A Certain 🎃 Ghost-Type 👻 Bidoof's Multi-Language Study Log 🇯🇵 🇩🇪 🇨🇦 🇵🇱

[GolyBidoof]

well you’ve got to excuse me posting late today because

October 1st, 2025

• 161 reviews on WaniKani
• 15 lessons on WaniKani
• 15 reviews on Bunpro
• 3 stories on Satori Reader
• Manga: ささやくように恋を唄う第２１〜２６話 (第５巻 in entirety)
• Game: ゴースト トリッ第１４章〜終わりまで

I just finished my second visual novel in Japanese ever.
As before, no textgrabbers, purely through the force of spite on the Switch xddd

16h1m, it’s 12 hours long on howlongtobeat, which means that reading it in Japanese only added four extra hours to the time
It also means I played the game for 5.5 hours, which eXPLAINS WHY IT’S SO LATE THAT IM WRITING THIS

but man.

there are five video games that have successfully been able to permanently change my brain chemistry, and ghost trick definitely is one of those five. chronologically, of when i played them at first ^^

1. phoenix wright ace attorney: trials & tribulations
2. ghost trick: phantom detective
3. virtue’s last reward
4. danganronpa 2
5. the house in fata morgana

back when i played ghost trick for the first time in 2010, i knew there was something SPECIAL about this game, i just didn’t know HOW special, and today, ever since I arrived at 第１５章, I just had SHIVERS all around - the pacing from that point on is wild, and sometimes textscreens scroll without pressing on any button at all, and im like “ITS OK IM READING JUST AS FAST”, there is a point of no return in the game, where once you achieve it, it’s gripping hard on the Switch, crying and praying for the characters to be able to make it, and they made it

what a freaking game. as soon as i finished my reviews for today before 1am, i was just SEATED, i didn’t even go to the toilet because I was like “OKAY ONE MORE PUZZLE SEQUENCE AND I WILL”, and I never did xddd

I love this game to death and Shu Takumi is an absolute genius

well, i can only recommend the game enough, so in case any of this endorsement works, go and play it already ^^

Some funny things:
there is a word in late chapters refering to a location after the point of no return that gets brought up like 50 times or something. I kept reading it wrong for something like three hours, and then I decided to look up it on Jisho and I was like “OOPS”, and I’ll have to make a hard effort to unlearn the wrong version of the word xddd

Also, I saw this kanji another 50 times in Ghost Trick today:

but when it came back to actually SRSing it, I was like “eeeeee” xddd
I think I failed myself this one, 警察班, I hope that I drilled it into my head enough after today ^^

Also, that’s another game where I saw the く reading of eating, like 食い止め, I’m growing to like reading 食 as く, it feels fun ^^
In Hibike they had 食い込む, so that’s at least two useful ones ^^

and eee, I read another entire volume of ささこい today and eee, new items on WaniKani today xdd

Also, side note, I found a educational portal of NHK, 高校講座, where they post interesting TV materials in Japanese, and then add complete transcriptions to them and quizes for how much you understood a given material

And I think that this works even better than Satori Reader for listening and reading comprehension: I will not drop Satori Reader just yet, but this resource is amazing

---

Life

Okay, asiiiide from Japanese language xdddd

I woke up pretty nosy-stuffy, but by 5pm I was mostly recovered, so I decided to go grab a ramen to get myself hyped for Japanese study, if I wanted to have any xddd

The ramen place I went to was oddly aggro towards men, whAT DID THEY DO TO YOU xddd

But ahhh, edamame

Then I just went for an hour to my queer book club to say hi to them, and wHATS WRONG WITH MEN, WHAT DID THEY DO TO YOU xdddd

But yeah, just said hi, left them with some Japanese candy and went back to play Ghost Trick ^^

I 100% anticipate being a zombie tomorrow, (but it was worth it), so tomorrow might be a weird day xdd

Also, I’m featuring my Discord friend here, she wanted to be included after I started having Ghost Trick-related spasms here so just this is your place xddd

Either way though, take care and see you tomorrow ^^

[Akashelia]

Damn you sell Ghost Trick very well! I will work extra hard at cleaning up my backlog so I can play it soon!!

[Italy]

OMG YES YOU DID A LINKTREE AAA THANK YOU I LOVE THIS MY FORMATTING EYES R LOVING THIS AHAAA!!！！！<3
Edit Wait where is the message

[Italy]

Oh silly me it s the post s bio of course awrh silly mearrh

[nerdqueen666]

@GolyBidoof

So here’s one for @nerdqueen666: I came in when two women were singing Paramore Decode, but there were three microphones, so I just borrowed a microphone and by the end of the first verse we were already The Voice of Germany submission team ^^

Yessssss!!! I LOVE that song, and I love that you strolled in and formed the emo dream team with two strangers ahahaa

[sanshoo]

Hello there!

Went through multiple Labor Law trainings and certifications in German, finished a C1.1 course and passed Leben in Deutschland

How did you learn German if I can ask? I wonder if for exemple, with all the ressources available for Japanese, it is a different experience / harder for people who arent native.

[GolyBidoof]

@sanshoo

How did you learn German if I can ask? I wonder if for exemple, with all the ressources available for Japanese, it is a different experience / harder for people who arent native.

Wish I had a better answer for you, but the actual answer is really frustrating: Japanese language study is so difficult and so methodical, that learning any other Germanic language after it seems to be a piece of cake, and even though currently I actively do not attempt to try hard to improve my language, I simply absorb it from my surroundings doing different things

There will be a small tangent in my today’s log about a cool thing in German I found again, but that’s the state of things

The downside of this approach is that my grammar is a mess, all over the place, my accent is apparently read as “french” and I absolutely do not respect the grammatical genders of nouns no matter how important they are, but the upside is that I get to understand what’s going on

In terms of the entry-level German: I did have a course up to the B1 level at Goethe-Institut, those are available in many countries around the world, and then I did take a C1.1 course earlier this year to attempt to get myself ready for a potential C1 exam, but the closer I get to the self-imposed deadline for getting the test for citizenship, the worse I feel looking at the C1 exam papers, I probably should be studying it more

In terms of the resources to leverage for consumption: luckily enough, Germanic culture is very similar to English, so looking up almost everything that currently exists in the English-sphere will net you a result in German too, but the bonuses that you unlock if you study German are:

• cool materials about politics! German politics is genuinely really interesting and it’s more than just people screaming at one another and never getting anything but abusing minorities done
• materials about city planning, public transit and so on! Love videos about Deutsche Bahn and so on
• materials about local communities! Love hearing what’s going on in Düsseldorf or something

A significant downside is that if you’re digging into topics often explored in detail on English forums, like cinematography, feminism, pieces on specific people, the German videos will have the worst, the most mainstream takes and you’ll be fuming at them being like “why are they 5 years behind the American videos, grrr”

But the big caveat here is that I simultaneously wish I was learning more German, am upset for not knowing German sufficiently and at the same time I’m frustrated I learn it faster than Japanese

I tried Fire Emblem Shadows the other day and I got through the intro in German pretty quickly and without issues and then set it to Japanese and was like xdddd

And on the note of the most recent piece of media that helps me study German, there was a Manga Day in Berlin just a few days ago and I picked up a ton of samplers from there, who would have thought that living in a place gives you more opportunities to immerse yourself in the place’s culture ;___;

[sanshoo]

@GolyBidoof

I absolutely do not respect the grammatical genders

As a french guy, I understand that this is the gnarliest for learners lmao.

@GolyBidoof

difficult and so methodical

Maybe I am doing something wrong because for now, it seems fun to me! But maybe you are right, there does need to be a particular path / process to follow I think, since the system and characters are different etc. There is a method to the madness.

@GolyBidoof

5 years behind the American videos, grrr

Japanese youtube be like : hold my beer (sometimes I find it to be like retro-youtube, I have yet to find essays about games and such)

@GolyBidoof

wish I was learning more German, am upset for not knowing German sufficiently

Honestly, if you can understand it and live there, that’s probably why! Less motivation, but it’s very cool ! To me you did the job

[GolyBidoof]

@sanshoo

Maybe I am doing something wrong because for now, it seems fun to me! But maybe you are right, there does need to be a particular path / process to follow I think, since the system and characters are different etc. There is a method to the madness.

There absolutely is, I just feel like I’ve set off on an exponential curve in Japanese that also requires an exponential amount of brain connections to be formed in order to understand what’s going on and I went from seeing a kanji and my brain being like “OO THATS EYE! め!” to being like:

“wait, is that one really about an elephant? there is nothing about this manga that implies that an elephant would be relevant, but that’s the only meaning of ゾウ I know… it does mention an インドの, so it most likely might be… but it’s in katakana? is there any other ぞう I’m not aware of that I missed? It’s gotta be the elephant, right?”, and like that for at least 15 minutes each time I warm up and I haven’t calibrated myself for reading in Japanese that day yet

[sanshoo]

I have felt that sometimes, I was close to unveil beyond the “curtain of the beginner”, and to find out that there is an ocean of nuance compared to my small drop of knowledge lmao.

For now, I stay blissfully unaware beginner stage FTW, nothing else exists beyond です, and a small て-form if I feel daring

[YandrosTheInsane]

I’ll read in full all the updates this weekend but I’m honored to have been deemed worthy of the title of friend of the log .

[WeepingWeeb]

Omg log friends

[shitsurei]

Same. Just

[GolyBidoof]

I reworked my op today! It’s a little closer to my idea of what my OP could be, I can’t think of a way to insert the travel content into the OP considering the fact that I travel a few times every month and it would take forever to document it in the OP xddd

But I did make a section for a few of the hand-selected posts, I did run smol big data to find out which posts have generated the most interest with people to see if I should feature them…

…and it turns out that most of my heavily-liked posts are only from the last two or three months

So that’s why the bias for the handpicking posts is from the more recent ones ^^

…I also tried aggregating how long are the posts divided by month and <exhales>

I promise I’ll try making the posts shorter again xddd

As a side consequence of reworking the op, I didn’t even realize that adding the section of the friends of the study log would, eee, CALL EVERYONE, so sorry for the pings if you got one!

@Italy

OMG YES YOU DID A LINKTREE AAA THANK YOU

@YandrosTheInsane

but I’m honored to have been deemed worthy of the title of friend of the log .

@WeepingWeeb

Omg log friends

@shitsurei

Same. Just

Thank you for participating in my study log! I really appreciate you being a part of my adventure too, and I’ll try to participate in yours’s as well!

One other thing I noticed is that I interface with this forum almost exclusively through study logs, so there is a decent likelihood I don’t know what’s going on outside of this box that says “new” and “unread” posts at the bottom, so I wonder how many stories and how many interesting threads am I not participating in because they didn’t appear in front of my eyes

If any of you can think of a really fun thread that I haven’t seen yet, let me know!

---

October 2nd, 2025

• 157 reviews on WaniKani
• 15 lessons on WaniKani
• 29 reviews on Bunpro
• 5 stories on Satori Reader
• Book club: 自転車屋さんの高橋くん第１〜２話

Would you look at that, I went back to a book club
I’d love to participate more in Book Clubs, but my interests in things are often driven by “uUUuuUuuUu” aspect rather than being methodical, so I often find myself confined by the idea of a book club, but this one is a Speedrun Book Club and I really want to see it through ^^

…and I realized I blew through my Halloween game on October 1st, what am I supposed to be reading now xddd

Also, finished 聞き耳ラジオ on Satori Reader, another one of those stories that has a big twist that shows halfway through, my first impression of the story was rolling my eyes, but as soon as it got to 地震 I was sold on this one ^^

I’m thinking of eventually transitioning to something like 高校講座 I mentioned in the previous post, so my days on Satori Reader might be numbered, I just don’t know what the number is xdd

---

Life

Berlin, Germany!

…wait, I’m not traveling anymore xddd

Anyway, went to the Zoo neighborhood today, there’s a church that got bombed over WW2 and then it only halfway got fixed to remind people of the horrors of war, and it looks really aeshetic!

A new japanese toy-themed shop opened up in Bikini Berlin! Now that gallery has four distinct Japanese stores, but still the closest to a bookstore is a stationery store, so I’ll have to wait a bit longer ^^

…so they opened a new Pop Mart in there, in Europa-Center xdd
The prices are much more expensive than in SEA, and it kinda does feel like a deluxe product, and you know I like labubu-likes, so hey.
Second in Berlin, and this one doesn’t have any queues yet
They made this whole decor with bouquets at the entrance with German flags to let people know that this is the proper opening!

On the note of reading in German vs Japanese, the Hugendubel in Europa-Center does have a veeeery tiny Girls’ Love section, still bigger than the one in most Japanese bookstores

One title caught me by surprise, a Korean webcomic by the title of Her Tale of Shim Chong, the illustrations are so pretty, aaa

Would be great to practice my German, because I don’t really do it much, but when I saw that the tome is 18 €, I exhaled and was like, “okay, not today” xdd

Anyway, see you tomorrow ^^

[GolyBidoof]

October 3rd, 2025

• 148 reviews on WaniKani
• 15 lessons on WaniKani
• 28 reviews on Bunpro
• 3 stories on Satori Reader
• Book club: 自転車屋さんの高橋くん第３〜９話

I’m reading the ジャム屋 on Satori Reader now and there’s a sentence in the third chapter that’s like…

and im like xdddd
that sounds pretty awkward to me, but that might be a regular expression in Japanese, I don’t know xdd

Also, speedrun book club doing really well, even though I’ve wasted an hour or two or three trying to improve the script to circumvent bookwalker DRM, but then I started reading and I read for like an hour, so that was fun, volume 1 clear ^^

Added a review on Natively, I’ll keep going!

Also,

@Akashelia

@Daisoujou and @Starzor are we still on to read the sequel in November?
It just went on sale Save 35% on The House in Fata Morgana: A Requiem for Innocence on Steam
Ping @michellespeering and @GolyBidoof , maybe you want to join us!

…I mean…

…at this point it’s a matter of convincing myself that this is the best use of my time, I need to do some of my pep talk if anything

---

Life

Autumn!

Today was the German day of Reunification, a bank holiday, so nobody worked today

I went for a bike ride to Tiergarten to look for the signs of Autumn, it’s my favorite season of the year C:

There’s already chestnuts everywhere, and yellow leaves, for as long as I don’t freeze walking outside, autumn is great ^^

Ahhh, Gulaschsuppe, seasonal treats ^^

I had a plan with a friend tomorrow, but they needed to cancel, so instead I came up with my own plan, that does involve a train, so I will be locked up on a train tomorrow for a few hours, I wonder if I’ll manage to study any Japanese over that time ^^

See you tomorrow!

[Akashelia]

@GolyBidoof

…I mean…

…at this point it’s a matter of convincing myself that this is the best use of my time, I need to do some of my pep talk if anything

Instructions unclear, it’s not November yet xD

[trunklayer]

@GolyBidoof

Autumn, it’s my favorite season of the year C:

Same here!

Thank you for always sharing great photos!

[mitrac]

@GolyBidoof

and im like xdddd
that sounds pretty awkward to me, but that might be a regular expression in Japanese, I don’t know xdd

You mean the word 贅沢 or something else?

I definitely don’t have enough exposure to Japanese to detect an awkward sentence written by a native

[polv]

@GolyBidoof

the script to circumvent bookwalker DRM,

I have another script modified from Chris Fritz’s.

@GolyBidoof

regular expression in Japanese

this

[GolyBidoof]

@mitrac

You mean the word 贅沢 or something else?

I definitely don’t have enough exposure to Japanese to detect an awkward sentence written by a native

Me neither, it’s just the word “extravagant” or “luxuriant” aren’t words I would personally associate with the summer, and neither would WaniKani, DeepL translates this as “it’s a very luxurious season” and I’m wondering when is summer going to open up its’ dubai chocolate stall xddd

@polv

this

yeah i knew that expression was irregular grrr >:[[[[ xdd

October 4th, 2025

• 169 reviews on WaniKani
• 15 lessons on WaniKani
• 17 reviews on Bunpro
• 3 stories on Satori Reader
• Book club: ファタモルガーナの館, sloowly going through door 2 ^^
• Book club: 自転車屋さんの高橋くん第１０〜２０話 (Finished the book club, Volume 2 and Volume 3 complete ^^)

Moderately interested in the spin-off book club if shitsurei and akashelia would also be in, so maybe we’re not done with the series yet ^^

I’m also trying to see if this time I could do The House in Fata Morgana for real, and I very quickly remembered why I stopped reading it when trying to read it today xddd

Between then and now though I’ve received a gift from a fairy that could make the toil easier, or maybe even possible in the first place, I haven’t used it today yet though, as I was reading on a train and it’s always awkward laying out a full workspace on a train, but I can try and see how I could make it work if I’m in front of my desk at home.

Side note, it would be really nice to configure a textgrabber on a Steam Deck, I just don’t know how would something like this work or even look in the first place, so if anyone has any advice for handheld devices, let me know!

Also, Satori Reader today:

well that makes it two times I’ve read today about blind people in Japanese, 偶然？？？？ ^^

My study today came to 5h of book clubs + 1h of a review block, I wonder how long can I keep up studying for this long… and will there ever be a point where I go like, “i’m not studying, i’m just reading a news article that completely coincidentally is in japanese and i’ve also read like 30 of those today but i’m not studying, just scrolling by”

Much less studying anticipated for tomorrow.

---

Life

France!

No, I’m messing with you, that’s just the Ku’damm district of Berlin where I went to have a breakfast earlier today ^^

…I will be in France in less than two months though xdd

Warsaw, Poland!

I came in because I got invited to take part in an escape room tomorrow and I was like “YEEE ESCAPE ROOM”
the trains from Berlin come in pretty quickly, only five hours, and you can use that time to study some Japanese ^^

Before Warsaw though, I saw an ad for a newspaper, Junge Welt, in the city earlier today and I was like “hmm, that is some good wordplay” xddd

In English it’d be something “they lie as if it were printed, we print how they’re lying”, or in proper English, “they lie through their teeth, we print their lies”, it works MUCH better in German than in English though

The Polish expression is “kłamać jak z nut”, to lie as if from musical notes, how sweet and adorable is that ^^

Anyway, Poland is slowly growing to embrace East Asian and South East Asian culture too, there’s a lot of shops that advertize themselves like “AS SEEN ON TIKTOK”, and Miniso is the biggest trend recently seems like ^^

No Pop Marts yet!

And fun story, in the YA space of books, if you see a book with a Polish title, it was written by a foreign author, if you see a book with an English title, it was written by an aspirational Polish person that wanted to be COOL xdddd

So tomorrow, escape room, and after that me… and my mom!, have a ticket for the Varso Tower, seen in the background here, the tallest skyscraper in the entirety of the European Union!

The drinks apparently are super overpriced, but that’s okay, we’re not there for the drinks xdd

So, see you tomorrow!