Daisoujou's Study Log - 🤷

[Daisoujou]

@Beyond_Sleepy

So their attitude is like “10 years of human intimacy? Pics or it didn’t happen.” sounds frustrating yea. Hopefully most of what they’re asking for is in the “nice to have but not necessary” category

Oh on that note we are literally collecting pictures to show us spending past holidays together, being with each other’s families, etc, haha. Yeah I’m honestly unsure cause the lawyer has given us a huge list of stuff but we’re kind of just submitting everything we can right now and then waiting to see if they think what we have is sufficient or not. I know our lawyer said they wouldn’t bother submitting without a few specific ones like joint bank accounts, but otherwise, who knows.

@Beyond_Sleepy

I haven’t been using Satori much, but I got that one year subscription as a gift and I plan to read through all their stories before the subscription runs out, but since I’m also reading manga already I guess I shouldn’t wait too long or it might be obsolete as a stepping stone before I get to it:p

I know exactly what you mean, though in my experience I feel like the kind of grammar I learned via Satori (and now VNs and books) is stuff I rarely or never come across in manga. To be fair, I haven’t really explored “harder manga” so I’m sure it converges a little, but I think there truly is a wide gulf between your standard written Japanese and (pseudo) conversational so they might overlap less than you’d think. But yeah I read close to all of their stories at the time I did it and can vouch that I was able to go right into books, so it’ll guide you nicely if you do indeed go through it.

[Beyond_Sleepy]

@Daisoujou

I know exactly what you mean, though in my experience I feel like the kind of grammar I learned via Satori (and now VNs and books) is stuff I rarely or never come across in manga.

Good to know, where do VNs fall on that spectrum? Since I might be spending some time reading those as well going forward.

@Daisoujou

To be fair, I haven’t really explored “harder manga” so I’m sure it converges a little, but I think there truly is a wide gulf between your standard written Japanese and (pseudo) conversational so they might overlap less than you’d think.

I don’t even know if it qualifies as “harder manga” but I bought all of 火の鳥 together with the first three volumes of Hunter x Hunter (just to get a better proportion of shipping to product price, and since I was planning to read it eventually) and it sometimes just breaks up the comic book parts with a few pages of text before the pictures return:p While I didn’t attempt to read any of them yet I get the impression it won’t be pseudo conversational, but more like how in some novels the narrator will “interrupt” the main narrative with longer asides, commentary, or concluding remarks. In terms of overlap though I’m trusting that Bunpro will cover both sides as I progress there.

@Daisoujou

But yeah I read close to all of their stories at the time I did it and can vouch that I was able to go right into books, so it’ll guide you nicely if you do indeed go through it.

How long did that take you, just to get an idea of the scale of the task before I decide how/when to approach it. I know there are about 1000 “chapters” but they’re almost like paragraphs iirc

[Daisoujou]

@Beyond_Sleepy

Good to know, where do VNs fall on that spectrum? Since I might be spending some time reading those as well going forward.

They certainly can vary, but generally I feel like the writing is close enough to being novel-like with some descriptive prose or space dedicated to the protagonist’s thoughts. Perhaps on the easier novel side overall since they’ll necessarily be recent-ish and many aren’t trying to show off their fancy writing TOO hard, but there are certainly exceptions known for being hard. There’s definitely more goofy conversational stuff too than I’ve come across in my books so far, with more colorful role language which might lean in the manga direction. Generally people find the dialog the relatively easy part though, so I’d say the other is what you have to focus more on.

Otherwise the issues are subject matter specific. There’s plenty of slice of life type stuff, but a lot of VNs get into weird topics, rambly and philosophical, very chuuni, etc. All that is going to raise the difficulty purely through less common domains and, at least sometimes, content that is in itself aiming to be dense independent of the language issues.

@Beyond_Sleepy

I don’t even know if it qualifies as “harder manga”

If we want to trust Natively, that stuff ranks pretty much the same as the easier books I’ve read! Not that I think cross-medium comparisons especially are particularly useful there, but I can say they’re certainly harder manga than I read. I mostly used manga chosen for being easy as my stepping stone because more of my interest was in VNs and novels, but I want to go back and explore more eventually. Going to be the only Japanese learner who uses learning Japanese to get into manga and not the other way around

I guess to expand on the difference, what I mean is reading more prose writing (compared to my experience in easier manga only, caveat) has longer sentences you have to build the ability to comprehend, and lots of those fancier N1 and N2 grammar points show up far more often. Honestly most of those points aren’t “hard,” just another thing to remember. Depending on the work the particular descriptive words might be more rare and unusual. But having recently read Azumanga Daioh for a brief trip back to manga, I found while my overall understanding is so much better, manga can still pose unique challenges. Sometimes the brevity was actually the hard point, where my lack of a clear understanding of exactly what a verb does and does not mean introduced ambiguity that more words in another medium would have probably cleared up. Slang and the like is obvious enough too, etc.

@Beyond_Sleepy

How long did that take you, just to get an idea of the scale of the task before I decide how/when to approach it.

I dug back through this topic and see I first mentioned using it in August, then in November I stopped. I remember I stopped Secret early because I stumbled onto Ace Attorney videos and went “wait I think I can read this now” and just ran off to do that. I usually tried to read about 4 of them per day. They didn’t have Fujiki or The Jam Maker at the time, and I chose to skip Akiko because it was so long. Those aside, I read pretty much everything (well in series with 2 difficulty I chose one based on what I wanted at the time and just did that).

[MissDagger]

@Daisoujou

Oh on that note we are literally collecting pictures to show us spending past holidays together, being with each other’s families, etc, haha. Yeah I’m honestly unsure cause the lawyer has given us a huge list of stuff but we’re kind of just submitting everything we can right now and then waiting to see if they think what we have is sufficient or not. I know our lawyer said they wouldn’t bother submitting without a few specific ones like joint bank accounts, but otherwise, who knows.

When I was applying for the student visa to Japan, I had to add a few sentences explaining why I had a gap between my 1-month Japanese school study a few years earlier and my now 1-year visa I wanted to get. That was my Japanese language school just wanting to make sure the Japanese government wouldn’t potentially ask for complementary stuff because of that. It felt very weird because the answer was basically: I didn’t want that at the time? xD But I wrote some lines together about how I’d been too busy with other things to go for a year then.

Bureaucracy/visa-applications/immigration is so much about digging up info you never thought you’d ever need for any reason, bullshitting, and then some genuine “this seems legit” things.

[Beyond_Sleepy]

@Daisoujou

Going to be the only Japanese learner who uses learning Japanese to get into manga and not the other way around

Maybe one of a few, I’ve talked to some people who were reading manga for the first time because they were studying Japanese and they seemed to like it:) Personally I used to read manga, stoped for over a decade, and got back into it after deciding to learn Japanese (with my motivation for learning mainly being a weird sense almost of claustrophobia from being merely bilingual in a world of 7000+ languages🙃).

@Daisoujou

I usually tried to read about 4 of them per day.

I almost wanted to ask 4 episodes or 4 whole stories, but based on what you said you read and how long you spent I see that the math adds up for episodes:p I think I’ll try for 10+ per day and see how that feels.

[Daisoujou]

@Beyond_Sleepy

I almost wanted to ask 4 episodes or 4 whole stories, but based on what you said you read and how long you spent I see that the math adds up for episodes:p I think I’ll try for 10+ per day and see how that feels.

Nice, good luck! Yeah it’s possible you’ll see quicker results than me. I had been doing graded readers the whole time and a little manga prior, but I was still quite new to reading overall when I started Satori. Basically went through both Genki volumes then used Satori Reader as my next major learning tool immediately after. Was also figuring out sentence mining to Anki at the same time, started it with Satori.

[fallynleaf]

@Daisoujou

Going to be the only Japanese learner who uses learning Japanese to get into manga and not the other way around

Don’t worry, I’m very much on track to be in this same boat, haha. I have a list of manga I want to read that I’ve more or less set aside until next year, wanting my Japanese to be better before I attempt them. Yotsuba in particular, I’m actually saving, since I love the manga in English, and want to be able to properly read the volumes I never got around to reading in English. A little bit backwards there, compared to other learners .

For me, it’s largely a question of time. I have to prioritize the TJPW translations, so that takes up the vast majority of my reading time and energy, and whatever I have to spare, I’m trying to put that into actively studying grammar. But as my Japanese improves, I get faster at translating, and also eventually I won’t have to spend as much time studying kanji or grammar. Ideally, that saved time will eventually become manga reading time, haha.

Honestly, I can already tell that translating wrestling stuff is going to give me a huge leg up with the manga, because it’s a lot of very colloquial Japanese. But I’d be much more hopeless if I didn’t have substantial translation help on it, haha. We sort of have a mini year-round book (and listening) club going in the pro wrestling thread for Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling .

With more literary/formal writing, I’ve actually gotten a bit of that with wrestling, at least reading articles/recaps about it, but I’m sure there’s loads of grammar that’s more common in novels than articles, and vice versa. Novels are currently my lowest priority, so it might take me a full additional year before I get around to really diving in there, depending on how fast I’m able to get through my manga backlog.

[Daisoujou]

Oh yeah, I forget if I’ve ever said it to you, but your whole wrestling translation project you’ve been leaning into is really cool! I’m very impressed at you putting that stuff out there. I know you have help, make it clear you’re still learning and not authoritative, etc, but I don’t know how many years from now it would take before I got the confidence to do that sort of work, haha. I doubt I’ll ever actually do translation specifically. Who knows what might happen, though.

@fallynleaf

With more literary/formal writing, I’ve actually gotten a bit of that with wrestling, at least reading articles/recaps about it, but I’m sure there’s loads of grammar that’s more common in novels than articles, and vice versa. Novels are currently my lowest priority, so it might take me a full additional year before I get around to really diving in there, depending on how fast I’m able to get through my manga backlog.

Yeah it’s interesting and kinda cool how people go off on their own paths like that. I noticed the mock N2 JLPT was annoying for me because it’s all essay/article style reading specifically. I’ve had no real purpose for that and don’t immediately see that happening beyond the occasional times I’m looking something up that needs to be searched in Japanese and come across online articles on it. For what it’s worth, I felt like VNs and novels prepared me pretty thoroughly for that grammatically but not at all in vocabulary. Dunno how representative that truly is, though.

Though I’m mostly just immersion and SRS now, your time paragraph is still hugely relatable for simply finding the ability to squeeze in more reading. My wife sometimes wants to pick up the same books I’ve been reading (English versions for her), and did so with コンビニ人間. After feeling good about being around 20% at the time, she read for an hour or something and caught up with me. Long way to go

[fallynleaf]

@Daisoujou

Oh yeah, I forget if I’ve ever said it to you, but your whole wrestling translation project you’ve been leaning into is really cool! I’m very impressed at you putting that stuff out there. I know you have help, make it clear you’re still learning and not authoritative, etc, but I don’t know how many years from now it would take before I got the confidence to do that sort of work, haha. I doubt I’ll ever actually do translation specifically. Who knows what might happen, though.

You just need to get really into something that has a lot of annoying twitter discourse that you ultimately get completely sick of, until your annoyance outweighs your lack of confidence .

Honestly, though, since I started making the translations public, I’ve actually regretted not doing it sooner. It definitely adds more motivation for me to get them done, and you get that satisfying rush of seeing the likes and retweets go up, haha.

I’ve also felt a bit guilty, like I was hoarding information that I could have shared with other people, even though it’s imperfect. I’ve certainly read plenty of worse quality fan translations than the ones I’ve put out there (especially since I have significant help with them, so I’m punching pretty far above my weight). I’ve seen other fans basically following the stories by machine translating the shupro transcripts, so my competition is basically just DeepL here (for fans that bother to go even that far…), and as imperfect as my translations are, they are definitely better than that.

And with wrestling, since so much of it is, well, time-sensitive, you don’t have to worry as much about your older work being worse quality, because for the most part, people will just read the new stuff and not go back to read translations for past shows. It’s a weirdly forgiving environment for a language learner, whereas if I translated like a book or manga or something, there’d be a lot more pressure to have quality translation all throughout instead of basically using it as an ongoing learning tool.

It’s definitely a case where I basically created the twitter account that I wish I could be following rather than running, but, well, no one else was making it, so here I am . I do feel like the world is better off for it existing, though, and that helps keep me going.

@Daisoujou

Yeah it’s interesting and kinda cool how people go off on their own paths like that. I noticed the mock N2 JLPT was annoying for me because it’s all essay/article style reading specifically. I’ve had no real purpose for that and don’t immediately see that happening beyond the occasional times I’m looking something up that needs to be searched in Japanese and come across online articles on it. For what it’s worth, I felt like VNs and novels prepared me pretty thoroughly for that grammatically but not at all in vocabulary. Dunno how representative that truly is, though.

Yeah, the vocab would definitely be my weakness, too, because I don’t think wrestling vocab would really help me out a lot here, haha. Though I have picked up some formal covid-related vocab through wrestling, though I’m not sure how much that would even show up on the test . I’d actually probably benefit from reading proper Japanese news, honestly, because major news items do come up in wrestling occasionally. I think it’s important cultural context at the very least.

Actually, I just watched a DDT match that featured two actual politicians, haha. I wondered a bit about what their actual politics were like (though neither of them were very major politicians) and considered trying to look it up, then decided that even if I could read articles about it, I wasn’t sure that I actually wanted to know…

[Daisoujou]

Well, there’s been a whole lot of emotions and things crashing into each other. I guess that’s how life goes. The worst of it are a few complications in the application for my wife’s immigration – I think we can manage, but there are parts that are a little difficult to get our hands on, which felt particularly scary. It’s funny how often everyone I know, or my mom’s friends, or anyone, has no idea how hard immigration is. They pretty much have all assumed we just get married and she’s immediately allowed to stay here indefinitely now. Given the rural midwest area I live in, no doubt some of these same people think immigration is too easy .

I’m still very much dealing with arm/etc pain too, not sure I see any improvement there. I finally have insurance (though I may be losing it sometime next year…) so I’m going to see a doctor in about a week to find out what they have to offer. Not at all getting my hopes up, but it’s worth a try.

I’m really ramping up my excitement for Splatoon 3 after getting a taste of it in that free demo day, too. It’s been a long time since I’ve had something like this I was looking forward to so much (y’know barring the wedding but I’m kinda separating that out from the release of videogames and stuff haha), which is cool but also annoying in how impatient I’m getting.

I also briefly mentioned that horror movie event before. Well, the criteria for picks came out, and here is the list my wife and I intend to watch, all first time watches for us: Letterboxd Hooptober list . Just in case anyone is into horror / movies in general or anything and is curious. There’s my Letterboxd profile too so you can see the pseudointellectual attempts at reviewing I’ve made .

Pretty much every part of this has led to me, either through stress or through distraction, dropping what I do in Japanese somewhat. I’m still managing my daily reviews and reading some, though the latter has been bare minimum. At this rate I expect to be reading Flowers for ages. I’m at least pretty far into コンビニ人間, and still loving it. Thinking I’ll read another by this author next. And I’ve made decent progress into level 56 on WK, so the end remains in sight.

That’s more or less it, I’m just kind of adjusting to this being a waning period in how much time I spend on Japanese (though it’s definitely still in total probably a couple hours per day) and allowing myself to have that while trying to not feel too bad about moving through things really slowly. With all the coming distractions, it’s only going to get worse, so it unfortunately it is definitely not a good for me to think about adding anything else.

[MissDagger]

You seem to have a lot going on right now. I feel that a lot. The last couple of weeks, honestly a lot of August felt like that for me (whether I had as much going on as my mind tried to tell me I had or not). I barely read any Japanese and only kept up with WK and the forum (I don’t have a spouse to fulfill my social needs with :3 ).

I’ve really hated periods like this in the past. Where it feels like any forward progress is sluggish and nothing seems to actually come to fruition. But I’ve also learned that the way I feel tends to change after a while. Perhaps something actually get finished and dominos start to fall because I was trudging through the middle of multiple projects that then mostly finished all together (which comes with its own problem of having to start many things at once after instead ).

I feel like I went off on a tangent somewhere there. All I wanted to say was that I feel you and that I hope this is a fleeting period. That things that are weighing on you will either finish or at least let up on the emotional heaviness scale. I know that when I have such life changing things as immigration hanging in the balance, it is hard to pull focus away. And that is natural, isn’t it? This is something that’ll define your lives, or at least where you live. And worrying about shelter is one of the basic needs of life.

So hopefully when that gets sorted in your wife’s favor (I’m rooting for you! (closest thing I could find to a cheerleader…)), it’ll open up mental-emotional space.

[Daisoujou]

@MissDagger

So hopefully when that gets sorted in your wife’s favor (I’m rooting for you! (closest thing I could find to a cheerleader…)), it’ll open up mental-emotional space.

I appreciate all that! Just wanted to ramble in this direction because it’s such a huge thing and has been for… 1/3 of my life basically? I mean we’ve been dating in some capacity for like 11 years now. As nice as getting married is it’s hard to really feel it the way I want to because it’s also consumed as a step in the whole immigration process, which it’s hard not to be at least slightly frustrated about. The idea of marrying someone being that you then (at least intend) to stay with that person… there’s not so much real weight to that in the way that there is for more standard weddings without all this. If we weren’t moving ahead in the process they’d boot her out of the country sometime next year so we can’t get “stuck together” haha.

But anyway it’s been such an enormous thing for so long that I hardly ever stop to truly consider what it’ll be like when that’s finally over. For a while it was a very long distance relationship so it’s gotten so much better than it used to be. The idea of one of us truly immigrating was always such a far off hypothetical thing that even when we’re collecting the documents to submit it I don’t think I can conceptualize it as being that real yet. It’s hard to imagine the level of relief that should eventually bring. Unfortunately, it sounds like even after we file it’s likely to take a couple years to get approved. After a certain point it’s just waiting rather than actually doing anything, but the proper relief period is annoyingly far away even now.

[MissDagger]

I don’t know how much I’ve mentioned it here on the forum, but I spent a couple of years traveling the world trying to find a country that felt like home, because I didn’t feel at home in Sweden (at the time). So I traveled around to several places, usually staying for 1-3 months and I learned 3 things (about myself I guess):

1. Any place can feel like home, that it is more a state of being (emotional being perhaps) than a physical place. Although there are certain features that make me happier/more comfortable that I can use to get to that feeling.
2. Immigration is a lot of bureaucracy to go through for vaguely feeling more at home in a place
3. Maybe I liked Sweden better than I thought

Now here I am, living in northern Sweden (instead of middle/south Sweden) and I’m happier in this place than I can remember being in a place except maybe the year I spent on Gotland (an island in the Baltic sea, part of Sweden). I was also pretty happy in one place during my travels which had to do with proximity to the ocean and good friends. Coincidentally I live close to good friends now too. (And not that far from the sea but I actually haven’t visited it even once despite living here for 1,5 year. )

The point with this story is that things are variable. I think. Maybe you have a better idea of why I told it than I do.

I think when you’ve turned in all the papers and done everything you can do, some calm can come. The possibility is there. I know for me it would, a kind of the peace of “I’ve done all I can, now it isn’t in my hands anymore”. Although I don’t think it would arrive instantly. Sometimes we have to marinate in that realization for a while.

Instead perhaps it’ll be important to celebrate the filing. Not necessarily with family (if they think it means it’s a done deal that doesn’t help!), but with your wife. A way of affirming that you’ve done this thing. Done what you can. Your cards are on the table and now you can just hope it’ll be enough, but no longer is it up to you. So celebrate you’ve done the step, help your lizard brain realize its done as far as your actions go (at least that is how I’ve read what you said).

Emotions are emotions are emotions. But we can always guide ourselves in what we want to feel, whether they will follow or not only they can tell. If nothing else you can celebrate that you don’t have to search for more documentation? If all the other reasons for it doesn’t ring true or feel right.

Now, I definitely feel like I’m throwing mud on the wall. I’ll see myself out of this particular post.

PS. If anything is confusing or so, I blame it on the wine. I’ve had exactly two glasses so shouldn’t make a difference, but I’ll hedge my bets. xD

[NicoleIsEnough]

All this bureaucracy stuff is really painful, no matter what and where I guess I hope you can get it somewhat sorted soon, and if it then takes a couple years to be processed, I hope that this will not affect your lives too much going forward. (At least she won’t be kicked out while this process is ongoing, is my understanding?) So while it would of course be great if everything was finished and legal, if it can take you to a state where you can live relatively peacefully and with low stress, that’s already a win for you, I hope.

@Daisoujou

I’m at least pretty far into コンビニ人間, and still loving it. Thinking I’ll read another by this author next.

Just a quick word of warning: This book is really the big outlier when it comes to the works of this author. It is very, very different from her other books (I’ve read one short story collection and two other novels on top of Konbini Ningen). I mean, of course that shouldn’t keep you from reading her books, I just wanted to warn you that you won’t find what you’re looking for if you’re aiming at a book similar to Konbini Ningen, contents-wise. (In that case I would rather recommend Hakase which is also easy to read, and I found it quite similar in terms of the general feel.) The only thing that remains the same in my opinion is the ease with which one can read her books. That’s truly a feature in and of itself.
I’m sure you know that there is the Murata Sayaka book club, so you can get some inspiration and recommendations there if you like, or just hop in straight away!

[Daisoujou]

@MissDagger Yeah I think all of that is true and it helps to read it laid out that way, but is also at least what I’m attempting to learn to do better? Heh. Thanks for all your advice. Just, the full eventual relief assuming it works out is truly something on another level when it’s all over, though I’ll do what I can manage to find good things on the way there.

@NicoleIsEnough

(At least she won’t be kicked out while this process is ongoing, is my understanding?)

Yep! That part is still very good news to us. She should get approved relatively quickly once we file everything to stay on a tentative basis until the final decisions get made. So that’s of course great. And honestly the more I hear about what you have to do for certain processes in other countries (even getting a copy of her full birth certificate from Canada requires some truly ridiculous things), I can honestly appreciate that no matter how much I hate the US’s bureaucracy, we probably have it relatively easy compared to many other countries.

@NicoleIsEnough

This book is really the big outlier when it comes to the works of this author.

Much appreciated, though I do have at least a general idea of what her other writing sounds like it goes into and, honestly, I have a high tolerance for unpleasant things in art and enjoy oddities so in my limited knowledge the others sound even more appealing. It’s half for the writing style and also half for what I perceive (also based on an interview I read) to be her general worldview and the sort of themes she’d write about.

[NicoleIsEnough]

@Daisoujou

I have a high tolerance for unpleasant things in art and enjoy oddities

Oh yeah I did not want to imply that you might not be able to handle it I figured as much from your mentions of various movies and such. I just wanted to warn you a bit in case you were looking for “more of the same” and had no idea how different her other books are. But as I see, you’re perfectly prepared
BTW I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts here or in the book club threads if you pick one that I’ve read as well!

[Daisoujou]

@NicoleIsEnough

BTW I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts here or in the book club threads if you pick one that I’ve read as well!

Thank you! I’ll definitely say something at least, been planning to do my best to throw together a コンビニ人間 review when that’s done too.

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This is me jumping to another topic but I just remembered I’ve been really wanting to check out Edogawa Rampo. In fact, one of those aforementioned horror movies is 乱歩地獄. I took a quick look at 人間椅子 the other day and was mostly annoyed by the old kanji and many words I didn’t know, looks like a bit of a struggle, but since he has a lot of shorts maybe once I find the energy I can work through something…

[MissDagger]

@Daisoujou

@MissDagger Yeah I think all of that is true and it helps to read it laid out that way, but is also at least what I’m attempting to learn to do better? Heh. Thanks for all your advice. Just, the full eventual relief assuming it works out is truly something on another level when it’s all over, though I’ll do what I can manage to find good things on the way there.

Honestly I wish I’d told someone how very distracted and unfocused I was after I applied for my student visa to Japan. Only now (partly due to this conversation) did I fully realize why I got so little done for the few months I was waiting.

I don’t want to make things worse, but for me, there was very dual feelings after I turned in my application. Both a peace of I can’t do any more, and the helplessness in knowing that I could literally do nothing to sway the decision, it was fully out of my hands and someone else would get to decide if I could go or not. But I guess, it might be better to be forewarned, at least that is how it is for me. Forewarned, forearmed. If that isn’t a saying it should be.

Basically I guess it is possible for it to go either way and fluctuate between those two states. If you can pick at all, I’d suggest going with peace, and while that seems obvious, I don’t know how many times I’ve picked the more miserable option just because it is supposed to feel that way, right? Except, not “right”, there is no right or wrong. And there is nothing wrong with feeling the helplessness, there is also nothing wrong with “welp, I’ve done what I can” and let it go at that.

If I’d been as aware back then (only a few years but still) as I am now. I would have used every tool in my emotional toolbox to let it go. When action is out of my hands, it is out of my hands. All I can do is plan/be aware of alternatives that I can spring into action or rather deep dive research if things doesn’t go as planned. However, if your lawyer is good I expect you’ll only file once you have enough that acceptance is the most likely outcome (not sure how variable immigration bureaucracy is in the US).

So ehmm… I hope awareness and someone else’s experience helps you. And I feel like I’m being very apologetic tonight.

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In book news, I look forward to seeing what you think of コンビニ人間, and even more to what you guys have been talking about in the Loopers threads.

[NicoleIsEnough]

@Daisoujou

I’ve been really wanting to check out Edogawa Rampo. […] I took a quick look at 人間椅子 the other day

This is unrelated, right? 人間失格 is by Dazai Osamu, as you probably know. But I heard that Ranpo (at least his books geared towards adults) is kinda similar in difficulty, as he’s from the same era. He also wrote children’s stories but I don’t know how interesting they are.

[Daisoujou]

@NicoleIsEnough

This is unrelated, right? 人間失格 is by Dazai Osamu

椅子, not 失格, but I’d like to read the latter too! You had me really questioning myself for a moment