Luna's Learning Log

Japanese
21

２０２３年１２月２６日 ちょっと忙しい

ひげひろ、初めてのオーディオブック

I read the 5 main novels of ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。 (series) | L27 last week. It’s very imperfect, and I have a lot of opinions, but overall really enjoyed it! A large part of why was because I read it along to the audiobook!! It let me read a lot more extensively (for better or worse), and let me get through it way more quickly than I would otherwise. The downside there is that I didn’t take the time to stop and reinforce the vocab.

I had a bit of a crisis over whether or not I could log reading progress, since I was relying on the audiobook. In the end I decided it felt more unreasonable not to.

If feels like cheating different than actual reading though, and I worry I’m short-circuiting my development there… But most of the things I’m reading don’t have audiobooks anyway. I absolutely plan to use them more in the future (next with また、同じ夢を見ていた, then maybe I could go back and complete 本好きの下剋上 1), but definitely won’t stop reading the standard way either. The only difference is that now I don’t feel like I have to reread for it to count.

I watched the anime as well, and having done the audiobooks made that really easy.

SAO 2

I finished the Silica story!! Gotta really appreciate how well A1 adapted that. The only difference were very minor, and in all cases I prefer the version in the book, but think the anime works great too. So far this has been slow, but enjoyable

Liz story: also finiahed! it’s amazing how an author can make a 失恋 story heartwarming at the same time!!

I’m on Yui’s story, and having to pause every 3-10 pgs. Tbh I don’t really want to read it (or Sacchi’s), and I prefer the first person style of the others. So I’m letting myself read much more lazily than I would otherwise. But I want to be able to mark it complete, by the end of the year. So I’ve got 27 pgs/day to get through. Maybe it would be better to drop it, but one of my goals for 2024 is to finish all the SAO LNs (including Progressive), and I’d prefer to write a review for the whole book, instead of half.

他の読書

I’m still sticking with the “slow and steady”, read a bit of each thing approach for now (except SAO, which I want to finish soon). Definitely won’t start the next SAO book anytime soon. I’ll need the energy for 後宮の烏, and I in general wanna get my “Now Reading” (tho almost everything I’m reading is a long-term thing anyway… So not too much I can do there)

兄友 (series) | L22 is my easy-ish read, though I’ve been a bit underwhelmed by the last two volumes. So if I’m not into vol 6, I’ll probably drop it).

読書会

後宮の烏 | L35 starts up in a few days (🇰🇷 🇯🇵 Home Thread for 後宮の烏 / 후궁의 까마귀 🪶 👩). I gave the first page or so a read. It’s definitely going to be really challenging. Not sure I’ll manage to keep up, but I’ll try to stick with, even if I’m behind. It does feel a bit easier than 薬屋のひとりごと 1 | L38 and the vocab overlap will certainly be helpful

また、同じ夢を見ていた starts at the end of Jan (home thread). I read-listened to half of the first chapter, and it’s definitely on the easy side, so I’m not at all worried about that. Gonna read it without checking translation, since I’m not hyper invested in it, and there will be the book club threads anyway.

アニメ

I recently re-watched .hack //SIGN | L27 which is one of my favorites animes from when I was a teen (the other being 鋼の錬金術師 S1 | L27 ( FMA 2003))! I was really relieved to find I still loved it, and I can appreciate it in a new way, as an adult. Also it’s great to see something with a complete absence of fan service, tired tropes, and cheap jokes!

I kind of want to rewatch FMA 2003, but I don’t think I have 51 episodes in me, for an anime that’s probably going to be way too hard anyway. I started watching FMA 2003, and besides some of the alchemy words, the level is a lot easier than I was expecting… So I guess I’ll watch it after all!

Besides finishing ひげひろ (an ok, but not great adaptation), I’m staying up to date with:

SRSは別に嫌いじゃないだろうか？

I’ve been doing more SRS lately, and it’s been odd/interesting to find the right balance. On one hand, I’d like to be making a lot more reading progress. On the other hand, studying does だんだん help reading work better.

What I’ve been SRS’ing (all decks from scratch, except the nouns/proper names):

Premade:

  • Ringotan (writing Kanji)
  • Proper Nouns anki deck
  • Japanese Names 人名用漢字 deck

From scratch:

  • 声優 deck (making this really eats up time)
  • SAO 2
  • SAO Lycoris
  • 兄友
  • 薬屋のひとりごと 1

Creating the 声優 deck really eats up time (tho got better once I figured out the flow), but is also the most fun, and I’ve attached pics of associated chars + VA.

The decks were adding up to around 1 hr per day rn, due to the name ones, but I’m getting more aggressive about suspending, and lowered the new cards to 1 per day for now. Ringotan can also eat up a lot of time, but I reset it b/c too many reviews piled up, so it’s manageable again.

Names are annoying, bc a lot of kanji are (almost) only used in names, and even the common ones use weird readings. They felt more relevant when I was reading 日本の歴史 more actively (I’m on and off with it)… But it’s really more of a long term thing anyway. A lot of the time I’ll get 3/4 kanji right, but a lot of the time I’ll totally not realize I know a certain combination until I see the answer. There’s some overlap with names and kanji in the 声優 deck tho, so that’s helpful!

レッスン

I added a new teacher, R-sensei. She’s my favorite of the ones I’ve worked with so far. Our lessons are half talking, and half Tobira, and I’m surprisingly really enjoying Tobira. I find she’s the easiest to talk to. Despite her mentioning being an otaku in her intro vid, we’ve barely talked about anime or manga at all!

I dropped lessons with K-Sensei. It felt a bit too structured, and I didn’t feel like we were clicking/communicating very well. I also didn’t like some of the tasks we were doing (it was the sort of stuff I’m bad at even in English). Just not the right fit for me rn. So I decided I’d rather use the money for lessons with R-sensei.

I’ve moved on to doing manga in my other lessons - ぼっち・ざ・ろっく! 1 | L28 with Y-sensei, and 私がモテないのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い! 1 | L25 with T-sensei. I feel very refreshed, since it’s more aligned with what I want to do. ぼっち is hard, btwn the lack of furigana, and the sentences + text density. わたモテ is fun so far. I think both manga are the right fit for their respective teachers (ぼっち was my pick, わたモテ was T-sensei’s).

6 Likes
22

２０２４年１月１０日 新しい

Despite getting sick for the first time in 3 years, 2024 started off ok.

最近終わった - Recently Finished

Books:

Anime:

今の読書 - Now Reading

Light Novels (with audiobook):

Light Novels (text only):

Manga

Textbooks

Paused, but will pick up again:

今のアニメとゲームと音楽 - Now Watching/Playing

Anime:

Music:

  • 結束バンドLIVE-恒星- | L30?? - I’ve watched most of disc 1 (concert) and half of disc 2 (ぼっち・ざ・とーく part). Haven’t done disc 3 or listened to commentary on disc 1 yet

Games:

  • SAO Alicization Lycoris… not very far in. I forgot how aggravating a lot of the story is.
難しい物は多すぎる - Too many hard things

I’ve been feeling really stressed by the number of things I’m reading, so I finally gave in and dropped some things (all of which I will definitely come back to). Now I’m “only” reading 9 things. The problem is that 4 of them are things I categorically can’t finish soon (Tobira, わたモテ, ぼっち, 後宮の烏), b/c I’m reading them for lessons or book clubs.

後宮の烏 in particular has been a source of stress, but now I’m ahead of the book club, and can read next week’s portion at an easier pace. Watching a few episodes of the anime has helped my interest. I want to binge the rest of it, but it’s probably more productive to stay in-sync with the novel.

Otherwise the other LNs are hard to prioritize:

  • 本好きの下剋上 (33%) - easiest read, least-motivated, will pause after book 1
  • 弱キャラ友崎くん (13%) - perfect balance of motivation + difficulty
  • 薬屋のひとりごと (15%) - hardest/slowest , but most enjoyable

In some ways, 薬屋のひとりごと is a good complement to 後宮の烏 b/c of the setting, but then I’m reading the two hardest, this making the slowest progress.

I think I’ll prioritize 本好きの下剋上 after 後宮の烏. While it’s the one I’m less interested in, reducing the novel load will be helpful (gotta get that dopamine rush lol)

Then there’s also the reading vs watching anime debate - and I’ve also got too many there (10 if you count the 結束バンド Blu-ray). 結束バンド has probably another 5 hours of playtime, if I want to watch everything. Otherwise 5 anime are current season, so 1 ep/wk - that’s manageable. 3 of the remaining are only 12-13 eps total, but I’m trying to watch 2 of those along to manga. New Game is enjoyable, but the most difficult, and I have to be in the mood. Then there’s ハガレン Brotherhood, which has another 50 episodes left. I’m torn between dropping it vs feeling like I need to finish it (out of fairness and cultural literacy for HelloTalk)

もう一度HelloTalkを試している Trying HelloTalk again

I decided to give HelloTalk another try. I’ve lowered my expectations, but also decided to just seek out other otaku, and to blog more. I find people there are pretty bad at 会話テンポ (keeping the conversation going). But with the blogging, people can just comment and/or make corrections.

It’s really frustrating how hard it is for me to express myself - particularly in JP lessons. If I didn’t already feel overwhelmed, I’d start going over the Miku Real Japanese shadowing course again. It was so helpful, but I don’t want to add another thing right now.

Anyway we’ll see how it goes. If it gets too annoying, I’ll just drop it again.

暗記とリンゴたんをリラクスしている - Chilling on Anki & Ringotan

I think part of why I’ve felt overwhelmed lately has been the ever increasing reviews on Anki & Ringotan (resetting Ringotan helps with this). The name decks especially really pile up. So I deleted a few decks, and will just try to be lazy about the remaining ones + be aggressive about suspending/deleting cards I already know. Also I’ll only do reviews for ones I’m reading at the moment… Which means I can put 弱キャラ友崎くん and 薬屋のひとりごと on hold, until I finish 本好きの下剋上 (which I’m not doing a deck for, bc I don’t care).

It’s a tricky balance to find, cuz the SRS does help, but it also feels like a huge struggle

レッスン - "Lessons"

Lessons are generally going well, basically:

Y-Sensei: intro conversation + ぼっち・ざ・ろっく
T-Sensei: intro conversation + わたモテ
R-Sensei: 1/2 talking + 1/2 Tobira

With Y & R it’s almost entirely in Japanese. With T it’s a mix, but explanations tend to be in English. I’m definitely really grateful to be reading わたモテ together bc there’s so much slang, cultural references, and euphemisms I wouldn’t get, even checking the translation. It’s helpful for ぼっち・ざ・ろく too, but the slang and references aren’t as extreme there.

Btw can anyone correct my JP headings here? I have a suspicion that’s not actually how you write these things…

9 Likes
23

I’ve said this a few places before, so I’m kinda a broken record at this point, but I’ve burned out so hard on SRS that it kicked me completely out of language learning multiple times. fwiw I’ve been making considerable progress just reading–I definitely keep looking up some of the same words over and over, but I also see some that I know I didn’t know only a few weeks/months ago.

My personal philosophy at this point is if the SRS is helping and not giving you grief, then go for it. But if it is, and you don’t have any specific deadline or goal, your time is probably better spent with more reading. :woman_shrugging:t4:

5 Likes
24

I started SRS in the last few months bc, while reading SAO, I noticed I was looking up the same words repeatedly (mostly forgotten readings), and it was really disruptive. I’ve definitely learned plenty of vocab from just reading too tho!

I entirely agree! That’s been my usual MO until recently.

Ringotan & the name decks have been helpful. I just need to be more aggressive about minimizing the time/effort required.

An interesting contrast: for SAO I only added words that I saw repeatedly or thought were cool. For 後宮の烏 it’s almost entirely unfamiliar words (specifically names/titles) that I think are likely to be repeated there or in 薬屋.

4 Likes
25

It’s hard to say… it does convey the meaning, so I’d say it’s fine. Jumping at me right now would be:

  • 今 is less formal than 読書, I feel like 今読んでいる(本) or something like that would be more appropriate.
  • 難しい物 sounds both vague and unnatural (in particular the use of 物 here), but I’m not sure what would be the best way to say that. I tried googling a few alternatives that came to mind, but they don’t really seem to match well.
  • リラックスする is an intransitive verb and it just means くつろぐ in Japanese, so its usage is technically incorrect here. If you want to keep it, you could turn it into リラックスで (then the を is connected to する which is fine)

I think the best way is probably to ask one of your teachers.

5 Likes
26

Thx for the corrections!

Gotcha, I also thought it sounded odd. I’d originally thought of 難しい事… But wondered if 事 was too abstract…

Ahhh, totally not the meaning I was going for then. I meant in the sense of making something less 厳しい or like “relaxing the pace of” / “taking it easy”

Hmm, I think I’ll make a post on HelloTalk. Don’t wanna use lesson time on something minor like this.

Thx again!

4 Likes
27

２０２４年１月１３日

I bumped myself up to 52% with 本好きの下剋上 (about 4 hrs left), so feeling a bit better about that

And accidentally binge read all 13 vols of アオのハコ (now I just have the 14 chapters that apparently haven’t been bundled into a volume yet). It really caught me by surprise, and I can definitely see myself rereading it (both for story and to reinforce the language that I skimped on). So I think it will be my next physical purchase, after the remaining 暁のヨナ volumes (or maybe before, since I am only going through those at about 1 vol per month anyway).

4 Likes
28

２０２４年１月１６日 going in hard on an episode

A friend sent me a link to this vid:

The methodology is, take an anime episode (or any audio you have a transcript/subs for), and line by line:

  1. Watch, no subs
  2. Watch, EN subs
  3. Dictation (write what you hear)
  4. Check Dictation (against subs)
  5. Read Aloud
  6. Shadow
  7. Read aloud from beginning to end

Needless to say, this is hardcore - but I can definitely see why it’s effective. I’ve been wanting to work on listening comprehension for a while. And I’ve been frustrated with Ringotan lately, feeling like “I’d rather just learn by writing something real, but I don’t know what to write” (to be fair Ringotan has made this much easier).

I’m doing a modified version:

  1. Watch, no subs
  2. Dictation
  3. Put subs on to finish/fix dictation
  4. Watch, no subs again

I’m skipping shadowing bc it gets exhausting, I end up reading aloud as I write anyway, and I spend at most 3 hrs a week verbally conversing. This lets me keep it simple/efficient. I often have to fuse steps 2-3, bc my kanji recall is still weak. 未来で I might try this with shadowing and no dictation.

For now I’m doing this with 薬屋のひとりごと ep 1, and trying not to fuss too much about getting things perfect. Every once in a while I use Google Lens, to get an outside sense of how legible I made things. I’d say the accuracy is about 80-90%. Kanji with 10+ strokes are the main difficulty. I also reset Ringotan to only do kana, so I can write/remember them better.

Here’s what 3:19 of 薬屋のひとりごと 1 looks like (with a few skipped lines):

PXL_20240116_173113104
PXL_20240116_1731131041920×2550 223 KB

Anyway this is a very intensive method. So I’ll definitely only do it with things I’ve seen already.

9 Likes
29

Like you say this is still pretty hardcore, but definitely something I could get on board with if I wanted to move my Japanese media consumption into something more like studying. … I mean, I don’t, but maybe I should…

There was a… one of the bro language learning channels (I get them all confused) that had a video about “getting fluent” in French in X days that used a method that was basically like, think of an anecdote that you would want to tell people about you. Record yourself struggling to tell it, look up all of the words you needed to say in your native language, try to tell the story again, repeat for a week (or however long it takes you to be proficient in this story) and then move on to another story. I could see combining these two approaches to get to a pretty high level of conversational fluency relatively quickly.

4 Likes
30

It was bothering me. I went to look for it.

2 Likes
31
Kinda bumping in as a native French speaker

Just checked the intro, but I’m confused as to why he would confuse 10 and 30 on day one… Those aren’t even similar sounding. Did he just not think about what he wanted to say beforehand? :joy:
Also, based on the way he speaks at the beginning, he obviously had a strong background to begin with. It’s not a particularly surprising change for 30 days.

Edit: kept watching and he literally said “tell the story in your language to get the details straight”. Wut.

Edit2: he shows a piece of paper with the words he looked up… there are mistakes in there :upside_down_face: Edit4: that went into his Anki deck too. Oh well. Edit5: to be fair, better make a small mistake than not speak at all. (That’s literally the point of his day 30 story too)

Edit3: DeepL being wrong too. That made me scream inside

5 Likes
32
Digression

I’ve been getting bombarded with ads for ‘learn to speak using an AI chatbot!’ and I want to burn them all to the ground :fire: DeepL is probably the best translation app out there at the moment and it still has so many issues and gives bonkers translations at times.

I really hope most learners don’t lean into this AI fad because it’s going to bake in some mistakes and cause a lot more confusion than is necessary.

7 Likes
33

Right, this is basically Studying, but using anime as the assignment. I definitely would not consume things like this in general. Tbh it might be better to use shorter clips, rather than like a whole anime episode… I’m just a bit of a masochist lol, and it complements my current reading/watching well (2x 後宮の烏, 2x 薬屋のひとりごと)

font size stuff

ところで、I had no idea that using double <small> tags here had an effect like that :open_mouth: . Great illustration of the difference btwn em and rem units for font-size (rem = “root em”, meaning it scales proportionally to your browser’s “root font size” (usually 16px)… em = scales to the parent container… so in this case it effectively becomes .5625em, instead of .75em). Note: this might not work elsewhere, b/c it depends on the website having set their small tags to use em (though that’s admittedly pretty standard practice)

Nice descriptor lol… Unless X is like 1-2 years or something, I hate titles like that.

I’ve heard the “make a story” thing suggested before, and think it’s brilliant. That said, I think for EN → JP, you’d need to be at a certain level already to do that. There’s just too many nuances, too much grammar, words that don’t quite have the same flavor, etc, to do that unguided imo. EN → French probably works a lot better. This particular implementation sounds like overkill to me, but if it works for someone else, cool.

With conversation in mind… after the 薬屋 ep, I might try to find like a drama, or a slice of life show I’ve already seen, to do this with. One thing that’s been neat so far, is that it gets me to really hone in on the grammar, as opposed to just loosely intuiting things from context. I’ve yet to find a JP drama I could get into, but I feel like this might make one more interesting.

5 Likes
34

I wonder if, at some point, people will get so used to those mistakes that they will get baked in the language itself.

No, keep going with 薬屋 (or even better 後宮の烏) and embrace talking like 寿雪 :triumph: /j

5 Likes
35

Yeah, I think I’m just getting to a proficiency level in Japanese that I’d be willing to try it (again, if I was willing to study… and…). I feel like it’s probably not a great use of your time until you get to the “I understand what people are saying to me but I can’t answer well/at all” stage. Which absolutely happens way faster in EN → FR than EN → JP. Honestly if I had known what easymode French is I would have bothered with it sooner. But maybe it’s only easymode now because I’ve been toiling away at Japanese for decades and am also somewhere between A1 and A2 in Spanish.

font size nerdery

honestly I didn’t even know if it would work but since discourse gives you the preview window it looked like it didn’t break anything so I went with it. I am far too lazy to actually code things correctly, esp when it comes to html tags :upside_down_face:

I knew he had to be full of some amount of shit, and it feels good to have that confirmed. :joy:

Not to mention that speaking a language is a completely different skill than understanding it. I think there’s a place for AI in language learning (I sometimes use ChatGPT to ask if something sounds natural when I’m reaching into less active vocabulary and/or grammar), but a general language model is not going to be a good foreign language teacher. And sure as hell isn’t wroth like $150/yr or whatever insane amounts of money they’re asking for.

I don’t see why you wouldn’t use some sort of language exchange app to get this actually corrected (along with nuanced explanations sometimes). I would absolutely plop my story into HelloTalk’s moments feature or something similar (does lang-8 still exist??) and get real humans to correct my story in context.

2 Likes
36

I’d argue even that would be better served by something like HiNative. I have very high levels of distrust for LLM/Text AI. :sweat_smile:

4 Likes
37

Yeah, but then you have to wait :upside_down_face:

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no universe where I’d use LLMs for something important. But a quick “does this mean what I think it means” when I’m chatting w/ a language partner is at the very least, a nice confidence boost.

2 Likes
38

I could see it working well earlier on, if done together with a teacher… but otherwise, I agree.

Yes, but it’s closed off to anyone who wasn’t already on it as of Feb 2017 sadly

Social anxiety could be a reason (but certainly not one that applies in this video’s case)

HiNative is incredible, and I really should look things up there more. (esp since a lot of the answers tend to be in JP, which I’m at a useful level for now).

More thoughts on the AI stuff

As AI translation things go, the one in the HelloTalk app seems actually pretty good, but you have to pay for a membership to use it more than a little, 残念. That’s actually a spot where it makes sense, since you’re still gonna get immediate feedback from whoever you’re talking to anyway.

Personally I’m surprised so many ppl are just willing to take Chat-GPT and other LLMs at face value (both for language learning and in other areas), and agree w/ you @cat about it likely causing lots of unnecessary confusion and mistakes for learners.

4 Likes
39

2023年1月18日 writing & reading

Writing:

I’ve been doing the going in hard thing w/ 薬屋 1 still, and printed out some lined paper, which is definitely making things easier (tho grid paper might be even better, so I can work on character width). It’s been nice, but definitely takes a lot of energy. It’s only been 2(?) days, but I’m already remembering various kana and kanji better, and that’s pretty exciting! Update: I tried the grid paper… It’s helpful, but I’ll stick with the lined for now

Reading:

After some discussion in the what are you reading thread, it occured to me I could use 古見さんは、コミュ症です。(1) | L23 (or the anime | L25 to work on reading handwriting better. However, since I’m already intensive learning 薬屋 1, I think I will hold off on this. They’re both at a good level for me tho. So it’s something to consider.

I picked up ログ・ホライズン 1 異世界のはじまり | L33 again, and am pleasantly surprised at how much easier it is than last time I tried!! It might be partially that I’m in an easier section where there’s not a lot of fantasy vocab, but also I guess my reading has just improved a bit. The long “3-4 sentences in a trenchcoat” sentences still trip me up, and so i still have to check the translation, but then I can break it down (with some effort), so I’m feelingドンマイ about it. There’s also still some “I didn’t know you could do that” grammar moments, but they’re on the sparser side. I really enjoy being in Shiroe’s head as well :slight_smile:

5 Likes
40

I tend to use embarrassingly large grid paper. It feels silly but it’s the thing that most improved my handwriting and kana/kanji balance especially.

2 Likes