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
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.
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
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.
異世界の沙汰は社畜次第 1 | L29 - isekai, but the uke’s a legitmate workaholic, to the point of early in the plot it is the plot because it’s affecting his health. very slight dubcon more at the beginning, but protag tends to take a more “eh, this is a hassle it’s eating into my work time” than anything.
アスタリスク 1 | L25 - angels; might lean more towards bromance
MOON・TRICK 1 | L25 - lead uncontrollably shapeshifts into a cute random animal each night; more towards bromance
獣の王国 1 | L25 - young man discovers world of animal people; bromance
きのう何食べた?(1) | L27 - haven’t read, but lots of cooking slice-of-life from what I’ve heard
氷の魔物の物語 1 | L24 - fantasy, demons; uke is the cutest little fluffy thing you’ve ever met. Also has a single-disc BLCD that iirc covers the first volume of the manga.
SILVER DIAMOND 1巻 | L28 - fantasy, isekai; young man goes to try to save a dying desert world. more on the bromance side
Hopefully there’s something here that clicks with you! Please let me know if you’d like more thoughts on any of them!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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!
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