2024-01-07
Decided I’m not going to do weekly updates because I don’t finish things quickly enough for them to be interesting.
Japanese
Reading
- 奇譚ルーム | L24 - A book about a person who gets caught up in an SNS VR death game. I was bored and didn’t feel like reading more slice of life, so when I saw this in the activity feed I thought it was a pretty interesting concept and maybe an accessible mystery/murdery/book for my level. So I guess I managed to start a real book before the two natively book clubs later this month? I like it so far from a learning standpoint, the prose is simple and somewhat repetitive. Can’t call it striking prose, though, ha.
- 四つ子ぐらし 1 ひみつの姉妹生活、スタート! | L22 - Got a copy from the library since I recognized it as one of the Children’s Books Book Club nominations because why not (even though I definitely don’t have time to read all of these). I started reading this in the evening during my “electronics off” time period so I couldn’t do any dictionary look ups, but I could still follow the story so far (even though I’m def missing a lot of the details), so maybe good practice for less intensive reading.
- ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 1 | L30 - Started the JJBA book club. It’s been not so bad so far despite the inconsistent furigana. I didn’t bother looking up all the obscure vocab in the prologue but I think I got the gist of it because of Chinese, nice. I have no idea what to expect since I’ve never watched JoJo (didn’t even know Dio was the villain, lol) but from the start I could hear the dramatic narrator voice in my head
- (Finished) 可愛いだけじゃない式守さん 1 | L18 - cute story. Decided to finish it early because ABBC was a bit slow. Art was pretty good too.
Audiovisual
- (Finished) ポケモンコンシェルジュ | L20 - Easy 5 stars, this was so cute! I hope Pokemon makes more slice of life stuff. I went in not knowing what to expect but I could understand most of it (except the Japanese pokemon names, haha…)
- ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 Phantom Blood & Battle Tendency | L30 - Watching this alongside the manga with JP subs, it’s interesting to compare what they changed. I found it harder to parse the JP subs though (I was using Animelon) because sometimes the sentences run on each other, whereas the manga has proper breaks.
- ふらいんぐうぃっち S1 | L20 - For some reason I find it more tolerable to watch the anime instead of reading the manga
Maybe it’s because I found ch 1 to be particularly lookup heavy while being not very interesting. I haven’t read any further but I’m a couple of episodes into the anime.
Mandarin
Reading
- 弟の夫 3 | L20 - continuing with the series, a good read.
- Christmas Tina ‐泡沫冬景‐ | vndb - reading alongside the Natively club in Traditional Chinese though it’s a Japanese reading club. Figured I was reading too much Japanese already and one of the protagonists is actually Chinese, so. Definitely would not be able to keep up with the club in Japanese. Unfortunately the VN is kind of frustrating me right now for story reasons. We’ll see if it gets better…
I guess if I keep reading Chinese translations of things I will learn a lot more Taiwanese specific vocab For some reason most foreign media translations are done by Taiwan (so I’ve heard) or are in Traditional Chinese (so definitely not done by mainland China).
Other
I mentioned last time that I was trying out Hack Chinese but I didn’t actually keep up with it, RIP. I think I’ll just use Pleco if I ever figure out a good way to use SRS via extensive reading instead.
Cantonese
Oops! No progress here. But I took a look at the Refold Cantonese discord server and learned about these free graded readers which have a quite interesting (if inefficient) way of marking tones. For example, from 00248p:《食月亮嘅巨龍》The Dragon Who Ate the Moon - 冚唪唥粵文讀本 Hambaanglaang Cantonese Graded Readers:
Though the stories don’t seem that interesting, I probably should go read through some of these to visually ingrain the tones → tone number in my head, because I have no intuition around that…
I also found a podcast 絮言．狂想 舊文 - Rhapsody in Lingo on linguistics and language, which actually has Cantonese transcripts (only the first chunk of each episode is free though). I really wonder how common writing in Cantonese is. I know I’ve seen people write in it in YT comments, so I guess blogs and more informal sites might do it.
I’m going to be a lot busier over the next few months with studying programming stuff, so will have less time for language learning, sadly. I hope I can still do a bit of reading every day, and at the very least keep up with existing book clubs. I’m pretty doubtful about starting both the beginner LN and children’s book book clubs at the end of the month though – my reading speed is quite slow.
