I also would not associate “luxuriant” with “extravagance”, but then I could be wrong as not a native English speaker. (rather, luxury good, but luxuriant grove)
But then, I feel I have rights to detect an awkward sentence written by a native, despite not being one. – As in dare to make mistakes and dare to declare my opinions. (Also, in some ways, dare to mistrust dictionaries, putting experience first.)
I also feel this one is off, unless I come into contact with similar examples/situations later on. (But I don’t think translation itself is off.)
I would check 国語辞典, as well as 類語辞典, but now that Goo dict is no more… (I still have Yomitan.)
Maybe it isn’t wrong, only that I haven’t seen it yet? (3)
I’m about halfway through book 2. I have a kinda busy week coming up, but I’m hoping to be through 2 and 3 by the end of the week at the latest. I love the characters, and it’s a pretty breezy read for me.
hooray, I have successfully conned other people to get me to read books I want to read!
I love this so much… but also… do musical notes lie? Like, don’t you just play what’s written ?
i think it’s more like, you lie as if you’ve been rehearsing the music performance to a T and you know perfectly how the verse and chorus go ^^
i should start a book club for layton: unwound future, that’s the one i’ve never read and it’s apparently the best one and it’s something like “the childhood’s end” of video games, which would be very fitting for my end of wanikani journey too ^^
let me know if anyone wants the layton unwound future book club (2026) xddd
October 5th, 2025
192 reviews on WaniKani
18 lessons on WaniKani
10 reviews on Bunpro
3 stories on Satori Reader
Book: 8番出口, 4 pages
Film: 8番出口
So this one is funny, because I was attempting to read with others in a car and they constantly asked me questions and I couldn’t focus on the book at all, but I noticed that the book went pretty easily in
Funnily enough, I also had this “i don’t know half of those words” at the beginning and then literally a few sentences later I’m like “i understand literally everything”, so warmup is still a big issue for me
I bought the book when I was in Malaysia, in a Kinokuniya, and thought today might be a perfect day to start it, and start it definitely is the key term xdd
The amount of text I’ve read made up for about a minute-minute and a half of the movie ^^
But, despite getting distracted, I ended up getting my mom to the cinema to watch 8番出口 together: very easy film in terms of language used/necessary and I was impressed with how many different ways the translator was able to translate どうする and 大丈夫 xdddd
Only 30 days left to finish WaniKani. November 5th, time to already put this in the calendar ^^
I will most likely be at a work event back there. What better place to celebrate? xddd
It might affect and delay my level 60 post a bit? maybe? i don’t know? should i start writing a draft already???
If any of you have watched A Real Pain from last year, this is that backdrop from that movie ^^
Funnily enough, I feel I’m better at speaking about movies set in Warsaw than movies set in Berlin, even though I live in Berlin xdd
Forced my (poor and fatigued) mom to jump on a bike and cycle around the city with me today ^^
There’s a lot to love about to Warsaw, but concrete is definitely not one of those things: they like to call themselves the green capital, I ask them WHERE xddd
Instead of resorting to a French bakery, as we always do with my mom (Paul is her love!), we found a Polish bakery, and I think it’s pretty climactic too ^^
We stumbled upon a festival of the Masovian countryside, and when I think of Poland, countryside is one of my first associations: similar to Ireland as well ^^
…we went to a food court instead ^^
One of the biggest advantages of being in Poland is that the country maintains positive relations with Georgia after Russia started making demands of the country, so a lot of Georgian people looking for a better chance in life, not necessarily immigrants, decided to go come to Poland and opened a ton of Georgian restaurants, so here’s khinkali with Georgian lemonade C:
They had really high quality props prepared, including sound and light and even actual actors in the middle of the escape, though some puzzles dragged on ^^
We’ve heard that the escape rooms are pretty hard to make money off of, and they would be closing this room indefinitely after Halloween this year, so hey, barely made it and we might have memories nobody else will ^^
Then, ee, surprise surprise… we went to a proper Georgian restaurant xddd
Here’s khachapuri, and some dancers that were animating the show to the pleasure of the other people eating, I think their dance number was great C:
And then we split off and me and my mom went to Varso Tower to compare it against the other towers, and while the height isn’t amazing, they made up for it with the programming and the illuminations
And then we ended up going for the film and now it’s super late and I’m working tomorrow and I need to return to Berlin in the morning so AAAAAA see you tomorrow xddd
Ahhhhh ok now I get it.
I like it even more now. I’m gonna be that person at some point soon and be like “well in Polish they say you lie like musical notes” it’d be a small reprieve from me constantly talking about what they say in Japanese
Your mini adventures somehow seem to be more filled than my full blown ones now I definitely want to go find a bakery…
didn’t manage to play with it how much I’d like yet, but it looks really fancy C:
one thing i noticed straight away is that there is a streak keeper that gives some leniency for skipped days, which is great, problem being I don’t skip days, i simply sometimes do reviews before midnight and the next day i do reviews after midnight xddd
The Bunpro one probably is the one I trust more, because I try to hold myself accountable of the timezones and midnight there ^^
Since tomorrow I’ll have an unGODLY AMOUNT OF REVIEWS i’ll try to play around a bit more tomorrow, and hopefully wait to see any userscripts be updated in the form of the widgets too ^^
I’ve been pretty critical of the WaniKani platform offering for a while thinking that it stopped developing and it stopped listening to people, but this change in my opinion is just a huge positive one in my book, so I’m curious to see which direction WaniKani goes in the future ^^
Also, I messed up today and did the 15 vocab lessons first not realizing I still have 18 kanji to do, I’ll do no lessons tomorrow xdd
Also, the Exit 8 book, it’s very quirky and it feels like it’s a retelling of the movie events rather than a thing on its own, but one fun thing I noticed about it is that sometimes they call specific characters yellow to draw your attention to a different message, like the 8出口から外にでること on this page, it’s a bit hard to see it, but when you do, it’s so cute!
There is a specific type of pastry in Poland called a drożdżówka, it’s basically yeast with puff pastry
and all sorts of different things you can put in there:
it’s really rich in calories (and sugar xdd) and you don’t even notice it when you’re back in Poland, sometimes you get one, sometimes you don’t, but I realized that you can’t really find it much anywhere outside of Poland, so custard drożdżówka was my rail companion today ^^
The closest thing in Germany I can think of is a Streuselschnecke:
And slight spoilers for an adventure in a few days: Festival of Lights is being prepared in Berlin! The actual illumination will begin on Wednesday evening, I might see them either on Thursday or on Friday ^^
On Anki, you can tell it when you want the day to turn over for streak calculations and I’m pretty sure mine is at 5am. You could just put your time zone into like.. somewhere in central Asia and probably get the same effect.
WaniKani keeps getting more and more difficult, and seeing 204 reviews queued up for tomorrow is making me go like “REALLY???” xddd
as before, my attention span can accommodate maybe 149 reviews, probably not more than that, the final ~50 reviews today were me just writing in a random hiragana character, pressing enter, nope, that’s not it, word failed xdd
I also did some revenge procrastination before the block today knowing that it’ll be obnoxiously long, but also I have another 204 reviews for tomorrow:
with the only saving grace being I might go for a queer book club tomorrow and if I return late, it won’t be “hmm should I check out one more page or do reviews”, it would be “you literally have to do this before you go to sleep” xdd
I’m still doing much better than in early 2021 with the amount of reviews, but I definitely share the sentiment that the current item load of level 55 is probably too much for me…
…so we’re going until November 5th xddd
And this is more German, but when revenge procrastinating today, I did stumble upon some German subreddits and this Easy German video about rent prices in Berlin:
I currently overpay for my rent (legal definition of overpay xdd) and there is a legal procedure in place you can follow up on to see if you can get your rent reduced, a few people in Berlin I know have been successful in cutting their rent significantly, so this video does contain a wide spectrum of different prices for that reason ^^
Life
Every döner specialist is familiar with the three sauces, Knoblauch (garlic), Scharf (spicy) and Kräuter (herbs), what would happen if the latter were to be missing???
ran by a Russian owner, I know a few basic expressions, so I could thank for my coffee and tell her I enjoyed unsere Kakao, would recommend C:
Then we went to a Korean grill, which had some really nice decorations inside, but it only made me ache for the actual Korean cuisine more, my bibimbap was a stark reminder I’m no longer in the bibimbap land xdd
We spoke about the k-drama called Extraordinary Attorney Woo, about an autistic woman who is really good at her job and also falls in love and so on, I did give the recommendation for Ace Attorney series, we need to make law appear fun to people xddd
Also, on our way there, we found a ping pong place, they have machines to count the score and lessons to improve at table tennis, I think it’s a fun idea for a place to be ^^
And yeah, there is something that’s on my mind and I want to talk about this openly, but feel free to go away if geopolitics isn’t your thing:
October 7th, 2023 and Gazan Genocide in Berlin
I saw a decent few posters and ad campaigns today about what happened on October 7th two years ago, and moreover, my local library did hang an Israeli flag earlier today, and not the Palestinian one, it made me a little upset. Knowing how desperately Germany is currently doing everything in their strength to avoid calling what currently is happening in Middle East a genocide like the UN experts concluded, to avoid responsibility for their actions while at the same time being complicit and spreading pro-Israel propaganda. I felt provoked a few times today going around the town
While I do acknowledge that the massacre of October 7th was definitely a terrible, terrible thing, and many Israeli people unjustifiably and horribly lost their lives to it, I believe the reaction to it, going for multiple years now, has been extremely disproportionate and I feel like Germany is really hostile in imposing one correct interpretation of that view.
By the time I got back from work, the flag was no longer on the library. I do hope that there was no violence involved in that process, but also my reaction to October 7th, 2025 in Berlin remains consistent with my posts above.
…and you know what? there’s surprisingly a lot of text in Mario Galaxy 2, I didn’t expect it xdd
I’ve never played it before properly, but I remember that Mario Odyssey was immediately like “GO. DONT WASTE TIME. GO.” and in Mario Galaxy 2 there’s textboxes that slow you down everywhere, and maybe it becomes easier and less with time, but it’s the most text-heavy mainline Mario game I know of yet xdd
The controls for Switch 2 are really meh, especially if you play joined joycons, I find myself doing the famous Dean Takahashi Cuphead tutorial thing while attempting not to suck on the game, but there’s three things to keep track of at the same time, Mario’s 3D position, Yoshi’s tongue angle and Yoshi’s tongue pointer, and they don’t like to all be synchronized together at the same time, so I suck at this game so, so bad
Study block today, obnoxiously long again, tomorrow will have a few reviews less, luckily, a little better accuracy than yesterday, but I’m pretty tired of long review blocks already
I’m not a huge fan of the jam-maker story on Satori Reader, I have a feeling somebody who wrote this took writing stories for beginners too close to their heart and they go like, “i love spices! such as, thyme, mint, cardamom, basil, they can be used to make all sorts of amazing things, like dishes, cakes, dinners, foods”, and I’m listening to it and being like xddd
It still teaches me new expressions though, so I’ll keep listening regardless~
i’m so reminded of that “now is not now” post from a few months ago
it kinda feels like a film set if you look at this ^^
There’s a Billie Eilish corner at the Rewe supermarket in East Side Mall and I wonder, who paid for this??? xd
It’s like the MrBeast Feastables, but with Billie Eilish instead, interesting
I don’t know her that well, but she came to Berlin and made a big show around, so maybe it’s the supermarket’s way of saying thanks to her???
But yeah, went to the queer book club today and we’ve had a small snack exchange, for some reason the pics I took are blurry, but pretend they’re amazing xdd
We talked tons of things, but my favorite conversation from tonight was about the concept of the cotton ceiling, and how the whole conversation was based on a twitter thread over a decade ago and nobody even has the original tweet anymore, including the Internet Archive, but it didn’t stop people from developing their own interpretation of how the discourse went regardless
And yeah, a lot of political dialogue in Berlin is held over stickers, markers and street art, so this was in the elevator going up to the office where the book club took place xdd
“…YOU HAVE LITERALLY WRITTEN IT BELOW, WHY WON’T YOU ACCEPT MY ANSWER” xddd
But yeah, really good day for archiving and downloading your own content from the internet, plus learning new things, because I’m considering getting one of those 読み放題 subscriptions from Bookwalker to just download 50GB of stuff and them run them through Mokuro for no reason other than “it’s fun” and why am I like this xdd
All of the illuminations are running in late evening hours after the sunset, and last year I had a few friends over just sit at them and go like “ahhhh” xdd
So here is a tour of all of the most characteristic places in Berlin you can see them ^^
There is a special area right next to the Opera/Humboldt Forum where most of the projectors are concentrated, and just LOOK at how many people are in there, people just fight with their elbows to get closer to be able to take a picture ^^
For a while you might see me dabble in weird mangas, because I’m looking for volumes that are free to expand my interests and just consume characters, the story for this one is a woman trying to find a way to survive as a single person in her 20-30s, hilarity ensues…
But today definitely wasn’t a big native immersion day, I felt like I procrastinated on my studies by looking for ways to study a little too much xdd
I did find cool things though!
So first up, I was able to scrape a lot of Japanese content, I mean, A LOT, it’s still Mokuroing in the background. Magazines, manga, manga magazines, some EPUBs, it was just fun to go with it ^^
Then, speaking of Mokuro, somebody made an file server where they share their own Mokuro’d manga, there’s so many series in there, and so many volumes, that it’s crazy, but I want to start with my own content first D:
And then I found jidoujisho, which is a “video player, reading aid, dictionary and card creation toolkit with features specifically helpful for language learners” and let me tell you, it’s a swiss army knife of tools: it’s almost like Chrome with all extensions I’ve been collecting this year condensed into a single application
They have all of your common Stepmania clones, Mario Kart arcades, some rhythm games, but what I found to be the coolest were the Westaboo games that you can’t find in the Asian arcades
…an arcade version of Angry Birds??? A beer shooting-themed game???
And then I went to Dussmann bookstore and signed for the new loyalty program for discounts on books, but also, found a magazine for Lesbian issues in Berlin, my first time seeing it
i think you can automate the download using wget or fetch or something similar, but i wonder why is it that the user-facing website seems to be password blocked and the actual resources… aren’t
WUUUU LEVEL 56 C:
so this is how it looks like on a new dashboard ^^
But yeah, since I could have my manga on a tablet now, I just carried the tablet around the city and pulled by different places and read there, and let me tell you, some places are better than the others ^^
upon reading something like 500 pages of manga today, I started thinking that I’m probably going to pass the N3 exam in December, wHAT DO YOU MEAN I SIGNED UP FOR N2 xddd
Listening to Jelly Jelly Radio, I definitely don’t feel ready, but you know, for some reason Germany thinks that N2 is equivalent to the C1 level…
…while I feel somewhere between B1 and B2 judging by my amount of comprehension
Well, that one is definitely wrong xddd
But yeah, quick round of manga, I uploaded all reviews on Natively:
しあわせは食べて寝て待て: pretty depressing and talks about important issues, but in a way that makes me depressed as well, so that one was interesting from linguistics standpoint, less so from the plot standpoint xddd
百合短編集: it’s 青年 yuri. that’s all you need to know. I don’t like 青年 yuri xdddd
タイのひとびと: SOOOOOO GOOD. I’m growing to realize I love travel and adventure manga, and the author was SUPER ENTHUSIASTIC all the way drawing the story, so I really enjoyed this one ^^
Life
Today was the very first day ever that I had a thought of “why am I even studying Japanese language if I could be studying German instead? there’s like so much more resources and i’m so much more interested in the culture and-”, you know, the usual one, bUT IT HAD NEVER OCCURRED TO ME THIS WAY
it was always wanting to study Japanese instead of German xddd
I didn’t (and I still don’t) know what to do with this thought, because I’ve hit singularity in Japanese and I want to keep it up, but I still need to write the German proficiency exam later in the year, so I’m just observing the thought for now and not letting it derail my Japanese study xddd
I also stopped reading books in English/German/Polish altogether, and there are so many cool YA books in German I just don’t read (but probably could) (and should)