So although the thread title is “today”, I’ve been trying not to spam it by posting every day when activity has been so low at points, hence the weekly update table (Also because I’ve already done the table for my study log on the WK forums, so it’s easy to copy over).
But anyway, since my last update I’ve finished volume 2 of both 老女的少女ひなたちゃん yesterday and 放浪息子 yesterday. I’m probably going to take a little pause on the manga front now since I’m tracking so ahead of what I thought was going to be my reading target this year, and have another go at the LN of 本好き . I’ve seen people elsewhere describe manga as harder than LNs because they’re more slangy, but I kind of just assumed everyone would find novels harder because of the volume of text and lack of extra context hints from the illustrations. So operating under the theory of maybe I just need more practice there, I’ll do some LNs for a bit I think.
I’d say they’re different kinds of hard. LNs usually have much tougher vocab and more advanced grammar, so it’s a bigger cognitive load… but they also explain things thoroughly. Otoh manga have much more 砕けた言い方 (colloquial/broken speech), and you have to determine who’s speaking, infer context, etc with less grammatical clues. You have all the handwriting-esque, out of box text (this there a name for that?) as well.
Fwiw 本好きの下剋上 also has a manga - could be an interesting point of comparison, or a useful bridge if the LN feels hard.
That’s just… completely wrong? At least for me. Manga have a literal visual aid that helps you parse what is happening and slang is just series dependent. You can find manga with 0 slang and LN where every line of dialogue contains slang.
Plus, I could read manga with no problem way earlier in my learning journey than I could read novels (which tend to not contain slang). Can’t tell for LNs, since I found out about them when I was already advanced and could read with no issue anyway
Alright, fine, I’ll try to go ahead, then.
I also wasn’t so much into the first volume of 本好き until the very end, then I binged the whole series. It could be a similar situation.
Never thought about that, since I was exposed to a lot of handwriting from taking Japanese classes (some teachers had pretty rough handwriting too), but I guess it will have an impact at the beginning?
It basically remains hard until you specifically start working on handwriting. Like even after learning for 2 years, and reading tons of manga in that time, it’s only in the last few months since I started using Ringotan (and now actually physically writing) that it’s getting easier to read some of it.
(I guess in theory you could learn to read handwriting without learning to write, but no idea where/how you would do that, outside of a classroom)
You don’t need to write to get good at that. I think it’s still just an exposure thing. I’m fine at reading that handwritten side text in manga without practicing writing myself.
‘Finished’ Dungeon Meshi 1 (didn’t bother looking up words for the last two chapters, but I was reading in parallel with eng, watching netflix etc). Probably too high level for me right now, the vocab lookups required is a bit insane for me. Turns out explaining fantasy biology and dungeoneering (and occasionally cooking) is… a lot
Waiting on the Natively lower-intermediate book clubs to start…
You’re right, and logically there’s no inherent difference btwn learning to recognize handwritten vs typed kanji. But as exposure goes, there aren’t clear ways to get consistent, structured exposure (unlike learning to read in general). So it lasts much longer than “in the beginning”, at least for me.
Anecdotally, working on writing has improved my reading of both handwritten and typed kanji a lot.
Wrt reading handwriting, it’s progressed more over the course of 2 months / 37 manga than the 2 yrs / 192 before that - due to very actively doing a kanji writing app. Maybe for someone else the gap wouldn’t be so big tho.
Edit: or maybe 2 years is still in the beginning, in the grand scheme of things
Again, never thought about it, but you could technically do that, if you wanted to. A few quick google (image) search gave me tons of pictures of letters, 絵馬, and random texts. Now, that sounds like a pretty boring thing to work on, but technically I find language learning itself boring in general, so YMMV.
It was for me Took me 3 years to get to the N4 level. Once I moved to Japan, things got a bit faster, but it still took me 8~10 years to feel comfortable with Japanese. (And 14 years until I reached a point where I considered that I am not learning anymore)
Edit: I’m not a particularly fast nor dedicated learner, obviously. I mostly learned Japanese because I had to, rather than as a hobby.
Right, there’s ways you could DIY, but there aren’t say input-only apps, graded reader sets, Anki decks, etc, afaik
What did you search exactly? Searching 絵馬 gets a lot of stock photo-y things, but I can eventually find more organic text like that. 手紙 produces some more productive results for me. I’d probably get bored of this sorta thing pretty quickly tbh - it’s a bit too random.
It occurs to me that 古見さんは、コミュ症です is a good manga (or anime) to work on learning to read handwriting, bc that’s like half the actual manga
手書き [something] 例. For instance, 手紙 作文 絵馬, etc.
For 絵馬 I had to scroll a bit, but it’s manageable. I found this in particular, which was funny.
Family. Younger kids are particularly brutal too, they won’t care if you can’t follow. At best, they’ll go “Y U NO UNDERSTAND” or something.
That being said, my work is primarily in Japanese, so that did help as well
Well, I did study German for 8 years because of the French education system, and nothing came out of it. I had to get somewhat fluent in English because I had to move to the US for a while for work, and Japanese is for the reason above. In both cases, I was dragged forward kicking and screaming by life. Good thing I didn’t have to rely on things like “motivation”, because I have none.
I tried learning Korean because of this site, and quietly dropped in like a week
Started 女生徒 | L36. (Never read 太宰 治 before)
I initially planned to read it in a single day to fill the bingo card. A YouTube reading I found was a little shorter than 2 hours, and I was willing to spend up to 6 hours.
Well it turned out the book is harder that what I expected.
But more importantly, I realized I’m liking the writing a lot. Like regardless of the contents just reading the words had a nice feeling, which was a first time for me when reading Japanese. So I decided not to rush with this one.
Well, I finished ログ・ホライズン 1 yesterday. I didn’t like it much, sadly. Since I had volume 2 around, I read a couple of pages, then flipped around, realized that ログ・ホライズン is the name of their guild, felt satisfied knowing that and just dropped the series. I wrote a review summarizing my main problems with the book:
After that, I read 蟲師 1 | L29, based on recommendations in the list thread. I liked it. Very atmospheric and it’s fun to consider the logic behind the different 蟲. No overarching plot, though, so I’m not feeling like just going ahead with it at the moment, but maybe one day.
I started 夏と花火と私の死体 | L26 and I am very confused that it’s rated at level 26, to me it feels harder than most other books that I read around that level. But maybe it just feels that way because the story isn’t really drawing me in (I am halfway through the first story). At least it’s a quick read
Took me 3 years to get to the N4 level. Once I moved to Japan, things got a bit faster, but it still took me 8~10 years to feel comfortable with Japanese. (And 14 years until I reached a point where I considered that I am not learning anymore)
