Daisoujou's Study Log - Out putting out output

[Daisoujou]

Well I’ve been back at it pretty substantially. Since last posting I asked my JP friends if they had book recommendations and only one did, キノの旅 (that really is a popular series huh) so I read the first one. Got through it in 7 or 8 days. Pretty decent! Still working through FF7 Remake, pretty far at this point. It’s only hard in very occasional moments, mostly the more corporate speak. Nice to be able to mostly sit back and watch given these are real time cutscenes.

I also have joined for voice chat once with those friends! I’m very bad at speaking Japanese haha. It’s inevitable but still particularly annoying when the gap is bigger between what you can understand and your own ability to barely spit out a sentence. There were like 4 other people in there and we’re playing a game at the same time so I kinda just made occasional comments and managed to not have to talk too much anyway. It was fun but yeah, kinda rough. They’re all very nice anyway. Guess I’m now Dai-chan

Just barely started the book 地球星人 cause my wife really liked it in English and I already know I like Sayaka Murata books, but it’s been kinda de-prioritized to focus on finishing FF7 Remake. I think I need a break before Rebirth. Dragon’s Dogma 2 looks really good… we’ll see. Might get that and do it in Japanese, dunno.

Assuming no big catastrophes come up a few of us on discord are starting to move towards planning to start Umineko in a couple months or something

My arm is kinda bad recently; the need to go back and restart moving towards surgery is still looming so I hope that doesn’t, y’know, go horribly wrong. Hard to know when that’s gonna happen though, both how long things will take and exactly when I’ll summon up the energy to actually call and reschedule things.

[Akashelia]

@Daisoujou

キノの旅 (that really is a popular series huh) so I read the first one. Got through it in 7 or 8 days. Pretty decent!

Cool, I’m happy to read that as I got it recently, aiming to read it after I’m done with ISLAND!

@Daisoujou

Assuming no big catastrophes come up a few of us on discord are starting to move towards planning to start Umineko in a couple months or something

Ooh nice too. This one is also on my list, but so many things are on the list, might take years to get to it
Anyway good job on everything Dai-chan crossing fingers for all the health matters!

[Daisoujou]

Thank you!

@Akashelia

This one is also on my list, but so many things are on the list, might take years to get to it

Yeahhh that’s understandable. Umineko is absurdly long too, like over 2mil characters, so we’ll see how well people last with it

It’s just the sort of thing people online heap so much praise onto as pretty much the best piece of fiction they’ve ever read in any medium, and in the past I started it in English but only made it about halfway through so I’m eager to see the rest. Really enjoyed the characters and mystery in what I saw but it sure is sprawling.

[Daisoujou]

Well I sure haven’t kept in touch, but I’m doing the Japanese things. I never even updated here about my health! Got much better news following my venogram – to put it short, I shouldn’t need surgery at all, and despite some discomfort to manage (I also have more physical therapy starting soon) the surgeon thinks there’s nothing to worry about. My surrounding capillaries have compensated well so the actual blood flow seems to be fine, just the vein it would normally use is totally, permanently blocked now. Surgery seemed inevitable because it’s usually always the preferred treatment to keep that vein open but because mine has already reached a state of being blocked long enough that it’s not gonna reopen surgery wouldn’t really even do anything – but I lucked out that things got compensated for in a way that seems like it doesn’t matter too much.

So following that I’ve picked studying back up in earnest. Started Umineko here (mostly on a short break to let others catch up after the first 50k characters but I’m going to pick that up again soon) and I’m fairly deep into Chaos;Head Noah. Having a great time with that VN. I’m using Anki again, and the fancy new word scheduler overall lightens the load, which lets me grab an even more ill-advisable number of words per day .

I’m casually playing lots of games in the meantime, too. Finished that FF7 Remake, then played FF6 for the first time, replayed Super Paper Mario, and the Paper Mario Thousand Year Door remake. I’m a little ways into Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and also just started Shin Megami Tensei 5: Vengeance. Lots to do. Bit by bit it’s getting easier.

[Akashelia]

Excellent news must be super nice to be at this stage, where learning is through playing! I’m getting close too, only a few month of actual studying left, and the rest will be learned by exposure!

[Daisoujou]

Still studying pretty hard! One of my Japanese Splatoon friends went back to Japan for a few months, coming back sometime later in August IIRC, and I told them I would voice chat while playing after they get back so I have to work as hard as I can before then lol. Talking is still so impossible.

Mostly continuing as usual, nearing the end of the Chaos;Head Noah VN. I’ve managed to increase to 20k characters per day most of the time, so it’s nice that my speed and stamina is climbing and the patterns all feel a little more natural. Also reading Shin Megami Tensei 5 on the side, and chaotically mining dumb amounts of words between 30 and, on a few rare occasions, 70 lol. It’s working for me, just trust

I watched Welcome to the NHK, had no access to JP subs, and mostly was able to get by. A bit of it was a pain to understand, but overall fine. Chilling with Nichijou at night, just need to keep moving to more listening practice soon I think.

I learned about this interesting listening test from @javerend 's study log! You listen to audio and the sentence appears on screen at the same time, with a one hiragana gap. Then you have 4 seconds to quickly find the right sound for that gap and select it. The twist is parts 2 and 3 have progressively bad audio quality; part 3 is this miserable old webcam speaker-ass audio. So given that, I’m happy with how I did!

[generalteddie]

This test seemed pretty interesting so I decided to give it a go too

Even with your description I was not ready for the audio in section 3. I thought I got everything on section 2 but clearly not… but given that I have no clue how I got the same score on section 3 (maybe it was because I was trying really really hard to focus for the final section). Also it felt like cheating when I occasionally just selected the answer that made sense grammatically instead of what I heard (or didn’t hear).

Also the test format just felt super stressful because of how short every question is.

[Redglare]

I actually felt that section 2 was worse than 3. Maybe because the lady in section 2 was kinda slurring her speech ^[1], while the guy in section 3 spoke more clearly so even if the audio quality was 144p, it was easier for me to pick up. It doesn’t reflect on my score tho, but I do remember feeling a sense of relief when I heard section 3.

@generalteddie

Also the test format just felt super stressful because of how short every question is.

This!

---

1. my hearing is so bad I even struggle with what my friends are saying if they don’t speak clearly ↩︎

[Daisoujou]

It’s been a bit! Let’s see here, I finished all of Chaos;Head Noah (762k characters), I’m on the verge of finishing episode 1 of Umineko (266k characters), I read the books むらさきのスカートの女 and おいしいごはんが食べられますように, finished the game SMT5. Occasionally listening to podcasts on walks and stuff, but it’s super hot right now so I can’t as much.

Currently besides Umineko I’m in volume 4 of the manga ダンダダン and in the club here, which moves at a leisurely pace, for Trails in the Sky FC. I also decided to restart Dragon Quest 11! Eventually burnt out on that game a while in the past, as it was basically the first game I ever tried in Japanese and I was still painfully going through character by character. It’s nice to finally directly compare something and the majority of the time just be able to read it, no problem. Maybe run the voiced cutscenes on auto because I can keep up with the natural speed just fine most of the time

Getting a little tired with Anki cause I can’t stop being ambitious and the way my algorithm has worked out is hitting that 90% target well, but it gives me like 450 reviews per day which is a bit of a drag. I can tell adding Anki really works for me though so at worst I’ll slow down but I don’t think I intend to go without it again.

Still keeping in touch occasionally on discord text with a Japanese friend, they want to voice chat sometime but that’s the part I can barely do so while I kinda want to I’m still putting it off after trying voice 1 time with people.

I have to say I’m seeing progress but also it feels like it never really lets up with constant new words or other aspects of the language for me to still struggle with.

[Akashelia]

Still impressed by how much and how fast you can read, very nice!!

[Daisoujou]

Let’s see, since last time… I finished up Umineko’s chapter 1. Putting that on hold to read other things and give people in the club time to catch up. Keep forgetting / not making much time for ダンダダン so that’s where I left it, but still plugging away at the club for Trails in the Sky. I finished Dragon Quest 11! Enjoyed it way more this time; I guess the language struggle was making it harder to appreciate. I can even texthook that with Agent, which I did to make occasional parts easier, but on the whole, especially with the help of furigana to remove the remembering readings bit, it wasn’t too heavy on lookups anymore. Oh also I read the short VN Everlasting Flowers with the little informal club here! Kinda meh, 5/10 on that one, but it was an easy read!

I took part in the readathon on the forums with 私の夫は冷凍庫に眠っている | L28 and managed 65k characters in 8 hours of reading, then finished the novel the next day. That’s a new record for me. Quite liked the book overall, and its writing style was pretty easy to run through that way. I also knew most of the words – across the two days in the 24 hour period I went hard with the word mining, probably a little over 120 in the two days, but that was the bulk of it. I still double check a lot of things but there were probably fewer new words in that sense than pages, for example, which is not the kind of ratio I’m used to. Still a long way to go cause I want that number down further, but it’s nice.

I also did voice chat with the aforementioned friend once while playing Splatoon… kinda sorta managed? Still way too hard and during the game she got hard to hear; I think she’s on a phone and the positioning of that was making what she said way less clear than in between games. Haven’t done it again… probably should; she seems up for it, it’s just hard.

I’ve started The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom in JP as a chill read on the side and I’m a little ways into the Steins;Gate VN, but having a hard time enjoying the latter honestly. Not a fan of most characters so far and it’s loaded with time travel physics infodumps REALLY heavily. Chaos;Head grabbed me straight from the beginning. Trying to stick with this but it’s cutting down my reading somewhat because I still don’t care all that much.

Also dragging a little on Japanese in general as of very recently cause I’ve been kinda down. It’s multiple things but honestly in part, with how much I’ve played Splatoon 3 over the last two years, its final event happening and the game winding down (no more new events or updates, really), it’s clear how many people are dropping off of it pretty quickly. I made a lot of friends through it, some I managed to get in contact with despite how the switch makes that so hard, but there are people kinda disappearing too. There’s one in particular I met the full two years ago as kind of my best friend from the game, who I’m not able to talk to on Discord after a period a while back of being able to, and I’m unsure if that’s gonna happen again, or we’ll at least persist through the games somehow, or not, but seeing everyone fade away is a bummer.

That aside, on the JP learning side I guess I’m doing well? Gonna continue with what I’ve got going, and I’m excited to play Metaphor: Refantazio in Japanese when that comes out soon. I slip in podcasts/streams in bits of time here and there but I definitely spend way less time on focused listening right now. At least VNs and a lot of games have voice acting so I’m functionally doing subtitled listening, for what that’s worth. On the small scale I think I’m remembering and re-encountering some of the stuff I’m doing in Anki for example to an ok level so I’m feeling some progress there. Large scale, meh, I last posted a month ago. Hopefully it’s that small percentage easier. Can certainly tell I’m not as fatigued or caught up by little things as X time months/years ago, but will need a larger period to really feel it any better than when I last checked in.

[Daisoujou]

Also, this would have to be put off for a while because I’m in the middle of a lot, but I’ve kind of gotten it in my head I want to read Soukou Akki Muramasa | vndb sometime… which I also tend to hear is up there with the hardest VNs to read in Japanese, so I’m not sure how well I’ll manage, heh. Curious how reading it would go…

[Daisoujou]

Small update: I finished Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom already. Fun little game! Nice chill reading on the side, conversations came up surprisingly often. This stuff’s casual now. I have been keeping a list on Backloggd of all the games and VNs I read in Japanese (since VNs get lumped in as videogames), and I have a total of 24! 'Games I Played in Japanese' a list of games by Daisoujou | Backloggd

Excited to get started with Metaphor: Refantazio very soon.

Not too much else to say. Still don’t like the characters in Steins;Gate haha, I’m on the VN’s chapter 2 and, spoiler: Okabe just got the IBN5100. Makise Kurisu is the closest to being ok but so far her character is entirely stuck going “I’m not Christina” “I’m not your assistant” “Don’t tell that person I’m your assistant Christina” “Stop being so chuuni” to the degree that she can’t really exist as anything but a target for the MC to be more annoying at. And at this stage most other people are one-note… Daru is just literally The Pervert with nothing else going on so far. I don’t think I’ll stop without seeing it through to see what all the hype is about, or at least not til later if I get more fed up, but lukewarm interest at best is making getting through a decent amount of characters per day a little hard.

[polv]

@Daisoujou

what all the hype is about,

Probably cultural references and places, at least, and also the glossary entries (also of cultural ref).

But still, I struggled to play S;G 0 for more than 30 minutes, until recently. Actually, I struggled to even starting to commit to the playing the game.

For S;G, I bought via Steam long before deciding to play it, just because feeling the the text was too dense, and so, too hard. When I decided to play, I got along with the tropes and over-characters easily. Maybe I was ok because my Japanese wasn’t so good at the time, and needed significant effort, and also because I heard it was frequently named. And also I generally like fan service stuff.

[Daisoujou]

@polv

But still, I struggled to play S;G 0 for more than 30 minutes, until recently. Actually, I struggled to even starting to commit to the playing the game.

I didn’t realize original Steins;Gate was literally ranked number 1 on vndb now til recently. Feels like I can’t not try to form my own opinion on the whole thing. I had intended to one day keep going through all of science adventure, but we’ll see, if my opinion on this doesn’t turn around. Adored chaos;head, though.

I’m just hoping when something bigger happens the plot really pulls me in. It seems common enough to react kind of how I did, and anime fans also seem to find it slow until X episode later on, but I feel like my negative reaction might be a little stronger than average so far. Right now it’s just a little grueling because it’s almost exclusively science discussions or the characters messing around.

I’ve endured some VNs that were really bad until eventually getting interesting (pacing in Ever17 is brutal) so maybe this’ll work out, eventually.

[Daisoujou]

I started Metaphor: Refantazio last night and I’m loving the game already! It’s on the hard side for sure in Japanese difficulty, lots of not so common words, here’s an example:

I wish I could texthook it – considering SMT5 and stuff are on Agent, I kind of think it might be texthookable one day, but I’m not gonna wait. I’ll keep an eye on Agent updates as I go. Either way I’m confident I’ll manage.

In part I wanted to make this update for the silly amusing milestone that I’ve been watching some Japanese streams recently and in 3 instances the streamer has been unable to remember how to read a word when I knew it

I already forgot what one was, but one of them was 陽炎 (かげろう, heat haze) and another was 汝 (なんじ, basically archaic you, like thou). In 99.9999% of situations my Japanese is worse than these natives, but I have found the individual single exceptions I can beat them on, and an exception existing at all is cool, no?

[Daisoujou]

Hmm, how am I feeling… conflicted? I guess that’s what happens when you’re doing 10 things at once.

Metaphor is super slow going. Still some odd words and super text dense at times. Been trying to read the fantasy world culture, technology, etc glossary but all that is going to take ages. Sprinkling it in in bits. Parts of it just use this small scrunched font too – not something that makes it illegible for me, but unpleasant at times. Game seems cool but the way I’m dragging through is starting to be a pain. Hope the script gets added to Agent (texthooker) sooner rather than later. Want to be more able to just read whatever and not keep running into walls.

Trails club here on the forums is chill enough. I’ve gotten back to Dandadan lightly now, I’m mid vol 5. It wouldn’t take me long if I wanted to focus on it, but I’ll just keep taking it casually. It’s a fun little series.

I’m in ch 3 of Steins;Gate, still not in love but it’s getting slightly better as the stakes are raising a little. Still don’t love the characters but I’m slightly softening on them, at least Mayuri. Moeka is kind of amusing too. Now that I’m already used to all their black hole physics words it’s getting easier to read at the sort of pace I’d usually keep up in VNs. Which is slow tbh, but a little less than I’ve been recently heh.

Still watching streams on the side and the streamer I’m watching right now ( https://www.youtube.com/@rice-ball_2gi2gi , her Silent Hill 2 stuff) has been super easy to understand almost all the time so that’s nice.

The biggest thing is that a Japanese Splatoon friend I did voice chat with once before started asking me again about it, a little surprising she apparently actually enjoyed dealing with me barely getting out any words and it wasn’t just politeness after we first talked lol. I’ve voice chatted with her two more times now that last two days while playing but the way I can barely say anything is pretty frustrating. Gap between what I can understand and what I can say is so enormous.

I guess that’s natural enough when I’ve only ever spoken like 4 times now, but I’m also not sure how much is simply that I haven’t internalized a lot of words well enough to bring them out quickly just as much as it is speaking inexperience. They’re both part of it. But the process of trying to learn to speak, given the way it happens in real time and not alone (I mean yeah I CAN just talk to myself but…) makes it way more frustrating to try to get over the period of being atrocious to raise it up to the level of “pretty bad,” where my other skills are. Bleh.

I guess I’ve made a lot of progress but still have the feeling that there is just not enough time in a human life for me to reach the point where I’m gonna be at the level I want.

[Jintor]

@Daisoujou

I guess I’ve made a lot of progress but still have the feeling that there is just not enough time in a human life for me to reach the point where I’m gonna be at the level I want.

nah its more a case of like how much comprehensible input/out you’re doing in terms of manhours rather imho, like, native speakers don’t just get to their level by osmosis, it’s because they’re using the language all the dang time. so it’s really more a case of ‘how much can you practice japanese without going nuts/destroying the rest of your life balance’

[Daisoujou]

@Jintor

nah its more a case of like how much comprehensible input/out you’re doing in terms of manhours rather imho

Certainly true, I’ve just (barring a short health break period) more or less maintained like 4 hours a day minimum most of the time so it’s a matter of being a little unhappy about the pace given that imo I’m doing a pretty high amount of it.

[Jintor]

yeah i get that, i reckon 4 hours is probably a decent amount especially if you’re not living there! it all adds up eventually. the fact you can even start to read metaphor is amazing imho, i’m still amazed i can understand a lot of this ace attorney case pretty okay at this point, just it takes a lot longer than it would in eng. as for speaking, it’s a pain and you feel like a dumbass for so long but i just ended up kinda dealing with it lol