I’ve managed to follow Fate/stay night S1 | L31 pretty well, despite watching without subs from ep 9 onwards (timing was off, and I didn’t feel like adjusting it on my phone). Granted I did do jpdb prior.
Been sick, so haven’t gotten any reading done. Thankfully not that severe. Hoping I’m better by tomorrow. Been very loose on the jpdb grading, cuz there’s been a lot of “I know this, but missed bc I’m sick” answers. Also set my review intervals back to normal. I wish the gap btwn those wasn’t so severe. Like rn on normal I have 3 reviews, but on shorter it’s 615 Will wait till Monday or so before adding a new deck. I re-added UBW deck - which I mostly know, so not too bad
Last night I discovered (and seriously considered purchasing, if it weren’t for shipping) a listing for all Yurihime issues since 2005 (including S & Shimai). Anyway I discovered that the pre-2016 ones (not available for purchase) could be found digitally…
So I’m formally making it a mission of mine to read one old Yurihime magazine a month, in addition to the releasing ones I already read. I can’t add the oldest ones to Natively (data error), but I’ll track them in 読書メーター and this comment. Maybe I’ll add the tankobon vols for the individual series, as I progress, so I have something tangible
Thankfully the older ones seem to be on the shorter side (vol 1 is < 300 pgs), so this won’t be too bad to start. And of course I’ll skip any series that ick or bore me (which probably means I’ll skip most of S )
General: had a few days of burnout, after being sick over the weekend
Jpdb stuff
Review Pileups and burnout
Hit a bit of burnout with this lately, due to sudden review pile-up - wish there was a working reviews forecast. Anyway dealt with that via a mix of spamming Okay on like 500 kanji (why isn’t there a Never Forget for kanji? ), grading leniently, and temporarily deleting then re-adding decks. Strongly considering just deleting old decks… but I feel like there’s a benefit to keeping them to reinforce the words longer - so I’m trying to push myself. Maybe I’ll blacklist kanji again… but then I can’t use the blacklist as a blacklist
I’m gonna try to roll back the lenient grading, cuz that defeats the point of getting more secure on words & kanji I’m inconsistent with… but even if I don’t, I’m still getting some improvement from seeing them regularly. With kanji, it’s mainly the unknown ones that I care about at this point. Like if I look at it and go “wth is that?!” - then I’m definitely grading strictly Idk, with reading it’s not such a big deal - but with listening/watching, accurate instant recognition matters a lot more.
Oh a brighter note, a lot of my decks are very close to being 100% known, and only Lycoris Recoil is above 100 unknown words. I added リコレコ and SAO 2 b/c my friend is likely gonna watch both soon - so I’ll watch along with him, and リコレコ is gonna have some good vocab!
New Decks
Madoka Magica - interestingly has had some grammar terms. A few new kanji so far. A lot of “I havent’ seen this in a while” words
Lycoris Recoil
General Reading
百合姫 2005 vol 1 - 28/
Physical books: 2 finished, 4 midway
Finished the rest of Ch3 in クラにか, which made me feel a bit better
I’m looking forward to まちカドまぞく book club (gauging interest) . Assuming I like it, it should be a nice challenge. Will try to at the least finish volume 1, even if I’m not super into it in the middle.
Book Clubs & Speed frustrations
I’ve felt pretty frustrated with book clubs & scheduling lately. I really don’t like having to arbitrarily stop in the middle of things, and reading things over 3-5 months feels so dragged out (especially if it’s a club I’m running). It feels like such an unnatural way to read a book to me - particularly stopping mid-chapter - unless you’re reading something above your level, or like a non-fiction book that’s formatted to be read in units. With manga it’s a bit more tolerable - but even then, it’s definitely decreased my (and others’) enjoyment of various manga - 雨でも晴れでも | L24 comes to mind. Plus it’s easy to forget characters and names.
For current clubs I join, I’m just gonna read ahead as I feel like, and either take notes or highlight lines, and then join the discussion when the time comes. 明日の世界で星は煌めく Volume 3 is the only one I don’t feel like reading ahead with for w/e reason
For future clubs, I’ll probably read the LN ahead of the club. If it’s something I’m running, I’ll do it either schedule-less or schedule-optional - since that lets people read at their own speed, while accommodating people who’d lose focus without a schedule.
Anime
Got through Fate/Stay Night (DEEN) pretty well, mostly without subs
Most seasonals feel somewhere between easy to moderate challenge
Will watch SAO 2 and LycoReco sometime in the next few months, with my friend
Starting a rewatch of 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ S1 | L27 rewatch soon - my memory of it comes down to “it’s dark, everything’s fucked up, Fuck Kyuubei, Homura is really gay for Madoka”
The pressure is on! I’ll have to really keep on top of things if it’s just the two of us.
Now that I think about it, I should cross-post to the WaniKani forums since at least one or two people voted for it in the poll over there.
This is why I haven’t joined / kept up with many book clubs in a while. I’m in a book club for ひとりぼっちの○○生活 | L22 (reread for me) and ぼっち・ざ・ろっく! | L31 (just joined now that they caught up to where I stopped), but these are slice of life so it feels okay to only read two chapters per week. Other manga book clubs I tend to just read at my own pace.
I’m in a book club 香君 上 西から来た少女 | L36, but this book is incredibly challenging. In a sense the pacing is still too slow since very little happens in any given week, but unfortunately I’m not able to read it faster. The last novel I finished with a book club is サイレント・ウィッチ 沈黙の魔女の隠しごと | L30, but I also basically read this at my own pace. The book club pace was very slow for how easy the book was and it’s much more enjoyable at the faster pace.
It would be nice to have another person or two, but I’m fine either way
Honestly I have a hunch it’s a large reason book club participation dwindles, the further you get in. It’s just hard to sustain interest that long, and you get busy and distracted and stuff. Thinking back, a lot of book club stuff I finished were books where I only joined about 75% in
Yeah, I could see that… plus they’re 4-koma, so a decent amount of reading (and hopefully events) actually happens in a chapter - unlike reading 15-20 pg chapters of a normal manga.
Is 2 chapters a common default there? I feel like most of the clubs here default to 1 per week, and that’s the difference between a manga taking 1 month vs 2
That’s a scenario where a schedule makes sense to me. Since you both get a certain minimum done, and prevent burnout.
Does the L30 seem accurate? There’s still a part of my brain that sees L30 and instinctively goes “hard”… which is silly cuz I’ve read much harder at this point. I pulled the Jiten deck into jpdb, and it says I have 3263 unknown words… which is higher than any other LNs on my list. But I’m sure some amount is just words that haven’t shown up in reviews yet. Maybe I should just try w/ Kindle anyway though. Do you know which anime eps correspond to volume 1?
We’ve been reading クラスで2番目に可愛い女の子と友だちになった | L27 at a similar pace (<= 20 pgs/wk), but 明日の世界で星は煌めく Volume 3 - Week 2 at 26-39 pgs (10-15%) per week. The latter also has labeled section breaks (1.1, 1.2, etc), so the pause points are natural.
Just for 4-koma, and even then it still usually starts at 1 chapter per week before ramping up to 2. So 13 4-koma chapters still might take about 2 months. And 4-koma aren’t picked very often, to my disappointment.
I still burned out and didn’t always get the minimum done. I’m not even going to keep reading the second half with the club at this point because reading the book is so exhausting. Though I’m going to try an “easier” mystery novel instead, which I may also regret given the pace.
I think so. It’s definitely easier than 本好き, which is L32, and I was able to read it pretty quickly without issue. It still does have magic words and math words (which I’m fine with), but its more of an 1800s kind of setting rather than medieval, which I think makes it a bit easier.
I liked a previous book by this author and I didn’t expect it to be so much harder. 獣の奏者 | L34
Also with the WK Advanced Book Club. Their pace is really fast though, like 30-70 pages depending on the week. And I’ve never read a mystery novel, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up.
I really like math, so a few years I spent a while on Wikipedia and dictionary entries looking up math terms. They come up surprisingly often.
Watched more Simoun with a friend (we’re towards the end of my 4th watchthrough). As usual, decent comprehension overall, but some lines I wouldn’t get without subs…
Watching SAO 2 (from ep 15) with a friend - 2 eps, and my comprehension with subs was like 95% not from memory - which is pretty exciting. A little help from recent SRS, but most of it I was fine on my own. Curious to see how that will go with Yuuki’s arc, which I’ve probably rewatched the least, and has more complicated medical terminology
Fate/Hollow Ataraxia remake - comprehension is fine, but plenty of lookups in some parts… I mostly lazy-read those sections though, b/c the beginning is annoyingly long, and a lot of it I just really don’t care. Interested to see how much I have to look up, once I get to the main game
I figured out a way to jpdb when there’s no subs:
Extract audio w/ ffmepg
Use a JP speech to text tool like this one to transcribe the audio (it also puts subtitle format, in the paid version)
Paste contents into jpdb deck
It’s definitely got some glaring errors, but enough of it is correct, and I got a lot of useful vocab from it - including some of the parts that I found tricky (I checked ep 11). It will be exciting to watch with subs next time - though hopefully I won’t need them anyway by then.
Gonna aim to get more book reading in this weekend. Hopefully finish 人斬り 2
Finished 『人斬り』少女、公爵令嬢の護衛になる 2 | L27 and started 『人斬り』少女、公爵令嬢の護衛になる 3 | L30?? - I’m not sure why, but I’m having more trouble following book 3, even though 1 & 2 felt very easy with comprehension. It’s not hard per se, but I’ve had to actively think about and/or reread a few sentences. Some of that is speaker identification. So far my lookups have been 104 in 48 pgs (so ~2-3 words per pg - though it’s not always distributed like that) - all of which I’m adding to a jpdb deck.
Watched 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ S1 | L28 (loved) & 劇場版 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ[新編]叛逆の物語 | L30 (couldn’t stand). Overall think I did a good job with comprehension. In the former the only parts I really had to think consciously with were the parts where Kyuubei and Madoka are debating ethical stuff, or Kyuubei’s saying stuff about harvesting energy to prevent the heat death of the universe. In the latter, I felt like I had to concentrate a lot more, and felt like I should check the Wikipedia summary afterwards - which I did, and turns out I hadn’t missed anything.
Anyway it’s interesting, the series is L28, the movie is L30, SAO series is L29. In theory (according to jpdb), Rebellion should be the slightly easier of the three. I wonder if memory played a role there - since I remembered some of the larger points of Madoka (though I’d forgotten like 90% of the show). In any case I’m both proud that I followed as well as I did, and motivated to try harder going forward, since my comprehension still isn’t at the level I want it to be. Hopefully I won’t have any issues when I rewatch the three movies in Jan/Feb
Leveling up comprehension
Besides vocab, I think I probably just need to watch more challenging stuff, in general. So looking at L28-33, these are options from my Finished or Wishlist:
Anime
Known
Total
Remaining
灰と幻想のグリムガル
2339
2391
52
Lycoris Recoil
3315
3425
110
Shoujo Kageki
1865
2052
187
Goblin Slayer
2688
3129
441
Lord El-Melloi
3544
4145
601
暁のヨナ
4136
4753
617
赤髪の白雪姫
3773
4396
623
Fate/Apocrypha
3912
4538
626
FGO Babylonia
4318
5178
860
鋼の錬金術師
5358
6301
943
Log Horizon S1
4938
5943
1005
Bodacious Space Pirates
4991
5996
1005
ベルサイユのばら
5247
6373
1126
Shirobako
4580
5709
1129
Anyway, I think that lines up w/ things I’d wanna watch rn pretty well - so I’ll try to follow it, more or less. Crossed off ones I probably won’t actually be in the mood to rewatch them soon - but I’ll do the decks anyway. 灰と幻想のグリムガル I might be picking up vol 7 again soon anyway
Sometimes it feels like doing all this SRS lately is cheating, bc I’m not doing actual Japanese (reading, watching, etc). But I think it’s beneficial, and I’m enjoying it, so w/e. I certainly would have been a bit lost in some key scenes in Madoka without it. Also I’m glad I’ve been able to keep all my decks this time around
I dunno, I’m starting to think that targeted SRS is the most useful thing that I’ve done so far. Or maybe it’s just the perfect thing that I need to level up right now? Either way, it’s been way more helpful to me than SRS has been, probably ever before. (But also remember that anki didn’t exist when I started Japanese… maybe not even supermemo… I’d have to look that up ).
I won’t lie, I laughed a little when I read that, because it felt like I was reading, “is it cheating to learn vocabulary in a new language?”. Doing targeted learning isn’t cheating, it’s just a better use of your time than learning words randomly.
I suspect for me it’s the latter, but feels like the former. There was a point where I got sick of SRS (targeted or otherwise) and was like “fuck it, I’m gonna just read, and look things up as I go” - and I think that was actually the most useful thing I’ve done. SRS can make reading/listening a lot easier, but you’re still only gonna get good at reading/listening by doing them. Tho in retrospect, I wish I’d still done some targeted SRS during that period.
Now that I have that foundation, targeted SRS helps fill in the gaps. And it’s very effective at that.
I think random SRS is good for initial/core vocab acquisition. But past that, it doesn’t really work for me
Jaoanese isn’t the first language I’ve tried to learn, but I only heard about SRS at all when I started learning JP - and wow it makes such a difference.
When you put it that way…
Do you mean acquiring vocab passively during reading/listening? Or untargeted SRS?
For context, I’ve been on jpdb for 4-5 hrs a day the last few days (in addition to watching/reading, yes I’m neglecting my work). So what I’m gaining in vocab, I’m losing in hours spent reading/watching (and thus in comprehension)… Granted not all of that would be productive reading time anyway. Like I do vocab shortly after waking up, and until I fall asleep… I intentionally don’t read during those periods, bc I’m not awake enough.
The latter; literally just randomly farming words from whatever source. Honestly I would say that acquiring vocab passively during reading/listening is still targeted SRS, just in a different and less concentrated form.
Holy crap; your brain is a marathon runner. I could do maybe 2 hours a day, but I know my retention would take a dive after hour three.
Agree. (I also think the same about how much you can read).
I think I do about 1 to 1.5 hours spread across multiple sessions. It’s a good low effort task initiation thing I can do that will get me into the mood to read. Although sometimes TV is the easiest thing for me to do and I put off my SRS all day, so I guess it depends on my mood.
The only time I was spending 5-6 hours was when I was doing gratuitous card styling and then was really only actually doing SRS for still about an hour a day. My partner actually brought that up when I started with jpdb again and I told him that I can’t actually style the cards there, lol, so I got his approval
)
), grading leniently, and temporarily deleting then re-adding decks. Strongly considering just deleting old decks… but I feel like there’s a benefit to keeping them to reinforce the words longer - so I’m trying to push myself. Maybe I’ll blacklist kanji again… but then I can’t use the blacklist as a blacklist 
I’m not even going to keep reading the second half with the club at this point because reading the book is so exhausting. Though I’m going to try an “easier” mystery novel instead, which I may also regret given the pace. 
