It has once again been a while 
I’ve been really enjoying reading novels since my last post; there’s definitely been a switch that’s flipped, and has opened up the level 25-26 space to me where’s it’s not a lot of effort to read anymore. The unfortunate flip side of this has been manga, I think. I’ve been just really not into reading manga lately, and have fallen out of two book clubs because of it. I’m planning to circle back to both series later (and maybe pick up a “previous book club” bingo square with one of them 
), but it is a little sad that I have so much manga to read and I’m not really excited to read any of it.
I’ve also been playing around with the TTS assisted reader in the Kindle app. The voice is… rough, I won’t lie, but it also reads about 5x faster than I do (even when I turn the speed of the reader down a bit to a more comfortable pace for me, 
). It’s also brought me to the realization that some books that I thought I wasn’t interested in, I actually wasn’t interested in at the speed that I was able to read them. My current non-book club read (ガラスの靴じゃないけれど | L26) was pretty close to being DNF’d until I started using TTS to read it, and now with 1-2 chapters a day it’s not like a good book or anything, but it’s entertaining enough. It’s a nice trick to have–it obviously is only going to work for ebooks, and I don’t want to rely on it all the time, but reading more is reading more.
I maybe also spent about 3 hours furiously researching (again) whether or not reading along to text is not as good as reading alone. I looked at both native language research and L2 research and it seems to be no worse than reading text alone. Having help decoding the text seems to act as practice to decode texts on your own down the line, so it’s probably not going to stall my reading improvements, and it has the added bonus of getting me through more language faster. So I’m going to leave good enough alone (for now…) and just use the tool.
I also started taking italki lessons, but not conversation italki lessons. I found a teacher who has something that’s probably related to chorusing and/or shadowing where he breaks down very simple sentences and has me repeat, noting places where my American accent wants to hit hard and what Japanese pronunciation actually wants to do. It’s all very weird (not in a bad way) and I’m not sure how much it’s going to help in the long run. But it has helped me notice that Japanese speech, as he says, “runs out of energy” at the end of the sentences, where a lot of English sentences really hit the end for emphasis. I’ve been paying a lot more attention to that, and also how softly most particles are spoken (寿司を食べる gets said a lot in my lessons to remind me what not to do )
He’s also got me to notice that English consonants are a lot … sharper? more defined? than Japanese ones. I stumble a lot on バ行 where he says that I want to hit that consonant a lot harder than Japanese wants it to be, and I’m the worst when it’s a loanword (バス has become my nemesis).
It’s been an interesting experience. Part of why I keep on taking the lessons is that he’s quite firm in making corrections which, honestly, is almost reason enough to keep with a Japanese tutor, lol. I’m not really interested in improving my speaking right now (but you know, I’m also planning to be in Japan for a week and a half next month so like, I can’t avoid speaking forever), but I do want to start laying some foundations for when I’m ready to start working on speaking in some handwavy future.
), and I’m not going to worry that sometimes all I want to do is be a couch goblin and watch game streams. Esp if some of those are in Japanese.
), but it’s less bad than reading at my current speed. I’m just starting to make the step into books with fewer and fewer furigana and I know that’s part of what’s tanking my reading speed.
sounds like an interesting tutoring experience though! I’d be interested in doing tutoring like that too at some point after all the dabbling I’ve done in shadowing over the past months.