ChristopherFritz's Study Log

Now that adding pages to my site is very streamlined and clean, I’m utilizing it a lot more.

Today’s grammar: 〜てほしい.

It’s grammar that I “know”, but when I see it I still need to think about how it fits into the sentence. I don’t have that strong pattern recognition built up yet.

Thus, I pulled some examples to better familiarize myself with it:

Maybe I went a little overboard but I was enjoying looking at the various situations it was being used in…

I also like returning to the material I’ve read with a greater understanding of the grammar (and sometimes knowing more vocabulary) than I had back when I originally read it.

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What the hell, man. You really solved learning Japanese.

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Nah, I’m just bad at remembering new words, so I aim at (pre-)learning the high-frequency ones in the material I’m reading =)

Sites such as JPDB do similar with subtitled anime and novels/light novels. I just do it with manga.

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I meant more with knowing the percentages of unknown words and seeing which manga to read next and stuff.

Meanwhile, I’m just like, “should I read this? Eh, why not.” And then I don’t.

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I’m expecting to see Migaku (subscription tool) head in that direction in the next year, as well. They already have tracking known words, and they’re planning on having some way of seeing what content to delve into next based on that.

I do this too. I have about 70 to 100 manga on that list.

The main issues on picking manga to read based on percentages of unknown words are:

  1. I don’t know if I’ll even like the manga.

  2. I’m using limited-time free previews to extract vocabulary word lists from, so I’m limited to these.

If there’s a series I think would be interested in, but it doesn’t have more than one chapter available as a preview, I can’t get a sense of how readable it would be beyond skimming chapter one. (In some cases, the preview is only several pages.)

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From these, I’ve seen some pages of 〇〇 and they’re pretty funny and cute, so I think you can’t go wrong with that one.

Gives me some 三ツ星カラーズ vibes even though I haven’t read any of them. :sweat_smile:

I started watching 甘々と稲妻 and it was ok, I would probably enjoy the slice of life aspect, though I don’t know if they get too into the cooking, but I imagine they might.

I’ve also heard of 日々蝶々, but I don’t really know anything about it.

Also, inputting all the words you know into JPDB takes too long. I started and don’t really feel like continuing.

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Same mangaka, so… :wink:

I did enjoy the first volume of 〇〇 back when I read it, but didn’t enjoy all the kanji look-ups, which Mokuro fixes for me.

I enjoy slice-of-life. But I don’t enjoy cooking/eating, so if it leaned heavily into that I’d pass on it. I guess I’ll find out one day!

I’m not familiar with their interface for it, but I like how Migaku lets you quickly and easily mark known words as you read. (But it doesn’t work for manga yet.) I also like that Migaku lets you track if you’re learning a word, rather than just known/unknown.

My own tracking system is all spreadsheets, so in the beginning, I would:

  1. Load up a manga’s frequency.
  2. Filter out any already in my known words list.
  3. Select the ones I already know. (Easy to do with a mouse and keyboard.)
  4. Copy and paste them onto my known words list.

It did take a little time in the beginning, but it was definitely worth it.

However, if a system doesn’t make it easy to add known words, I can definitely see not using it.

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Yeah, that might explain it. :yum:

Yeah, your system sounds like a pain to set up, but easy to use.

These are the options I see in JPDB.


You can either go word for word.


Full deck.


Or go in the Learn section and basically review them first.


Like so for words.


And like so for kanji, see anything missing?

Either there’s like a grid or card view you can go to and quickly set words as known with a click, or this is it.

Kanji come back since they can’t be set as never forget. There’s srs, but every time I want to add more cards, I need to go through them.

You can turn kanji off, which I didn’t want to, for like a quick review, but I’m not so sure now.

I’ve never been a fan of too much convenience. (He says, while lying in bed, AC comfortably cold, typing on his relatively not that old smartphone)

Like I think the look up is part of my learning process. See a word immediately if I don’t know it, I’ll probably forget it as quickly. Have to look it up, maybe figure out the reading or radicals or write it on Google Translate (I don’t have a Google keyboard installed), that thing’s probably staying at least until next time I see it, then it’s downhill from there.

I don’t know if it’s actually making it better, but it hasn’t really impacted what I read based on difficulty either, imo.

It does sound pretty convenient, though.

I guess I’m usually a 多読 rather than whatever the opposite is, since I don’t really pore over all the kanji or words I don’t know. Either figure them out by context, or look some of them up if I’m feeling particularly studious and let it go into the memory banks eventually.

As in reading about it, doing it, or both? :eyes:

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You have an air conditioner? How comfy :wink: I should get one eventually.

That’s true for me with grammar, but not for vocabulary unfortunately =(

Even if it were, all my old methods for looking up unknown vocabulary words with unknown kanji and no furigana were mostly about taking a long time to get an answer I’d soon forget.

That said:

I do see where this can be beneficial. I’ve always been really bad with radicals, though. (Maybe it’s why I’m so bad with WaniKani!)

Since I incorporate frequency lists, I do get the bonus that I know which words are extremely rare in what I read to skip trying to learn. I mean, 正夢(まさゆめ) is a nice word and all, but it only shows up once out of about 230 manga volumes I’ve read or am in the process of reading.

I meant reading (or watching in the case of anime), but both actually! (Just today, I forgot to have breakfast this morning, then I didn’t think to have lunch…)

Anytime in a manga or anime where everyone’s sitting down to a homemade meal, and they’re going 「おいしい!おいしい!うまい!おいしい!」, I just want to skip ahead.

I only got through this one manga because I took it to be a comedic parody.

That, and it’s Superman.

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It got to 50°C this year, not unlike other years. :eyes:

Noo, my man. :skull:

One meal a day isn’t enough for Japanese learning, gotta get them calories.

Time to never forget this. Putting it in the pile next to 卒然.

That mouth top right reminds me of Fire Punch…

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I think Koohi can do all of that except the “here’s how far I am in it”. I’m pretty sure the only option is chronological from the first page of the volume. But I do believe there are list per book/volume in a series (if it even have multiple). Obviously, Koohi’s list isn’t never are extensive as jpdb. But it has honzuki which is a series I definitely plan to read, and it has some others I’m interested in too.

It isn’t like I’m planing to start doing it for every series/book I’ll read anyway, just a few, to nudge my vocabulary a bit more. :slight_smile:

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yeah and just to build off of that, it’s a simple add to deck/trash/[other option I forget] which is pretty dang close to “do you know this word? yes/no.”

Also because you can put a lower limit for the frequency, it’s possible to prioritize them that way as well.

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One of the remaining slow points for looking up vocabulary words and grammar in manga I’ve read is the transition from searching OCR’d text files to viewing each image the text is from.

I finally put together a simple interface that, while not completely streamlined, is already saving me a lot of time by no longer having to navigate through my filesystem for the series, volume, and page to get to an image.

Instead, I can search for text, get a list of results, then click or tab my way through them to instantly see manga page matches.


And that brings me to today’s grammar I’ve focused on.

I came across じゃあるまいし in a manga recently.

It felt like nothing I had ever seen before, but apparently, it shows up quite a bit. In Detective Conan alone, I’ve passed over it five times, with two more coming up.

(Wait, wasn’t Detective Conan supposed to be the series where I take my time and ensure I know all the grammar I encounter as I go? So much for that idea!)

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Wow, nice tool you’ve made there :open_mouth:

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For manga on my “to consider reading” list, 「6月のラブレター」 worked its way up to the number two spot on my “highest percentage of known words” list (0.12% below the number one spot), matching its position on my “highest percentage of known kanji” list (0.36% below the number one spot).

Normally, an “easy to read” series for me means I feel I can follow the story even if I don’t look up every unknown word, and I accept I’ll miss some things.

But I’ve also been wanting to try reading something where I don’t gloss over some things.


This specific series was added to my “to consider reading” list based on the following:

  • Limited-time free trial of the first volume = I could extract vocabulary words.
  • Nice cover art.[1]
  • Content artwork seems nice enough.[2]
  • There’s no objectionable content.

Very important items that did not go into consideration were:

  • What the story is about?
  • Will it interest me? (I’m not really into [seeking-]romance stories, as the title suggests this will be.)
  • Is the series complete or ongoing? (As it turns out, it’s complete with three volumes!)

The number one thing going for this pick was the high number of words and kanji known to me (at least for the first volume).

Looking at Kobo’s listing for the series, here is the description:

高1のももこは小学校のころから極度に控えめな性格。支えてくれた親友・真昼は、中学入学を前に亡くなってしまう。そしてももこに訪れる初めての恋―― 一向に積極的になれないももこの前に、自称・幽霊となった親友の真昼が現れる。着れなかったはずの制服姿で…。絡みあう恋と友情。甘いのに、どこか切ない初恋感覚ストーリー

Momoko, a first-year high school student, has been extremely reserved since elementary school. Her best friend Mahiru, who supported her, died before entering middle school. And then arrives Momoko’s first love— Before Momoko, who has never before been assertive, appears the self-proclaimed ghost of her best friend Mahiru. In a uniform she shouldn’t have been able to wear… Intertwined love and friendship. A sweet, and yet somewhat sad, story of first love.


So, jumping into what promised to be yet another high school teen crush series, how did it go?

I read the first chapter, 53 pages, in just under an hour and a half. Longer than I expected, but there were a few parts where I didn’t properly understand something that cleared up a few pages later, so I doubled back and re-read prior sections with a clearer understanding.

With roughly an expected 230 unknown words in the volume, I was prepared to look up about one word per page, but it ended up being half that.

Looked-up words.
  • 予鈴(よれい)
  • べらぼう
  • ()もれる
  • 通知(つうち)
  • ただでさえ
  • (かかり)
  • さり()なく
  • 面倒見(めんどうみ)
  • ()()ける
  • まともに
  • うだうだ
  • 絶句(ぜっく) (This one came without furigana, but somehow I was able to read it without knowing it!)
  • 死守(ししゅ)
  • どうりで
  • 年季(ねんき)
  • ガタつく
  • ハラハラ
  • ほぐれる
  • やり()げる
  • 後回(あとまわ)
  • 肝心(かんじん)
  • ()たす
  • 友達面(ともだちずら)

(Plus a few I didn’t need to look up because I looked them up in advance.)

Averaging one lookup per two pages to not miss any words in this chapter wasn’t too bad (although sometimes they came in as two or three lookups in one panel).

Overall, the experience reminded me of reading Orange, which has a similar number of unknown words for me. If anything, that’s actually a little bit of a letdown. “After all these months looking forward to an easy reading experience, it’s no different than the easy reading experience I already have with Orange!” (Maybe I need to get back to reading Detective Conan, so I can properly appreciate the easier series!)

Storywise, I can see where the mangaka is setting up things to reveal to the main character (and the reader) later, so hopefully there will be good pacing. I look forward to seeing how things fill out the next 11 chapters.


Fun coincidence: There’s a classmate named 菜穂ちゃん, whose name appeared without furigana. I don’t recognize the kanji, but I knew it looked very familiar. Upon checking to confirm, sure enough, it’s the same name as the main character in Orange.


  1. ↩︎

  2. ↩︎

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Was it fun?

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Regarding the characters and events, I enjoyed it. I’m only one chapter in, but I get the feeling I’ll want to read all three volumes.

But the difficulty was really the same as Orange, and really did take longer than I expected to read, so it wasn’t extraordinary as a reading-in-Japanese experience or anything.

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Today’s vocabulary studied:

Otherwise, I probably spent too much time today playing with OpenAI’s Whisper and wishing I had a GPU that could take advantage of it.

There is a nice C++ port that makes good use of my CPU, but it doesn’t handle Unicode very well for Japanese for me.

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I assumed this meant cat lady. :sweat_smile:

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I used Subtitle Edit with Audio to Text in batch mode (so run once for a whole series), and it seems to use CPU model🔉 🎙 Listen Every Day Challenge (Summer Edition) 🏖 - #823 by polv

Whisper seems to prefer medium model and up for Japanese, so needing GPU RAM at least 5 GB, and also of decent speed.

I have tried Subtitle Edit and Whisper with small model + GPU, and both aren’t exactly satisfactory. Whisper entails more transcribing errors, while having better language.

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