Daisoujou's Study Log - 🤷

[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!

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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…