Daisoujou's Study Log - Celebrating 4 years

[Daisoujou]

Ok well recently I’ve been mostly quite depressed and not motivated to do much, though I’m occasionally doing a little Japanese. Today I got it in my head, seeing everyone talk about JLPT results, that it’s finally time to take the full N1 practice off their website and see how I do. Just like when I did the N2 one before, I timed it and tried to as best as possible take it fairly like the real conditions. My audio setup is good so that probably is an advantage over real test takers in terrible environments hahaha.

And… I totally passed. This still is just a simulation and doesn’t mean anything technically but it’s a cool benchmark. I missed 15/70 on the written section and 9/37 on the audio. Wrong answers were decently evenly distributed in sections. I learned from someone to just split into the 3 sections, take your %, and multiply by 60 per to get a rough score estimate, which gives me:

Language knowledge: 45
Reading: 50
Listening: 45
Total: 140

That’s pretty good huh! It’s funny because I didn’t quite have the level of confidence to match a score like that, but it WAS way less exhausting than when I did the N2 practice so that’s nice. I still don’t think I’ll go take the real N1 just yet, but I very likely could manage.

This is the power of just doing Japanese things! I read trashy visual novels and play videogames and watch vtubers and shit; I didn’t study for the N tests at all. Outside Anki to drill words I’ve done no proper “studying” since Genki 2. Just do things and you’ll learn it.

[Akashelia]

Hello friend
Feel like I haven’t been posting a lot lately, which is too bad now that you’re more active here!

@Daisoujou

怪人二十面相

I didn’t even notice that you were reading that book and finished it recently, I also just read it last month!
I enjoyed it too and pretty much have the same comments as you language wise. Now for the lore part, I have yet to see it in the wild but I also have yet to play many of the good games! Not starting the good things yet on purpose, using the less good things as training material to up my Japanese so far. Had to drop writing because I realized that I enjoy reading so much more and it was taking a lot of time away from that. I’m following how’s your progress on that, maybe I’ll get some inspiration from it
And wow congrats on the N1! I don’t know that I would have the patience to do a real length mock test to begin with haha. And amazing results at that!! Though of course I know how much work (can we call it work when you’re having fun ) / time you’re putting on consuming Japanese content so not all surprised! さすがに大僧正さん
And sorry to hear about being depressed, that’s tough. Hope you’ll find the way out of the tunnel, keep us posted

[taiyousea]

@Daisoujou

This is the power of just doing Japanese things! I read trashy visual novels and play videogames and watch vtubers and shit; I didn’t study for the N tests at all. Outside Anki to drill words I’ve done no proper “studying” since Genki 2. Just do things and you’ll learn it.

printing, framing, hanging above mantel, lighting incense under every day, etc.

[hotdogsuplex]

Congrats on passing hypothetical N1! That must be a huge weight off your chest.

@Daisoujou

I read trashy visual novels

Don’t be shy drop some recs

This is how I hope to eventually pass N1 some day. I don’t like textbooks, I just want to read and watch and write stuff.

[Daisoujou]

@Akashelia

I didn’t even notice that you were reading that book and finished it recently, I also just read it last month!

Oh very cool! I need to start taking a look at what you’re doing too – I got so distant from the forums for a while that I do update here and talk in the Trails club weekly but that’s almost all I do right now, failing to keep up with others too. The book was great fun!

@Akashelia

Not starting the good things yet on purpose, using the less good things as training material to up my Japanese so far.

Interesting way to go at it – I totally get you because there are certain things I’ve heard are partly good for their writing style in particular and I’ve thought the better I get the more I can appreciate that, but otherwise I’m too driven by my immediate whims to do anything the kind of way you are, haha. But it does feel nice as things are getting easier now.

@Akashelia

Had to drop writing because I realized that I enjoy reading so much more and it was taking a lot of time away from that. I’m following how’s your progress on that, maybe I’ll get some inspiration from it

I’m definitely the same way – my break from it has been MORE about mood and motivation problems but it’s definitely the first thing to cut cause reading and listening is the fun stuff. I want to talk to friends so I want to know how to do output but I don’t really want to do the practice grind, which is different from how it’s all one and the same with input. I mean I could just throw myself into trying to talk more and probably should somewhat, but I think I need the other practice more regardless. Hopefully I get back to it soon.

@Akashelia

And wow congrats on the N1! I don’t know that I would have the patience to do a real length mock test to begin with haha. And amazing results at that!! Though of course I know how much work (can we call it work when you’re having fun ) / time you’re putting on consuming Japanese content so not all surprised! さすがに大僧正さん

Thanks so much . It’s… not fun! The test is pretty annoying and the second half felt like such a drag, but I’m really happy to be able to point to it as a proper marker for some of my skills. Good thing trying didn’t backfire on me, haha. Maybe I will take the real thing next time, considering as of now I’m almost a year out from the December one… we’ll see how things look then.

@taiyousea

printing, framing, hanging above mantel, lighting incense under every day, etc.

It’s true! And I’ve really been feeling like over time the main thing I see from people who get good at Japanese is just, as long as you’re still doing something, the details really do not matter. You pretty much can’t not learn it as long as you keep showing up and direct some amount of attention to it.

@hotdogsuplex

Congrats on passing hypothetical N1! That must be a huge weight off your chest.

Thanks! I’m remembering just now that I included that as one of my 2025 goals in that thread so, hey, goal achieved early .

@hotdogsuplex

Don’t be shy drop some recs

Depends on what you like! A lot of what I’ve been reading in Japanese right now are kind of obvious popular picks – got Umineko going on the forums which is remarkable but I’m waiting around at the end of the first part while people catch up. Higurashi I read in English only but it was also phenomenal. A little while back I read Chaos;Head, the entry before Steins;Gate in that series, and it’s super cool if you like psychological horror kinda stuff. That one fits best as messy and trashy but I love it for it haha.

My big discovery one is the recent Famicom Detective Club revival, Emio, for the Switch! Really endearing characters, cozy investigation vibes, and then it sucker punches you with some of the most emotionally painful stuff at the end.

I’ve made a few posts about what I was reading at the time this thread was posted – when I finish some more things I’ll probably keep giving my thoughts there, and there are of course other people posting too if you wanna discover some stuff. I didn’t double check the thread so if you are like the second post in there or something forgive me

Right now I’m in the midst of the Ace Attorney Investigations games and those are great. Afterwards… I’ll decide if it’s time to tackle Muramasa since that has such a reputation for being hard. I AM a theoretical N1 level . If not that I wanted to dive into some of the denpa untranslated VNs sometime (denpa being a very particular horror subgenre about people behaving strangely and that kind of thing). We’ll see!

[Akashelia]

@Daisoujou

I need to start taking a look at what you’re doing too

To be honest it’s a bit hard to find because I haven’t been making new posts, but it is there! I will tell you the secret: if you are on my study log, then go to the first post, then find the link to my Bingo card. I update that post whenever I finish a new square and that’s the only thing I’m doing right now, I’m super obsessed by it, feeling like I’m still in Readathon mode since January having a lot of fun! (another way to find out what I’m reading is to look at my Natively or Bookmeter profile but there I only record things being read and don’t write reviews)

@Daisoujou

I want to talk to friends so I want to know how to do output but I don’t really want to do the practice grind,

I don’t really know how to solve that one, but given your goal, have you considered trying to get an italki teacher and having 1:1 with them? I think if you find a good teacher you could make a amazing progress, and would be great to have someone dedicated to you and with whom you are welcome to make mistakes and ask questions and so on

[Daisoujou]

The bingo looks fun! I know a few other people have mentioned doing it in Discord, as well. I let myself be so driven by whims I’m not sure how I feel about picking a lot of things in advance that way? But I do know that sort of selection is fun to make and work on; I used to do things like that on Letterboxd with movies. Of course, movies are way quicker to get through, heh.

@Akashelia

I don’t really know how to solve that one, but given your goal, have you considered trying to get an italki teacher and having 1:1 with them?

It’s honestly probably a good idea, and like you said I’d have a person who will really give corrections and whatnot. Have just never considered it seriously because, I dunno, I think I’m more awkward about that kinda thing haha. I know logically there doesn’t need to be pressure but that doesn’t stop the feeling, and even though it should be easier because this is what they are there and prepared for, I think the hired tutor thing makes me feel the most awkward for whatever reason. I think I’d be more likely to just start throwing myself into fumbling around in voice conversation with the friend or two I can right now. Which I probably should just do again, but the struggle to get words out got kinda demotivating and frustrating last time.

I do think the biggest thing is I just need to get phrases to come into my head faster, which just writing (or hell, thinking) can help with… just need the enthusiasm to come back.

[Daisoujou]

I finished FF7 Rebirth! Another Japanese game down. I’ve been dumping time into that really hard; the game took nearly 100 hours. Posted about it in the videogame thread but suffice to say I think it’s fantastic, impressed with what they did there. Some of the language gets a little complicated but I basically was able to just sit and play it without worrying about stopping to check things so that’s really good! Being relatively confident with listening with subtitles means I can kind of just play whatever I want when it comes to videogames; I don’t feel like I need to worry about something being above me.

I haven’t immediately decided what to follow this with; I’ll be thinking on that today. In the meantime I still have 2 cases left in Ace Attorney Investigations 2, I’m very early in the frogman book, and the Trails game club is still going along nicely. I also joined the beginner book club for Look Back since it’s a one-off, but at beginner club pace I’m just gonna be knocking those sections out in 15 minutes or something per week. It’s nice to dip my toes back into clubs here now that reading something like that isn’t a big commitment, though!

My anki deck is a real mess of words that get tangled in my head that I keep getting wrong because I think they’re a different one, and despite cutting it down to 10 words per day for a while now it still hovers at like ~350 reviews per day, but I’m managing that. You can’t really know how the alternative would’ve looked, but I think hitting Anki hard has helped me make the sort of progress I have. I have the patience and time for it, regardless, it’s just a little annoying some days.

Let’s see – the pirate Yakuza game releasing now looks very appealing, but I should probably play Infinite Wealth first. I stopped early on that one. I dunno about playing it immediately because it’s another game that might take triple digit hours. Maybe I need a brief respite from projects that are that long. I still want to get to the Muramasa VN, but since it’s known for having such a wide vocabulary and being difficult, I want the space to focus on mining from it and really making it my main thing. Frogman has a surprisingly high amount of new words, so now isn’t the time (and it’s another huge project, heh). I’ve got a long list of things in mind really, but most are lengthy JRPGs or VNs. There’s also the option to just focus on Ace Attorney and mix in smaller things that catch my eye – maybe finally try to watch more movies or something? Shrug. The possibilities are endless! Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom and all that.

[Daisoujou]

Slowed down a little cause I’ve been playing Splatoon more and also Monster Hunter Wilds. I did Wilds in Japanese so cool I suppose? Admittedly I didn’t pay super close attention through all the story and it had some pretty annoying overly specific environment-related words and etc, but it’s some extra exposure. Kind of annoying though because the game has the worst nightmare UI I’ve seen in my life and MonHun, which I only have limited prior experience with, is already overly complicated and unintuitive so I’m making that more annoying on myself. Still, the more I just stick with Japanese the better.

The thing I picked up next is 428: Shibuya Scramble, a VN using a lot of real photos. It’s very goofy and fun so far. I didn’t bother to see if it was texthookable so that’s huge improvement to be able to choose to do that, haha. I’m still looking up a solid chunk of words but it’s easy enough to type in the readings most of the time.

Doing a lot more background podcast listening and the like recently at least, to decent results.

Still reading the Frogman novel at the world’s slowest pace because I’m doing chunks to mine words and my god is its vocab so much fancier than I’d expected, new words and phrases I’ve not seen once before in Japanese or fancy new kanji ways of writing things come up like 10 per (ttsu) page.

I also kinda on a whim decided that I’d like to relax a little away from the screen before bed so I picked up what I figured would be the easiest Japanese physical novel I own, Haruki Murakami’s After Dark. My feelings vary on Murakami books, but I read this years ago and liked it most of everything I read by him at the time. Before bed feels like the right time to read it anyway. I’m going really slowly and manually looking up more than I’d like, but it’s MOSTLY me checking readings and being overly particular than needing the dictionary to follow things. I’m picky about getting those right. So I only do maybe 10 pages per night but it’s a cool milestone because this is my first physical novel ever in Japanese.

Someday I’ll find the time and energy to practice output again maybe! There’s still so much work to do to be really near where I’d like to be

[Daisoujou]

Small milestone of sorts, last time I mentioned reading After Dark before bed in print form, and I finished it last night! I could’ve scraped my way through some print novel earlier than this for sure, and I have a decent amount of experience with manual lookups from unhookable games (though monitor stuff is still more convenient than putting a book down for lookups), but it’s still nice to feel like the volume is no longer so high that I NEED the instant lookups, if it’s not too hard of a book. One physical novel down is another little milestone.

428 won’t take me too much longer, still working through it. Added in a few films to… mixed results, but my listening is less bad than it used to be anyway. Some people just slur so hard.

Lemme take stock of what’s going on for my sake:

Far into 428 VN
Almost 1/3 through Frogman book
Late game in the Trails in the Sky FC game club
Middle of Look Back manga oneshot club and vol 1 Nana club

Looking to the future:
Umineko ep 2 VN club soon
Fata Morgana VN club in May
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy VN/game in late April
Another novel for nighttime?

I’ve got a lot of things on my mind that I want to start in addition to all this, so I wish I could be faster, heh. At least when I finish 428 I’ll probably add on… something. There are people out there who manage to be bored and not have anything to do, like hobbies outside working and the like, and I know I have more I’d like to read/watch/listen to in Japanese alone than I could do in a few lifetimes; I’ve always found that so bewildering.

[Daisoujou]

It’s been over a month since I posted! Hit a bit of a bump with stressful times with how the world is generally, which only really interrupted me for a few days, but did kinda lead to me falling out of Nana club. Oops.

On the whole things have proceeded smoothly though. Finished 428, posted my thoughts here. I also started and got all the way to the end of the first Xenoblade Chronicles game. It was… pretty decent? It’s a game that does a lot of cool stuff and had me very into it for a while, but it has some meaningful flaws and I thought the gameplay leaned into its most annoying aspects heavily the further I got, and I think I would’ve been so much happier had it ended like a dozen hours earlier than it did. Nevertheless, I’ll check out 2 someday. The language was a little more difficult than I expected, either some technical terminology I wasn’t ready for or really fancy semi archaic style speech that went a step beyond even the RPG babble I’m used to by now. Still, I took a moment and looked up what I needed when the time came; I don’t struggle for meaning too often anymore, which is a very positive development.

I’m 87% through Frogman, so nearly there when I get around to finishing. I think “it’s just ok” is probably where I’m gonna land, not as fun as the cover would lead you to believe for sure! That energy is very lacking. It’s hard to go do the last bit because I’ve been playing/reading The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, and it’s hard to do anything else. Posted about that here. I’m so excited to be back reading a Kodaka VN; I’m probably going to have to come gush more about this when it’s all over. Reading hasn’t been too hard, and it’s such a great feeling to just do whatever now with no real thought about difficulty.

Amusingly, there’s a character in Hundred line really into VNs (well, eroge specifically ) and I’ve seen a screenshot on Twitter where she says to read さよならを教えて – which I believe I posted a while back about getting to that being a goal for me in Japanese, since it doesn’t have an English version. Maybe it’s time, after Hundred Line.

Beyond that, I dipped my toes into Umineko Ep2 and I’ve been reading my paper copy of 十角館の殺人 before bed, which I’m a little over halfway through. Been really digging into things! My other skills could still use work but on the reading front I’m way closer to feeling like I’m getting there to a level I’m happy with. Right now unknowns are still more common than I’d like, but that will keep shrinking with time.

[Daisoujou]

Hey again, no big changes but I keep focusing on reading cause it’s what I’m into at the moment. Mostly Hundred Line, a little over 50 hours clocked in that already. It’s hard to pull myself away so other practice is on hold, heh. This game has things some people are going to hate but it’s damn near perfect for my exact tastes and tolerances, haha. I’m just now finally about to finish the first ending so… 99 to go! Obviously no way they take as long each, but I’ll be here for quite a while all the same.

I did finish Frogman! And… meh. It’s pretty trashy about its violence but at the same time doesn’t really actually have a very fun tone to match it, felt like it dragged along without enough flavor. The cast of characters who exist beyond one page is super small really, which makes it not very fun as a mystery even though it pulls some weird twists. Ehh. I kinda the writing style, but the content doesn’t do a ton for me. 2.5/5 more or less.

Will be done with 十角館の殺人 quite soon, we’ll see what paperback I have on hand that I grab next. Maybe ハサミ男？This one’s been a lot of fun; these classic mystery types are entertaining every time so I really should get checking out more.

Honestly I’m partially making this post to do the non-Japanese related life update thing and just mention I’ve starting eating less and losing some weight recently! Years ago I did this already – by highschool I weighed 275 pounds, and a little after it ended I decided it was finally time to stop that, work on my health a little, and managed to drop all the way to 215. I know BMI is super imperfect, but there aren’t too many other benchmarks to refer to, and for my height that’s just under the point where I stop being labelled obese. Eventually I stopped trying and went back up to the sort of 225-230 range which I consider a win honestly, cause that’s me sometimes going through periods of stress and doing what felt like overeating, and all the same that became my new ceiling, nowhere near the old 275.

Recently I finally decided to get back to that for real, started at about 225-228 a few weeks ago, and I’m currently fluctuating… the range I’m fluctuating around right now is about 221-224, so that’s real progress! Won’t take long at all to set a new low. Occasionally I’m a little tired adjusting to it but on the whole it doesn’t feel THAT hard; I just had to get the willpower to want to do it enough to be willing to put up with being constantly kinda hungry.

Have a few Hundred Line screenshots just to spice things up visually; I’ve taken nearly 500

[Daisoujou]

Haven’t been feeling the urge to update too often simple because studying has been a little… monotonous? Maybe I mean that half negatively half neutral, ehh. It’s routine. Big breakthroughs are hard to come across so it’s basically just a rotation of whatever I’m reading right now. Except even the rotation is slow because I’m in the midst of a couple of the longest visual novels, a medium already known for being longwinded. Let’s take stock again:

Hundred Line (VN/game) - I’ve gotten 2 endings of 100 with 80 hours logged. Definitely not actively reading every minute of that, but,
Umineko (VN) - Early chapter 2 (of 8) with my club
Fata Morgana (VN) - Semi-early in chapter 3 of 8 with my club (though they trend longer over time)
推し、燃ゆ (Novel) - Probably finishing today
Lunar 1 (videogame) - I dunno, 1/3? Halfway?
Trails in the Sky FC - Finished with the club this week! Not starting part 2 for a couple months it seems.

I already had too much going on, but picked up the Lunar remasters on a whim because I was going to be away from home for a few days and wanted it as a chill thing to do on the Steam Deck. Very cozy game, easy to read.

On on hand I mostly don’t have trouble reading average stuff anymore, and my definition of “average” is far from the extreme end, but also people kinda give me the impression it’s above where the average learner’s average might be. I started noticing that sentence was a mess and leaned into it, sorry. The only thing making me fight for comprehension ever is the novel. It’s not even that hard in its language, like word choice, but the book is pretty stream of consciousness and that ends up meaning you have to be very confidently getting the meaning from each word. Might totally miss what exactly is being said if you misinterpret a word or two because there isn’t always nicer surrounding context given, and mid paragraph she might start talking about doing a whole different thing in a different place. So it’s kind of like reading rambling out of context sentences sometimes. I enjoy it but it’s not easy.

It has annoyed me a little how slowly I read things though, the enormous added time compared to if I was doing it in English – that’s inevitable, but I don’t feel like my reading speed has improved much in quite a while and I hope to see it do that again. I’m probably doing this to myself by taking on too much, but there’s SO much I want to experience in Japanese, and the speed issue is a direct limit on me there.

In better news, I think my listening keeps getting better despite practice there being somewhat sparse. Reading really does just make everything clearer. I finally had the experience earlier with what I would have previously considered a trickier podcast (さくら通信) where I pretty much just understood close to 100% of what I listened to. My struggles at this point being really rough ways people can talk on movies and the like probably does bring that to being largely a need to practice listening to that kind of thing more, sometime.

But I also want to make time again to practice output. Maybe I’ll get started on that soon. Would like to voice chat with my friend but it was just always too difficult to get damn near anything out, and while I did shadowing and writing for a short time, they were aggravating compared to being able to spend more time on reading… because you know, my reading speed is slow so I need to dedicate more time to it. It’s going fine but everything competing for my time is a pain, heh.

While typing all this, I realized it’s nearly June, and I started learning on June 1st I’m pretty sure, so I’m a couple days away from the 4 year mark! So this is a celebratory post now too!

And in non-Japanese news, I mentioned working on losing weight in my last post – that’s progressing well! The lowest I’ve weighed in so far is 217, which if I take my high before starting this is already 11 pounds lower. Bit exaggerated by comparing lowest to highest, but the change is real. I’ve gotten more used to how I’m eating now and the hunger isn’t bothering me as much, so I’m working on adding a little more exercise (at least, as much as I can tolerate, cause doing a lot tends to make me feel bad and drained for a long time after in a way it doesn’t most other people). But I’m feeling like I’m making good progress health-wise too for sure.

[Daisoujou]

Alright since last time, I finished Lunar 1, finished Fata Morgana, made it to 14 endings on Hundred Line, progressed just a tiny bit in Umineko, and started and finished the novel 殺戮にいたる病. Not bad! I should get to movies and other formats more again sometime, but reading and playing videogames is most fun right now so here I am.

Admittedly I ended up dropping anki for mined words again (still working through a Proper Noun deck to learn names bit by bit). Can’t seem to prevent the review counts from piling up and enough time inching back towards 300 or so was wearing on me. I read so much right now and I’m pretty particular about checking everything so I think I can get away without it. Might go back in the future again, but it’s whatever for now.

Still need to get back to doing almost any output practice at all – I find myself more actively paying attention to ways to say some things when I come across them, trying to take close note, but outputting on my own barely works and is kind of painful in the way that it’s so hard to start. Especially when I could just read 10 things instead like I’ve been doing.

Because I can’t stop overwhelming myself I’ve also been playing Death Stranding in Japanese, and recently started Romancing Saga 2: Revenge of the Seven. Enjoying both quite a bit. Started on my next novel last night (魔女たちの長い眠り) but physical book reading I just do every night before bed so it feels like it’s own separate thing to me. But I’m juggling 2 VNs and 2 games and I have ticking time bombs in the form of the return of the Trails club for game 2, wanting to go back to Fata Morgana sometime to read the followup prequel, and also probably joining the Final Fantasy club that was posted just today. I am getting so much input

殺戮にいたる病 was fun. Very trashy, explicit, sexual serial killer thing, alternating reading from his perspective and a couple other people. You have to have a taste for this kind of gross excess but I find it fun sometimes, certain anything but boring. The book has a sort of twist that blindsided me so hard I’m still not sure if I understand how to square elements of it against that, which either makes it too smart for me or actually messy. I’m assuming the former; it’s the sort of thing I almost feel like I need to reread but I’m not going to do that right now. 4/5, and not too difficult to read either. I’ve been aiming to make my physical novels not too taxing.

On the weight loss side, I’ve dropped to about 211, so that’s still advancing!

[Akashelia]

@Daisoujou

I should get to movies and other formats more again sometime, but reading and playing videogames is most fun right now so here I am.

Haha I keep thinking the exact same thing :x