I’ve been putting 夏目友人帳 on in the background lately. It’s a nice show to have on while eating dinner and doing chores. It’s very episodic and the flow is pretty logical, so it’s easy to pick up even if I miss a scene. The dialogue between humans is pretty casual but not overly dialectical so it’s not too bad to follow either. Honestly, if not for the unique speech patterns often used by the yokai, I would say it’s a great beginner anime that fits in a lot of interesting and unique Japanese culture.
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Madame Sullivan reveals at the end that it was her as an excuse to have the war and therefore gain control of so many witches/wizards though. Or at the very least implies it iirc.
My understanding is that the book events sometimes are super different from the movie though.
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Think it depends on the movie but yeah. It’s not really explained in the film that I remember but that was the impression I got. Thanks 
I’ve recently added D.Gray-man S1 to my little watch list; I’m a huge fan of the source material, so even though my DVDs don’t have JP subtitles included, I thought it might be reasonable to try to muddle my way through the anime. So far it’s going okay; I want to say it’s easier than HunterxHunter so far, but I’m a bit hesitant to grade just yet. Part of it is I haven’t quite decided how I want to grade shows/movies. How much emphasis should I place on difficulty of vocab/grammar vs. character accents/how fast they talk? I feel like you need to consider all of fit for a good grading, but it’s hard for me to accurately judge the second pair of considerations.
I feel like the two shows are probably more or less equal, and it’s just my familiarity of DGM that makes me want to grade it lower, hence my hesitating on the grading…
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I’m trying to finish watching 勝手にふるえてろ because it’s actually quite funny, but I’m right about the 50% mark and the awkward humor has ramped up significantly. I’m really bad with awkward humor 
Please let’s go back to the absurd conversations and ordering fossils off the internet and skip the romcom anxiety-inducing stuff.
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I watched a lot of anime yesterday and today. I usually only watch a handful of episodes per week, but with Netflix cracking down on account sharing I wanted to get some stuff out of the way. I watched the last four episodes of season 2 of Bofuri yesterday, and the whole season was a letdown compared to season 1. Today I watched the Violet Evergarden movie which was good and pretty easy to follow. And then I also watched episode 7 of Oshi no Ko, which was good but probably the most difficult episode since the first. I really like the vibes from Oshi no Ko. Once the anime finishes and I have a solid 6 months to forget many of the details I’ll probably try reading the manga. Though I’m not sure the static black and white images will be able to live up to the animation from the show.
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The books were also a let down… and things aren’t really getting much better. It gets quite repetitive after a while.
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I started watching 僕だけがいない街 again. I originally tried it…2019? I understood bits and pieces at that time, but it was more a case of celebrating understanding any of it than actually following the story well. This time around it’s a breeze, and I’m able to recognize which bits are dialect and infer the meaning, whereas in 2019 it took googling each unfamiliar phrase 
Also continuing インビジブル (also on Netflix) but I’m not that invested in the plot. It’s starting to feel like they don’t have that much story to write and so they’re using a lot of filler.
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Finished:
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Started:
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Intermittent:
- ツバサ･クロニクル S2 (I should finish the manga at some point)
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Dropped
- やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。 (hard)
- スキップとローファー S1 (couldn’t get into it)
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YouTube
- 日本の歴史を12時間で語る。(12 hours’ History of Japan) (dual EN & JP subs, speech is fast)
- ぼっち・ざ・とーく
- ぼっち・ざ・らじお (just audio)
I have to put the history one on 0.75x speed, just get what vocab I can out of it (definitely wouldn’t understand without the EN). Once I finish it, I might rewatch it bit by bit to really understand the translation.
The Bocchi ones I leave on at work, as an “I get whatever I get” sort of thing. Sometimes I have a decent idea of what’s going on, others I just enjoy the energy.
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I found this guy on Youtube and I’ve been watching a lot of his videos. I like how he explains a lot of difficult to read stories in an easy to understand way and points out a lot of the symbolism that I missed reading them myself (like the colour symbolism stuff in 走れメロス!! That was really cool to learn about.) His content is geared mostly to Japanese school kids and follows their textbooks but as I’m taking a class that is basically a middle school level 国語 class starting a couple months from now I can only see his stuff being more helpful in the future. Would recommend if you like any stories that happen to be featured in Japanese school textbooks and want to get a deeper understanding of them. Also he has some videos on grammar but I tend to avoid them.
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So I started watching 離婚しようよ S1 | L35?? on Netflix and I finally finished episode 1. All the episodes are an hour?! Oof. But it’s a fun watch - I love shows about cheating. 
I’m not totally sure what to rate it yet so gave it a tentative 35. The politics talk has been rough for me but everything else has been pretty normal but definitely more involved conversations than in typical rom-coms - might end up towards the lower end of the 30-35 range after I’ve seen more.
Basically the plot is two 30 somethings, one a politician, one an actress, who are struggling between maintaining their public image as a happy couple and the simple fact that their marriage is not a happy one anymore.
I will say that the main actress, 仲 里依紗 (Naka Riisa) I’ve seen in another drama and at the time I thought her character had an odd affect, but put it down to the type of character they wanted her to play. But now…I think that’s just how she acts
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Recently finished 山田くんとLv999の恋をする and ホリミヤ, and really enjoyed both. ホリミヤ especially really grabbed me, and I’m now reading the manga. I wrote a review for it that doesn’t really do it justice. It’s hard writing reviews sometimes.
Also started 本好きの下剋上 司書になるためには手段を選んでいられません to accompany my reading the novel. But I’m making slow progress, so I might put the show down for now.
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I have been making my way through some of my anime backlog and Blue Lock might just be the most boring sports anime, I have ever watched. (DNF’ed after 5 episodes & skimmed ep. 24) I had heard good things about it and at 24 episodes it’s longer than usually, so I thought, surely, this means there must be something good about it. But it sucks. Sorry, if fans are reading this, but I don’t get it. You know the MC has plot armor, so there aren’t any stakes to be invested in, when the whole end point of the story is: who is gonna be the best? We all know who that is gonna be - and the episodes don’t add anything. None of the characters are likeable, though quite a few are absolutely awful. I remember the old-school soccer (and other sports) anime and if Blue Lock is a good representation of modern sports anime, we are letting current kids down. 
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I’m so glad to find someone who agrees! (I read the first volume; didn’t check the anime, but close enough).
Absolutely agreed. Plus, the setting is just horrible by itself.
Right, several friends told me it was a new take on the genre… but I think we were good.
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Glad I am not alone. 
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Started watching ライザのアトリエ 〜常闇の女王と秘密の隠れ家〜 and enjoyed the first ep. I tried it without subs at first, but gave up & switched to EN subs, and then rewatched when JP subs came out. Still had to pause a bunch, but it’s good learning!
It starts off appropriately slow-ish (it’s set on a remote island after all), but in a way that looks like it will pick up. Definitely has a bit of a steampunk visual aesthetic, and the characters are enjoyable. I’m looking forward to getting to know them better, and seeing what the show does with world building. It’s frustrating to have to wait for JP subs to be available, but that just means more time for reading, in the meantime!
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I’m watching Cardcaptor Sakura. I recently did a EN rewatch with some anime watching friends, and it came to mind that it’s probably a good level of content for my current level of Japanese, so I’m now watching it in JP. Since I watched the english recently enough to remember the plot of various episodes, I’m just watching it raw with no subs for now. I’d say my understanding is maybe 60-70%. This is not an evenly distributed 30% that’s missing though, it tends to be some complex sentences or sentences with missing vocab, or just Kero’s Kansai-ben that I just fall behind and miss the rest of the sentence, so as far as episode understanding, it’s a little better than my percentage of Japanese understood I think.
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I started watching 離婚しようよ S1 | L35??. Honestly this was the first time I actually found a Japanese TV drama funny. The elevator scene in the hotel was probably the best part. I’m really enjoying it so far, but im glad that this had JP subs as there was quite a bit of difficult vocab so far, and I haven’t even got to the part where they really talk with the lawyers yet.
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I don’t remember those scenes being all that tricky fwiw, I feel like the political stuff was way harder, at least for me. The lawyer scenes were more like, “are you cheating?” “…no” “really?”
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Sorry for the double post but just realized this hasn’t been promoted here:
@Daisoujou hope you don’t mind me shouting it out! I know you’re less active on this forum comparatively.
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