In the name of heat from fire fire from heat?
Please have mercy on all you frivols, once I have acess to such power it is an irreversible thing can’t you see the moral quandary
I love cacti
Welcome to Frankfurt!! I love the place
Also I am sure your mother will be fine, I, a fellow creature too bound by simple needs haven’t slept for 3 days straight and I am operational
Although yes I guess biology plays a decisive role
PAULANER. SPEZI. YEAH
It is time ^^
Yep, back to reading Yurihime, I’ll try from now until JLPT to do at least some reading every single day, if not, make up for it every day I can’t ^^
I did not finish Ghost Trick after the last update and the japanese SRS review blocks are getting so LONG I JUST CANT SJKFKSDN, been solid over an hour today xddd
It’s my fault for doing so many lessons on WaniKani even though the accuracy is getting low, but it’s getting really long, but two days until level 54, so it’s not that long until WaniKani is over ^^
The Asia trip is officially over! I’ll change my thread title to reflect that ^^
I’m still very, VERY exhausted and that’s why I haven’t read the study logs for a while, but I’ll try to do a proper round around the forums either tomorrow or on Sunday, I’m sorry for not having caught up on the forum yet!
tl;dr thoughts? Most of our regrets sit with either Korea or Malaysia, with me, more regrets sit with Thailand too: those are three countries I really wish I had more time on and I could see more of, but we’ll see with time ^^
If you scroll up, we’ve had a ton of adventures and I hope that I’ll come back to Asia before too long for more, or a completely different direction too C:
Next trip: I have a Works Council seminar at the end of October in Hessen, and then flying to Lucca in Italy for Lucca Games & Comics, so look forward fr a report from that ^^
And adventures from today, just a quick update as I’m falling flat on my face xdd
Today in Berlin was a manga day, perfect timing for coming back to the city ^^
A part of the celebrations is that manga shops around the time give you a lot of manga samplers, and I think all of them are in this picture ^^
I didn’t particularly care about getting all of them, but I got 12 of them, still a ton xdd
It’s at most 3 per shop, so there was some circling around and my mom was helpful to increase the limits too xd
Considering most of the manga shops had those queues…
And also, it’s Oktoberfest time in Berlin! They put up an entire market in front of Alexanderplatz! It’s almost like a Christmas market ^^
And post-Asian dinner to celebrate being back, gyoza, edamame, xiao long bao and bao beef bun ^^
We did a ton of walking, as usual, and saw One Battle After Another in the cinema, tomorrow my mom is leaving back to Poland, so we’ll have the final round of goodbyes then ^^
Until then, see you tomorrow!
完璧 
Your 109 outfit looks great!
I appreciated the map
What an awesome Bidoof story arc
Excitingggg
Woo it looked like you had a lot of fun, must be nice to be home though
Sometimes when reading the more cutesy manga, I get the issue of reading them once, and not getting them
reading them twice, and not getting them
reading them three times, and not getting them xdd
i feel the same about ささやくように恋を唄う, people claim it’s very easy to read,
i can literally do 10 hours of Ghost Trick in a single day, i cant do
BUT THEN IF SO THEN SHOULDNT IT BE LEVEL 35 ON NATIVELY LIKE CMON
Also, today’s review block was over 2 hours long, was getting really distracted
Tomorrow I should get to Level 54 on WaniKani!
Took my mom to the bouldering gym in the morning for the first time and… surprise surprise, she’s a really good climber! She made it all the way to the fourth difficulty (the green one) on the very first climb, the only thing is that she has a significant fear of heights and when I showed her one of the easier courses that climbed over the wall, going down turned out to be a much bigger challenge ^^
All of the courses at the bouldering gym got reset, so I had nothing to show for myself, but I didn’t break any nails today, so woo, good one C:
Then we went to a museum, Berlin Global at Humboldt Forum, and a fun exhibit, would recommend!
What does freedom mean to me?
And then, my mom went back to Poland and I made it to the Berlin Ramen Festival in the evening ^^
Aaand here’s the food I’ve devoured!
And also, they had karaoke, but it didn’t have many Japanese songs… to the point they didn’t even have Yoasobi xddd
They had a lot of k-pop though!
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 ^^
And then for the next song I knew I had a banger on the hand, but the other two women decided to put their microphones down, so I was the only one doing the falsetto, here’s Bring Me To Life out with 10 strangers on the microphone xddd
Wish they let me keep this haori for longer ^^
Today, one of the exhibits at Berlin Global asked what was your favorite place is, and my answer stiiiiill remains Berlin, even after the Asia trip ^^
I’d probably have to spend a bit longer somewhere else to change my mind ^^
Mental health check, I’m so, so happy today, and have been since the Switch 2 midnight launch, so hey, would recommend summer vacations, summer vacations are great ^^
Anyway, back to work tomorrow, that’ll definitely affect my mental health xddd
From tomorrow on, definitely shorter posts, this one took me half an hour to write ^^
See you tomorrow!
finally you’re back onto my coffee drinking pre-work schedule
who needs holidays anyway
Ooh! The hoari is perfect for your proportions
you must track down one for your wardrobe!
I love that your mom is so much like me (although I’m not scared of heights; I still have moments of hyperventilating when I look down)
(and I think she has higher endurance stats 
)
I love rock climbing–it’s so much fun with the safety harness, just gliding back down…
Well, cute girls doing cute things is not my thing, but I needed something small and short to read, so might as well yuruyuri a bit ^^
Well guess who’s level 54 today :DDDD
Level 54 is the first one on WaniKani that just doesn’t have any radicals, and it’s so weird to see all of the items being open immediately:
that also means i’m something like 36 days from being level 60/120, might be the time to start thinking of the level 60/120 post
The whole forum is turning to Halloween and I’m gonna give you a better one xdd
ADVENT CALENDARS
Back in Poland, Halloween is not really widely celebrated, so around October the Christmas season is in a full swing in shops, I’m surprised at how little Halloween is here in Berlin, but oh well, October 1st didn’t come yet ^^
Aside from that, I saw ads for a Taiwanese Film Festival today, and I’m really curious, but I have a feeling that this stuffy nose is me needing to physically rest, so I don’t know if I’ll make it ^^
I had the first stroll into the internet in a month today and I forgot how much I love human creativity and human spirit, I found a post pretty early on the Ace Attorney forums:
that made me go like going like 
“omg human spirit” and also “i really feel for you and pray that you manage to do different decisions in life” xdd
Anyway, as promised, shorter update today, see you tomorrow yall ^^
I first found it from シムーン S1 | L32 . Tho I’m disappointed to say I didn’t immediately recognize it when I saw it just now
Does this character have a lot of dialogue throughout the book/series? I think I standard that would be:
思ってるなかったから
頑張らなかったんだと思う
おめでとうさん！
Yeah that will happen 
the nice thing with those is that it probably doesn’t matter if you can’t get it anyway
I’m guessing you already got the scene worked out a while back, but iirc that’s ゆるゆり and she was expecting more ppl, but then shocked when only 冷ややっこ (is there a character with that name?) was there.
A few thoughts:
Manga ratings on Natively tend to skew 2-4 levels lower than their novel counterparts, for whatever reason. So L17 might be more like L20-21, in a sense
Manga involves a different type of comprehension than novels. They’re a lot more implicit & context-reliant, and often have broken speech. Anything you miss = a much higher proportion of the text vs if you were reading a novel
It’s interesting how different people find different things challenging. I forget if I’ve mentioned here before, but ホリミヤ is my go to example for something that other people often say it’s easy, but I had a lot of challenge with it. I was super shocked when I discovered that it was an Absolute Beginner Book Club pick here
Is there something specific about ささ恋 that you find hard?
Now that I’ve been reading more wall of text manga (Nana comes to mind, but I was also reading something the other day around the 26-27 range) and I think that’s less true at higher levels. But I’m also reading Sasaki and Miyano which is graded at L22 which is a lot harder than a novel L22, imo. So yeah, it feels like manga in the 20s below L25s are harder than their levels, but it does eventually settle down 
Another theory of mine is that a lot of the easier manga is much less text dense, so it’s easier to get through a volume, but then anytime you miss anything in the dialogue, you’re lost for a page or more on average. When there’s whole conversations happening on one page, you get a lot more context, and any single line you miss is a lot less consequential.
Hmm idk. I think that mostly tracks, though I definitely found Fate/kaleid liner プリズマ☆イリヤ | L27 (kinda fun, but cursed series, don’t recommend) harder than L27 fantasy novels, and various L25 fantasy manga I’ve read seem like they’d match L27 novels better. I haven’t read any novels below L26, so I have nothing to compare lower L20s to.
I agree with your theory about text density. Also I think the visual and storytelling style of manga can vary a lot, in a way that novels generally don’t. So while the language in something may be simple, the visual-language might be less so - and that’s hard to really quantify.
the same people here ask me every year when Halloween is, and I’m like - it’s not hard people, it’s always the last day of October, which is always the 31st. And no, you can’t have a Halloween party in November for goodness sake 
I think the Germans have just been pretty successful at resisting commercial versions of holidays tbh (except for Christmas…)
this is definitely one of the things that trips me over the most, especially reading a magazine that just pulls over a chapter 第７８章 and you have to ask yourself whether you’re missing something linguistic or you’re just not up to speed with the context
And that especially is the case with the mangas rated as <L20 on Natively, because:
i probably should work through novels first and then get back to mangas after a bit to see how i’m doing, but i like me my mangas first ^^
mostly how casually it throws words such as “放課” (45294 on JPv2, N3 and N2 kanji, N0 word), “衣替え” (40072 on JPv2, both N2 kanji, N0 word) or ”一目惚れ" (14713 on JPv2, another N0 word) and then turns them into arc words that get repeated so that there is no way for you to advance in the story without having understood those expressions
with some of the more difficult mangas, there are words you can just omit and get around without having read them, often they just repeat the expression with a synonym so that you don’t feel lost, with this one, if you don’t know the exact word, you’re missing out on the context of the conversation, they will not rephrase them
it does make it easier to remember those expressions in the longer run, yes, but then how does an N0 word composed of N3 and N2 kanji fit into the idea of a level 20 manga xddd
I wanted to find out how difficult it is to read ささこい today to answer akatsukinoluna’s question aaand the answer is it wasn’t
It felt like this was the easiest volume out of the four to read, partway because I did a lot of reading recently, but partway because it stopped introducing those STAPLE BIG IMPORTANT WORDS and just kept running with the plot, so maybe I jumped on the topic pre-emptively xdd
On the planet WaniKani, I’m so fed up with the 150+ review blocks xdddd
My brain is made to be able to focus on like, 147 reviews at most, when it sees 195, it starts to panic and the review blocks involve a lot of alt-tabbing and procrastinating
Because of me prioritizing kanji ahead of vocab, kanji tends to struggle a bit more than the vocab part, and I will probably have to bootcamp some of those items to make sure they stick with me more:
That being said, I kept trying to bring my attention back and I was able to get the 195 done in a mere 50 minutes 
Also, important kanji, 残酷な天使のテーゼ ^^
And is there an achievement on Bunpro for finishing the reviews 2 seconds before midnight???
My stuffy nose has become like, really stuffy and today wasn’t a day of many adventures outdoors xdd
I ended up cycling to the office regardless, but started coughing much on the way back and my vision was blurring out from tears, so that wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve made xddd
I found an interesting video about the world getting worse at English:
and interestingly, it’s fueled by the youngest people worldwide, because of the pandemic they’ve been robbed of an opportunity to practice languages irl, and then suddenly AI translations with tools came out and learning English stopped being as important
and then i thought about using Ttsu and Yomichan and Mokuro and DeepL and Google Translate OCR and I was like “uh-oh, am I literally on the receiving side of this problem in Japanese” xdd
I try to pat my back and go like “don’t worry, you’re respecting the culture and you’re attempting to improve your Japanese every day”, after which I visit an ENGLISH subreddit for yuri manga and read ENGLISH pages of japanese visual novels on Steam
aaanyway xddd
Thanks to the ENGLISH subreddit for yuri manga, I found out that Studio Élan exists!
It’s an American studio that has people around the world contribute to it, and it makes visual novels in a Japanese style, that often get localized to Japanese as well
I’m one of the people who thinks that the best things to come out of Japan are the things that are a fusion between western style and Japan, so it definitely came across to me as interesting!
Furthermore, they are hosting a sale on Steam for many different romance VNs, both queer or not queer, including a pack of all of their games!
I’m really inclined to get at least one of those and try to play it in Japanese, but so far, looking at the titles, only A Tithe in Blood made me go like , pluuuus I have a backlog of things to read right now, it’s super cool that something like this exists ^^
One more thing, there was a Japanese language-exlusive game a while back called Iwakura Aria that advertized itself on being a Fata Morgana lite yuri experience:
…so the top review on Steam is a thumb down and has a spoiler that they encourage to click on regardless, and so I did.
…ouch xdddd
we deserve better xddddddd
Anyway, see you tomorrow! Hopefully a bit healthier! ^^
To be fair, number 1 and 3 have got to both be like top 1000 words maximum by frequency in teen romance stuff
But yeah, agree that with less words, missing one thing is a lot more important for understanding in manga than not knowing an onomatopoeia word in a novel or something
That’s very interesting, and honestly I’ve seen it a lot.
For example, My mother went on vacation to australia last year, and told me that she communicated with australians using an AI translator app. Until then I didn’t even know they existed 
Speaking about AI, I’ve read about japanese AI translators, but they’re supposedly not very good at the moment 
I think both DeepL and Google Translate have gotten to this really scarily good level where you read the translation of a sentence and it sounds like a proper interpretation of it, rather than just word-by-word breakdown. Stuff like, if you take one hiragana character away, the translated sentence changes completely, so I could see people just walking to walls of text in Japanese, taking a picture with Google Translate and read the AI-generated OCR translation as if it were in English all along
I used something similar with Korean and Vietnamese quite a lot when I was in Asia and it worked really, really well 
Hmm, I don’t remember either of the first two words being particularly prominent (well 放課 isn’t surprising, and it’s 2/3rd of 放課後, which is apparently in N2). On the other hand, I’ll never forget 一目惚れ in my entire life, b/c of ささ恋
Ahh, I find that makes them easier, but I’m the sort of person to look up everything… which also makes me procrastinate manga where I think I’ll have to look up too many words
Short answer is: N levels don’t actually map to anything irl, except the JLPT (and probably business-esque environments)… and the Natively levels only loosely correlate to them, as Our Grading System | Natively says: “Like we said above, this mapping to JLPT is only an estimation - our system is focused on perception of difficulty, not JLPT guidelines. User perception of difficulty may factor in many things totally unrelated to JLPT, like text density, writing style, book length, or slang. The JLPT estimation is just a rough guide and hopefully helpful to our users.”
Also seeing “N0 word” - my question is more “why did the JLPT ppl think this word was unimportant?” Like yeah 衣替え instead of 着替え is a bit of a weird choice… but 放課 seems like a pretty common word, for anyone in school. (Answer: b/c JLPT is oriented towards business-like environments)
ところで what is JPv2?
Yayyy 
the beginning of anything is always the hardest, and you probly also got better at reading it over the last 3 volumes too
I played a tiny bit of it, and thought it was cool, but I’ve heard the JP localization is a bit of a mess fwiw
I’m not usually into horror stuff, but I watched the preview vid on Steam, and it looks pretty interesting
Hmmm that made me feel a lot more ambivalent… on one hand I actively avoid parent-child pairings, but otoh maybe in this setting I could actually tolerate it? Cuz like everything is supposed to be really messed up. Idk, and there’s certainly no shortage of other stuff to play instead. The original is apparently sibling & also step-sibling incest… but I guess that wasn’t shocking enough? 
Edit: yeah, I think I’ll pass on this one
The thing is JP is so often implicit, and heavily context-reliant, and AI just doesn’t (and can’t) have certain context. So in some ways they can actually be really good, and in others they can be so horribly off. So if you use them with purpose, and know enough to differentiate btwn what’s junk and isn’t they can be useful tools - but otherwise, meh
Also there are no official JLPT vocab or kanji lists, all vocab/kanji listings by JLPT level are just estimations by people who make textbooks/resources, and I’m not sure where the original source which is used in Jisho etc., but it’s not official. So it’s just someone’s best guess as to whether it’s around a JLPT level, based partly on the old lists which were available pre-2010 for the old format of the JLPT. So it’s all 15+ years out of date and doesn’t map 100% anyway.
This is my experience, too. They’ve just gotten better recently at being believable, and in that way worse for beginners imo. I’m glad the result looked like trash when i started because then the flaws were obvious and I found other more educational ways to learn Japanese. Getting a clean result now, a beginner probably can’t imagine there are still so many errors in parsing word breaks, readings, subject, and overall meaning…
I wonder if using these is what is killing book club participation.
ABBC and BBC used to be filled with people asking and answering nuanced questions.
