I have been kept so busy by wrestling 
. Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling is in the middle of one of their busiest periods of the year, and this past weekend was WrestleMania week, which is not a show I care about in at all the slightest (I’ve never watched WWE and never plan on it), but it’s a bit of an annual tradition for a whole bunch of companies to put on indie shows in the same city as WrestleMania, sort of riding the wave of enthusiasm for pro wrestling and taking advantage of the crowds.
So TJPW had two shows in America, coming off of their biggest show ever the week before in Japan, and I’ve been diligently plugging away at the resulting translation workload (the material I’m translating from Grand Princess on March 31 is over 12k characters, which is I believe my longest translation yet…).
And then on top of that I have an insane plan to read an entire book on fandom tanka in Japanese so that I can learn how to write tanka poems in time to write one in response to Hyper Misao’s (a TJPW wrestler who loves tanka) produce show on April 19.
Thanks to these two projects, I’ve been reading/translating Japanese for a solid four hours a day for basically the past two weeks. Two hours of translation each day, and two hours of reading the tanka book. And whatever energy I have left that has not gone into watching wrestling (or adjusting my sleep schedule to watch wrestling) or doing a few IRL commitments has been going into attempting to compose tanka poems (in Japanese).
So my Spanish studies have been firmly backburnered 
.
I have been getting some listening practice, though! I’ve been going on walks and listening to Radio Ambulante.
I also watched a couple CMLL shows! Or, well, I watched CMLL Homenaje A Dos Leyendas 2024 on March 29 and then like one single match on the show the week after because it partially overlapped another show I was watching, and it was my fourth wrestling show that day… 
But Homenaje A Dos Leyendas was great! The Blackpool Combat Club (minus Wheeler Yuta and plus Matt Sydal) came from AEW to Arena Mexico and fought Blue Panther, Mistico, Ultimo Guerrero, and Volador Jr., and the crowd atmosphere was absolutely incredible. The show sold out weeks ago, and the Mexican crowd was so excited to see the AEW wrestlers. Many fans were excited because of the wrestlers’ WWE work, but I heard that there were a fair number of people there in BCC shirts, so clearly there were fans of their AEW stuff as well.
Bryan Danielson came back the week after to finally wrestle his dream singles match with his idol Blue Panther. And Willow Nightingale stuck around for another match after the Leyendas show. She had some great exchanges with Stephanie Vaquer in their tag match, so I hope they get a proper feud, too!
Apparently the atmosphere was so incredible, it sparked a lot more interest from AEW wrestlers in coming to CMLL. I hope there’s a lot more of this to come!
In any case, it was solid listening practice for me because the shows all had Spanish commentary. I also read some tweets about the show from Mexican fans afterward, so I got a tiny bit of reading practice in, too, haha.
Funnily enough, I watched the stream with a bunch of strangers, and the topic of learning Spanish actually came up. Someone talked about being glad that they took Spanish in high school, and other people chimed in saying that they didn’t learn enough to actually be able to use the language in a meaningful way. I was this close to commenting and recommending some learning tools, but I didn’t exactly want to direct a crowd with a lot of 4chan users to the Natively community, so I held my tongue…
I am firmly behind on the La Ciudad de las Bestias book club, though .
I successfully read chapter 1, then sort of ran out of time and fell behind from week 2 onward…
I’m hoping to start catching up now, though! I’m going to try listening to each chapter all the way through before reading it like I did for the first chapter.
So hopefully I will join you all again in the book club threads soon!
I’m going to leave off with this Dungeon Meshi fanart that taught me a new word in Spanish:
@jay_jays_jay 9:34 PM · Apr 5, 2024
senshi cebando mate #dungeonmeshi
(I tried to embed the tweet, but the Natively forum is not currently set up to embed tweets, so I had to attempt to do it manually )
