11/17/2025-11/23/2025
Chugging along despite disappointment…
Achievements 
WaniKani Level 9 
Listened to 650/600 minutes
Read 7/7 days
- Yagate Kimi Ni Naru / Bloom Into You (Nakatani Nio) Vol. 1, Vol 2. Ch. 6-9
- Happiness (Shuuzo Oshimi)
- Tadoku Graded Readers Lvl 3 x 3
Wrote 4/3 LangCorrect posts
Didn’t get the job 
Reflections 
Mid-week (in fact, right after my last post here) I got the news that I was “not retained for candidacy” at the company I’d been interviewing with. After six months of unemployment, countless job applications, and a fresh PhD that is functionally useless outside of academia, this has been discouraging to say the least. JP study is one of the few facets of my life where I’ve been able to maintain a sense of progress. In that light…
On something of a whim, I decided to try transitioning into manga as my reading practice. Bloom Into You was my obvious first choice as one of my favourite yuri (which is saying something) and I picked up Happiness based on the recommendations I’d seen around. To my surprise, it was much smoother going than I was expecting—not without obstacles, especially grammatical colloquialisms and such, but nevertheless smooth enough that I found myself finishing Happiness within the week; I am soliciting opinions, if you have any to share.
I have Bloom Into You paced because I’m reading the colourized webtoon, which Bookwalker only makes freely available on a throttled basis. The panels are absolutely gorgeous, so I’ve found it’s well worth being bottlenecked, but… oh what I wouldn’t give to have those colourized pages in physical form. I figure I’ll move on to either Horimiya or The Flowers of Evil next alongside it.
Still, I realized that the text density of manga I can manage to read is low, so I’ve stuck to reading a few graded readers when I can for that particular kind of immersion. I’m thinking that in the vein of text-dense material, I’ll switch to “real” books through the Children’s Novel Club here whenever they start their next book. I’ve also decided to make it a JP-learning goal to read Planetes, which has been on my radar for some time. I love hard SF so it gives me something to look forward to.
Aside: I was “corrected” for the first time on my use of 僕 instead of 私. My girlfriend predicted this would happen, but the imposition of trite norms in the face of the fact that plenty of (native-speaking!) girls use 僕 for their own reasons made me laugh a little.
How has everyone’s week been 
if you made it this far, thank you for reading my little diary entry.
For Next Week… 
idk just keep going i guess ^^
POTW 
Last year I went to the Huntington Botanical Gardens around the wintertime… really pretty bits of nature. I’ve become enamoured with gardens like this, I think.
