Powered by Pash - Random Study Thoughts and Log

Japanese
61

Time for my weekly check-in :upside_down_face:.

I finished watching ギヴン S1 | L25 (finally). All in all, it was an alright show, but I think I would rather watch it at movie length instead of 11 episodes. It had its lengths and at times I felt like the scene was more “for the vibes” than to drive the story forward. That being said, it had a very mellow and sensitive atmosphere. The characters didn’t interest me too much though, especially the MC seemed a bit bland to me.

I bought a few new BL manga just from the vibes of the cover and reviews, though I find that you can’t really trust Amazon reviews since it depends on what you’re looking for. Like, the one I bought was smuttier than expected but apparently exactly what the reviewers were looking for :saluting_face:

Anyway, if someone has recommendations, please direct them my way!

  • preferably: wholesome, slice of life, both protags are puppies (the more non-stereotypical the seme/uke dynamic is the better)
  • please no: dubcon, pwp

Also if someone has recs for BLCDs I would love to hear it, I recently checked out some I had bookmarked earlier and find that my listening level improved so that I feel comfortable trying it without a script.

I think soon I will start the Shin Kanzen listening book, but I first want to finish either the grammar or reading book (probably the reading book). Though I believe this will be more useful as test practice than actual listening-in-the-wild practice.

I didn’t do much textbook work this week but I reached my self-imposed target of reading ~100 manga pages a day. BTW, I wondered, how do others set their reading goals? I don’t have any concrete goals other than doing that (approximately, not a stone-set goal) and hopefully finishing Semantic Error by the end of the year.

6 Likes
62

Can’t help you with your BL search, but there is a BL fan club somewhere on this forum so if you toss the question in there I’m sure someone will have recommendations.

I actually have a yearly minimum now (5k non-manga pages) but previously I did # of books (I think my goal was 5 books the year I started reading in Japanese) and then shifted to pages. Honestly neither is perfect because difficulty of the text, size of the page, familiarity with the vocab in use all impact how easy or hard that goal is. Frankly it comes down to the type of person you are. Does a goal motivate you to push yourself, or do you find yourself bargaining with it and finding ways to make it easier? Why do you have the goal in the first place?

For me, switching from a high goal to a minimum was realizing that maybe I’ll only read 5k pages, but if they’re really hard books that’s fine! And that 5k is plenty to maintain my Japanese level (it works out to around 16 novels a year). It also opened me to other goals like ‘read 4 nonfiction books’ or ‘read more of my physical book collection’.

So uh, my answer is I set goals via magical calculus that is individual to me :sweat_smile:

5 Likes
63

I can try tossing some recommendations your way! Note that these won’t necessarily 100% fulfill the criteria, and some I haven’t read yet so I’m just recommending based off of word of mouth. (And apologies if you’ve already read some of these, I didn’t check your library beforehand.) Some are also going to lean more bromance than “true” BL.

Hopefully there’s something here that clicks with you! Please let me know if you’d like more thoughts on any of them!

3 Likes
64

Wow, 5k novel pages, I can’t imagine myself there yet, I struggled a lot just with the ~30 pages I did last week. I hope I’ll get there some day soon. Once I find a good fanfiction archive maybe :laughing:

4 Likes
65

Omg thank you so much, you’re a life saver! Will sort through them and see what I can wishlist. I haven’t dabbled too much with other genres like fantasy yet but might be a good opportunity.

2 Likes
66

Mostly I don’t - and when I do I probably end up doing something else anyway. Looking at my 2024 goals and follow-up, they’re mostly very broad/vague, and some (SAO, VNs) I more or less abandoned (SAO become a “whenever” thing). And I mostly set those goals cuz I saw the post.

I guess I make short term impulse goals, like
“I wanna read/reread all of xyz series”, or distant future goals like “I wanna read Fate/Stay Night or 薬屋のひとりごと without major struggle”, but with no specific timeframe.

One major exception for me was deciding I want to keep up with Yurihime magazine every month. Which meant I needed to read about 7-10 series from scratch (I’m almost there). Even there it’s a “when I feel like it” sorta thing

5 Likes
67

I had the same thought, but apparently I’m at 4k for 2024??? Reading along to audiobooks can really help.

That said, unless I’m only reading physical books, I don’t really find pages to be a meaningful measurement for myself, bc there’s no objective/consistent page.

3 Likes
68

I have been thinking about this a lot now that I am starting to read light novels because my reading pace is so different to manga.

I haven’t set a goal yet because I am still adjusting and my reading speed is all over the place. My plan for now is to read every day, collect some data on how much I can comfortably read on average, then set some goals slightly higher than that.

I think finding the minimum you can comfortably read per day and then gradually increasing it is probably a safe strategy to avoid burnout. Obviously, book difficulty will vary and it’s not perfect.

Side note: I recently started using ッツ Reader for my ebooks which tracks reading speed by characters as opposed to pages, so at this point I am still trying to figure out what reading metrics to even use lol.

4 Likes
69

I surpassed 8000 unique words in Renshuu :tada:

Last week I started 美しい彼 | L31 (the novel version). I had asked in the forum thread for advice and even though I said I wanted to read the manga first, I felt more like proper reading for once (hope I won’t regret that later).

So that’s actually my 2nd novel that I started. This time I want to do a more thorough approach, the other novel I’m just reading extensively, skipping over a lot of unknown vocab and whole sections if I don’t get them (I know the general content from the fan translation).

I exported the vocab list from JPDB to my Renshuu and am currently doing the following approach:

  • use JPN → EN card only (to focus on recognition)
  • study 20 new words (daily), focus on kanji reading and example sentences
  • normal review of old cards
  • browse through the next unknown 20 vocab and read the novel side-by-side up until that part (usually about ~1-2% progress), but don’t “study” the words yet

I was thinking how I could speed up the process of my normal Renshuu reviewing, since the deck has 6000 cards and I still don’t know like half of them (3000+). With my normal pace of 10/day it would take a year to go through them. I don’t like using frequency filters, I like to have the vocab list side-by-side, so sorting/filtering by frequency was also out.

Adding more would add a lot of reviews for rarely used vocab (my normal cards use JPN->EN and EN->JPN). So what I decided to do was to add 20 cards, but only JPN->EN side. Since I have other decks like Core/JLPT decks with review-only 2-card settings, the overlapping vocab will be properly reviewed in them, at least that was the idea.

This explanation probably sounds overly convoluted, but I feel the side-by-side reading really enhances understanding and retention of the new vocab for me.

Otherwise, normal study as usual. I started Shin Kanzen Listening which seems pretty relaxed and less study-intensive than Reading and Grammar. Hopefully I can get through Reading this week, and Grammar maybe in 3-4 weeks (I’m lazy and I hateeeee grammar study).

7 Likes
70

Oooh, hope you enjoy it! Please feel free to post in that forum thread if you have any questions, or just want to talk about the story in general! I’d love to hear your thoughts as you go through!

3 Likes
71

Haven’t updated for a while, but everything has been going steady. I’m still quite lazy to do textbook study, I haven’t touched Tobira in like more than a month. However I finished Shin Kanzen Dokkai at least.

My September quick stats:

  • 26 days read
  • 543 manga pages
  • 186 novel pages

The last 3 weeks I was on vacation and could do some reading there. It wasn’t much in terms of quantity, but I did read a lot more novel pages than manga, which feels for me like a great achievement, since usually I run out of stamina quite fast. For me, 1 novel page feels like 10 manga pages in terms of effort. Good news, I think I’ll finish Semantic Error soon. Bad news, this was only the first of two volumes :face_exhaling:
And now that my vacation is over, I can already feel the life energy seep out of me sigh

A new study way I found recently, is that my library offers several Japanese magazines over Libby. There are some I picked out that seem useful for learners:

Dekiru 英会話 and 新ゼロからスタート Enjoy英会話

Actually intended for Japanese people that learn English, it has texts in both languages and the first one also has snippets of Japanese customs (apparently for the students to explain their home customs in English).

image
image1080×1440 263 KB

image
image1050×1692 150 KB

Discover Japan

Travel magazine with lots of interesting articles about places, food, customs, etc.

image
image1079×1460 183 KB

Newsweek JPN edition

Japanese edition of the Newsweek with news articles, commentaries, interviews etc. I found it because they have a special interview with Hanyu Yuzuru.

image
image1080×1419 175 KB

I hope this will help me for my non-fiction reading (previously I only ever did news articles which I personally find rather boring). It’s definitely also good practice to recognize the blocky headlines in different fonts.

8 Likes
72

I finally finished セマンティックエラー! That means I finished my first novel :face_holding_back_tears:
weeee

In summary, the process was painful but now I also feel accomplished and it was a very interesting experience. I guesstimate my pace was about 20p/hr, though I did only short sessions with 15-30min due to study fatigue.

I already started my next novel (going with the beginner-friendly また、同じ夢を見ていた). This time I chose one of the beginner recommendations, since I don’t want to torture myself again for a while. This already feels SO MUCH EASIER, like I know almost all words, only have to look up like 1 word per page which virtually doubles my reading pace.

Also I finished オールドファッションカップケーキ S1 in like one session, my moot recommended and I absolutely loved it, the light and soft banter, the actor chemistry, the workplace setting. I’ll probably try reading the manga as well, but the Amazon link is broken for me :sob:
If someone has similar feel drama/anime/manga, please direct them this way!

11 Likes
73

Congrats! :partying_face: Great choice for a first novel, btw - you’ve reminded me that I’ve got the Korean edition on hold, I should get back to it soon… :sweat_smile:

5 Likes
74

Woo-hoo!! Congrats! Finishing your first novel is so exciting!

5 Likes
75

Wooo first novel! :tada: what a milestone! Gonna start racking em up now!

5 Likes
76

Some thoughts about stuff I read/watched the past week:

[Novel] また、同じ夢を見ていた
As mentioned before, I wanted to try an easier novel for a change, and it worked quite well, it feels sooo relaxing to read this and I actually enjoy the story a lot too. Feels like the author rewrote her own Little Prince with the little Japanese girl. The scenes in the school library remind me a lot of myself, when I used to be a little bookworm. It’s been some time since I’ve read a book with some philosophical quibs, and it reminds me that I actually used to enjoy a lot the type of books that are neither fantasy, thriller, or romance etc., but just “protagonist thrown into some situation” (I don’t know if that makes sense, since that applies to most books I guess - but I mean there’s no overarching goal or theme and the situation is a rather unexpected one).

[Novel] 美しい彼
Still going at my slow pace since I’m doing full vocab lookups. Cross-consuming in multiple media forms in hopes of that it maximizes my understanding. Maybe not the most effective method but it gives me a routine task every day. Recently I also had a dib into the BLCD and I was really happy that I understood almost everything of the first CD. Granted, I probably overestimate my listening, since I’m familiar with the content, but it felt good to be able to listen to it and completely understand what’s going on.

[Manga] カードキャプターさくら クリアカード編 11
I reached volume 11 and I’m getting really confused. It’s been hard going through the explanations of the history of the magical clans since the language and grammar was more complex. Doesn’t help that CLAMP uses the snippet method, sprinkling in some background here, vague dialogue there. So what I got is that Kaito “eloped” with Akiho who is sort of like a magical artifact in that she can’t do magic but can be impressed upon (whatever that means) and he’s waiting for Sakura do create a certain powerful card that he wants to use (probably something reincarnation? love? death?) . Now about the Clear Cards themselves, I didn’t quite catch why they were existing in the first place, are they her former cards transformed or new cards? (since most seem to be a pair to a former one). Or where they transformed by Syaoran, who did some magic apparently to prevent Sakura from getting too strong/overwhelmed? Or did Kaito have something to do with that?

[Manga] ひだまりが聴こえる | L22
I liked the characters a lot, it was a very sweet story. I’ve had a peek at the follow-up volumes, to see where the relationship is going, seems to be rather slowburn and I’m not sure how I like it, 太一 kinda feels like his character is a bit reduced compared to the first volume.

[Manga] 能美のうみ先輩の弁明べんめい | L23
I followed the author on Twitter, I think it’s her latest release, marketed as “Philosophy BL”. Now that is a bit exaggerated, though it does have a bit of that setting. There are a lot of mentions of philosophers, so I guess the author knows their stuff. I had to chuckle when the last pages revealed the publisher’s collaboration between the classical literature department and BL comics department - multiple pages of recommendations from Plato to Schopenhauer. Kinda wished they’d had more in-depth conversations in the story, that would have been super interesting.

The two protagonists are basically philosophy students with very opposing personalities and the story unfolds kinda like “strangers to (annoyed) fwb to lovers”. I absolutely adored the art style, especially the 受 character is GORGEOUS, and I loved his personality as well (kinda laidback hedonistic? someone who lives day by day, engaging in worldly pleasures, without great ambitions).
As a content note, there are several NSFW scenes, and they are rather explicit.

One thing which is getting a bit stale for me is the “gay for you” trope in Japanese BL, I’m trying to visualize it as them just having their Bi awakening but yeah like I wish it wasn’t so prevalent, same as the short height government assigned 受 thing.

[Anime] 桜蘭高校ホスト部 S1 | L28
I started rewatch Ouran High School Host Club and watch one or two episodes after work. Since I must have watched them with EngSubs about a million times, understanding feels great. Thought about reading the manga but just skimming through the first chapters it feels very daunting, with a lottttt of text all over the place, plus the 金持ち弁 (as I learned it is sometimes called). In the anime my brain probably skims over these parts (blablabla strange keigo forms blablablabla). Anyway I loooove Tamaki, his antics, his dramatics, him being a soft and adorable puppy. Other tropes aged a bit badly, though I guess you can still call the parody route since they use a lot of meta jokes as well.

[SRS] Renshuu Stats:
Words: 9032 (10K I’m coming!)
Kanji: 1839

6 Likes
77

Same, seems more text-dense than I imagined. :sweat_smile: But this might help, they’ve read a few volumes so you’ll probably find the usual wordlists and help in the threads:

They way he goes from suave prince to total dork! :joy:
And the twins bullying him is hilarious.

6 Likes
78

I’ve had the entire series on my shelf for 10+ years and it still scares me (it’s one of the things that I’m learning Japanese to be able to read). But you two are tempting me with it again :joy:

5 Likes
79

Omg thank you for the find! It will most like be some (or a lot of) time until I can look at it, I have a backlog of 3000 words for 美しい彼 :weary:

I think I’d need like a week to go through one chapter, when looking at it I kinda feel like those print magazines where text is everywhere

7 Likes
80

The end of the year is slowly approaching and I feel like I have to start thinking about my goals for 2025 soon.

I will take the JLPT N3 exam in December (of course hoping to pass) and after that it’s probably time to re-evaluate my study progress and re-new my goals.

So far I’m very happy with the progress I made this year; I’ve been really consistent with my word reviews (365 day streak on Renshuu! yay) and studied a lot of new vocabulary.

And I read a lot, but more like I discovered a lot, found many interesting books and authors, which I wouldn’t be able to if I didn’t study Japanese so that makes me really happy. There’s still so much untranslated stuff in the things I’m interested in and it feels like the study journey really paid off.

For the future I would like to keep that relaxed attitude of looking for and finding stuff to read what interests me in the moment. But I also would like to intensify my focused studying a bit, mainly grammar and speaking.

Recently I’ve been thinking about subscribing to Nihongo no Mori’s grammar lessons, because I am just that person who can’t do with random mix of grammar resources. I know there’s a tonnnn of good grammar channels, articles, websites etc. but I can only do them for quick lookups, not really for studying, I think I need more structure. I saw that NnM offers even Zoom classes, but didn’t find any reviews on them (they seem to be included in the yearly 11,000 yen subscription which sounds - actually not that bad? You get all the grammar vids and JLPT prep vids and a 33x 1hr zoom class? Even if it’s just a recorded stream, that does not sound so bad to me).

But regarding textbook work I also want to get back to study Tobira again (I think I stopped at around chapter 3-4) and work on building sentences freely. Maybe I’ll ditch my community college class in favor of that, unfortunately we are progressing really slowly.

Regarding speaking practice, I’d really like to get into italki classes or at least download HelloTalk but recently my social anxiety has gotten super bad again and I haven’t participated in the local meetup either. I don’t really know what I can do against that, I can’t bring myself to it and I don’t have any external force for it.

Anyway, these have been some thoughts that had been floating in my head lately.

9 Likes