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@pocketcat @downtimes I’m here to say I finally got around to finishing 方舟！ It was a fun read; I imagine you all would like it. This sort of combined disaster with a murder mystery makes for a cool setup and I thought the reveals by the end were nicely satisfying. Pretty nice easy read, too. I think it could maybe do better with the characterization than it did, but the mystery itself is very entertaining. Think I’m settling on a 4 on Natively? I perpetually struggle with the lack of .5s there; I don’t think I want to quite go to 5 but what it does well is great fun so a 4.5 would’ve been easy. Ratings are arbitrary but point is while I think I can have some criticism, what it focuses on is all entertaining and still worth seeing.
While I’m here, I’ve been on shorter routes / ones with lots of endings recently but I made it to 60 endings on Hundred Line, another 10 already just 8 days later!
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I’m here primarily to make a non-Japanese related announcement: today I weigh 199 pounds! Good progress starting from somewhere around 228 this time. At my most back in high school I weighed like 275. Really different. I still don’t think I feel those health improvements people claim, haha, but in theory I’m healthier! It’s certainly cheaper to eat a lot less 
The Japanese learning is still going as it last was. Putting more time in Silksong has me in learning less mode, but even that for me is a minimum of a couple hours of reading per day. I’ve hit 65 endings on 100 Line, one away from being able to say I’m 2/3 of the way there. Been posting a lot in the videogame thread, mentioned at one point I picked up an old CRT TV for old games! It was a nightmare to move into the apartment, 100 pounds all frontloaded in the most horribly awkward giant box shape, but now that it’s here I love how it looks. Picked up a Japanese PS2 and right now I’m playing through Chrono Cross!
Clubs keep moving on, and I’m reading this novel: チュベローズで待ってる AGE22 | L32
I really need to make the time to practice output but it’s fun to keep reading and playing games so I keep doing it.
Oh also! We’ve been planning in the videogame thread to make a club for the PS1 RPG Xenogears, starting November maybe? You, the reader, should join us 
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Are you also going to have time for Requiem for Innocence in November too?? So many things 
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Yaaaas. More people reading the insane host book 
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I’ll manage! Any club I’m in for this stuff moves at a rate where I sit down for 1 hour or 2 at most for the week and it’s knocked out, and Xenogears pacing sounds like it’s gonna be similarly casual. I can balance it alright; I’m just jumping between 10 things but managing to balance them quite well. Here is where I want to say if I can get done with 100 Line by then it’ll help a lot… but a lot of the same writers, because they’re insane, have already released a new ~40 hour VN/game called Shuten Order a few days ago, and I think I’m going to start that one as soon as 100 Line ends 
. But I’ll make it all work! Haha
I catch a lot of the things you all talk about or review and get them in the wishlist backlog, this was one that came up to buy physically in my last batch since it seemed like an easy enough read. I’m quite early but enjoying it so far.
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Pfeww! I can’t say that I wouldn’t be doing that too, if I were at your level and with a bit more free time too hehe, so enjoy!
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Oh also! We’ve been planning in the videogame thread to make a club for the PS1 RPG Xenogears, starting November maybe? You, the reader, should join us
Guess I have to join this club…
Really enjoyed Xenogears when I played it a couple of years back, and playing it in Japanese would be good because the English translation was noticeably clunky in some places
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Yes!!! I need all your thoughts and opinions
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Just happened by and saw this and wanted to say congratulations! I know that’s not easy to do. Hope you start feeling healthier and healthier very soon!
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Thank you very much! I haven’t managed to update in a little while because I’ve been dealing with a lot of dental issues for the last month or so, which I think are hopefully getting better now – but I’m currently at 195! Progress is pretty slow now but still happening, I’m probably aiming to lose another 20 or so if I can?
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Nice! I’ve heard losing weight slower is more sustainable, which makes sense to me, so hopefully that counts as a win. 
Sorry about the dental issues … 
I hate the dentist, so I have so much sympathy for that.
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Ok, I’m in the mood to look more widely at what I’m doing, which won’t be all positive, so you have that warning. First, some life update crap.
First off, been a bit cause I’ve been busy and stressed and etc. Had a cavity filling redone that was cracking I guess, and because it’s deep in the tooth, it set off nerve pain. One year ago I had a similar thing happen from getting a crown (also due to old dental work…) and that spiraled into some of the worst pain of my life and getting a root canal. So I hurried to take care of this one and was advised to just have it extracted. Did that, but in the process my sinus was perforated so I had a hole between that and my mouth. Went through a few bad weeks of that not healing (due to food caught in it probably?) where sometimes I’d breathe in my nose, which was constantly congested from that problem, and pull air through my mouth, which was probably aggravating the healing too. Was very worried about needing a surgery to fix it but I think I’m ok now. Through much of that time I couldn’t focus on anything and was super tired, stress and healing fatigue together made it feel like I had the flu sometimes.
That’s fading now, maybe, but also we have this giant leak of nebulously known or unknown source (god I don’t want to get into it) in the apartment so… I dunno, shit’s wet all the time. Still trying to get maintainance to fix it properly. Blah.
This is the line where I talk about Japanese.
I finished The Hundred Line and posted about it in the VN thread, so that’s huge. I’m working through other stuff, besides my background clubs I’m playing The Silver Case on a PS1 and reading/playing Shuten Order, by the same devs as The Hundred Line. I need to finish that novel I mentioned but I kinda dropped book reading at the moment while my life has been a mess. On the side I’ve been reading a couple eroge VNs that I don’t bring up too much because of the sort of content and the reactions you get to that but I got it in my head to be kinda pointlessly defiant the way sexuality in art is getting witchhunted harder recently and there are so many series in the back of my head I’ve always heard had really interesting plots/worlds/etc in addition to the adult content. I’m pretty neutral to the adult content itself tbh; I just like VNs broadly and also like how art that has already completely forgone good taste and mainstream appeal gets to pretty freely do anything it wants with its time. Anyway just generally bringing it up to show I’m reading a lot 
I listen some but it’s much more unstructured random Youtube stuff. I want to do it more intensely but I honestly struggle a little to find good listening content. I like movies but I don’t like missing things in those and they tend to have tons of parts that are pretty hard to understand still for a variety of reasons. Beyond game streams, which are easy enough for me, I feel like I’m not finding a ton of Youtube stuff that I’d like to yet and I’ve had little luck in podcasts either. さくら通信 can be fun, but that’s nearly it. Streams are fine but I feel like I’d get better practice from hearing somewhat more in depth conversation type stuff. Just don’t find much that I’m really going to purely cause I’m super interested, it always feels like listening practice first, sadly. Maybe I should get more audiobooks, I dunno. Ehh.
But I’m kinda just thinking about where I am in Japanese learning in general right now. I’ve been at this for just under 4 and a half years, not counting a few months when I stopped one time. In that time I’ve done many hours per day, usually. I couldn’t dream of telling you how many hours of this I have but given the very roughly ~1500 days I’d be shocked if it’s under 5000 (3 hours per day) and that’s honestly a super conservative guess; I think it’s a lot higher. In amount of things done it’s like 20 VNs (some of which are enormous and most being at least large), another 25 or so games (not ALL huge and text dense but more are than aren’t), over 20 novels, etc.
And for all that time… I dunno, I’ve certainly made progress but I can’t help generally wanting it to be more. I can pick up a lot of things and read them ok, still doing some lookups as I forget things or see new words forever. The bigger problem is being very slow. In absolute optimal conditions with something I knew so well (I had like 200 hours already of reading Hundred Line and was texthooking) I maybe got 13k characters per hour. I already don’t LOVE that number but that’s optimal upper limit stuff. Umineko I might be lucky to get 10k. I think I’m improving but it’s VERY slow and it’s both a drag on how much it limits me doing more things, and how if I’m met with a sorta comfortable-for-natives auto advancing text, I’m often still just screwed. Reading more should help but I dunno, do I need to spend time specifically training for reading faster?
I’ve always been weaker with listening so like I said, sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s like I don’t know the language one bit. Depends on the material I guess, but I think my line for where it stops being great is not all that high, sadly. That’s just the need to grind it more, probably.
There’s also output, which I… just can’t do. I made gestures at it before but writing is still an arduous slow task and speaking is out of the question with how slowly I think of anything. I need to get back to practicing it but at this moment it’s kind of uncomfortable and unpleasant so it’s hard to grind through that. I can’t help also thinking about pitch accent. I forcefully shut that out of my mind for the most part because I still straight up can’t really hear it. Do I grind the minimal pairs test and somehow start distinguishing it? I was just describing to someone how being able to hear isn’t an active thing you do in the same way as like a talent with your hands or body so the best way I can describe being told to distinguish pitch accent is as if I showed you two ultraviolet images and asked you to distinguish them.
I think there’s some aspect there though where, I get that it’s inevitable to have some accent, but it’s also demotivating to try to learn to speak while knowingly, like, never learning to say a single word correctly? Feels more analogous to learning English while refusing to pay attention to the correct emphasis on any word or something. In theory, hypothetically, I could become one of the best Japanese readers out there with super high effort, but with speaking, at least if I continue as I am now, I guess my cap will be never learning to say 私 correctly, which seems a little bad. But I dunno how you start hearing something, just grind the minimal pairs test and see if before I go insane my ears do something themselves? And if I do start hearing pitch, do I now have a new piece of information I have to memorize for every single word I’ve ever learned? Fuck that! I felt genuinely a little scammed when I learned pitch accent existed in Japanese after being lured in with the promise that it was not tonal – and I know tonal has a specific meaning that doesn’t apply here but I was not given the “but…” following that! I’d probably still be here I guess but I genuinely would’ve thought harder about it cause, as we can see, I can’t do that.
I guess right now, sure I’ve made a lot of progress and I’m somewhere, but I’m in the midst of thinking about which deficiency annoys me the most and how I want to handle it. I dunno, while I think it’s obvious that you get best at something by practicing that thing (to learn to read you read, etc) maybe I’m hitting a bit of some kind of wall from the unbalanced nature of things here. Like, if understanding is largely about anticipating, for example, yeah I’m getting better at recognizing and anticipating structures and word pairs and whatnot from encountering them repeatedly, but not a fraction of how well I’d anticipate them if I could conjure them to my own mind nearly instantly the way you do when speaking, yeah?
Is that enough reason to focus on output? I want to be able to do output, sure, but not as much as I want to understand very well, and I don’t know if there’s any getting around how much I dislike the early phase of straining hard to get anything out. In the hypothetical future when I can just chat easier I’ll probably enjoy it, but right now? Probably not. That’s what keeps me just reading. Do I do what I like most and keep postponing that forever? When I already have issues with how long it takes me to read something, cutting into my reading time is unappealing, y’know? Not sure what I want to do because I have various ideas but it’s all about how I’m gonna allocate this time, and I’m decently dissatisfied with, well, pretty much everything.
It sounds very negative all put like that I guess but I’m just trying to be direct and get the thoughts out there. I mean, I’ve made progress and I can pick more things up and just read them or whatever than before so it’s not like it’s dire. I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong, but I do feel slower and further back in ability than I want to be and maybe “should” be for the amount of time spent. Basically all the thoughts are just coming now as I think, when I get a little past all the shit I’ve been going through recently, what do I want to change / focus on / etc? I’ve gone months now just coasting on the promise that if I just kinda kept doing stuff things would get better, and I’m sure they have somewhat, but it’s probably time to do some evaluation because I’ve intentionally just kept reflecting on it at arm’s length for a bit.
I don’t think there’s anything to do about the speed of learning thing. Maybe I’m wrong and this is a fine rate. Maybe my brain is less plastic from not being as young or having covid or stress or whatever. Maybe I’m just dumb! I don’t think my methods are wrong really so i don’t think i can speed up. It’s just all the more reason, if I’m slower than I wish I could be, that I figure out my priorities for the future.
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We’ve been learning Japanese for a similar amount of time and I want to say that recently I was struck by a comment on a post I made on LangCorrect. I’ve been posting on that site daily for a little bit to try and get my writing output into a better spot, and I mentioned in a post that I’d be learning for 4 years. And one person responded that I wrote very well for someone who’s only been learning for 4 years. At first I thought “*only? *” but on reflection I realised it’s true. 4 years really isn’t that much in the grand scheme of learning a language. It’s a lifelong pursuit - there’s still tons of words I don’t know in English. I was really struck by that after I started reading Titus Groan; I like to think my vocabulary is pretty good since I read a lot, but with that book there’s tons of words I had never of before now. Does this mean I’m no good at English? Not by any means, but it does mean that there’s always more for me to learn about my language. Being able to do what you’re able to 4 years in is, frankly, really impressive. The amount of people who crash and burn before this point is staggering, and even then among the people who make it to 4 years there’s not that many who can read full complex games etc
In terms of output, it’s hard to start for sure. You’ll probably notice that you mimic things you’ve seen or heard, and this is a natural part of the learning process. For accent, there is the option of shadowing where you make the mimicking explicit and focus on trying to reproduce audio that you’ve just heard to train your muscle memory etc. I’d definitely recommend biting the bullet and practicing your output in any case - maybe starting with writing is best since you get all the time you need to formulate your ideas etc
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So one piece of good news there is they are patterns like “most 3 syllable い-adjectives are pitch pattern X” that I learned about from the Dogen guide (though haven’t learned off yet as I’m still focusing on the phonetics part).
I’ve recently come back to the minimal pair test and when I first got to it, for a long time I was stuck in the 50/55% range (basically barely better than random guessing). This time I’m also using it as a source of shadowing material and that seems to have helped it be more effective than last time. I now get pretty reliably above 70%. I won’t say it’s not a slow slog though, because it is. But it sounds like you’re pretty similar to me with >1000 hours of input practice and <50 hours in speaking practice so it’s kind of natural to feel frustrated by the discrepancy in ability I think.
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I definitely think you’re right about the 4 years thing, but I mean ultimately it’s all about the amount of real time spent and that’s why years are a poor measure, yeah? I have no doubt I’m very far along for the average person in 4 years but I’ve also read more than most JP learners probably do in 10, or than a lot ever will tbh. I try to keep my focus on what I’ve actually done and judge around that since that’s what really matters.
Titus Groan is a great book by the way! I meant to read the sequels but never got around to it…
Thanks for the advice. I was previously shadowing for a little while and didn’t necessarily feel like I was seeing anything come from that but I probably didn’t do it long enough, it’s something I’d definitely consider going back to if/when I restart output practice. Focusing early on writing as well, yeah, I think I basically agree with everything you said in that section.
That’s really good news, thanks. I should probably watch the full Dogen guide eventually, just being stuck before step one pretty quickly frustrated me out of thinking about pitch accent so it’s been buried in the corner of my mind forever.
Glad to hear you’re actually seeing improvement over practicing the minimal pair test, too. I’ll be thinking a lot about if I want to / have the mental fortitude to grind through that sometime soon.
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Well, I have some good news. I played around with the minimal pairs test, and, after a few practice rounds:
This is better than I ever used to do, so maybe there is something to figuring it out longer term with lots of JP listening? I think it helps that you can hear the comparison audio when you get it wrong, a long time ago when I tried it for real it didn’t have that. I knew they added but by then this test was a source of frustration for me so I never really tried it again, heh. Results could still be better but I’m at least getting the idea, broadly. Should probably do it more in the near future? But potentially taking pitch accent more seriously adds another thing to have to consider when picking what it’s time to work on.
Right now apartment maintenance is being useless as water pours into our place so it’s musing on the future time; I can’t get started in any study changes just yet until this garbage is over with.
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Well speaking of reading speed troubling me –
The Silver Case is a very odd game/VN, and I just reached a part where this guy you are working with suddenly springs a 100 question quiz on you. He’s uhh… measuring my worth somehow, but at the end they’re like “haha you thought your answers mattered? You passed, don’t be distracted by quizzes, get out of here.” I like Suda51 and his weird ideas a lot.
10 seconds max per each question. I was rarely even successful at getting through reading them. To be fair it’s harder on my side because the PS1 version has some less clear font, cause looking at it on this video I’m hanging in better, and I’m sleep deprived today, but still. That was torture. I wasn’t gonna know most of them regardless because it’s Japan trivia and stuff (some questions related to the game mixed in), but… would be nice to be able to read what the question and answers are in time.
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