2023-12-24
Meta (Yomitan, Anki, etc)
Recently I finally installed Yomitan (which has Firefox support!) and spent like an hour fiddling with Yomitan settings and downloading a bunch of dictionaries from GitHub - MarvNC/yomichan-dictionaries They even have Cantonese which is nice.
I’ve managed to configure it so I have a default profile with Japanese dictionaries that activates on Ctrl, but Cmd + Ctrl activates the profile with Chinese dictionaries. No need to manually toggle between popup dictionary extensions every time I want to switch!
I’ve also set up AnkiConnect, but don’t really want another SRS on the pile… maybe I’ll look into it later for Chinese as I don’t have any good vocab SRS going for that right now.
Japanese
I started going to a weekly in-person Japanese language meetup which is supposed to be a self-study group, but we mostly just get distracted talking to each other. It’s fun though! I learned that there exist Japanese escape room books, and I wish that my Japanese was better, because I like puzzles.
Reading
Ongoing:
- 怪しくゆかいな妖怪穴 | L30?? - I’ve been keeping up with one entry a day for the Yokai advent which has been surprisingly not so bad so far (with a dictionary, ofc). I don’t know if I will continue reading it next year, but maybe it could count as my nonfiction bingo square if I read more than half of it in 2024
- Satori Reader - Considering my tendencies to “just guess the meaning and roll with it” it’s nice to have in-depth grammar explanations about nuances I haven’t really thought about. I’ve managed to get away with the former because I’ve been reading manga, but once I read more text-only stuff I assume guessing will get a lot harder.
- この美術部には問題がある! 1 | L24 [WK BBC]- I would like this more if the comedy didn’t depend on ““anime tropes”” (aka fanservice)/one of the main characters being into 2d waifus so much…
- 可愛いだけじゃない式守さん 1 | L21 [WK ABBC] - might just read the whole volume because the book club pace is very slow.
Finished:
- レンタルおにいちゃん (3) | L18 - Probably going to leave the last book for the 2024 bingo challenge, but this has been a very heartwarming series to read.
- ルリドラゴン 1 | L19 - Learned a decent amount of casual Japanese from this book. I really want to know the backstory between the mom and the dragon. It’s kind of entertaining to read a story set in the modern world with a fantasy element that is just treated as “normal”.
Maybe:
- Tempted to join the Christmas Tina VN club because it has both Japanese and Chinese, but also I have way too many other Japanese book clubs I want to join in the next month. Decisions… Maybe I could read along with the Chinese version instead.
Mandarin
Reading
- the Chinese translation of 弟の夫 2 | L21 - the series so far is a good read for me (I think I am pretty close to the recommended 90~95% known words for extensive reading for this one minus the informational blurbs between some chapters)
- Book of No Sleep 無眠書 - I picked this up in HK. It appears to be a bilingual collection of short scary stories from /r/shortscarystories or other subreddits of dubious quality… in the store they were up to book 4. The English (and I assume original) versions of the stories are… okay. I mostly got this because it seemed like a relatively easy way to get used to traditional Chinese and have something to read in short chunks instead of giant walls of text. The most interesting thing about this book is that it’s basically all black, even around the page edges, and the title/blurb is glossy black against the matte black of the cover.
I also found Hack Chinese™ Official which is an SRS for Mandarin (kind of like jpdb.io with much fewer built in lists), but it’s pretty expensive. I’m trying out the free trial for now.
Cantonese
Audiovisual
- Listened to a couple of episodes of 茶嘖 which appears to be a podcast about life philosophy, etc. I think I like having short episodes to focus on or otherwise I’m just going to lose interest and tune stuff out, like I do with podcasts in English…
- Also started 模擬生存空間 which seems to be a podcast of two friends talking about various topics or nothing in particular.
- Found a Cantonese let’s play channel GamePlayHK and watching their playthrough of 《夜迴三》 , I like it so far. Gives me an excuse to swap out the random YT videos I watch while eating.
- Signed up for a trial Cantonese lesson on italki for Jan 10 because I might as well ask the teacher for learning resources as well.
Fun video of the week: Twitter X in the '80s
