difficulty feels just right. There are occasional spikes but never for long and never incomprehensible. The difficulty is “moderate” but not sure how that is calculated. I don’t trust it too much.

Anyway this tells me to continue to aim for this sweet spot. I’ve been looking through jiten to see if there are any other vns that I am already interested in that are around 90 percent coverage. Which gave me…

a bunch of stuff I read in english already that I don’t care enough to replay (various danganronpa, yurirei (kindred spirits on the roof), house of fata morgana)
a short indie vn I already played that I would like to replay but its official site seems to be down (Natsu no Hi no Resonance)
Stuff that’s waaaay too long and would take me a year at my current speed ( Sakura, Moyu., 9-nine series, muvluv series*)
- I promised a friend we’d go through muv-luv together soon and it might get voted as a group read for our english vn club next time so I was planning to read it in english to be able to keep up, but I might try it in jp I suppose. Either way going to wait on it.
Harumade Kururu (I like fuyukuru but idk if I can handle all the sexual content and jokes but straight this time quite so soon after it)
several games that might be interesting but no voice option makes them not a priority ( 滅び朽ちる世界に追憶の花束を, 舐犢の玉座)

Which leaves me with…

hanahira, a short cutesy yuri that is louded as the easiest jp vn and that people who don’t love cutesy yuri play just for the difficulty level and end up hating
月影のシミュラクル mystery
Stargazer-少女は星の夢を見る- another low rated yuri vn that seems sad instead of fluffy

Anyway, I am not close to done with fuyukuru just thinking out loud / planning ahead to see if I can build any excitement for stuff. It’s also likely my coverage will change when I am done since I update jiten weekly with all mature cards.

novels I think vns and novels occupy more or less the same amount of energy level required for me. I was looking through my library and not feeling a pull towards anything, and thought to myself I wish uketsu had a new book as his stuff is dumb-fun and simple, but also intriguing enough that I want to keep going. Reading his stuff is great for my jp self esteem since I finish it so quick lol. Only to look up and see he does have a new book coming by the end of next month. A while away but I look forward to it. 変な地図

anyway just a bunch of rambling because I don’t feel like doing anything. hope I’ll be out of this mood soon.

暁のルナ · September 27, 2025, 11:43pm

I also haven’t been lately… It’s a weird feeling lol. I am still enjoying 今日はまだフツーになれない【イラスト特典付】 | L27 though

Impressive! I only have 78.8% (70.5% unique)

I always feel bad when this happens to things I’m reading/watching

多分あたしの好みやないけど、凄いわ！

Looks interesting

Good luck with the mood stuff. Hope it passes soon enough.

earwen · September 29, 2025, 8:19am

Considering the amount of known words you shared before I’m really surprised by this difference! It’s interesting you have a much higher unique stat though I guess a lot of our known words don’t overlap?? Interesting to think what this could be. Reading it right now, I’m not sure what that could be I don’t feel like there is a lot of specialized vocab

Anyway weekly post: my last post basically says what I am doing more or less. I am mostly focused on fuyukuru. I really enjoyed the last session with it and actually had to force myself to stop. I also ended up skimming a bit not because I was bored but because I wanted to see what was going to happen a bad habbit I have in all languages. It did skew my reading speed statistic a bit but it will even out in the long run so idc.

Anyway I somehow stopped at a really nice and clean number of sentences by accident so I wanted to share

Actually I wonder what a “normal” reading speed is

I don’t think I can reasonably compare my english reading speed to jp since the information density per character is very different. I searched (in jp) and got 400～600文字 per minute. So on the lower end 24000 per hour. its nice to think I could theoretically double my speed. One day. I’m not actually aiming for a higher speed right now though I think I am still at the stage where it will naturally grow as my other skills do, particularly vocab. Hard to focus on speed when I have to look up a word or two every few sentences.

anki stuff is going fine but I think I will have to set a daily limit of how many words I can mine because I don’t like having a big backlog of words.
kanji stats

I tried some manga but nothing super grabbed me rn which is fine. I did watch a bit more of madoka though which I enjoyed.

暁のルナ · September 29, 2025, 3:50pm

I think part of it was that I hadn’t imported blacklisted words from jpdb, and that includes a lot of common particles/basic words that were auto-blacklisted. Just imported my whole blacklist, so revised, it’s: 93.6% Coverage (73.2% Unique)… which I guess is more in line with what we’d expect. Like you said, interesting that the Unique stat is so different, since our other percentage is really close. If I import the deck into jpdb, it’s 93.3% (67.6% Unique)… Oddly, if I transfer only Unknown words from Jiten to jpdb, I get 1694 Unique New words - which jpdb thinks I know 384 of already

A lot of the unknown words are pretty interesting. Unsurprisingly, a good number are sex or anatomy related

Glad you’re enjoying it more now. I usually only skim if I’m bored, but my reading speed definitely increases a bit if I’m excited… possibly with a partial comprehension loss (from going too fast)… so, different but similar. Is there anything particular that changed about Fuyukuru btwn when you started vs now that’s making it more enjoyable?

earwen · October 3, 2025, 2:19pm

that makes much more sense now

A bit outdated now that we talked about it more on the thread but, I would say I did enjoy it from the start, but the section I was talking about had a lot of the reveals piled up so it was especially intriguing Right now, I am back to enjoying it but not as much in a frantically “what happens next” sort of way.

earwen · October 5, 2025, 11:01pm

Anki has been going ok. My workflow is do all reviews of my mined deck, then by default I have 10 new cards per day which I might increase or decrease depending on how I’m feeling. If the new cards have new kanji I want to learn I will create migaku cards for it. If I decide I don’t want to learn it yet I just bury the card until next time it shows up (which isn’t necessarily the next day as newly added cards have priority).
I limit myself to about 10-15 new mined cards per day. Currently I have about 30 cards backlog which is ok.
For the kanji deck I do it within the day whenever I feel like it.
Kanji stats for the week

About 40 new kanji this. Though tbf some of them are kanji I am familiar with from wk but wanted to still keep in circulation.
Something I’m considering is move some vocab card from wk deck to my mined deck in cases where I feel like a specific kanji needs more examples. Since I am mining I don’t necessarily see the same kanji in a lot of different contexts/words. So it might help with reinforcement.

Non anki stuff: Finished fuyukuru, this was most of my weekly jp time. Enjoyed it. I will post in the thread at some point. I decided my next vn will be Amaranto since I am in the mood for something like that, it’s relatively short, and has voice acting despite being very indie. I started but didn’t get too far in.

I also am watching Marimite anime (2 eps left). Maybe I am in that fabled anime-watching mood.
Oh that reminds me, I should do a small check in for last months goals.

goal updates

finish level 42 of wk done though dropped wk afterwards
Book clubs…
- finish かがみの孤城
- 百合オタに百合はご法度です! ? → finish vol2-3 read about half of vol2 and decided to pause because I wasn’t in the mood for it. I still don’t think I am in the mood for fluffy yuri comedy.
- finish a route of memories off (and then decide if I want to read more) I read the common route and skimmed through Yue’s. Dropped. However I did finish a whole other vn so I can’t say I’m upset about this.
- (not natively) also running my own manga book club for my friends though it’s a reread for me. This might not work out for reasons unrelated to me however. Let’s say this is an “unofficial” goal. wen’t better than expected. 2 people (not including me) have stuck with it and we are done with first volume. We will go on for 2nd volume. Though admittedly I am a bit behind (but it’s a reread so its ok…)
roughly ~24 eps worth of anime…again. This can’t be so hard. It is so hard
- finish スキップとローファー(9 eps) didn’t even watch 1 ep
- watch more of おジャ魔女どれみ watched around 5-6 eps
- Finish the first madoka recap movie I watched a little bit and enjoyed it but something interrupted me and I didn’t go back to it
aim for an hour minimum of study time which I had dropped since the move. I definitely averaged on 1 hour or more though I once again stopped tracking it idc that much.

Goals for next month:

doing whatever I feel like and not doing things I don’t feel like

earwen · October 12, 2025, 3:41pm

I was sick most of this week, still am not fully ok. Not that much time for jp

I did my reviews, and watched some anime with jp subs. Finished marimite. I decided to stop watching madoka for now because my annoyance with not being able to watch reze movie reminded me the same will happen with madoka, so I will rewatch later to get ready for the new movie.
Watching skip and loafer now. I also watched a bit of a danganronpa playthrough in japanese because I was told the localization that I played is quite bad, but idk if I care enough about the game to replay/rewatch it. I do care enough that I want to play the extra content in the upcoming danganronpa 2x2 eventually and if so it’ll be in jp so it might be good practice for that.
Lastly listened to about 10 mins of 成瀬は天下を取りにいく again. I had tried it before a few months ago and found it way too fast while reading along. I didn’t read along this time and while the speed itself didn’t seem that high, I definitely was lacking in vocab. I got the general gist of things but too many details missing to enjoy.
I also think I might use jiten as my main way to gauge if something is the right level for me over natively. My main issue is vocab and it gives me a much better view of how much vocab I’m lacking. Well I’ll probably just use a mix of both.

Gotta keep anki-ing and immersing i guess.

kanji stats

26 new kanji cards which is more than I expect given the circumstances. I added some in the weekend where I felt a bit better.

Also finished my german audiobook (Die 13½ Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär), since I could basically do nothing else sitting in bed half the day.

To be completely honest lately over jp im focusing on finishing Clair Obscur, both because it’s really good but also because I want to finish it before another game drops (bloodlines 2) on the 21th.
I also am starting a new position at my job (was supposed to start last week but some issues setting up account meant I could sleep most of the day instead which I needed to get better anyway). So probably won’t prioritize jp next week either.

mic · October 12, 2025, 5:23pm

The book has a LN entry: Die 13 1/2 Leben des Käpt'n Blaubär: Roman - | L30??