Unfortunately for me, I’ve decided that Mokuro isn’t a huge help. I’ve actually reverted back to a preference for physical manga lately. I feel like even with manga that is a lookup every few pages I still feel like I’m struggling.
Mokuro did help me a lot with being able to read the handwritten text in manga since as long as that’s written relatively straight it’ll be able to OCR it. Depending on the author it might be a joke, a bit of flavor, or sometimes just a whole ass portion of the plot I’ve noticed…
I think @暁のルナ kinda hit on my problem with there being a lot less context for what is said, combined with a lot less text overall. And in action manga, it’s easy to miss things in sound effects or very stylized panels. Part of why I think I like physical again is that I can flip back quickly to figure out where I got lost. But I started this language to read manga, damnit! So I will keep practicing
I did a whole lot more Japanese last month than previously, very much at the expense of French. (Although I also started Baldur’s Gate 3 and some of my French time has come from there too ). I’ve been trying to not be overly bothtered by it and just let myself follow the fun.
Japanese
Finished the first season of 神風怪盗ジャンヌ S1 | L24 yesterday (There’s only one season on tvdb so it shows as one long season, but I can’t be bothered to make an account to change the tvdb data). I remember first watching this in high school with my best friend after school. The soundtrack (op+ed songs plus the music in the show) are all bangers, and I think listened to a lot of the bands before we watched the anime. I like the first season a lot because it feels a little more realistic as a magical girl show goes (it’s still a magical girl show though, so don’t take that statement too far ). This is the first time I’ve watched any of season two though, and it’s starting to feel like it’s lurching towards Magical Girl territory. Luckily it’s a lot fewer episodes and I’m invested enough to make it to the end.
I also finished up 美少女戦士セーラームーン SuperS | L26. I guess I actually had seen most most of the season but it’s so forgettable that I forgot most of it. I’m about a quarter of the way through 美少女戦士セーラームーン Sailor Stars | L26. I’ve technically seen all of Stars but watched it with the same friend as I watched ジャンヌ with and so I didn’t understand most of what was said and only knew what was happening from the visuals and my friend explaining key plot that I missed to me, so this feels a lot more like a first time watch than the other 4 seasons did.
I’m already looking towards my next big watch and I think I’m going to go back to 犬夜叉 | L27. I forget exactly where I am in the anime and/or manga, and while I could probably just skip the whole first season of the show to get closer to where I’ve left of, I really really like the show so I feel like it won’t be a drag to start from the beginning. I think I’ll watch a few episodes and play it by ear.
I ordered some more チェンソーマン | L23 and はなにあらし | L18 and have been very happily reading both. I’ve kinda been neglecting ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。4 | L26 a bit lately, but not on purpose. I feel like book 4 is supposed to feel like Big Things Are Happening, but it’s felt like a drag, plot-wise compared to the previous books. There’s only one more in the main story though, so I’m excited to finish this book an the next one and finish my first ever (admittedly short) LN series.
French
… oh French…
It feels like there’s way more friction to get myself to watch things lately. I still averaged more than an hour a day in May, so I should probably just watch what I want to watch and either wait for my skills to improve, add more any reading, or hope that I stumble into some media that I want to binge again. I’ve also considered taking a class but I’m sure I’ll be annoyed since no one teaches CI methods and they’ll make me talk and write and I really just want someone to speak simplified French with me and tell me what books I’d be interested to read. I’ve been eyeing my German books lately, and esp since it’s a Natively language it’s been a little tempting. But it doesn’t feel like I’m ready to fully give up on French and I do not need to add more language study to my life. My goal is to get my French up to my year ago Japanese level (can watch some basic TV, can read books with a lot of lookups and struggle) and then just read some books and let my skills marinate for a while while I pick back up one of my other languages. Or Korean. Because I’ve also been eyeing that lately
One of the nice wins that has come out of Japanese last month is that KKJ reminded me quite a bit of Miraculous Ladybug and I decided to give that a shot again and it’s a lot closer to my level. It’s also paced for someone who just drank about 14 shots of espresso, which I’m sure appeals to kids (it’s one of my 6yo nephew’s favorite shows) and is also good for not totally understanding what’s going on. Luckily there are a bajillionty episodes of that to keep myself busy.
I never watch recap episodes (tho I’m making an exception for when ぼっち・ざ・ろっく comes to theatres here - cuz I’m really hoping that it will get an S2 with enough support)
I posted an update to my goals I set at the beginning of the year in the goals thread earlier this week:
I find it interesting to see what goals I both under and over estimated myself on this year. I don’t think in the next 6 months I’ll somehow magically jump up 5+ reading levels (even if I downgrade my goal to 30 being a comfortable read + listen level), but my watch with subs level is pretty comfortable at 25-26 and my pure listen level is not that far at probably a 23-24 and 25 is just right around the corner from that. I guess I shouldn’t be very surprised at that considering I’ve spent this year really focused on my listening skills by mostly only reading books along to ebooks. I’m not exactly mad about this since I do want speaking skills, eventually, and I spent the first many many years decades of Japanese study with reading skills way higher than listening or speaking. There’s nothing like buying books that you can most definitely read from a bookstore in Japan and then not know what they’re saying if they ask you if you want a bag or not.
June Summary
Reading
Total pages read
2,226
Manga
1,603
Book
623
Listening
Total Hours
80
TV Episodes (123)
52
Audiobooks (4)
28
Conspicuously, there’s no French here this month. I’m not so much unmotivated/burnt out (although there’s a little of this) as I am excited for stuff in Japanese right now. Since my language mantra has become “follow the fun” I’m putting down French for a while and following the fun that I’m having in Japanese. I not surprisingly had my biggest month to date this month with (around) 80 hours of Japanese listening. I probably shave 2-5 mins off of every TV episode skipping opening and ending songs and fast-forwarding through recaps, but this also doesn’t count any YouTube, podcasts, or anime I watch with my partner. I especially don’t know what to do about content watched with English subs, so I don’t add that to my “study” time.
Media Highlights
ひげを剃る。そして女子高生を拾う。 | L26 I finished out the main series early last month. I am glad I read the series, but there’s some parts of it that I didn’t love that I talk about in my review here. I have a vague interest in maybe reading the side stories one day either when they become an easy read for me, or if they ever record audiobooks for the side stories.
からかい上手の高木さん | L17 I scarfed down the first five at the end of the month while they were free to read, the first time I’ve binge read that many free to read books at once and it didn’t even feel like a chore! I liked the story enough, and would read more, but not enough to pay full price. Maybe I’ll grab the rest if they ever drop to ¥100 or less.
神風怪盗ジャンヌ S1 | L24 Finished this up towards the end of the month. I was really disappointed with the second arc of the series. They introduced a bunch of new big bads, had a ton of monster of the week episodes, and then crammed all of the plot into 3-4 episodes at the end of the series. The op + ed were also way worse I’m glad I did finally watch it though since I started it as a teenager and now finally know how it ended.
犬夜叉 | L28 Been absolutely sailing through these since I finished up KKJ. I get a little lost in the villain/regional/sengoku-y talk from time to time, but am getting 95% of the show. It helps that I’ve watched it before (some episodes more than once) and read some number of the manga. At this point I don’t remember if I read or watched further into the story, but at 45 episodes in I still haven’t made it to new story yet.
I’ve been really down on my language progress again. I almost wonder if there’s some correlation between very close to a level up in abilities and this feeling because the last time I felt this way was right before I started being comfortable watching more difficult shows than I had before. Part of why I’m posting this right now is that I want a date with this feeling that I can refer back to it in the future. Part of it is because it’s always nice to see that you’re not the only one who’s feeling down. But I’m going just keep doing what I know I need to do because that’s how I get where I want to go.
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.
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.
Awesome! Glad you are feeling better about your progress this month.
I relate to this so much. It’s part of why I have shifted a lot of my learning effort lately to light novels. I want reading manga to be more casual and fun!
I managed to do a ton of listening again last month thanks to the monthly challenge. I think it’s starting to pay off because for the first time ever my watching section has more orange than purple! I’m going to focus a lot more on watching with subs this coming month because I feel like I’ve hit a point where things around level 24-25 are doable for me without subs, and I want to watch some harder shows to push that up a bit higher.
I have a lot of purple in my reading lists, but I’ll blame at least some of that on book clubs (always be deflecting responsibility). Although to be fair, I’ve been enjoying some easier manga lately and just having the experience of just reading it. To that end, I’ve been having a lot of fun with からかい上手の高木さん | L18. It’s all very episodic, but there’s the world’s slowest plot through line that is keeping me at least a little interested. I came to the realization that Takagi and Nishikata are a little like if Calvin and Susie were older in Calvin and Hobbes and somehow that has made it even more fun to read. I’m also considering picking up からかい上手の 元 高木さん | L15 if I still have energy for the story after I’m done with the main series. There appears to be a whole Takagi CU with even more books from other characters’ perspectives but I don’t know if I can go that deeply down the rabbit hole.
I’m still on the hunt for a level 24-27 LN series that I enjoy enough to read a bunch of books of. I’m cautiously optimistic for 信者ゼロの女神サマと始める異世界攻略 1.クラスメイト最弱の魔法使い | L25 which I started last week. It seems so far really easy to read (honestly easier than 隣の席のヤンキー清水さんが髪を黒く染めてきた | L24, and that’s not fantasy) and I got the first volume free earlier this year. Honestly, I’d be fine reading more of 隣の席のヤンキー, but there are only 3 books so far. I have #2 coming in the mail right now, but it’s still not a long enough series to satisfy my needs.
I had joined the ダンジョン飯 1巻 | L30 book club on WK but decided to drop it for now. Having the vocab sheets was really nice and felt like a nice middle point between reading physical manga and mokuro-ed digital manga. So of course I jumped all the way into the deep end and decided to ALSO start 鋼の錬金術師 1 | L30 since that was the last manga the group read and there’s a spinoff group for the later volumes. I ended up enjoying reading FMA a little more and I have 25ish volumes already that I’ve been picking up at Book Off over the past decade without the ability to read it. I think I was mostly not feeling ダンジョン飯 as much since we just finished watching the anime as it was airing, and I haven’t watched FMA since the original series (I never got into Brotherhood for whatever reason).
So yeah. Progress is slow, but noticeable. I guess I’m just gonna keep at it.
So it’s been a while.
I have a few forum topics that I made that have spoken to how I’m feeling lately:
I have been playing around with the spreadsheets that I’ve started using to track my progress so I don’t have code to do my analyses just yet, but I’ll probably post a November lookback in the next few days.
I want to also get better about posting in here more frequently again but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that…
One thing that I’ve been playing around with lately is to bring anki back into my studies into a not overly intrusive way. I thought that collecting words that I’ve come into contact with in my reading and the dictionary marked as common would be a good place to start, but I ended up finding that a bit too much. So my new plan is to scale it back to just learning the readings for words and not quiz the meanings. I’m hoping this will help me learn more readings (which I will need as I transition out of full furigana works) but also that seeing the definition on cards when I quiz readings will be enough to help me remember when I see the words next time when I’m reading.
I had that issue for a lot of years. I didn’t really like the more manga-esque style humor, and also the original does the beginning arc much better. Brotherhood skimps on it bc they assumed everyone had seen the original already. It’s been a long time since I watched Brotherhood, and I still like 2003 substantially more, but I was really impressed with Brotherhood in the end.
I’ll read the manga eventually… but last I tried, it was right after rewatching the anime, and I needed a break. Maybe if I buy the physicals…
I have all (most?) of the physicals. That, 神様はじめました and 桜蘭高校ホスト部 are tied for the longest series that have been unread on my shelves for the longest time. I have to be able to read those damn books at some point, right?
You make a good point about Brotherhood though. Maybe if I plan a rewatch I might start in the original series and then jump to Brotherhood when they started catching up with the manga and had to make hasty broad strokes plot moves… Hmm…
wow, I’m back just a day later. It’s like a seasonal holiday miracle or something. This is gonna be a long and rambly one, guys, so buckle up.
So I’ve been thinking about goals a lot. Mostly because everyone is making their goals in the goals thread, but also because I’ve been thinking a bit about stuff outside of language goals. I’ve been thinking a lot about the point of goals and how they can work positively for me. I’m still in pretty deep burnout (although doing a lot better than I was even a few months ago) and I have the issue of doing all of the things, or none of the things (and therefore burnout). I’m trying to figure out a way to get myself motivated by my goals, but also how not to feel weighed down by them. I also don’t do well with sandbagged goals, since if I complete an easy goal I will immediately discount it hell, I discount actual goals all the time, so a sandbagged one doesn’t stand a chance.
What works really well for me is to make consistency goals. I had a secret goal this year of reading every day and unless something crazy happens in the last weeks of the year, I’m going to make that. I see two problems with “read every day” goals though. The first is the obvious: once I fail once, I’ve broken a goal for a whole year and I will have zero motivation to get all day but one if I miss a day in say March. The second issue I see with this goal, having done it now (I had a long streak of reading every day before Jan 1 this year so I’m pretty confident that I’ve read every day for a year, just not the exact window of Jan 1 to Dec 31 yet) is that it’s not really specific enough anymore. Now that I have the foundation of a habit I’m not going to lose it overnight, so I think that maybe something like a yearly page goal (I think I’ve seen that in Cat’s goals?) is something that will suit me better?
Checking in with last year’s goals and secretly using that as an excuse to put the link here so I don’t have to keep looking it up, just doing any consistent reading at all in 2023 was a big deal, so I’m glad that I’ve kept that habit over the last year.
Unfortunately, what’s bumming me out is that first goal:
Which like, before I wallow, I’m going to step back and say that I pretty much did it for my listening goal last year. Level 25 is not 100% comprehension for me, but it’s not at all frustrating to watch that high without subs. I will sometimes miss things said quickly or parts get more technical, but I’m fine considering that “comfortable”.
I would even go so far as to say that I find it easier to watch/listen to level 25 than to read it right now. I’m not sure if it’s because I have more tolerance for ambiguity when it’s just listening or if my listening skills are just better than my reading skills now (it’s probably a little of both).
Put another way, I’ve brought my listening skills up from low N3 territory to high N3 territory in a year by watching a bunch of anime and also reading along to a ton of audiobooks but that sounds way less sexy, and yet I’m bummed out. Don’t tell my therapist, I’d never hear the end of it
But kinda getting to the meat of the issue, I didn’t make my reading goal this year. In retrospect, I don’t think it was a good goal, because what I’ll be able to read is not something I can directly control, it’s only a product of things that I can control.
I think where I “went wrong” with reading was that somewhere in the middle of the year I was exhausted with reading 29-31 level books and found that when I went back to 22-25, it was really really easy for me to read and I could read more like how I do in English. And so I stopped reading anything harder for a few months and just read things that were easy. I don’t regret that decision, nor do I think that it was harmful to my goals. I’m not sure how much better I would have been having read less of harder things compared to more of easier things. But I think if I want to read around level 30 I’m going to have to read around level 30 (or at least higher than my current comfort zone) at least some of the time.
Another thing that someone pointed out in one of the threads I made last month was that I can be reading harder manga. I had been thinking of manga as more of a “reward” of getting my reading up to the level of the manga, but especially with Mokuro on digital manga, lookups are trivially easy and bonus that I finally got my setup working with the GPU so it only takes an hour or so to do 10 volumes now. I prefer reading from physical volumes, but only when I know there will only be lookups every few pages. I wonder if manga in the genres I’m hoping to eventually read LNs in (fantasy, otome, shrine/kami, sci-fi to some extent) will be a way to get the vocab for the novels? I’m currently trying to bias my anime watching towards the genres that I want to eventually read (although I have a lot of simulcasts right now that don’t fit that but a lot of those seasons will be done in the next few weeks).
Finally, something that I hadn’t really thought about until I was reading an entirely unrelated Reddit post, is that because the knowledge you need to pass any of the JLPT levels grows with each level, necessarily the Natively levels can’t be equal to each other. So when I first made my level 30 reading goal for the end of the year, I was looking at the differences that I was seeing between levels 22 and 23 and expecting that amount of effort to get between 29 and 30, and I think this can’t be true.
So a lot of hand wringing. I think what I’m taking from this brain dump is:
make a page-based reading goal
and as a corollary:
make a hours-based listening goal
have a quota for reading a certain number of books/pages above say level 28 (the midpoint of the N2 range I think?)
make sure I’m reading things that are in the genres of things that I’d like to read longer term
I’d also love to find a long series of books that is a bit of a stretch for me now but I can finish and come out the other side leveled up. Since this is dependent on finding a series I’m not going to put this as a goal, but I will keep my eyes open for one.
My experience is that yes they will help, but there will be plenty of vocab in the LNs that won’t appear in manga (bc manga doesn’t really need to use description). But there’s absolutely a number of common words you can get like that.
If you have a tolerance for repetition, you can even read a series in manga, and then later read the corresponding LNs, to make it more targeted.
Anyway I think you’ve got a great takeaway with the goals you wanna set. Best of luck
Specifically I have a yearly minimum. It’s a number that I fully expect I can hit even in a turbulent year and represents to me the standard of ‘maintaining my progress’. For me that’s 5000 pages of books. I’ve been hitting 5k+ since 2021, so I know it’s reasonable for me. It’s less a goal and more a reminder, I suppose.
I think I’ll also share some behind-the-curtain secret sauce:
When I finally iron out my goals before the new year, I’ll through my daily routines (weekdays and weekends) and see where I’m going to fit them in. This is giving me more confidence I’m setting reasonable goals and not driving myself towards frustration or burn out.
For example, my draft of next year looks like:
weekdays:
prework:
coffee + anki (my custom jp deck @ 2 new cards/day, handwritting kanji @ <1 new card a day, names deck @ 1/day, swedish @ 15/day)
5 min shadowing
workout for 20-40min on mon/wed/fri
swedish textbook or swedish listening on tue/thurs
post work:
jp reading + jp listening as I please
catch up on swedish practice as needed
weekends:
same anki routine
workout sat or sun unless hiking
indulge in reading/listening, no other formal study required
I know this is reasonable for me because I have a long standing habit of studying in the morning and it’s when I have the most mental energy. If I set a boring task after work (“definitely study my swedish textbook then!”) I’m very likely to fail at it.
You know, this makes a lot of sense. Everything under ~28 kind of blurs together for me. I always say “don’t trust my ratings in the 20s” because I simply can’t tell anymore. But I can tell 30 from 35 from 40 easily whereas 25 and 20 are uh…kind of the same to me
I had the same thought as @暁のルナ, in that if you don’t mind potential redundancy, you could read the manga adaptation/watch the anime (if there is one) before starting your chosen L30+ novel. Maybe on some sort of rotating schedule to give your brain time to solidify the plot/any specific vocab? So like, say you want to read LNs X, Y, and Z:
Read manga for LN X
Watch anime for LN Y
Start LN X
Read manga for LN Z
If LN X is finished (or you feel confident having two LNs going at once), start LN Y
Etc.
That’s just a really rough example, of course.
Another potential option: might be worth looking into reading ~L30 literature instead of genre stuff, depending on where you think your weaknesses are. If it’s just genre-specific vocab, then reading lit doesn’t really help much, but if there are other pain points, reading literary works should help you work on:
Reading, understanding, and integrating a perhaps more subtly-told story that what you’re used to in lower level books
Gaining useful “novel vocabulary” (for descriptions, onomatopoeia, more advanced “daily life” vocab like 定例、鼻持ちならない、売却、or 姑 [all picked randomly, hope you don’t actually know all these, haha], etc). Basically stuff that’s likely to pop up in both literary and genre works, but maybe not as often in lower-level books meant for middle schoolers or whatnot.
Reading stamina in general. Some literary works can be quite short for a novel, and are typically standalone (at least in my experience). There’s also the benefit of a number of them being popular book club choices on here and WK, so there should be a bunch of folks who could help answer questions.
Another option, like you said, is just to read harder manga. It definitely exists (the WK IMC club has some good examples), and it’s always fun to pick up something new and get slapped in the face because you weren’t prepared for hardcore Buddhist vocab in your manga.
And ultimately, what worked for me personally was just really really wanting to read something and reading it. Not great advice when the potential for picking up something way above your level exists, thereby making your reading slow and unfun, but I had the advantage at the time of not knowing Natively existing, and therefore not knowing I was picking up an L35 series, so I could just plod through happily instead of worrying about what level I was supposed to be at. I was pretty used to struggling through too-high level books at that point, so it felt normal.
Dang, that’s a great insight. Makes complete sense in hindsight; like @cat said, once you start reading high enough the lower levels just get all blurry in terms of difficulty distinction. May also explain why so many find it so difficult to start reading consistently in the L30+ range; I know there’s a small group here on the forums who’ve been gunning for consistency in that level range for a while.
Thanks for all of the really insightful comments, all! You all gave me a lot of really good things to think about. I do like the idea of doing an anime/manga/LN deep dive into a series as a way to get into harder reading and maybe going through a series like that makes it into my goals for 2025…
This is really good insight. I’ve been kinda dragging my feet on getting the summary of my 2024 activity (mostly because I moved from Natively as my source of truth to my own spreadsheets and I’m not looking forward to figuring out how to get as much as I can from the data outputs into my own formatting), but another reason why I haven’t made firm goals yet is that I want to see what I did this year to help me decide what will be motivating goals for next year. Since I’m kinda on sabbatical, kinda avoiding getting a new job since data science is losing its mind bc everyone thinks they need AI and no, you don’t need people who can build LLMs to monitor your KPI dashboards, and kinda don’t think that I can go back into corporate culture again without having a(nother?) full menty-b, I don’t have a ton of things I need to plan around, but I also don’t think it’s healthy to only do Japanese with my time.
I think what I might take from your idea of scheduling is that I might want to plan some more intensive Japanese studies in the week, but the rest of my time with the language is free.
I do have a fair tolerance for repetition, as long as it’s not back to back to back and I enjoy the series. I’ve definitely watched the anime along with the manga before, but adding in the LN is actually a pretty good addition.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few series that might make sense to start with (and I might also solicit some additional suggestions in the recommendations thread)
中村春菊-verse
世界一初恋
pros: I’ve watched the anime at least 5 times (and one time recently), and have read all but the newest manga volume. I also own a bunch of the LNs.
cons: the LNs are about the the couples that I like less, so I’m not super motivated to slog through the books. The one couple that I am interested in only has an OVA and isn’t really in the manga, so that’s less reinforcement.
純情ロマンチカ
pros: seen the anime 2ish times I think? I already own a bunch of the LNs.
cons: not as big a fan of this series as 世界一初恋 (but it’s still BL so like, I don’t hate it)
謎解きはディナーのあとで
pros: Watched the drama a few times. The novels have audiobooks which would make reading easier.
cons: while crime isn’t a genre I dislike, I mostly just watch crime shows and don’t read much/any in English. Who knows if this will hold true in Japanese, but it’s not a genre that I’m necessarily excited to get into by default.
パラダイス・キス
pros: I love 矢沢あい and have always found her works to be easy to understand despite their difficulty ratings. I’ve been eyeing the series for a rewatch since I haven’t seen it for at least 15 years (oof) and I never did get through more than the first two omnibus manga.
cons: doesn’t strictly speaking have a LN, but there’s a novelization of the movie. It also is old and out of print and doesn’t have a digital version.
弱キャラ友崎くん
pros: on the easier side of N2 books (it’s currently at 28) and I own the first 1 or 2 LNs. It also has an audiobook.
cons: it’s probably not a series I would gravitate towards organically, so that’s a lot of time with the story. On the other hand, it’s not a series I will feel precious about wanting to wait until my Japanese gets better to read it…
本好きの下剋上
pros: tons of books, tons of manga, audiobooks, lots of anime eps. I picked up the first 10ish LNs for ¥20 or some insanely cheap amount back when they were on sale last year. I think I may have also grabbed some of the manga free/cheap too?
cons: I read the first book with the book club last year and it was very fine. I have to assume it gets better as the series goes on, but from my impressions of the first book, I’d probably tap out of the series if everyone wasn’t constantly raving about it.
Totally open to any suggestions (and like I said I might ask for recs in the other thread).
Edit:
佐々木と宮野 and 君には届かない。both have novelizations… and I have most/all of both manga
For this, I feel like I’ve found a way to make it work, going around the limitations of the read everyday goal. From my 2024 Korean goals:
I usually end up reading 25-30 days a month, because keeping that perfect streak would be impossible (and demotivating when it inevitably breaks), and forcing myself to do so anyway is almost certainly going to affect my health (both mental and physical) negatively. So while I ended up reading very little in Korean during the summer after medical advice to just rest, I still counted that goal as achieved. Because that’s just it, I did read daily when I was physically able to, and managed not to overexert myself when I couldn’t.
Yeah, I think something like this, combined with having an overall page goal will make me feel better about missing any days.
That said, I said “reading” counted for as little as one manga bubble, so I was never so sick/busy/burnt out that I couldn’t do at least that much, but I do like your “as long as I am mentally and physically able to” addition to “read everyday”.
May Review 
). I’ve been trying to not be overly bothtered by it and just let myself follow the fun.
). This is the first time I’ve watched any of season two though, and it’s starting to feel like it’s lurching towards Magical Girl 
territory. Luckily it’s a lot fewer episodes and I’m invested enough to make it to the end.
June Summary 
August Summary 
September Summary 
This is gonna be a long and rambly one, guys, so buckle up.
Makes complete sense in hindsight; like 
