Daisoujou's Study Log - Year End Party and Cat Picture

Japanese Language Study Logs (Public)
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I thought it was okay (and yes, nicely shot!) just… not up to all the hype around it :man_shrugging:

Ah I did like this one, despite the weirdness :grin:
Didn’t realize it was an adaptation! Whelp, another one to add to the evergrowing reading wishlist, for… some time far far in the future :slight_smile:

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End of the year party

Alright I’m a little early, but I want to reflect a bit. A year ago I threw together some vague 2025 goals, let’s check in. What are your goals for Japanese in 2025? - #5 by Daisoujou

  1. “Any level of comfort speaking.” - You know… lol. So ok I haven’t quite focused on this. I made an early effort in the year at some daily writing and shadowing but fell off pretty quickly because it was just such a drag and as soon as I got stressed by life it was the thing to immediately go. So I’m still looking to break into this. We’ll try again next year. I have a better base to draw on, just no comfort at all using anything myself.
  2. “Start reading Muramasa” - Ok also no, but a less dreary no. Unexpected projects in Japanese ate all my time, but the point (besides just wanting to read Muramasa, which I still want to do!) was that this is a notoriously “hard” visual novel. And, probably tomorrow, I’ll be finishing the novel 人間失格. I feel like I need to add on to what I said before and confess that over time it had spikes somewhat tougher. I at least think the flippant way I talked about it proved to be a little premature, but it HAS been totally doable. Just, it does take real mental effort. But that’s ok, this is like real Serious Literature. I’m hanging in and following it without getting overwhelmed and that’s great. This goal was ultimately representative of wanting to read something difficult to see that I could, and I think I’ve done that successfully.
  3. “N1 practice test” - Hell yeah, that was like right at the end of January, very early in the year, relatively comfortable hypothetical passing score. I have no practical use for the N1 but still think it would be fun to say I have it so I MIGHT try next year, we’ll see. It’s inconvenient for me to drive to. I want to make sure I wait until I’m confident that I can not only pass N1 but that I can pass it on a particularly bad day, given likely travel fatigue, maybe less sleep, bad test room conditions, etc. But I benchmarked at good enough at a time almost a year ago already and I’ve got another year to keep improving.
  4. "My nebulous goals are just to get faster and obv more comfortable reading. " - Yeah, this is always the hard one to feel and measure, I’m not a big stats person and I’ve moved further and further away from that. But it’s getting better for sure. I’ve spent the year mostly freeing myself of all texthooker dependencies and the like. If I can read 人間失格 as a physical novel, I can play most videogames and VNs just fine with my manual lookups. I’m still a lot slower than I’d like to be, but in the last readathon under very optimal conditions I was just under 14k characters per hour across 7 and a half hours of reading, which shows a pretty decent speed and stamina.
  5. I had listening here, kind of - I haven’t as directly practiced this but I do think I’ve seen breakthroughs in just knowing words better, thus making it easier to follow more of the podcasts, audiobooks, and streams I have picked up here and there. It’s better but hard to quantify much. I referenced my struggles with films in that thread and that’s something I haven’t tried in quite a while, testing how well I can watch random live action movies at this stage. I should try that sometime soon and get back to you.

Looks like I’ve read 9 novels over the year, very soon to be 10 with 人間失格. Kinda low ehh? Perhaps you’ll be more impressed by about 22 videogames/VNs, mostly pretty longform ones. This includes The Hundred Line, which takes multiple hundreds of hours at native speed and is probably the longest VN script to ever exist now.

If it helps, I obviously can’t speak as to how I’d be doing right now if I stuck with Anki, but outside the proper noun deck I dropped anki early in the year and ran without it the whole time, and I can’t say I’m too displeased with how it feels like my abilities have changed.

It’s been a nice Japanese year on my end, mostly a bunch of games and VNs, just chasing what I’m in the mood for. The world’s biggest most excessive piece of Japanese appearing unexpectedly and eating up months of my life made the total amounts lower and made me not get to so many things I planned/expected to, but I’ve had fun. As I keep getting better and hopefully no one releases The 200 Line (and he doesn’t make DLC for 100 Line immediately like he keeps threatening to :sweat_smile:), we should see even nicer numbers next year. Hopefully with movies, speaking practice, whatever.

I’m in the midst of too many long running clubs but I have also briefly talked to a couple original VN club members about getting back together to read something sometime next year. Unscheduled clubs are nice in their own way but I miss the energy that weekly VN threads better maintain, so we’re doing it. I wanna sort it out with them exactly what they want to read and what’s gonna work best so that we can relive the fun of the old days, but of course it’ll be nice to have others if anyone feels like joining along when details get fleshed out and we know what we’re reading. お楽しみに！

I want to add a little visual flair, and have no better ideas, so let’s all enjoy a picture of my cat, Jeane.

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HUGE YEAR!! Complemented by the most beautiful cat in the world (don’t tell my cats I said that)

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So fluffy! So cute! Congrats on all of the reading and games, too :rofl: In all seriousness, there’s something to be said for vibing your way through content that you’re in the mood for instead of forcing yourself to stick with goals or standards that aren’t working for you. Hats off for having fun!

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Thank you! I think after I looked back at posts I made in this thread around the end of last year I realized it was a bigger year than it felt. Very useful to have something to look back on. And she appreciated hearing that – I knew it was true of her :shushing_face:

Thanks, yeah definitely! It’s been pleasant. It’s so freeing to not really think about how hard things are, what I can handle, how much I need to prepare for whatever I want to do anymore. There’s a lot of tightening up my abilities to do but it’s a very pleasant place to be.

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