I managed a week of daily Japanese yaaay! So let’s do it again
月 | | bunpro reviews to 0; 10 bunpro lessons; and hours (literally) of wanikani reviews woof and I still have over 150 haha it’s neverending
火 | | bunpro reviews, and a buuuuunch of wanikani reviews! see update below!
水 | |bunpro reviews and wanikani reviews both to 0 !!! what a relief to be back to being able to do that again haha also got my wanikani lessons to under 100
木 | | missing the summary pages like lots of people bc I liked being able to track how many reviews I did in various sittings so now I just report back based on vibes haha e.g. today I did a small ish session! about 5 minutes of reviews on wk
金 | | busy day at work so only about 40 wanikani reviews
土 | |
日 | |
tuesday update: after the longest time, I got to 0 reviews!!!
Did okay last week but didn’t do anything over the (busy) weekend! Let’s try for a full week this week, even if just a little bit every day!
M | | probably 20 reviews each on wanikani and bunpro
T | | got my wanikani reviews to 0 whooop and I did about 50 lessons!
W | | did wanikani reviews and - for the first time in months - anki reviews :o
T | | suuuuuper busy day so just did my anki reviews !
F | |
S | | the teeeeniest amount (like 5 wk reviews and my anki reviews)
S | |
happily surprised to find lots of kana vocabulary additions that I don’t know yet, like まぐれ and トランプ (lots actually!)
Last week didn’t go so well haha… but that’s just an opportunity to do better this week! I’m less busy at work so I should be able to do more. But I’m starting this week off with a tonne of reviews…
So I’ll just work on getting these down to 0 before starting lessons.
Next week a friend is visiting me in Japan so it’s unlikely I’ll do any studying. I’m probably going to put vacation mode on. So I’ll try and use that knowledge to spur me to try my best this week!
M | | wanikani reviews; also talked to myself walking home yesterday in Japanese hahah
T | | wanikani, bunpro, and anki reviews (25-50 each) and started reading Akira (20 sentences)
W | | wanikani reviews, 20 sentences of Akira, anki reviews
Th | | wanikani reviews, anki, 20 pages of Akira
F | | a LOT of reading/writing (about 50 sentences in Akira), getting my wanikani reviews to 0 and doing a few wanikani lessons too! lots of studying today!
S | | wanikani reviews to 0, anki reviews, a teeny bit of Akira
S | | about 50 wanikani reviews
I just finished whittling down a nasty pile of about 700 reviews myself (and I took bunpro off vacation mode…right as I went into the weekend. Rip) so good luck! You’ll catch back up
I hosted an overseas friend a few weeks ago, and I was very glad I didn’t put the expectation on myself to do any studying. I didn’t use vacation mode, but I’m also not working nearly at the same pace as you. Good luck with your reviews! And enjoy your time with your friend!
@Ayara012 omgggg お疲れ様 700 reviews sounds horrible !!! I’ve been there well done for pushing through!
@rua yeah I think it’s way better to just commit to time off than being indecisive and trying to both work and relax equally halfheartedly ! Hope you had a great time with your friend
(❁´◡`❁)
Read some of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira today. It’s super exciting that a text that was quite inaccessible to me a few years ago is now enjoyable to try and get through. I still have lookups but I can understand the meaning mostly So here are some new words I learned today.
Kanji
Reading
Meaning
爆弾
ばくだん
Bomb
旧市街
きゅうしがい
Old part of town
遅れる
おくれる
To be late; to fall behind
びっくり
Surprise
やがる
To have the nerve to*
行き止まり
いきどまり
Deadend
焦る
あせる
To be impatient/To get flustered
新規くせー
しんきくせー
Novel/New
やがる was a cool one to learn. It’s a derogatory/rude way of speaking and you add it to the ~ます stem as a way of showing hatred/anger towards something someone just did. So here’s an example from Jisho:
あいつは話の途中で電話を切りやがった！
The bastard hung up on me! or The bastard had the nerve to hang up on me!
Of course I’m never going to use these words in day to day life but it’s cool to learn for reading manga (e.g. I learned “bastard”/あいつ from reading ARMS haha)
Today I read (extensive reading, translating every line) 21 lines. Maybe I’ll try and do 20 lines every day :> (even tho I’m about to take a week off!)
I saw あいつ a couple times in the Final Fantasy 14 Academy manga I was reading today, but I didn’t realize it was ‘bastard’ and not just another way of saying “those guys” or “they”, whoops!
I didn’t actually stop to check it, because if I stop and look up every word I’m not 100% sure about when reading, I tend to go cross-eyed pretty quickly . So it’s kind of funny to see it here and realize I was missing that context
Oh it can be that meaning too ! You’re right it’s just a rude way of saying “that guy”. I think Jisho translated it as “bastard” in this case because in the sentence it’s paired with やがる so its extra spicy haha super rude!
20 more sentences read; definitely more challenging than yesterday.
Here are the new words from today:
Kanji
Reading
Meaning
ケツ
Ass
奢る
おごる
To treat someone
偶
たま
Rare/occasional
退ける
どける
To move something aside
ウロウロ
To loiter (verb) relecklessly (adverb)
確りしろ
しっかりしろ
Get a grip!
やべー
Risky/dangerous
ガキ共
がきども
Damn kids/brats (derogatory)
There were lots of sentences I couldn’t grasp the meaning of so had to check with coworkers or a translator. One of these sentences was:
春木屋迄飛ばすぞ。今夜もケツのおごりだからな
Ride to Harukiya! Cuz tonight ~~~~ again.
The ass’s treat? What does that mean???
I asked my coworkers and they also didn’t understand until one of them figured it out!
The characters are racing their bikes to Harukiya and whoever is the slowest (the ass) will treat everyone again tonight (to drinks/dinner whatever). That was satisfying to work out!
Another difficult sentence was:
たまには奢られる側にならねーとな
奢られる is the passive form of おごる aka to be treated to something
Tetsuo says this when they’re racing. He usually loses the race to Kaneda so I knew it was something about how he’ll get to be treated tonight and it’s rare (たま)
But in the end I couldn’t work out how になる (to become) was being conjugated (にならねー).
At first I actually mistook it for the conditional なら as you’ll see in my notes making something like “If/when I get treated for once/rarely” … which doesn’t make sense
I also don’t know what the と is doing and assumed it was just another emphatic article
I ended up checking on DeepL which suggested “Sometimes you gotta be on the receiving end!” (makes much more sense!). He’s talking about Kaneda not himself!
So maybe 奢られる isn’t just being treated to a nice thing but also a bad thing?
OH ! literally working this out as I’m writing this post So maybe the と is the “must” of ないと but …why would it be ねー and not ない (is this just a casual way of speaking the negative?)
I think I understand it more after writing this all out haha but if anyone can explain the grammar to me in this sentence more clearly I’d be hugely grateful :>
ALSO: I’m contemplating making a separate thread for posts from my reading … what do y’all think? Is it better to not clutter the forums with another thread and keep everything on this page or should I just go for it and make a different log?
This is pretty common in male speech. The male mc in the manga I’m reading rn practically always uses ね～ instead of ない
How do you mean? Like just a place to talk about your reading or do you want to ask questions? You could make one per series possibly, but I think it’s fine here? The style feels like something I’d see in the Read Everyday Challenge though if you’re interested in joining that
Interesting so it’s the same conjugation as あ-column +ない except it’s あ-column + ねー
Very cool!
Re. separate thread-- It’s mainly so I had one place that I could easily scroll through and find past vocab. I think if I joined the reading challenge there would be so many comments (albeit interesting and informative I’m sure!) I’d run into the same problem as I have here … but I think you’re right maybe it’s best to just keep it all in one place here !
Your Japanese handwriting is amazing!! I don’t have anything else to contribute but omg, opening the read more was like a jumpscare, but in a good way.
(And I’ve also seen ねー used in manga as a form of ない、and I think なー as well. I feel like it’s more intuitive if you’re listening to someone speak, but reading it is confusing at first, haha)
thank you hahahaha yeah admittedly it does look a bit like crazy scrawl because I’m halfway through this notebook so I’m trying to conserve space/pages and writing quite compactly
thanks for the handwriting compliment I think my Japanese handwriting is just as messy as my English but as long as it’s legible I don’t mind
In that case, if you’re fine with another platform, I’d recommend Renshuu.org or an excel spreadsheet.
On Renshuu, you can add any dictionary lookup to your studypad. Your studypad is a sort of index and you can make multiple ones. Like you could make a studypad for Akira or each chapter or day by day.
Excel you’d need to use a dictionary with unless you know how to pull translations automatically.
Ooh yeah I’ve seen excel spreadsheets for vocabulary on the bookclub for 小さな森の狼ちゃん! Maybe I’ll add the vocab after posting these lil posts into a spreadsheet for each new book. Thanks for the suggestion!
update: @DIO-Berry it looks pretty nice! This will be much easier than trying to scan through my crazy notes!
In the spirit of learning from someone else’s learning; this actually just helped me with my reading! I’m working through 名探偵コナン, and Conan just dropped やがる a couple of times. My phone’s dictionary didn’t have an explanation, but I remembered seeing you mention it here! So thanks for sharing
Also tagging onto the ない/ね/な thing – I’ve seen it around enough that if I have a sentence where there’s an n-root hiragana that doesn’t make sense, one of the first things I ask myself is “okay would this work if it were ない” lol. The same thing can happen with like, やっばい or じゃない too. It’s like, dialect or speech differences, but it can make understanding it…interesting.
A lot of the time my English sentences don’t read well or are grammatically weird but that’s okay to me As I’ve said before, the purpose of writing out the English is to check that I’ve fully understood the sentence in Japanese, not English (if that makes sense).
Here are the new words today:
Kanji
Reading
Meaning
昨夜
ゆうべ
Last night
拍ビル
はくびる
Hospital
軽率
けいそつ
Rash/thoughtless
マイナス
Minus
一般
いっぽん
General/ordinary
適応
てきおう
Conformity
目指す
めざす
To aim at/to head for
クズ
Dregs/losers/scum
ガタガタ
Grumbling/whining
I like how learning kanji gives you the ability to guess a reading even if you don’t know the word yet. It makes lookups much easier/quicker!
Pls note I didn’t write every derogatory word I looked up today here or in my excel sheet because I’m not necessarily trying to remember those hahah watch how Akira is going to make me speak Japanese like a thug.
@Ayara012 heeeey so glad it could help!
Yeah I think you’re right you just gotta play around with the options in your head or maybe say it aloud and see if it makes sense (given it’s easier to hear if it makes sense like @rua was saying)
In a similar vein, I read a sentence today that said 「50ポイントグレー」. Following the ‘e’ sound as making it casual, I guessed that this グレー might be a casual spoken ぐらい - what do y’all think?
I’ve had his happen for meaning, too! It was…a bit of an odd one…but I guessed that a kanji meant, like, “blood splatter” based off of the kanji it was made up of
What was the full sentence/context? I don’t see the sound changes as often with katakana, I don’t think, so I’m not quite sure right off the bat.
I didn’t use vacation mode, but I’m also not working nearly at the same pace as you. Good luck with your reviews! And enjoy your time with your friend!
well done for pushing through!
So here are some new words I learned today.
. So it’s kind of funny to see it here and realize I was missing that context 
I think my Japanese handwriting is just as messy as my English but as long as it’s legible I don’t mind
