Welp, it’s been two months now and things feel… different. I’m just coming off of the August listening challenge which paradoxically got me to read more than I would have normally.
August Summary 
Reading
| Total pages read | 2,966 |
|---|---|
| Manga | 2,526 |
| Book | 440 |
Listening Challenge: 35.9 hours
I didn’t do a good job of tracking my listening outside of the challenge this month (and I don’t feel like digging around in my data to get more accurate numbers), but I did an additional 37 tv episodes with subs and a few hours of audiobooks with text that isn’t captured in my 35 hours. I’m probably going to start thinking about moving my source of truth of study time outside of Natively, but I don’t want to do it in a way that creates more work than tracking here takes (once it’s set up). So for now I’ll be a sad little data scientist and just concede that my analysis isn’t going to cover everything.
This… probably happened. I don’t know if it was just pushing through a mental slump, specifically focusing on media that I could read/watch easily, my brain just needed some extra time to make some new neuron connections… but whatever it is (probably a combination of a number of things), my feeling about my learning a month and a half ago that I wrote this and now is basically night and day.
When I wrote that I was feeling down on how difficult reading manga in particular was feeling. Manga isn’t the reason why I started learning Japanese, but it’s definitely a core reason. I’ve also read a ton of manga over the years (to various degrees of understanding), so to feel like that skill was either stagnating or potentially even slipping was just really frustrating.
So I did what worked for listening. I bought a ton of really low level manga. Manga that I should be easy for me at my level. And I got to reading. The weird thing is that while I don’t think that my manga reading level has improved all that much, I think my prose reading has. I’m also starting to come to terms with the fact that I don’t really like it when I have to do many lookups to get through manga. Even with tools like Mokuro, there’s something about the medium that I just don’t like to have to struggle to read things. So I think I’ll play around in the proverbial kiddy pool a bit longer (which is good because I have about 10 series below level 20 that are in various states of completion).
I did decide to test out my solo (without audiobook) reading with 隣の席のヤンキー清水さんが髪を黒く染めてきた | L24 about halfway through the month and I was shocked at how easy it was for me. The first two or so chapters were a tensy bit difficult, but once I got used to the author’s style and vocabulary, I flew through it. I read the last 50 pages in one day, which is by far the most I’ve read on my own in a day before.
So I guess my takeaway over the summer is that learning comes in fits and starts and I just need to keep on the path. Not exactly revolutionary, but it’s a good reminder nonetheless.
