I had been saving them until my Japanese got better (™), but I think you’re right, I’ve watched the drama twice and am halfway through the anime, and with audiobooks I’d probably be fine.
Ugh yeah I know. And typing it out and seeing you reinforce it has made it that much more clear.
So, yay, gonna go start new books tomorrow
I actually added it from text of the book. At this point the search is so bad on the site that if I have the ebook I just add it myself instead of trying to look for it on the site.
I usually drop all of my decks when I have more than 200 and then think pretty hard about what one thing is the most useful for me at that point and deal with the ~100 reviews I usually get from adding a deck. For whatever reason when I did that on Saturday I decided to then add a second book. But now that the review madness is over I’m glad I have both of the decks in there.
Almost the exact same number of listening hours as last month. It looks like an hour and a half* is my sweet spot.
*
I count most video at about half of its run length, but audiobooks and podcasts get their full run lengths, so in time spent it’s probably closer to 2-2.5 hours a day, depending on what I’m listening to. I’m not sure what to do about things when I listen at faster speeds. At least for right now that’s not really an issue bc it’s really only a few beginner podcasts that I do that with from time to time… but at some point I’ll probably speed up audiobooks and I’ll have to decide if I want to count clock hours or recording hours…
My aforementioned reading funk got in the way of my page numbers, but honestly, with a week or so of dragging my feet on reading 1,400 pages is decent (we just won’t compare with last month when I was powering through 僕ヤバ at a pace of about 1.3 vols a day).
One of the things I realized last month was that I’m getting a little discouraged because I have so many books in progress that I don’t actually get to finish things very often. Right now out of my *cough* 24 books in progress, I’m between 30% and 50% done with 9 of them. If I was reading fewer books I’d have finished more of these up already instead of having a bunch sitting half finished. A fair number of these are book club books (and out of the 24 there are probably 10 books that I would have dropped to “on hold” if we had that option available), so while I could read ahead to finish them up, it would make more sense to read other books… but then I’m in so many book clubs that that’s most of my reading right now, outside of my audiobook only reads… Basically what I’m hearing from myself is that I need to join fewer book clubs… but like… good luck with that.
Anyway, I think my plan for the immediate future is to use my free reading time to clear out my in progress manga. I don’t get the same sense of accomplishment when I finish a manga as I do a novel, but it is better than nothing.
Isn’t it weird how reading is the pleasurable activity but lizard brain just wants to check boxes instead? Like sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m reading this book because I’m enjoying it and to stop wanting to rush to the end so I can read the next shiny thing. Like savor the book you have, silly brain.
…this doesn’t work with books I don’t like and is why I’m getting more and more intense about DNFing books that really aren’t bringing joy
It doesn’t help that I’m vaguely chasing the 100 books in Japanese milestone, since that’s just a big deal no matter what, and also anecdotally that seems to be about the number people cite when they get to being able to read most things without worrying about difficulty. I’m at 47 right now (12 are audiobook only, and I can’t decide if those count or not). So lizard brain is like “want to slurp more finished books” and rational brain is like, this is just a rule of thumb, it doesn’t matter, but everyone knows who wins
From the standpoint of progress, I really am starting to feel more comfortable in the lower orange level in both books and TV. It feels like being comfortable at ~L32 most things are open to you outside of literature or harder sci-fi. Given that my first books were about L20, and the levels necessarily get wider as they go up, being about halfway to reading freedom feels about right…
But all that said, sometimes I just want to scream at my brain to stop moving goalposts It was not that long ago that reading for hours a day in Japanese was an amazing accomplishment, and now instead of enjoying it I’m like “oh what next”
I think for Japanese specifically, because part of it is kanji comfort, I personally don’t count them the same. On Natively I lump things together of course, but in my personal spreadsheets audiobook with no text is entirely separated.
That said, the numbers are arbitrary as it depends on what ‘books’ those 100 comprise of for any of the people mentioning it. I felt like my world of reading became significantly easy around, idk, 70-ish books? But I did several hundred pages of reading Aozora content which is excluded from my book count because they were all individual short stories or essays, not full length novels.
I also started reading later than some people, and thus at a higher level, which also skews my figures. My first several books were mostly in the 30s because I went from reading regular Japanese news articles → reading books.
Yeah, same. I actually have book, audiobook, audiobook with text, and book with TTS as separate categories. Or more accurately, I have the ability to break them out that way.
I’ve added flashcards (jpdb) back into my routine because I noticed I had LOT of lookups where I knew the word but didn’t recognize the kanji. And now that I think of it, I feel like that’s gone down recently, so it’s probably helping. I’m also challenging myself with harder shows with subs, in addition to reading along to audiobooks. I’ve been waffling about whether or not it’s worth it to read along to audiobooks when I understand 90+%. I’ve thus far moved those to audiobook only to open up harder books to read along to text.
Yeah I probably read somewhere in the ballpark of 150 manga volumes before I read my first novel. I don’t count them because “a manga page” could be a wall of text and it could be zero text. Also because they didn’t really prepare me for reading prose that well. (Although sometimes I wonder if what they did do is get a lot of especially colloquial vocab that is paying dividends now that I’m watching a lot of TV…)
It’s like a Pause vs Stop button on a CD player… The Stopped status (fittingly) functions like the latter. There’s a few potentially undesirable side effects (loss of stats display; activity won’t be shown in feed; etc), but a key one is it goes in the pile with all the stuff you don’t intend to pick up again
Only way around that last one is to make a custom list of some sort afaik
The actually dropped ones I give a rating, the ones on hold not.
BUT: I recently thought that the one that I thought of as paused , I might finally drop, and one of the dnf-ed ones I might actually continue. So maybe to have them together in a dropped/paused limbo is just the right thing for me
…and I forgot again about the integration of the re-started ones into the GUI, as so far I not yet really re-vived a book.
The problem is that you lose I think any timing data that you have if you take them out of reading.
I don’t time a lot of my books, but I do time some of them. I usually don’t move to stopped unless I don’t plan to read the book for at least another year (or it’s sat in my reading for at least 6 months without progress).
Does it matter that I have all of those books sitting in reading? Not really, no one comes to check, but I do wish I could tidy it up without having to block gradings or lose data.
Interesting. I just give a rating to anything I think I’ve gotten far enough into these days. I usually write reviews tho, and will warn the reader that I only got so far in, and will reevaluate upon finish (or that I DNF’d)
I took a mock N2 JLPT test this afternoon. My brain is mush. The biggest pro about the test is that you get your grade the day of the test. Strictly speaking, I think this is so that you can study for the July test, but I missed the sign up deadline (). Anyway, I got an 89, and a passing grade is 90
I had been waffling whether or not I could pass the test and considering that I did exactly zero prep, I’m pretty happy with my results. I also have a few places I know I can work on now: I only got 1 point in the grammar section, I missed all of the questions in the part where you have to order the words correctly and then the star is the word in the correct answer, and I didn’t do that well on the reading. Mostly bc by the end I was just so tired of reading that I was just skimming the passages that weren’t easy to understand. Also, not surprisingly, the more essay like readings were a lot easier than the formal sections.
I actually didn’t do as well on the listening as I thought I would. I got really tripped up on the questions where they would tell you important information at the very beginning, then they’d have a conversation about that information, and then you had to use that first information to answer the question. It’s like it’s not my Japanese ability, I can’t remember what bus fares went to which travel package
Anyway, I’m gonna zone out for the rest of the day and not read anything else, in Japanese or even in English
Honestly the format of the questions needs studying imo. I can’t think of a single instance in a drama or YouTube video or whatever where they were like “here is a list of blah” and then vaguely waved at each item verbally by one random characteristic unless it was a joke bit. Similarly, I had to explicitly study for the “arrange this sentence in order” test because I do that in real life…never.
Read more essays. I am not going to start reading business Japanese bc, ew, but essays can be interesting and are closer to what is on the test than Isekai LNs and smutty manga.
Figure out why I’m so bad at the word order questions. I have a feeling I’m falling into a 最もよい trap where my answers are probably fine but not the best.
Figure out what to take notes on during the listening sections. I know that if I did a few dozen of them I would figure out exactly what info tends to want to get asked at the end.
I am pathologically allergic to grammar, but I do have the N2 manga book that I bought and maybe should start reading through. The problem I have with grammar is that they’re all incredibly precise nitpicky differences between them and I just don’t want to study them enough to get the nuances
I have 6 months, I think passing is completely doable with a bit of study. And maybe even without, with a bit of luck.
May 
Like sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m reading this book because I’m enjoying it and to stop wanting to rush to the end so I can read the next shiny thing. Like savor the book you have, silly brain.
and rational brain is like, this is just a rule of thumb, it doesn’t matter, but everyone knows who wins 
