Week 7
Japanese
I’m realizing this winter has kinda been a struggle, which seems to be manifesting as self doubt in Japanese 
Despite keeping up with my language goals I’m feeling like I’m not doing enough and I’m not learning anything (which are both not true). Anyway, winter sucks and I’m really looking forward to warmer weather.
Outside of book club reading, I feel like I didn’t do a lot of reading, and I think that’s at the core of my feeling bad.
I’m most of the way through あの頃の青い星6 | L22, which is adorable and charming as ever. I’ll probably finish that today or tomorrow. I only read a few pages of ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。 | L26, not because I didn’t want to, but I was just struggling trying to find the attention to read I guess? I also started https://learnnatively.com/book/460978226b/, which as been on my shelf for probably somewhere around a decade now. The prose is a cinch, but (as expected) I’m constantly looking up scientific words. Which is mostly the point of reading it anyway. There’s a whole series of the 忘れてしまった高校のＸ books (I also have the 物理 one) that I’d like to get into a read a few pages a day habit of, but given my current moods, I’m not gonna try and push it right now.
My watching went better than reading this week. I finished season 1 of 干物妹!うまるちゃん | L21 and started S2. I think I binged 3 or 4 episodes in a single evening one day. Umaru is such an unhinged spoiled brat and I love her so.
My friend was live-texting me while she watched 恋はつづくよどこまでも | L30?? last week and told me that I have to watch it so we can talk about it so I started that, and randomly ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 | L30 since they’re on Netflix and have Japanese subs in the app. I started watching both shows using Language Reactor so I can pause and replay lines I miss, but I always find that so fussy, so I’m not sure why I did it. And now I feel like I have to finish them there, even though I could just watch them on Netflix.
I don’t know where all of these feels about Japanese came from but it needs to stop soon. 
French
I went crazy with finding native content this week, so any fears I had last week were entirely unfounded. I am almost done with the episodes I found of Jeu de Bleue though, which I’m sad about. I can’t think of any other preschool shows that I could stand to watch besides maybe Sesame Street which I do plan to check out once I’m done with Bleue. I do love Sesame Street, but it’s not nearly as “What is this? That’s right its a _” that Blue’s Clues is, which I think is what’s been so good for comprehension.
I’ve kept up with watching Pokemon with subs, which has been a lot of fun. I always wanted to go back and watch it in Japanese, but Netflix doesn’t have the Japanese audio tracks anywhere I’ve lived (and clamping down on password sharing has also had the knock on effect of making it impossible to VPN, which I’m sure they are delighted with).
I’ve also gotten into Premiers Baisers, which is delightfully bad, and since I don’t understand most of it, it’s not that painful to watch. I do wonder how much it’s helping because I get maybe 50% of what’s said and mostly can only follow the plot bc it’s way overacted and follows really cliche sitcom tropes. Apparently there’s a bunch of spin-offs, and Helen et les garçons is supposedly better (although also not actually good). There are hundreds of episodes of each, and I’ll probably just watch some combination of the shows until I can understand enough to get annoyed with them😅
I’m still making progress through Alice Ayel’s Teen stage on her website. I’m not doing any of the writing that you’re supposed to (I don’t like the idea of forced output when I don’t feel like I can do anything but parrot someone else or say one or two word answers). Reportedly the next stage up is a fairly large difficulty jump, so we’ll see how that goes in a few weeks. I’ve still been watching 30-45 mins of content for learners on YouTube lately as well, but I think I’m up to more than half native content most days. Mostly because it’s a lot easier to just turn on a tv show than it is to figure out what videos I’m going to watch from what French learners channel. I suppose this is all for the best, but it’s always hard to trust the process since I’ve never actually gotten to fluent in any other language than my own 
February in review 
March in review + French 200 hour update 
April in Review 
) and I’m really loving the Learn French with Tintin series on the French Comprehensible Input channel. I watched a few episodes of Cardcaptor Sakura in Japanese recently since I’ve seen it come up in the activity feed so much, but I think I’m going to pick that up in French instead.
good luck to us both! They’re surprisingly hard (or too expensive) to find used tho. Might have to just do a cdjapan order one of these months.