Daisoujou's Study Log - Celebrating 4 years

Japanese Language Study Logs (Public)
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Well gang – the night after I posted that update, I was in the hospital with my always troublesome arm being more troublesome than usual (and in new ways – a bit swollen, red, new types of aches). Turns out I have a blood clot, deep vein thrombosis in there now. Coming back and seeing this post made me laugh a bit, hahaha.

Waiting for results to all the tests in a week or two to see if there is a more concerning central cause, because it’s apparently abnormal to get a blood clot in this location.

I’ll respond more properly tomorrow or something when I have more energy haha. To year 3!
:melting_face:

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I hope the doctors are able to deliver some good news and find the cause of the clots!

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Sounds like you’re the type who always pipes up when new things are being handed out?! :scream: :cold_sweat:

I guess it’s more normal to have them in the brain or in the heart… So you were actually pretty lucky, in being unlucky. I hope the root cause will be found and fixed quickly! :pray:

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Oh no. D:

I hope they find the cause quickly and that it clears up some of your other arm problems. :green_heart:

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Yeah you definitely will – and maybe sooner than you expect, given all the book clubs and everything you’ve got going on. It seems like dedicated reading like that moves people forward surprisingly quickly.

And thank you! I’ve really enjoyed your presence here in this thread and the help with the club and everything as well! Happy to be able to enjoy the medium with others.

Thanks, for that and everything else. :grin: It’s been great having you to give a little support through all the mess these couple years have been, haha. You’ve really been around here since I first started this.

Yeah to be clear all my thoughts on that are super contradictory. Like just thinking about learning Japanese felt like it was going to take a decade (and I mean, to a certain level, yes, or you could just say one’s whole life technically) but I think to get convinced to be willing to get started I needed the slight swindling of “oh you can be reading whatever, just look up some unfamiliar words,” within a year! And… technically that’s not untrue! But what you “know” is nowhere near as smooth and certain as you imagine it being if you’ve not learned a language before, or at least that’s been my experience. I’m not dissatisfied but there’s a lot of learning about how language learning works that comes along with this. Super happy to hear about you crossing a significant threshold, too.

Very much appreciated; thank you.

Well, specifically for deep vein thrombosis, it’s actually the legs where most people get them. The thing is they generally need a cause – they’re the clots people get from inactivity for a long time, like sitting on a super long flight. Generally they don’t happen in the arm unless you’ve recently had surgery or apparently if you have cancer :no_mouth: (I mean I don’t have other problems to point to that so I assume that’s unlikely the way I discover it – sure hope so). Maybe I have some more broad clotting disorder or something, who knows, that’s what they’re looking at. There’s something else I’ve discovered on my own called paget-schroetter syndrome related to the thoracic outlet compressing the vein that can cause clotting like this and that would tie into me already having some sort of anatomical issues with this arm so… maybe? I’m not a doctor.

I did get lucky though because these clots are fairly frequently symptomless, and when left alone there is a serious risk of them breaking off and blocking a blood vessel in your lungs. A lot of people get the leg ones with no symptoms and just suddenly die :cold_sweat:

Yeah thank you very much, tying into what I mentioned as a possibility above to Nicole, that’s my biggest hope. We’ll see.

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Alright, well my arm has been slow to improve (and peaked in pain a few days after), so I’ve been keeping posts around here to a minimum, but I think I’m starting to slightly see improvement so let’s get a few thoughts out –

Club stuff, even through all this, is going well. 2 days for 9-Nine, 1 day for 999. If the club does end up speeding up, I think I’ll be fine, though the initial votes are leaning towards something at a similar speed. Paranormasight is gonna take a while when I fit it in, but I’ll get through it. I’m probably not as far as I’d like to be, though I’ve read a lot of the files by now, so that’s helpful, heh. Zelda’s pretty chill, though I’m not pushing myself too much for every little bit. Most of it can be casually read, regardless. The other day I happened to see an image from the manga ぽんこつポン子 and oh a whim started that up. Just read the first two chapters, but it’s cute and easy! Nice little chill thing to do here and there.

I was just thinking, my listening skills are still so bad for this sort of thing, but a Japanese movie club would be fun. Availability for films gets very tricky (I hate what streaming services end up doing to reliable accessibility of this stuff…), and I don’t think I want to have to manage it because I can’t seem to stop having disruptions from life stuff. Something to think about in the future, maybe? Assuming there’s any interest it can’t be too tough to make it happen – watching something for a couple hours is very low commitment compared to most clubs here, haha.

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It’s not a real movie club, but I think the kurzgesagt club linked below is the nearest club you can get, which is being organized at the moment.
It will start with the first video on 10. June. Maybe it can be a start/substitute until a real japanese movie club will be organized (if it will ever - as you mentioned, I guess the availability would/could be a problem).

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Thanks for the mention! I don’t think Kurzgesagt is quite my thing, but it does seem to be the main listening club happening right now. Hope it goes well anyway; I’ll probably glance at it here and there.

I’m particularly passionate about movies so I think I should see if I can make this happen someday. In the end I feel bad for anyone left out but the availability is probably more an annoyance than a truly killer roadblock --picks can be moved through quicker than any club and “check if you can even watch this movie” will just be something to consider in voting haha. I’ve got a watchlist of multiple hundreds of Japanese movies I want to see so I certainly will have ideas!

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Well, things are still going I guess. The arm is a little better? Still fairly swollen most of the time, especially if I don’t keep it elevated all the time. I guess this can take months to fully improve. Hematologist follow up (and, consequently, the results of the tests on the cause) could only be scheduled like a month out. The medical system is a pain. Ehh well. Guess this problem isn’t the worst, at least right now.

I finished Paranormasight recently! Another VN down. Posted a little review of it in the VN club thread. Overall pretty good, though definitely one of the harder things I’ve done. I’m running up into a lot of (pseudo) old Japanese – Tears of the Kingdom hasn’t been too hard, but that’s the sticking point in that game too when I come across ancient writings tied into puzzles and stuff like that. Sometime I need to figure out how the grammar works for that stuff because I’m always more or less understanding, but a little vague on the exact structure of the sentences.

Speaking of totk, I’m getting pretty far in that. Finished the 4 temples and I’m working on what lies beyond that; I feel like I’ve more than had my fill of the open world so I’m probably going to mostly just run the main story down. So it’s really time to start thinking about what to do next in Japanese. Still have the 2 VN clubs, but I need more.

The release of Final Fantasy 16 really snuck up on me… I want to play that, but I figure it’s probably going to be a little too challenging? It’s all live cutscenes to keep up with, with that sort of medieval fantasy war flavor that has to make the vocab tilted towards things I might not know yet. I took a look at videos of the demo and I can kinda sorta hang, but those words I don’t know are definitely frequent too. Really not sure. Torn between wanting to do it and concerns about not following things sufficiently and/or getting too tired and just dropping it after I start.

I’m also starting to think about Anki again a little. It’s not like I’m not learning, but I think about the vast number of things I need to know, and realistically, how many words am I picking up per day? Something really sticking for next time definitely happens here and there, but it can’t be more than a few a day I think. I certainly know from experience that Anki isn’t going to magically cement every word I add to it, but I’m starting to want to pick up the pace. What I’ve been doing has worked wonders for making the general structure of Japanese feel intuitive, but vocab being as demanding as it always is, I feel like I’m going to set myself up to move too slowly for my desire. We’ll see though, I still don’t really like Anki so I’m sitting and seeing what happens to that feeling, for the moment. It would also require me to go back to ensuring I always have a texthookable thing to mine from, or to set up a new process for mining from all these things I’ve been reading with manual lookups.

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Coincidentally I’m also toying with the idea once more but I need to really plan ahead because I know I’ll burn out awfully if I go full power again. At this point I have exactly 1380 reviews and I’m not sure if I want to tackle that slowly over time and then once I’m done begin adding new cards, or abandon the deck altogether and make another one from scratch. SRS tends to burn me out a lot nowadays if I ignore the burnout signs for too long, usually when I start to dread more than enjoy adding new cards or just opening the program it’s a very clear sign I have to take a break, but it’s also hard to balance because SRS gets me into this mentality of “x items a day” which is both good and bad for me. If I go again I will strictly keep it i+1 though, keeping every card easy.

I’m not sure if it’s also the case for you or for anyone else, but the more I learn, the more I feel it bothers me not knowing a word I come across. It’s kinda stupid too, supposedly the more you know the more you should be able to enjoy what you read, and on one hand that’s definitely true for me since it has made so much stuff accessible, but it’s also annoying that the missing word usually adds nuance and flavour to the text, and at this point in my learning I’m not as satisfied with just getting the gist and moving on as I used to be… I feel like I want the full colour of the scene, but that point is probably thousands of words away still :smile: . I always keep coming back to thinking if SRS is not a necessary evil to achieve that, and then the cycle continues.

In any case, we keep rowing.

I’m so hyped for this one, but I don’t have a PS5 so waiting for PC release it is :sob: .

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Yeah, definitely. Honestly I’ve always been super picky about knowing every word, just more neurotic about that than anyone recommends, so if anything I’m learning to slightly back off at least when I do things that I’m less concerned with – say Tears of the Kingdom, since it’s all manual lookups, not truly focused on the writing the way a VN would be, and overall not hard to follow. I’m getting slightly better at skipping.

But I’ve always sort of felt some of that discontent, because I think the claims about how knowing X number of foundational words gets you Y% of text coverage are misleading. Ultimately it just means you have to study more and the approach is still functional, so it doesn’t truly change anything but expectations. Still, there are a lot of reasons I think that, but I’m happy to hear you bring up one that I’ve felt for a while but rarely ever heard from anyone else. Generally speaking, less common words are that because they are very specific, and that means that they often carry a fairly deep meaning. There are exceptions like particularly literary adjectives as descriptors and whatnot, but so often, I find that sentences hinge on those words that are going to be the unknowns even for people at our level.

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Yeah, my experience with Spanish right now is basically exactly this. I’m listening to Radio Ambulante now, which is an NPR podcast meant for native speakers, not learners, and my comprehension is decent to good for most of the episodes, but the stuff that I do miss tends to be the words that are super specific to the situation they’re talking about, which is like… the important stuff!

So the listening experience usually ends up being like: “…Then she went to [location] where she did [verb I don’t know]. She was just a child when she started [same verb], and growing up she experienced difficulties because of [another unknown word], which led to her leaving Mexico when she became an adult and traveling to Argentina, where she became a [word I don’t know]…”

:sweat_smile:

Like, my Spanish is good enough that I’ve basically got the connective tissue down and don’t have many issues comprehending that. But the connective tissue is usually the least important part of the sentence…

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Probably what surprised me most was seeing just how many words would appear like once per 3+ books. Meaning basically it’s more often that youll read through an entire book without seeing it.

Those words are very large in number, and there might even be 1000 words like that in a single book. As a group they are necessary for smooth reading, but each individual one is a relatively uncommon occurrence and you might go months without seeing it. It’s very hard to get down that category of words with just exposure because they have such big gaps between appearances.

SRS in that context can increase your exposure to a word by 7x or so, which is a very big difference, despite the low quality nature of exposure. I don’t want to call it necessary, but you’re definitely putting yourself at a big disadvantage if you don’t use it in my opinion.

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My former coworker, who is a native Spanish speaker who started learning English when she moved to the US at age 11, confessed to me that she would often quietly look words up in an online dictionary during our (spoken) conversations, haha, because I’d use a lot of words that she didn’t know. She’s fluent in English, but I’m a lifelong reader with a master’s degree, so my vocabulary is pretty big. I think it’s really hard to bridge that gap as a non-native speaker just because you’re basically many years behind the native speaker in terms of amount of exposure, so that experience of having to look up increasingly uncommon but still significant words will probably follow you a very long time unless you sort of cheat with SRS.

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Yeah, its a very big gap. Especially because of the fact that every native speaker went through the education system in their language, its hard to match their very wide ranging vocabulary. Unless you mine an extremely wide range of content, chances are that with srs you will cover less breadth, but have pretty cracked out depth.

Anecdote:

I usually end up teaching my girlfriend about 5x the words she teaches me. But if you look at the most recent stuff I taught her: 玉響、残滓、仙臺、同衾、不倶戴天 they’re all random shit that most people dont know. But then on the other hand, you know the most recent word she taught me? Blender. I literally didn’t know the word for blender. Its フードプロセッサー. So maybe I’ve seen it and just never bothered to SRS it but yeah. Point is, even just srsing endlessly, you might end up knowing the same amount of words, but knowing all the words that the average japanese person knows is deceptively hard because its not just about a number anymore and its more about variety.

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Well, if anyone is interested in knowing what it takes… I think in the Swedish school system we start truly learning English around the 10-12 age range somewhere (there is some English before then, but I personally felt like we didn’t have a lot of instruction in grade 1-3, maybe it started to pick up in 3rd grade, but anyway). When I was 14, I started reading more or less exclusively in English, and I was a voracious reader at least until my early 20s (after that I kinda fell off the wagon and now I’ll have a couple of sprints each year of reading a lot, like 10 novels in 2.5 weeks and then nothing/very little for a few months, then rinse repeat). At 16, I started playing WoW and joined a guild full of brits, so only communicated in English there. And when I got my (own) first computer (I had shared computers with my siblings) at 18 or so, I had the OS in English because I’d be more likely to find help online in English than Swedish. Actually my first computer was probably in Swedish and I got frustrated with having to translate help instructions online, so my second computer was probably the one in English. :joy:

It wasn’t long before all my devices were in English, and since I lived my life mostly online, and the English language part of the internet is… ridiculously bigger than the Swedish, it was all English.

I never used SRS for English. I read a ton though. I once in my voracious reader days tried on the challange of reading 52 books in a year, and hit it in May/June, and that was my normal consumption. So for maybe about 5-6 years, I read probably 100 books each year, and I’d say that was probably the biggest contributor to my very extensive English vocabulary. I also read fairly widely, hitting both historical vocabulary through fantasy and some historical romance, and then a wide modern one through urban fantasy and romance (I didn’t start reading much crime until later; but I watched all the crime shows back then so I still had the vocab but through listening (and reading subtitles)).

So I guess, from my experience, by the point I can read Japanese books well enough (with some look ups) that I can start hitting 50+ books a year, well, then I’d be well on the way. But I’ll never be as fluent in Japanese as I’ve become in English, unless I suddenly have a very real reason to switch most of my life to run on Japanese like I did for English.

(And at no point in my getting fluent and reaching a huge vocabulary of English did I ever live in an English speaking country. Vacations, yes. And later I spent a few months here and there in different English speaking countries, but the only time I’ve stayed anywhere for longer than 3 months, have been Japan. xD)

Now that is probably not the most efficient path to that level of fluency. But I’d argue it is probably the more enjoyable since I never felt like I studied English (I mean in my own private efforts, school certainly made it feel like studying at times). I did feel it some for getting my speaking and pronunciation to a standard I could live with. And I struggled a lot with that during my guild days in WoW, asking my British guild mates to help me learn how to pronounce things and occasionally having them laugh at stupid blunders. To this day, I have problems with being sure I’ll say soap vs soup the right way around. :sweat_smile:

SRS vs reading 500ish books. Yeah, SRS might be a lot more efficient. :joy: And did I mention I’m not a fast reader? Oh no, I’m really quite slow… :joy:

I haven’t thought about my fluency in this way before. Fun exertion down the memory lane.

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mfs who do both

Galaxy Brain GIF - Galaxy Brain - Discover & Share GIFs

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Appreciate all the info everyone. It’s been nice for helping me think about what to do. I think needing to stop SRS before was just a first sign of how life stresses were closing in enough that I ended up taking a few months off from learning at all. I probably have more negative associations with it than it even deserves from how stressed I was for a while. I’m going to do a little planning and probably get back into doing it soon. No doubt my review pile is a nightmare so I’ll start that over fresh; I’ve lost the whole “spaced repetition” part on all those words anyway.

I finished totk last night as well! It grew on me a decent bit but I still have a list of personal grievances; some stayed from my initial impressions, some went away, and some developed over time. Still, I do respect it for feeling unique and experimental in the AAA space. Maybe a 7/10 for my personal tastes, but it’s the kind of game I do want more people making. Though I also want more linear games, please, it’s ok for not everything to be an enormous open world :no_mouth: It wasn’t too bad in Japanese, though Ganon sure knows some unique words.

Anyway, with that, my Japanese schedule is totally open outside the VN clubs, so I’ll probably update again soon with what I settle on doing. The future is wide open!

This is very much the kind of thing I’m aiming to do, and luckily I have the sort of free time to do it, once my speed gets up to par… but yeah, I think I want to try to do both. My first two years have been really accelerated for your average Japanese learning, can’t let up now :grin:

The only one of those I recognize is this, but I’ve seen it quite a lot recently and don’t recall フードプロセッサー… so yeah. Your point definitely lands. Probably says something about the stuff I’ve been reading. I’ve never seen 不倶戴天 but I love it.

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Nice! I’m still exactly where I was about a week after launch, because I got busy with finishing Loopers and then Diablo IV came out and to keep up with my friends who love that game a lot (and I’d like to play the game some with them) I had to play a lot too. Hopefully I can find time to get back to TotK soon.

I have still only done the first temple, gotten the autobuild ability and then ran to Kakariko and Hateno. And I pretty much finished up the main things in Hateno and was right about to go somewhere (probably temple 2), when I stopped.

At least I have a lot of game still to look forward too, and as a fan of the series who got it on day one, I’m probably the only one left that can say that. :joy:

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There’s a side-quest on finding stone tablets with ancient stories from the founding of Hyrule and Zelda’s appearance written on them. I don’t know what they look like in the Japanese version, but if they’re anything like the Engish version, Ganondorf’s dialogue has to be a piece of cake in comparison.

Actually, I want to check that and see.

First tablet in English.

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Likewise in Japanese.

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It looks like the Japanese is a lot easier than the English here…

(The English version also adds an inconsistency, since Rauru, Ganondorf, etc. don’t talk like that.)

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