ChristopherFritz's Study Log

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 5

WK Lessons

One kanji and two vocabulary:

Lesson	Meaning	Notes
視	look at	And here’s that other one from Umino’s line in my picture from yesterday.
触角	antenna	Took me a second, but I was able to successfully guess the pronunciation.
感触	touch	I remember learning this one near the beginning of ごちうさ volume 1 back in 2018. (Mostly 'cause I kept getting it wrong in my Anki reviews throughout that year…)

To aide in remembering what 視 means and how it is pronounced, I’ve thrown together a few frames from the animated version of 「苺ましまろ」:

As a bonus, I actually know all the kanji (aside from newcomer 視) in the lines.

WK Progress

Just over 60 days into level 24, I’m down to 13 more kanji lessons pending. Apprentice is keeping steady around 70. If it dips below that and stays under for a whole day, I may increase my daily lessons. Nothing too crazy (for me), though.

Slow and steady.

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	0 pages	0 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	3 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	2 pages
ふらいんぐうぃっち	3 pages	3 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	2 pages	5 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	7 pages	10 pages
Total	15 pages	23 pages

Two of the series I’ve been reading don’t have digital releases, so I’m reading them paperback. Since I read most everyone on my e-reader now, it’s a big refreshing to have the two paperback series on hold at the moment.

Grammar

Mangajin lessons four and five weren’t grammar, so I’ve skipped them, bringing me up to lesson six, which covers おはようございます and おめでとうごないます. Even though I haven’t reached any grammar yet, there’s still been interesting information.

Aside from that, reading was a bit light, so nothing stood out to look into for grammar. Maybe if that’s the case again tomorrow, I’ll browse through some manga I’ve read previously for grammar to look up.

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 6

WK Lessons

My apprentice has been keeping around the mid-60’s. Today’s, it’s double lessons, with two kanji and four vocabulary:

Lesson	Meaning
差	distinction
管	pipe
一層	much more
〜層	layer of
燃やす	to burn something
左腕	left arm

I couldn’t find any good anime usages of 差 to help me remember it. I do somewhat know the word 交差点 via iKnow.jp, but that doesn’t help me with the meaning of the kanji.

For 管, if I can remember that 声 is pronounced せい (not covered by WaniKani) like in 声優(せいゆう) (which I’m not used to seeing it written with kanji), maybe I can think of this scene from “Porco Rosso” involving this word I’m not familiar with (伝声管(でんせいかん))?

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	0 pages	0 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	1 page
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	1 page
ふらいんぐうぃっち	0 pages	0 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	2 pages	6 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	0 pages	0 pages
Total	5 pages	8 pages

My reading goal’s really shrank as I’ve finished up my scheduled book club reading for the week… (猫 I’ve not been following the club schedule.)

Grammar

I mentioned before about と思う being slow for me to process when reading it. I think I figured out why, although it remains to be seen if this will help me speed up processing instances of it.

I never really thought about it before, but there are two ways of quoting:

Quote Type	Example
Direct Quote	The teacher said “If you turn it in tomorrow, you’ll get full credit.”
Indirect Quote	The teacher said I can turn it in tomorrow for full credit.

From high school, I only remember learning と as meaning “and”. If I learned its usage for quotation, I forgot it. Fast-forward to when I started getting serious about learning grammar, somehow I learned usage of と as being for quotes, without a distinction between direct and indirect. Thus, my mind cemented in the concept that と it always be a direct quotation. Don’t know how that happened, but hopefully keeping this distinction in mind will help me out with faster processing of と思う in time.

Today’s Mangajin was on どうも. Nothing spectacular there.

I’d hope to find something more grammar-related to do, but I ended up being distracted, so maybe tomorrow…

[DollyDaydream]

@ChristopherFritz

ひとりぼっちの○○生活

I watched the anime of this and seen it on Amazon the other day when I was browsing for some reading material. I’m considering reading it as well even though I’ve seen the anime.

How do you find it difficulty wise?

[ChristopherFritz]

@DollyDaydream

How do you find it difficulty wise?

At my grammar level (solid N4 I guess?), it’s relatively easy.

For kanji, I feel like maybe 80% I already know. It’s looking up the other 20% that make it a struggle to finish two four-panel strips per day. (I use Copyfish occasionally to speed up the lookups.) I haven’t run any stats on the kanji I’ve encountered thus far, but at your WaniKani level, I image you’d recognize nearly all of them.

I do get the occasional panel where I can’t figure out what’s being said.

The first few chapters are available here:

https://comic.pixiv.net/works/2176

[DollyDaydream]

I’m probably about the same grammar level as you (only with nowhere near as cool looking notes, I’ve had a look through some of your other posts)

Hopefully kanji shouldn’t be too much of an issue but I’ve never actually found myself an OCR so it’s good to know about Copyfish, it’ll be handy to have for when I inevitably come across a kanji I don’t know (or have forgotten )

Thanks for the link, it’s always good to get a look through something for difficulty level before you actually buy it. Pretty sure I’d like to give it a go though.

Another interesting manga to add to my long list.

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 7

WK Lessons

Apprentice has jumped back up to the mid-70s. Not a huge worry, but for now I’ve returning to one kanji, two vocabulary lessons.

Lesson	Meaning	Notes
象	elephant, phenomenon	I find it interesting the radical showed up for 像, then the kanji waited 11 levels to show itself.
所載	published
記載	record

I look forward to unlocking and learning the vocabulary for 象 so I can finally catch all the elephant puns I’m sure are pervasive in manga.

It looks like 所載 and 記載 have appeared zero times in any anime I have subtitles for. This…is not going to help my memory.

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	0 pages	0 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	4 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	1 page
ふらいんぐうぃっち	0 pages	0 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	2 pages	4 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	0 pages	0 pages
Total	5 pages	9 pages

My daily reading goal will start going back up a little tomorrow with アオハル, then a couple more on Friday.

Grammar

I’ve shifted back to Japanese the Manga Way today for Lesson 13, which covers some common particles.

Lesson 13 here covers に for uses of marking “purpose” (something I learned when reading ごちうさ volume one back in 2018), “absolute time”, “a source”, “a surface”, as well as its use as “and”.

Other particles covered in the chapter are へ, で, から, まで, と, だけ, か, and も. It’s quite the versatile lesson.

Not really anything new for me, but it’s always nice to review the multiple uses of some particles.

And then I wasted over half an hour...

Near the end of the lesson came a manga panel with 「一か八か」, which I just read somewhere this past week, but I don’t remember where! I ended up spending way too long trying to try and figure out where that was. Not knowing where I first saw it earlier this week is gonna bug me… (It’s not even in my browser history, even though I know I looked it up on ichi.moe…)

Review Panel

I encountered another panel that I couldn’t figure after just a couple of reads over. Breaking it down helped.

Bocchi (left) has finally made a friend at school, but one day her friend gets mad at her. Bocchi is afraid she’s lost her one and only friend in class.

Aru (right) tells Bocchi, 「ほら思ってること全部話せばきっとわかってくれるわよ」

Breaking this down a bit, I get:

• 思ってること: thinking things (referring to the Bocchi’s concerns)
• 全部: everything

I’m guessing there’s a dropped を that would be after こと. But what about after 全部? No clue… At any rate, I’m reading the two together as essentially “everything you’ve been thinking about” while feeling like I’m missing something. (Maybe it’s best I don’t overthink it.)

The clause ends with its verb:

• 話せば: if you explain

…and the second clause is straight-forward enough.

“Go on and tell her everything you’re thinking, and I’m sure she’ll understand.”

[beckswithspecks]

@ChristopherFritz

It looks like 所載 and 記載 have appeared zero times in any anime I have subtitles for. This…is not going to help my memory.

If there’s no anime to help out maybe youglish can find a youtube video that would do the trick?

[ChristopherFritz]

@beckswithspecks

If there’s no anime to help out maybe youglish can find a youtube video that would do the trick?

I’ll check it out. The main advantage with anime (and manga) is that the word comes up in a scene I’m familiar with, involving characters I’m familiar with. If I can associate a kanji or word with a scene, then similar to using a WK mnemonic, everything fits into place by that association.

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 8

WK Lessons

I think this is the third day in a row that doing lessons has left my pending lessons count at 13 lessons. Hm…

Lesson	Meaning
量	quantity
載る	to be published
都庁	metropolitan government

Today’s kanji reminder is brought to you by Jadeite, who almost has the target quantity of collected human energy:

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	6 pages	6 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	5 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	1 page
ふらいんぐうぃっち	0 pages	0 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	1 page	2 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	0 pages	0 pages
Total	10 pages	14 pages

Today’s page of 「ひとりぼっちの○○生活」 went by more smoothly (and more quickly) than usual. Just had to look up a few kanji/words, and had a slight stumble where I mistook who was talking for one word balloon.

The experience of reading this series is a big change from when I went through the first volume of 「ご注文はうさぎですか？」, pre-WaniKani. That manga, I probably knew maybe 4% of the kanji I encountered. (It’s what convinced me to start using WaniKani.)

But this manga, about 80 to 85% of the kanji I’ve encountered, I already know thanks to over a year and a half of WaniKani. That definitely makes for a different experience when both manga don’t have furigana!

I do look forward to when I reach level 60, so instead of saying, “What’s this kanji? I haven’t learned it yet,” I can be saying, “What’s this kanji? I completely forgot it.”

Now if only I could make more attention to kanji and less attention to furigana in everything else I’m reading…

Grammar

It seems like forever since I last watched a Cure Dolly lesson. The last time I watched one, I was distracted by something I wanted to work on, and it was a longer video, and I wasn’t focused enough to pay attention, and the material was a bit abstracted, so I stopped some minutes into the video. Then…a long time passed without getting back to it.

I finally got around to watching the video for Lesson 68: わけ、そういうわけ、わけが分からない、わけない.

わけ is one of those things that I understand just enough. The video covered a lot, and I don’t think I really absorbed it very well. I know I’ll be referencing it again when I encounter わけ in manga.

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 9

WK Lessons

I’m at 9 kanji and 4 vocabulary lessons pending. Looks like it’s time to swap to two kanji and one vocabulary lessons until more vocabulary lessons unlock. (I’m just glad that I’m keeping up with any lessons each day.)

Lesson	Meaning
境	boundary
環	loop
警察庁	National Police Agency

I feel like there was a sudden increase in kanji difficulty!

I spent the better part of a year doing Anki reviews for every single word in volume 1 of ごちうさ, and I don’t remember 環境 at all. Granted, I saved the color intro pages for the very end. But even then, I kept at Anki for months after I finished the volume.

Ah, no wonder. It leeched.

Well, now’s my second chance. Good luck to me on trying to remember that the kanji forming “circumstances” when alone mean “loop” and “boundary”!

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	6 pages	6 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	2 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	1 page
ふらいんぐうぃっち	4 pages	4 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	1 page	0 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	6 pages	9 pages
Total	22 pages	22 pages

Reading セーラームーン has definitely gotten a lot faster and easier for me since I started. Still a lot of unknown words I skip over due to feeling I’m not missing anything. Still a lot of words I look up because I am missing something. Although I still have about 40% of the series left to be read in the coming months, I look forward to re-reading the series some years down the line, when my vocabulary is above the 4,000 or so words I know right now.

Grammar

CureDolly

Today’s CureDolly video is on a word pair I didn’t know I’ve been waiting for a lesson on all this time: Lesson 70: かける / かかる

After watching, I looked up all the instances of かかる and かける that are spread throughout ごちうさ volume 1 to re-read those panels with a new outlook on the words:

Turns out it was not nearly as many instances as I expected, but three of them are exactly as covered in the video, so that was nice.

と思う

Over on the と思う side of things, it seems coming to the realization that there are both direct quotes, and indirect quotes, and that と思う is an indirect quote, has completely cured me of all the issues I had reading dialogue containing と思う. There’s no longer any mental slowdown as I piece it all together. I’m able to process it quickly and smoothly. (Now if only everything else could go that well…)

Manga the Japanese Way

Because it’s Friday, and my reading load was still fairly light, I found myself with more time for grammar. Lesson 14 is on “Connecting Words”. I like how up to this point in the book, the author kept to examples with shorter, simpler sentences. I wonder if he keeps that up for later chapters, or more complex sentences will show up after this lesson to give more exposure/practice.

It’s a long chapter, so I’ve read only the first half. It’s a mix between information I know well, information I know vaguely, and information I don’t really know.

[Rowena]

@ChristopherFritz

Good luck to me on trying to remember that the kanji forming “circumstances” when alone mean “loop” and “boundary”

One of the alternate meanings is environment, so I picture the loop of a magical lasso being cast around a particular environment to form a boundary to protect it… (if that helps at all )

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 10

WaniKani

Reviews

I’ve been keeping up with daily reviews. They’re mostly down to below 30 reviews per session (about three to five sessions per day), but sometimes I let it slide and have over 60 reviews.

While flipping through volume one of 「三ツ星カラーズ」, I happened upon one of my recently-learned kanji:

That’d be another form of review =D

(And then it came up in a WK review a few hours later, and I had to stare at it for a good half minute trying to figure out the mnemonic. I failed on the pronunciation, but I’ll get it next time!)

Affirmations

I’ve decided to start doing a verbal affirmation before and after every review session.

Normally before doing a review, I say to myself, usually half-jokingly, “I don’t wanna do reviews…” followed by doing the reviews.

Has this built up my ability to do reviews when I actually don’t feel up to do? I don’t know. But, even though I always say it jokingly, it’s kind of a negative affirmation.

Starting today, before doing WK reviews, I will say:

“I look forward to doing reviews. The more kanji and vocabulary I know, the better I’ll be at reading.”

And, regardless of how the review session goes, I will end by saying:

“That was a great review session. And the next one will be even better.”

Lessons

Today’s another two kanji, one vocabulary day.

Lesson	Meaning
武	military
質	quality
官庁	government office

Looks like I’m one step closer to being able to dive into the wide world of 武士道 manga.

(But…I’m not interested in that genre…)

I’m also one step closer to recognizing 質問 when I see it.

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	5 pages	17 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	0 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	0 page
ふらいんぐうぃっち	5 pages	6 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	1 page	0 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	8 pages	3 pages
Total	22 pages	26 pages

I may have gone a bit overboard on reading 「アオハライド」… Guess that one’s on hold until Wednesday for the next chapter.

On the weekends, I have all the time in the world to read, yet seem to get very little reading done…

Grammar

Reading through Manga the Japanese Way, I finished up the latter half of Lesson 14, as well as read through Lesson 15, “Quoting with と”. I probably could have used reading lesson 15 a whole lot sooner… Also watched the CureDolly video on counters.

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 11

WaniKani Lessons

My apprentice has reached high 80’s, low 90’s. I wonder where it’ll be in the next week…

The lesson queue has increase, which means more vocabulary lessons. This puts me back to one kanji, two vocabulary. (I envy people who can consistently do 20+ lessons per day, every single day, and still keep their apprentice down!)

Lesson	Meaning
述	mention
差す	to shine at
差別	discrimination

Doing a subtitle search (on anime I’ve seen and have subtitles for) has returned only three results for 述, and all three are for 述べる (different pronunciation from WK’s kanji pronunciation). Guess I’ll be hoping WK’s mnemonic works out for me on this one!

For 差す, I'm finding it combines with a lot of words.

Vocabulary	Meaning	Series	Line
差し上げる	to give, to offer	Bottle Fairy	「このたまちゃんが 学校の全てを教えて差し上げます！」
差し伸べる	to offer (e.g. aid, help, etc.)	Sailormoon	「いずれも いま 一歩のところでセーラームーンに救援の手が差し伸べられたものばかりですのよ」
差し入れ	supply of provisions, refreshments, etc. to someone carrying out a task	Clannad	「おっはよ、差し入れにきてやったわよ」
差し出がましい	forward, intrusive	Is the order a rabbit?	「すみません 差し出がましいことを」
差し出す	to present, to hold out	Angel Beats	「強盗さんがやって来たらそれを差し出してお帰り願いなさい」
差し引く	to deduct	Ouran High School Host Club	「経費を差し引けば利益は微々たるもんだが」
差し控える	to withhold (an announcement, comment, etc.)	Outbreak Company	「コメントは差し控える」
差し支える	to suffer inconvenience	Bunny Drop	「すみません。差し支えなければ会社名を。」
差し替える	to replace	Sailormoon	「ベルチェ この場所をダークパワーに差し替えるのだ」
差し置く	to leave as is	Ouran High School Host Club	「兄であるこの私を差し置いてですよ」
差し込み	to insert, to put in	Sunshine Sketch	「ごめん宮ちゃん 私シュレッダーにどんどん紙を差し込みたくなる」
差し違える	to make a mistake in deciding the winner	Sailormoon	「ヤツらと差し違える覚悟ができました」
差し金	instigation, suggestion	Clannad	「この恥ずかしいプレイは誰の差し金だ？」

And for 差別:

…although I won’t be learning 萌 until level 57.

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	0 pages	0 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	0 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	1 page
ふらいんぐうぃっち	4 pages	4 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	1 page	0 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	8 pages	8 pages
Total	16 pages	13 pages

A bit under goal today. I’m need to rework my ぼっち deadline for one page per day rather than two (as that’s what I’m mostly reading). I’ve been holding off on カラーズ for a few days because I’m down to probably one chapter left, then that’s the end until volume 9 comes out.

Grammar

Today’s grammar learning/review: Japanese the Manga Way, Lesson 16, “Complete Sentence Modifiers”. It’s another long chapter, so I read just the first half today.

Progress

The more I look for unknown grammar as I read (which I’m sure I’ll encounter a lot of over time), the more I find that what’s keeping me from understanding sentences most of the time is unknown vocabulary.

Back before 2018, my grammar knowledge was based mostly on high school Japanese class from a couple of decades prior, plus whatever watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles got me (which really wasn’t much).

I realize “learning all the common grammar used in simple manga in two and a half years” isn’t anything special, but I’ve enjoyed reaching this point by simply reading manga and looking up all the grammar I don’t know along the way.

I’m curious how much of the more difficult manga I read this year was an issue of unknown vocabulary (which was a big issue) versus unknown grammar. When reading a sentence requires looking up five or six vocabulary words, by that time I’d accept the general meaning and move on without looking carefully at the grammar for anything structural I do not know/understand.

Back when I started this study log, and wasn’t certain what I wanted to do with it, I did some posts on my progress reading the first volume of 「俺物語!!」. Flipping through the volume, and looking at random pages, I can see a definitely improvement in my grammar and vocabulary recognition, compared with just over a year ago. I wasn’t planning on reading the series in Japanese past the first two volumes, but since I haven’t made any progress on reading it in English for probably over a year, I may even lean toward picking up volume 3 in Japanese sometime.

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 12

A bit of a busy evening today, so little progress.

WaniKani Lessons

I’m definitely up to 90 apprentice. It feels like every time I turn around, I’m doing 40+ reviews… Since my lessons pile has gone up (more vocabulary), I’m reluctantly continue with three lessons (one kanji, two vocabulary) for today.

Lesson	Meaning
供	servant
型	model
典型的	typical

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	0 pages	0 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	0 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	0 pages
ふらいんぐうぃっち	3 pages	3 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	1 page	0 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	8 pages	6 pages
Total	15 pages	9 pages

I’ve noticed 調子 has been coming up a lot in the various series I’ve been reading, or previous reads that I’ve recently flipped through. I’m starting to recognize/remember the word, finally.

Finished up Sailormoon until Friday, so I may need to add another manga into the mix, or do more grammar reading/watching some days…

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 13

A bit of a busy evening today, so little progress.

WaniKani Lessons

Apprentice is back down to 80! So, another three lessons, one kanji, two vocabulary. (And then level twenty…something will probably come up for me in about a week to add radicals into the lesson mix.)

Lesson	Meaning
展	expand
原型	prototype
交差点	intersection

All instances of 展 that I seem to be finding in anime subtitles either involves (situational) developments, exhibitions and events, or a viewing platform. Nothing that quite says “expand” to me. I’ll have to just tough it out until I unlock some vocabulary.

I’ve been waiting for 交差点! This one was sooooo difficult for me to learn in iKnow, because kanji was just a bunch of random groups of unknown radicals to me. I eventually learned it as “the work with three kanji” which helped in multiple choice where I’m given the kana and need to pick the kanji. But it didn’t help me any when I was given the kanji, and had to write out the kana. Eventually I did learn the kana, but now I can finally learn the kanji side of it.

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	0 pages	0 pages
おじさまと猫	1 page	2 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	1 page
ふらいんぐうぃっち	0 pages	0 pages
三ツ星カラーズ	1 page	7 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	0 pages	0 pages
Total	4 pages	10 pages

I almost made it through a whole page of ぼっち without having to look up a kanji…until 敬語. Looks like 敬 doesn’t come up in WaniKani until level 33, so it’ll be a while before I formally learn it.

I’ve completed カラーズ, so now it’s waiting for the next volume’s release. It’d be nice if there was a way to buy the individual chapters as they come out, but I can wait. In the meantime, my search for a series similar to this and よつば continues (which is where much of my time went tonight, with no results).

Grammar

Today’s Cure Dolly episode was Lesson 72: The Great Connector (い-stem magic).

Now back to the search for the elusive “manga like Yotsuba and Colors”…

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 14

WaniKani

My apprentice has dropped to low 70’s, so today it’s the last two kanji for level 24, and two three vocabulary (extra word 'cause I forgot to filter the lessons):

Lesson	Meaning
販	sell
株	stocks
警視庁	Metro Police Department
無視する	to ignore
視覚	sense of sight

I remember learning はんばい from iKnow, so hopefully 販売 will be easy enough for me to remember 販.

And then there’s the mnemonic for 株:

I realize the mnemonics are supposed to be memorable, but in what world does a tree take a dive from a flying plane?

There's just no way a rational person can visuali—

Oh. That works.

(I seriously did not expect such a perfect result when I did an image search for “groot plane” with skydiving in mind.)

Hopefully the vocabulary will help me remember the pronunciation of 視, as I keep getting it wrong.

I didn’t find much of the way of 視覚 in anime subtitles, so I ended up with a line containing a bunch of words and kanji I don’t know:

Grammar

Today’s CureDolly video wasn’t about grammar, so I had to do some grammar reading afterwards to get some in.

I returned to the second half of Japanese the Manga Way lesson 16 on complete sentence modifiers. The material on もの, こと, and の would have been great to have read a few years ago when I was first trying to grasp it all, but it makes for a nice review now.

Another modifiers covered in the chapter is はず, which I learned when reading the first volume of ごちうさ. *Japanese the Manga Way" would have been a great reference book to have been using at the time.

And MangaJin lesson 9 covers どうぞ. The basic information was nothing new for me, but once again there’s a nice assortment of uses of the word in the provided manga panel examples.

[ChristopherFritz]

October Day 15

WaniKani

Apprentice 73, pending lessons 30 (all vocabulary). When I reach this point, I always feel I want to delay leveling up until I can get through the new lessons… (I’m two kanji away from leveling up.)

Lesson	Meaning
近視	nearsightedness
遠視	farsightedness
時差	time difference
管	pipe

Being all vocabulary, it should be simple enough to remember the pronunciations of. Well, except for 管 with its new pronunciation.

Reading

Material	Goal	Read
アオハライド	5 pages	6 pages
おじさまと猫	2 pages	4 pages
ひとりぼっちの○○生活	2 pages	2 pages
ふらいんぐうぃっち	0 pages	0 pages
美少女戦士セーラームーン	0 pages	0 pages
Total	9 pages	12 pages

I managed three four-panel strips of ぼっち with minimal kanji look-ups. Somehow I didn’t recognize 地 (which I should know) and 住 (which I still have trouble with).

Grammar

くせに came up a few times in today’s reading (and came up in a few other things I read in the past week). It’s something I’ve never really read up on to the point that I understand it. Looks like Cure Dolly hasn’t covered it, and it didn’t get a mention in Japanese the Manga Way. So either it’s really simple and I should be able to grasp it, or it’s so complex no one wants to touch it. I’m guessing the former.

However, Maggie Sensei does have lesson on it.

@Maggie Sensei

くせに means “although” / “despite” / ” even though” / “even if”.

We use くせに when we accuse / tease/ criticize someone.

It shows speaker’s contempt, dissatisfaction.

It is similar to のに ( = noni)

Compare to のに(=noni), くせに(=kuseni) is more negative, stronger and judgmental.

Hm, that seems simple enough… I feel as if I’m missing something important toward being able to remember it in the future, though.

I feel like imabi’s page on くせ also made the connection I need, but it ends up a form of “くせ means this one thing, and くせに means this completely unrelated thing”, leaving me still unable to piece together how くせ + に = くせに. (“habit + に = even though”).

[Elizabella]

@ChristopherFritz

When I reach this point, I always feel I want to delay leveling up until I can get through the new lessons

Same. If I had to complain about something, it’d probably be this. It’s mentally deflating to see a large amount of lessons waiting that have nothing to do with the current lesson. I find myself going to the new lesson to subtract the vocab so that I can figure how much I have left.

@ChristopherFritz

Somehow I didn’t recognize 地 (which I should know) and 住 (which I still have trouble with)

I totally double checked to make I remembered these!

You’re kind of making me want to check out JTMW, but I have gone through so many texts hoping to find one that I can commit to. WK has turned me into a visual learner so maybe this might be worth checking out…

[ChristopherFritz]

@Elizabella

I have gone through so many texts hoping to find one that I can commit to.

Coincidentally, just today I happened upon the shipping list that came with my order when I bought Japanese the Manga Way. I bought it in 2013. I think at the time, all the intro stuff (before lesson one) really bored me (nothing new for me, but I felt I just had to read everything). I’m sure I read the first few lessons as well, but none of it stuck, probably because I already had this feeling that the book was boring.

I really wish I had stuck with it at the time. But I didn’t. Maybe I would have if I skipped straight to the first lesson. I’ll never know.

I started reading from lesson one earlier this year. Some lessons are a bit boring because I know the material (unlike back in 2013 when I wish I read these lessons). But I like the manga samples and how the dialogue is broken down. When I reach a lesson on something I’m a bit weak on, the explanations and everything really help. I really could have used pulling this out to read back in 2018 and 2019 when I started getting serious at learning grammar.

Here’s a sample couple of pages:

[shuly]

All your help with the book clubs was always super helpful. Really enjoy reading your posts…so many similar struggles…death by leeches! Also forgot about JTMW…know you mentioned it a while back and I did buy a year or so ago…but never really cracked it open…thanks for the repeated reminders guess it’s time to pull this book out and dig into it a bit more.