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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