Thanks! Yeah I feel you. The original Ace Attorney was one of the first things I (re)read in Japanese a few years back. Was looking things up pretty much every line back then but it was great all the same. Love the series and it seems good for learning.
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After no updates for a long time, I just feel like yapping recently lol.
Trails FC is a nice pleasant experience, I appreciate that club. On one hand it’d be nice to get the VN club rolling again, but it seems difficult to get people on the same page about what to read there, and a lot of us more actively willing to read the bulky VNs fell off a bit to go do whatever on our own.
The word reading thing happened again with a stream, this time it was just 樹木, she was misreading it as じゅぼく and I caught it. Maybe the streamer I’m watching just isn’t great at reading 
They sure have some fancy words in Metaphor; here’s what I’m up against. I actually knew the sort of “hooked” kanji, かぎ、from 鉤鼻, hooked nose being in my Anki. Some of this I know but it gets very… specific. The writing doesn’t hold back with showing me new stuff I’ve never seen. Yesterday I looked up 宗主国, そうしゅこく, “suzerain state,” then had to go find out what a suzerain state was lol. Shit’s a little rough. Font is definitely readable but it feels a little annoyingly narrow too, heh. Still hoping someone can get the script up to make it texthookable cause it’s just loaded with words and kanji I’ve never seen elsewhere.
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I would misread this one too, and not bother looking up, unless voiced lines. Corrected and remembered now. (Also, appeared in various compounds.)
Natives may make mistakes at something depending on the individual, and so technically, learners can be better natives and possibly get unnaturally good at something.
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tbh from what i’m seeing metaphor’s font seems like a real pita to read
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Yeah I’m really particular about getting readings right, if anything I excessively double-check.
Yeah, the dialog one has a bit of a fancy edge to it but it’s not really anything I haven’t seen. But this font they use in menus like that journal I just posted is just so small and cramped, it’s around the UI in places too. Have to look really closely at the more complex kanji.
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I’ve been away from (or, rather, lurking) the forums for quite a while this year, but the VN club is something I’ve missed from time to time as well. I stopped participating at some point because for the majority of this year I’ve been sorting and managing some long overdue things, mainly mental and physical health, time management, life direction and other related stuff (good old late twenties crisis?). I fell off reading VNs for longish periods of time in between, I’m not even done with ISLAND yet, though it feels like I’m very very close (this thing just won’t end lmao, but I’m still enjoying it).
But anyway, I feel like I could give the club a try again, now that many of the things I’ve been working on this year are mostly sorted. I don’t think I could join a paced club like the ones we did in the past, though; at this point I just want to grab something and read as much as I want to. If at some point you and the rest want to pick something to read together, it’s likely I’ll join 
.
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Sounds good! I’m content either way on structure really – I always have several things I’m doing so I could squeeze in a few 10s of thousands of characters of something per week in a structured way, but I’m good with unscheduled too. So no objection to the latter. We’ll have to work out the details of that sometime, but I’d be happy to read something with you all when we figure out a good pick enough of us are interested in.
Also, very much hope things are going well for you now.
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This is less study log and more complaining about a VN again but I’m mid chapter 4 on Steins;Gate and it’s wild how this VN has pretty much ceased to leave the experiment room. Just hours and hours of way too much detail on using the microwave in the most painfully slow steps possible, every 50 lines taking a long break for Okabe to go MY DEMON EYE, AS A MAD SCIENTIST, or for Daru to start sexually harassing someone. Which is the sort of thing I’m used to in VNs and I’m not so much being scandalized by it as, just, god these jokes are feeble.
This seems like a setup that could maybe lead to an interesting thing happening? If they ever decide to make a thing happen. All science, no adventure.
Personally if I had time travel I would use it to make Okabe not exist.
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Some good news for me! Today, Metaphor was added to Agent texthooker. People work fast! 
Currently it’s grabbing dialog only, which is still the bulk of the important stuff for sure, but I’d be happy if some UI stuff got added like the culture/person/history logs and some of the mid-fight info. Some of those messages flash by REALLY fast telling you about an enemy getting buffed, or aiming at people in a certain row, etc. But great news nonetheless.
While we’re on Metaphor, I just want to mention how extremely cool the aesthetics are. The enemies are based on Bosch paintings, and it’s so great. This is the boss just after the first real dungeon, but I’ll hide it in case anyone doesn’t want to be spoiled:
Beyond that, moving ahead with reading things. Getting in 10k characters minimum, often more Steins;Gate per day. I’m somewhere in Ch5, on the cusp of where people say things happen! To be less snarky though it has been increasingly giving glimpses of reasons to be interested. I’m extremely annoyed at one plot development everything surrounding Okabe groping Ruka – yeah the act is kinda gross and just assault but I’m used to VNs sure going places, but the absurd stupidity needed for the protag to forget within 2 days that they literally used time travel to make Ruka be born female, knew something happened and never bothered to ask, then accelerated to THAT when people said she was indeed a woman… all while, if there’s no further twist, this worked because her mother ate vegetables. Ok. That aside, we’ll see I guess. I’m not letting it beat me.
Also started reading Dandadan much more; I’m mid volume 9 now. Pretty easy read, and what a fun series. I want to at least get through the 12 volumes I have and maybe work onreading a few novels again? Not completely sure but… lots I want to do. Need more time, or to just be faster.
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24 days ago huh.
Alright well I’m not doing anything new, just further in the stuff I was already up to last time. The end is looking pretty close on Steins;Gate. I’m on the 10th and final chapter, but I will have to run back through (largely on skip) to make choices to see another ending and the “true end” or whatever. It’s not too bad to read anymore; a lot of the science jargon infodumps were frontloaded and either way I’m pretty used to it now. When it’s a day I’m focused I can hit it at a little above 10k characters per hour and in recent days I’ll read like close to 20k per day. Usually that’s more like 2 hours + because I’m rarely totally locked in with the reading, but not bad.
The VN is… better than it was? I don’t think I’m gonna land on thinking it’s anything better than “ok” unless it’s waiting to blow me away at the last second, but I still have to consider the pain on the way here haha. Glacial pacing with fairly unlikable people and the actual time travel plot is… fine? It has some decent ideas but I’m still not seeing what people seem to find so fascinating about it. It’s just the kind of stuff I’d expect, mid-level serviceable, and I’ve predicted big swathes of it while watching the characters flail about because they failed to account for, like, the existence of the ability to lie or something.
It’ll be cool to have another VN finished in the near future but this sure cools off my enthusiasm for sci;adv on the whole. I’m still gonna power through to Robotics;Notes sometime, mainly because I want to get to Chaos;Child after it, as the direct sequel of sorts to Chaos;Head. I can almost certainly say I am way more of a C;H fan than S;G. But next up… I dunno, I need to get to Ch2 of Umineko. I read S;G to delay to help people catch up but they (maybe @fallynleaf only?) still have a sizeable amount of Ch1 ahead of them. Unsure if I plan to read another thing in the meantime.
I’m moving slower than I’d like in Metaphor but still playing that! The texthooker helps; I’m just not managing very big play sessions. It’s a cool game but its vocabulary is really large so I’m always looking up new words. It’s amusing, I recently added the 拙者 and かたじけない ye olde samurai type guy to the party and usually that would be the source of more vocab pain, but it really isn’t in the context of this game. He’s just another dude. Several people are harder to read than him.
Lines like this sure dredge up words I’ve seen once ever and send me running to do like 4 lookups at once.
I’m on Dandadan vol 16! Fun series. I believe 17 is the last one currently released. Nice easy reading with lookups here and there.
Attempts to watch various TV shows and stuff still mostly end in frustration, but I am finding certain Youtubers playing videogames, or like the 4989 American Life podcast people started on these forums bordering almost 100% comprehension, so I dunno, it’s just about vocab choice or speaking styles I guess? But I still find almost nothing I can watch and follow to a satisfying level when it comes to, like, narrative stuff. I watched a few episodes of Urusei Yatsura and thought that was tons of fun, the original old one, but I’m regularly struggling with following half the lines.
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I definitely have that too. People talking to each other → oh wow I’m fluent in Japanese. Narrative description or technical stuff → oh wow I know nothing.
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Ok, I finally finished Steins;Gate. Once I hit the point where the plot picks up (halfway through the VN or more), I… disliked it a little less? This is one of those cases where I’m clearly just very far off popular opinion because I think Chaos;Head was so much better to such a high degree that it bums me out. S;G is the one that got huge and no doubt informs what they’ve done after, probably even impacted the medium itself, given its reputation. And you can see how they’re chasing the S;G fame – 2 remakes at this point, more spinoffs and sequels than I can remember in my head, on and on. At least I have Chaos;Child to get to one day, but it seems like that’s pretty significantly different from C;H so I hope I like it.
I do have to credit the art; I think the weird glittery look S;G has is very distinctive and unique. But even now I mostly dislike the characters and found that the actual plot proceeded in a pretty basic, predictable way. Making chap 6-9 all follow one specific pattern was brutal for maintaining interest. It relies on character attachment to make you care about each individual story there, but god, just thinking about Faris irritates me even now. The characters are largely given reasons to be how they are, their own struggles etc but it just doesn’t land for me. Maybe I’ve just seen too much done in this sort of style now that dulls the impact of the time travel story. Shrug.
Reading wasn’t too hard. There’s frontloaded science talk (lots about black holes, relativity, etc) that wore me out and some heavy internet slang stuff but that mostly falls away over time. A lot of days later on I was reading about 20k characters which is pretty good as it’s not the only thing I’ve been focusing on. I’ll be back in the near future with more projects.
Side note on Anki, I restarted using that apparently just over 200 days ago. I was hitting it really hard for a while, still average 44 cards added per day lol. Wanted to make up for some lost time on Anki use and get any slightly more common stuff out of the way so I could start to slow down. I was peaking around 500 reviews a day at the worst time, cut it down from the default FSRS 90% to 85% (which I’m still evaluating really) because that seemed worth the small hit to retention because reviews should drop way more. That led to me adding a lot of cards again haha, and I’m getting near 400 review days now, so I think I have enough of a base set up that I can do 20/day and be happy there. I just want a ton of exposure, so I don’t mind going with large quantities, but it is time to let the reviews fall down a little and coast. I’m nearing 9k cards in Anki already after that hard restart, so before too long I’ll be celebrating the 10k milestone.
Also started a proper noun deck I learned about, chill 5 cards added per day. That seems like it’ll be helpful but I only recently added it.
That list of games I finished in Japanese is weird because it’s combining VNs and traditional videogames, but S;G marks my 25th entry! Pretty cool.
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Another little update! Since I last posted, I finished the last (currently available) volumes of Dandadan. That makes 17 total. Fun little manga series, excited to read more eventually. Overall it’s just doing shonen things with its story, kids in school fight a lot of monsters and aliens, but I think the characters are likeable and it does the quirky aesthetics and style quite well to keep me having a good time. There are a lot of wild, silly ideas to keep it fresh.
Metaphor has been great, and feels more approachable at this point. It still has a really wide vocabulary for a videogame, dips into some pretty unusual kanji occasionally, but the texthooker and time have made it ok. I dunno where I am, halfway? I’ve done a lot but it’s a big game.
More exciting than that though, I needed something portable with the holidays and started up Emio: The Smiling Man on the Switch. It has light gameplay sorta like the Ace Attorney investigation sections do, but it’s basically a VN. With voice acting to help me not have to think hard about the occasional reading I’d slip on, it’s… almost entirely readable. In more recent parts I’ve paused to look up things more, but for a while I was essentially just effortlessly reading/listening on my own for huge blocks, as if I knew the language or something 
. So that’s pretty big progress, that’s what I’m looking for. And I mean with more of that ambiguity tolerance I guess I could be already doing this, but I don’t like not knowing a word or reading so I heavily look things up, so what I mean here isn’t I could understand but that I just knew all these words, or the ones I didn’t know where very clear, barring the exceptions I looked up. But way fewer of those than ever before 
I’m still doing some stalling to let the Umineko Ch 1 people catch up, hoping that their pace naturally picks up somewhat over time and after Ch1 is easier for me to take a long break compared to after other chapters. To that end, I’m probably going to start reading Totono Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi. | vndb . Been meaning to for a while. It’s kinda deconstructive I think. I’ve got… mixed to slightly negative feelings on Doki Doki Literature Club but this gets compared to that a lot. DDLC for people who actually read and like the medium maybe not that I think DDLC intended to get the audience it did but it’s one of those games people read as their first/only VN and because it comes across as a commentary on VNs sometimes decide is better than everything else.
I should set aside a little more time for serious efforts with pure listening I guess, but I’m doing a decent bit on the side, just way more haphazardly throwing things on so I don’t talk about it as much. In general I’m feeling like I’m making more noticeable progress in general recently (maybe more in reading, but). Hoping if I sustain this for a little while it’ll keep making for a better base to deal more with what a pain speaking and all that is, when I get increasingly comfortable and lock things that I kinda know in harder.
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Big updates! Since last posting I finished both Emio and, just today, Metaphor!
I posted in this VN thread about Emio The Visual Novel reading thread - what are you reading now? - #36 by Daisoujou : The short version is it’s incredible, perfect marks from me. Very comfortable reading/listening level, which is maybe the most encouraging development yet. I wasn’t 100% perfect or anything, but it really wasn’t that far off with just scattered lookups, and it’s kind of a first to be understanding at the level my goals are more or less at.
On the other hand, Metaphor is hard and stayed hard. I’m very glad the texthooker development happened; I dunno if I would have had the energy without. The game likes to use all sorts of fancy kanji (the kind that was occasionally hard to even look up and once just led to a Japanese person, in the context of another game, pointing out it was kanken 1 and complaining about such language being used) and words. Even the text boxes are just more dense than a lot of videogames; while it would regularly put a couple sentences in one box, when it used the whole thing that’s pushing over 40 character sentences. And it mostly varies by character but it definitely uses the psuedo archaic styles constantly. Overall manageable for me, but only with help and a lot of lookups for sure. In the end I clocked over 100 hours.
The game itself was good with a few flaws – the sorta-job system has a lot of elements to it and I think in a few places it breaks down in ways that make it less enjoyable than it could’ve been, but they’re pretty understandable issues given the many interlocking parts. The pacing falls apart in the last act and it’s clear some stuff got cut, if I do a close reading thematically it has the sort of persona issues where it’s undercutting and not correctly commiting to some of the points it wants to make. At the same time, it has good intentions and REALLY wants to be making a point in a way a lot of games are currently afraid of. Art design is lovely, characters and world are pretty cool, it was a fun adventure if a little long in the tail. I’m a sucker for Atlus game design overall. I did, as the title suggests, truly give it a 4/5 on my backloggd lol.
My only ongoing project now is Totono, so it’ll be time to do more. In the immediate future I’m hoping to do the 24 hour solstice reading thing and read as much of 怪人二十面相 | L28 as I can manage in that period. Hoping I see at least a little progress compared to how I did last time. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is coming to PC in about a month and I played Remake in Japanese so I’m excited for that, will probably get it near launch. That leaves me chilling with whatever catches my eye until then. Maybe I’ll read normal books a little more, dunno. Among some other things, I grabbed my wife Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police for Christmas; I think it’s something she’ll like and occasionally we read the same thing, just cross language haha, so maybe I’ll start 密やかな結晶 before too long, too. We’ll see!
I think I kinda feel like things are getting better with my comfort in Japanese bit by bit. Will hopefully get back with more detailed thoughts on where I am after I branch out a bit more; I’ve been doing stuff like Metaphor for a very long time now. A part of me wants to do an N1 practice thing sometime just to see how that feels, but the full length test is pretty tedious (the N2 one I did a while back wore me out) so I dunno if I’ll get around to it. We’ll see.
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Ok, a couple more things!
I intended to start the 24 hour thing a little early and began on the aforementioned 怪人二十面相… and almost immediately realized I should’ve taken the reviews about the wide and perhaps now out of use vocab and etc a little more seriously. It’s definitely readable, but I think 28 is lower than it probably should be, and I was progressing fairly slowly and almost immediately decided that I want to take this book more leisurely and carefully. I like the bit I read today! But it’s not suitable for the kind of read I was expecting. I could try to grab another thing real quick, but then I’m scrambling to change when I do this as well, and ended up deciding I’ll probably just pass on this solstice challenge this time. No big deal!
I realized it slipped my mind that I’m about to be starting the other two Famicom Detective Club VNs, so that’s an upcoming reading project. I’m saving beginning them for downtime when visiting family around Christmas, after others go to bed and that sort of thing. They sound less good than Emio by most people’s estimations, but I’m excited all the same.
One neat piece of news, today I started an audiobook! GOTH, by 乙一. I picked this up something like a few months ago and listened to part 1, but was getting a little too lost in it to be satisfied. I’ve been hitting the Japanese studying pretty hard recently so I tried again today, and I think it’s fine now. Missed a few details when a word trips me up and stuff but I’m following the majority. I just don’t enjoy getting an “inferior” version of something, not properly engaging with what it actually says, where I’m fading in and out of knowing what’s written, so my standards are relatively high, so you can trust what I’m missing is pretty minor and occasional or I wouldn’t be planning to continue this way. Still wish the dips didn’t happen, but, you know. Did the first two parts, roughly 35 minutes, and I plan to continue. I’ve dabbled in audiobooks before but accompanied with the text, like listening then reading since I had huge comprehension gaps, that sorta thing. So this will hopefully be the first real audiobook I complete – which is fun because ZOO (1) by the same author was the first real Japanese book I read way back. I picked this in part because I know the author is pretty easy.
Hopefully I’m kinda getting there when it comes to listening, which has caused me such problems for so long. I think I’m still not good with delivery that’s less clean, like in movies, but we’ll see. I feel like the stage I’m at allows for going through a much higher volume of Japanese at once and with a firm grasp of most of the general structures, the details lock in better, so progress is coming relatively quickly these days. In that way, I was remarking to someone recently, the past months have felt like I’m making more meaningful noticeable progress than almost any other time learning the language, even the early days. Probably the truth is there’s half logic to it in the way I explained, and it’s half that my neurotic inner thoughts were never going to be happy going “I recognize that grammar point now!” if I still wasn’t just reading and following the sentence. My thoughts work in about every way that is supposed to be the opposite of what helps you stick with learning languages; I’m lucky I’m just stubborn lol. The alternative to accepting ambiguity is to hate ambiguity so much that you can’t stop until it’s eradicated. 
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For those of you still checking in here, late merry Christmas! Or happy whatever holiday you prefer.
I finished Totono! It’s quite an easy read for learning, only held back by a few portions of spoken dialog with no text boxes, and general accessibility. I’m making rapid progress in the first of the other Famicom Detective Club games too, so I think I might use that recently VN thread and just keep posting my longer form thoughts on these things once I’ve finished a little more.
怪人二十面相 got a little easier soon enough, but I’m fine taking it slow like I am. Enjoying so far. Mostly looking to the future, planning what’s coming next –
I think the Ace Attorney mood is back. Long ago I played the first of the Investigations spin offs, but never the second (which was Japanese only at the time). Now that it finally has a rerelease with an English translation… let’s read it in Japanese! Haha. I’ll do both of them because I definitely need the refresher on the first. This should be nice laid back practice at this point.
Which brings me to my other possibly upcoming project. I’ve had it in my head for a while that I want to read Muramasa Soukou Akki Muramasa | vndb, and finally got my hands on it. This VN is seemingly considered one of the hardest there is. Some people say it isn’t SO bad, just has a wide somewhat obscure vocabulary. I’ve confirmed I can texthook it so if that’s what it is, even if I have to move slow, I might be able to brute force it by now? I want to test it sometime but am prepared if it’s too rough to put it aside and have it as a future goal. But at this point I want to think if I’m stubborn enough most things are doable. This gets treated like one of the final bosses of Japanese learning for people into VNs so… we’ll see lol.
Been talking to one of my Japanese friends (in text) a little more again and I really should get started for real on shadowing or something so I can actually speak with her again; I know she wants to. Speaking is just such a pain for me right now, can barely get anything out yet. Shadowing itself is tough, like talking and listening in the midst of the other person talking feels like it wouldn’t be easy even in English. Gotta figure out what to do it with too, but I think sometime I really have to attempt to have some discipline and work on that, doing a lot more writing or even just thinking in Japanese, etc. Dredging the Japanese out of my own head is still nearly impossible.
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Guess it’s time for year end thoughts. I’m more scatterbrained about tracking than most people so I had to look back through this very thread, and realized because I was having my health scare, my break happened sometime like September-ish through starting back in March this year. Given that I didn’t even do things for a full year, I think I’ve made excellent progress.
There are a lot of mediums, and I’ve probably mostly been putting things like books more on the backburner (though I have read at least a few this year!). But looking at that list I have of the games and VNs I’ve gone through in Japanese for example, more than half of it comes from this year, and this half especially includes a lot of very lengthy entries. It’s a great sign my speed and endurance have gone up. In the last couple months I’m feeling better about how I can do too – not where I want to be necessarily, but bit by bit listening is starting to become easier, I have more mental space to more easily work things out in context, etc. The general structures all just make a little more sense.
I’ve been spending many hours each day on it especially recently, so it’s good to see the progress following. Since starting back Anki in early May, I’ve already mined almost 10,000 words as a sort of rapid fire catch up, but I have slowed myself down on cards added daily recently. Other than that, up to now, I really just read and listen to Japanese.
I finally feel like I’m at the point where I should think about output a little, so I’ve been shadowing for half an hour or so the last few days, and it’s… not easy, but I’m gonna stick with it a bit and see what I think.
I wrote a recent post in the thread about goals to talk about next year, which ties in here pretty closely, so here’s what I’m thinking about in the future: What are your goals for Japanese in 2025? - #5 by Daisoujou
Given the rate of progress recently, I’m hoping next year is the year I feel like I have some ok level of comptence across the language as a whole – get listening a little better so I can actually watch movies and the like, and hopefully somehow get enough of a foothold in speaking that I feel like I can actually get thoughts out as real sentences.
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Quick update – still moving through 怪人二十面相, a little over 40% through IIRC? Just started the first Ace Attorney Investigations game, which has been really cool because the first Ace Attorney game was just about the first real Japanese thing I read, barring a little manga. The experience of coming back and being able to just casually read it, occasionally looking up one word, is super nice. It’s a nice showing of how far I’ve come up to now.
I’m primarily posting to talk about my practice towards output, which is going better than expected! Shadowing can still be hard but it’s getting more comfortable overall, and while I need to get faster at coming up with the words, I’ve found myself way more able to write how I’d like than I expected to. I’ve been doing the daily speak/write challenge and a post like this shows it best if anyone wants to see, I mention what I’m shadowing (lol) and also there’s an example of something I wrote: 📝 Speak/Write Every Day Challenge (Winter 2025) ❄ - #17 by Daisoujou I’ve only been seriously shadowing maybe like a week now, and this was day 3 or so of writing, heh.
The main thing I want to point out is how, despite having a long way to go to fluently getting the words out, I feel WAY better at doing this than I did some months back in initial attempts to talk to Japanese friends. Basically, I think going 99% input for a few years the way I did paid off greatly because 我ながら my writing isn’t so bad, but the point I do want to make is making SOME small effort at Japanese use at one point was very useful to help me realize the exact pieces of grammar connecting tissue and etc that I had been slightly white-noising. From there, some more months spent reading and listening, and in that time I’m much more closely keeping at eye on the grammar and wording, leading to big gains now even though I was still just continuing to practice input. Essentially, if you have much interest in getting better at output at some point, I think it’s really valuable to make a brief attempt at output, and you can even put it aside afterwards, but I think if you manage to learn some about what’s lacking from that time you’ll come back way better. At least that’s how it worked for me.
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Well, I’ve been kind of depressed (again lol) so while I had a good start on output, haven’t bothered with that much recently. That said, I haven’t fallen off the Japanese studying. My recent Anki additions have seriously slowed from the large amounts per day I was doing because the review count is annoying, but I’m within 20 or so cards of having adding 10,000 total since restarting Anki… 261 days ago. So that’s nice. I’m managing well enough with early influx that I feel like now is the right time to drop the counts a little and proceed more slowly. I wanted the heavy start so this isn’t “whoa slam the brakes I made a mistake!” but me just adjusting to changing circumstances. Whether it’s a big Anki load or just the reading done in the meantime; I’m seeing loads of progress on remembering way more words I would’ve forgotten or not known back then.
Also today I finished the first of the two Ace Attorney Investigations games! I had largely forgotten what happened from my English playthrough when it was new, so it’s nice to re-experience it. Like I said I’m way more comfortable with Japanese compared to playing the first AA game a few years back. I still probably took about twice as long to get through it as internet estimates give for the playtime, though I know I wasn’t actively reading all the time it was on. And the original Ace Attorney probably took me more like 5x so that’s progress haha. On to Investigations 2 soon, and also I’m gonna play Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth when that drops on PC next week.
Nearing the end of 怪人二十面相, it’s good! I’ll talk about that more when I finish it. The next book I read is likely to be this, because, well, look at it.
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Ok I finished 怪人二十面相! I think it’s super cool and useful to have some context for sorta culturally significant Japanese works. Even while reading it, the Ace Attorney game I was playing at the same time directly referenced the titular thief.
It was a fun read! Not difficult but I also can’t really call it light and breezy – it lacks much of the older book difficulty since it’s aimed at a younger audience, but the vocab is still pretty wide and full of words not used so commonly these days. The sentence structure isn’t so hard or anything, but I did a significant amount of lookups and the sort of polite 1930s narration voice wasn’t hard to understand but still made me take my time through it all. I found the story pretty delightful; there were lots of interesting playful ideas since it’s about a master of disguise pulling off elaborate heists.
Another book down, and just in time to start on Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth tomorrow. I stalled for a while but recently listened to a few more parts of the GOTH audiobook which still remains sufficiently comprehensible, that should be my first finished standalone audiobook in a bit. Getting much closer.
It’s a spectrum that extends to infinity, but one of these days I’m going to feel like I know Japanese . I mean yes I appreciate how far I’ve come, how I’m far more able to choose what I want, and the difference in speed between me and a native reader, though still large, is getting smaller, etc. I think part of it is just how much I still struggle on output. Marking a goalpost for “knowing the language” isn’t really significant but I know that it doesn’t feel real when I’d barely manage, if I did at all, to hold a conversation. I want to keep training that, but lost the energy for it when my mood crashed; it’s so much harder for me than just getting more input. Which, to be fair, input used to be so hard I was fighting through headaches to claw my way through it so it’s partly about how that’s gotten easier.
There’s a lot left to do but I’ve done a lot by now. I have to be happy to be here after about 3 and a half years. I just don’t want outputting to take 3.5 years to reach the sort of level my input is at, heh. Surely it doesn’t have to because I’m building on all the knowledge I have, but it is true that for the output specific skills it’s going to need a fairly significant amount of time to train it up I think. Given how shadowing goes I’m not perfect but I think I can get the Japanese sounds out ok, it’s just the immense time to get Japanese out of my head and frequent mistakes when it makes it out. None of this should really be surprising, and yeah I think I can get there and make it better eventually, just one of those things I wish I could already be good at. Grant me one
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