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Because it‘s full color, I‘d assume.

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Ah ok, makes sense… Is it that they’re usually priced like that or is it because the ebook follows the pricing of the print edition?

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It’s the latter I would say.

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The last weeks have been pretty good in terms of reading time, I didn’t do so much textbook work but did a lot more reading.

Reading

Finished 3 more volumes and currently at volume 6 of 鬼滅の刃 6 | L23. I love Giyuu and Shinobu so much.

Also continued reading CCS Clear Card after I had the volumes on stash for a while. カードキャプターさくら クリアカード編 5 | L19

Looking forward to reading 彩香ちゃんは弘子先輩に恋してる | L23 which looks like workplace Yuri (my beloved).

Textbook study

About halfway through Tobira Ch. 4, the grammar exercises take so much time. They feel pretty exhausting to me since you have to come up with sentences and I’m just so bad at making things up like that.

Haven’t progressed a lot with Shin Kanzen, I’m about halfway through the reading and halfway through grammar.

I’ve done two JLPT N3 practice tests:

    1. 146/180 (53/60 vocab/grammar, 49/60 reading, 44/60 listening)
    1. 151/174 (47/58 vocab/grammar, 60/60 reading, 44/56 listening)

I think I’ll be good with passing but I’d love to improve my listening and generally improve my score.

Listening

Just kept up with some of the Beginner Teppei podcasts, I think I can now understand about 95% of what he says there. I know the regular Nihongo con Teppei podcast is there but I’m not keeping up regularly.

Series I’m currently watching without any subs and count as Listening:

Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Crunchyroll doesn’t have JPN subs, since then I’m forced more to watch series without subs.

There’s an online version of the Japanese Film Festival (https://watch.jff.jpf.go.jp/), my country doesn’t have JPN subs but the movies look very interesting, I already put the following into my wishlist:

  • 五島のトラさん | L30?? : “This documentary film follows for 22 years a nine-member family involved in the manufacturing of Udon in the Goto Islands, Nagasaki prefecture.”
  • サマーフィルムにのって | L30?? : “Barefoot and her friends decide to make a samurai movie, gather a unique cast and staff for the production, and try to screen it at their school festival.”

A general question for everyone (especially at the low-middle intermediate level): How much do you vocalize when reading? (Like reading out loud, I don’t know what the correct term is). I remember when I was a kid in elementary school I read out loud a lot, but I could also read super fast without reading aloud. When I learned English I also read out a lot and I think it helped my pronunciation (which has gotten worse again over the years).

At the moment I do both, for more difficult material I sometimes have to vocalize to make sense of difficult kanji readings, but sometimes I don’t, which leads me to more breeze through pages.

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For me it’s occasionally. I should probably do it more often since it helps me focus on the text and I understand more if I do, but most of the time I can’t be bothered. It mainly depends on three factors:

  • the difficulty of the text
  • how important it is that I understand everything completely
  • am I in public?

I usually don’t fully vocalise the words but mouth them instead.

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I do this when reading Japanese unless I’m in public but even then I may just whisper it as I can still hear myself with my ear plugs in. If I’m not reading aloud, I’ll read in my head instead or it doesn’t always make sense. I do find it helps my pronunciation and also helps me to piece together sentences or certain compound Kanji words.

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I’m not at the level you specified but I vocalized a LOT at that level and still have a habit of doing it sometimes, mostly for harder texts. It forces me to not skip over kanji I don’t know the reading for (I have strong sight recognition of vocab, and can guess a lot of words, but am dicey at knowing the correct reading).

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Not much, BUT I do about 90% of my prose reading (and wild guess, let’s say 75% of my overall reading when factoring in manga) along to audiobooks, so I have someone else vocalizing for me.

The one time I can think of that I absolutely will vocalize is when I find a new katakana/wasei word because I can almost never get those without hearing them out loud.

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A lot. I don’t even realize it half the time, but I frequently quietly mumble the words as I read. When I’m not mumbling I still find myself mouthing the words quite often. I definitely feel like I’m a grade-schooler learning to read again when I catch myself.

Makes it hard to read in public because I don’t want to be the crazy person mumbling to himself in the check-out line. :sweat_smile:

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Interesting, thanks for sharing your experiences, seems like most people do it more or less.

Following up I also wonder when my reading out loud will sound less like a elementary schooler’s :smiling_face_with_tear: I find it pretty hard to read out loud fluidly, I still pretty much stutter and stop and a lot of the more complicated words/sentences.

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I find this as well. The only time I read fluidly is when I seem to inherently know what’s coming, so grammar and vocabulary that I don’t need to translate. Otherwise I stutter and stop and start. I found that if it’s affecting my understanding, I read it slowly first and break it down to understand, then read it again at normal speed.

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I think for me it depends on comprehension. Most of my reading is in my head, especially if it is just small-talk that I fully understand. But brand new vocab or strange katakana words tend to get vocalized for me to understand/remember them better.

I think for me this same logic applies to rereading a sentence vs just internalizing it and moving on. If I feel the need to vocalize a word, I’m probably going to backtrack to reread it full speed.

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Usually only when I’m reading something hard, had a lesson shortly before, or have otherwise been recently doing it. Sometimes for unfamiliar words… especially katakana words - sometimes they make no sense until I hear it, and it clicks! It can be very helpful, but also kinda tiring. (Also I have a read-aloud book club every weekend)

When I’m reading silently, I still pronounce everything mentally, unless I’m skimming (which I only do if I’m really bored or the author is repeating something unnecessarily)

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I’m glad to know that I am not the only one who has to pronounce katakana words out loud to make sense of them :laughing:

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Halfway through august. According to my stats page I’ve read 1174 pages this month, about the amount I read in the whole of July :smiling_face: Looking forward to my vacation next month, we’ll do 3 weeks of beach holiday so I hope I have time for lots of reading (especially my novel).

I feel like lately everything has been pretty chill and routine. My study routine consist of doing my vocab reviews in the morning in my pomodoro breaks, doing a few pages of textbook work (either Shin Kanzen or Tobira), reading about 50-100 pages manga or ~10 pages novel (which I still struggle with) and watch maybe 1-2 episodes anime.

Recently I’m leisurely playing through Nekopara Catboys Paradise because a friend recommended it to me, this is actually my first touch with otome games lol. Easy to learn from I find, though the POV thing is kinda weird :joy: There seems to be a Game Gengo video about it too with the vocab breakdown if anyone is interested.

In terms of new study ways, I found out that subtitles files are actually just text files and I can use them to import vocab directly to my decks. I’m using Renshuu which has a text parser and let’s me filter it by JLPT vocab so I’m using that to not add too many things at once. Definitely have to do that more often for anime watching, I think it would help greatly to briefly go through the vocab for each episode before watching it.

On Monday I also went to the Japanese-German language exchange meetup again, it was pretty nice. The last time I struggled a lot with anxiety, but this time was pretty chill. I think I found the perfect amount of low level tipsiness that helps with speaking without constantly worrying about mistakes :laughing:
I still make a ton of mistakes and forget basically half the grammar I ever learned, but every time afterwards I feel like I gain so much for my listening and speaking, and also things like trying to explain things in different words. The Japanese people there are super patient and encouraging, I even got jouzu’ed a few times :smiling_face:

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I found out about that too at one point! It’s cool to see other people coming up with similar ideas!

A while back I found some old program online that could parse the text and list the most frequent words in a show based on the text subtitle files, but it was a lot of work to get it setup and ignoring common words. After a while of tinkering with it, I decided for me it was better to just spend that time immersing and not try to frontload anything.

Does the Renshuu text parser you use give you info like word frequency within the show or just the filter by JLPT level? I can imagine it wouldn’t be that useful to frontload learning words that only show up one time in the whole show.

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Currently they don’t have frequency but the dev is collecting ideas to improve the parser. Though I’m doing it rather on a per episode basis now to look for unknown vocab, so I guess that could throw the frequencies off a little. Also sometimes I like to order them rather by appearance than frequency, as I want to study the JLPT words anyway. Since it already compares the vocab with my studied vocab I don’t have to filter out the common words, things like particles and grammar parts I have already blacklisted in my decks.

Something like the tool you mentioned, I remember I had that, but I don’t remember the name :thinking:

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I see. When I tried it my goal was to frontload words that would show up a lot throughout a whole season of a show. I figured that would lighten the load of listening comprehension. But I am generally ok with missing words as long as I can follow what’s going on.

Doing it on a per episode basis to catch missing JLPT words is interesting. Makes me wonder if my approach was backwards because I will probably pick up frequent words anyways. Glad you found a new tool that works for you!

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Not sure if any of you are familiar with Subs2srs. Not sure if it would be helpful for what you’re doing, but back when I was heavy into flashcards I used it to make whole libraries of cards I could pick from when I needed to go sentence mining.

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Probably not, I guess rather mine is peculiar, but I just like checking words off my JLPT list. I think it’s how my brain is wired for rewards, and it likes having like a numerical value going down steadily.

I heard of subs2srs, but I think it probably works best with an Anki setup, since I use Renshuu for everything, I find it more convenient to utilize its tools since they’re nicely integrating with my existing decks.
But maybe someone can make use of it! Regarding Anki there are a ton of cool tools to import/export vocab, kinda makes me jealous sometimes but I just didn’t find studying with Anki engaging.

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