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.
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 
