Thank you @trunklayer , kind words from a wise 
. May we all enjoy studying this most demanding of languages for years to come!
Week 74.
Reading
- ドラゴンボール. 其之 四十一. 悟空にまた尻尾が生えた！
- Satori: caught up with latest episode of The Bartender. Started 狐の嫁入り, reached chapter 4.
Grammar
- Human Japanese Intermediate: breezed through the chapter on kanji
, refreshed my memory of how those pesky gōdan verbs conjugate, and started Chapter 5.
Anki decks
- KD kanji : Created some of my own mnemonics to ease learning of new kanji. Leech count now at 52, resurrected 4 cards from the suspended list for common kanji.
- JLab: hit a series of cards with foul language. The notes warn you to not use those expressions, I’m happy that Anki lets me skip them easily.
Week 75.
Reading
- Satori: caught up with The Bartender, where a shady character appears. Now I’m curious to see what happens next
. 狐の嫁入り, reached chapter 12.
Listening
- Slowly catching up on Speak Japanese Naturally. Seemed like half the sentences in those episodes ended with 桜がとても綺麗ですね
Here we’ve moved on to lily of the valley, traditionally offered as a gift on May 1st. My plant decided to bloom early this year, may this be a sign of good luck.
Grammar
- Human Japanese Intermediate: well, that chapter was a looong 40+ pages. I like my grammar sessions short and sweet. Nibbled at it one little chunk at a time and eventually got to the end of it
Anki decks
- KD kanji : average retention of ‘mature’ cards is on target at 85%; for ‘young’ cards it dropped to 70%. Yikes. So far the FSRS algorithm is still adding new cards at about 4 per day, keeping the cap on daily reviews at 50.
- JLab: I’m about 3/4 through the deck, looking forward to the last quarter.
Week 76. Action packed week in remote places, squeezed Japanese studies on flights.
Reading
- Satori: The app lets me preload episodes, very handy when travelling
. Completed this week’s new episode of the Bartender. I sense some supernatural event creeping up 
. Seems like a leitmotiv across many stories I’ve been reading so far on Satori. 狐の嫁入り, reached chapter 17. Not much happening, but was quite surprised at how rarely I needed to check the translation.
Anki decks
- KD kanji: every so often one of my old WaniKani leeches pops up with a mnemonic that finally makes the meaning stick. This week it’s 柄. The made-up meaning of the right radical is silly but somehow it works!? A quick check on Kakimashou indicates that it exists as a standalone N1 kanji, and… wow, no way I could ever have guessed its meaning
- JLab: going through examples of passive verb forms as polite expressions. I think I’ll be sticking toです and ます for a little while yet
Week 77. Err… where did those days go?!
Reading
- Satori: barely managed to read a few minutes most days, reached Episode 21 of 狐の嫁入り and caught up with The Bartender.
- Got distracted by some great postings on the Japan Travel section of this forum
Grammar
- Human Japanese Intermediate : completed chapter 6 incl extra credits. Excellent recap on the usage of the particle へ, especially in combination with the possessive の.
Anki decks
- KD Kanji - Generally poor reviews, retention is sinking below 80% on most days. Need to find ways to do my reviews in the very early morning, rather than at the end of the day when my brain is fried. FSRS is adapting by adding fewer new cards. Leeches count: 66
, 24 suspended. - JLab: ended up using the reviews as reading practice, rather than listening, which I much prefer to do on Satori. For sorme reason the anime snippets in my recent set of reviews seem to be dominated by obnoxious or aggressive characters. Longing for a bit more となりのトトロ。
Week 78. Crammed reading sessions at the beginning of last week so I had some progress to report besides anki reviews.
This wiki is getting harder to use on my ipad. Lots of weird display bugs. Anybody seen that?
Reading
- Picked up ドラゴンボール again, episode 41. This manga is full of surprises. 孫悟空 doing a synchronised dance with “Jackie Chan” came out of nowhere
- Satori: reached Episode 30 of 狐の嫁入り. I thought the story would take a darker turn, but nothing so far. Makes me wonder if the supernatural is truly that inbedded in the culture that nobody bats an eye when ‘gods doing stuff’ is a perfectly acceptable explanation for unusual events
Same for the last episode of The Bartender
Listening practice
- Last episode from Speak Japanese Naturally, turning off the English captions.
Anki decks
- KD Kanji: the struggle with learning new cards continues. Started customizing mnemonics and searching for example sentences to help with retention.
- JLab : was relieved to see new cards with short sentences after a series of long ones that took a while to parse,
Week 79.
Reading
- Satori: reached episode 35 of 狐の嫁入り, and caught up with The Bartender.
Grammar
- Human Japanese Intermediate: completed chapters 7 and 8. I keep forgetting how much I enjoy this resource (comes free with Satori). This time the exercises reminded me that I am clueless about masculine versus feminine Japanese, specifically who drops the final だ and adds よ or ね in informal forms
Listening practice
- The current episode of Speak Japanese Naturally included a short section that challenged viewers to test their katakana reading skills. I need more practice
Anki decks
- still ploughing away. I like the KD mnemonics for kanjis that include the wrap radical, the one for “cell” 胞 is my favourite : “A cell is nothing but organs wrapped around a nucleus”
Week 80.
Reading
- Satori: reached episode 43 of 狐の嫁入り and caught up with The Bartender. That story is getting a bit sordid, not sure I want to know what happens next
?! Spent more time listening to each episode, first the full episode, then one sentence at a time. The voice acting is superb. - Manga snippets posted daily by @trunklayer : this week there was one post where I knew every kanji, yet was struggling to understand actual sentences, because I couldn’t make sense of the compound words. I should spend more time on remembering 熟語 rather than single kanji
Grammar
- Human Japanese Intermediate: slowly filling the gaps in my knowledge of basic Japanese grammar. Current topic: the two ways to say “brush your teeth” as in “polishing your teeth” or “doing the tooth-polishing”. Hopefully this will help me lift the fog over verb nominalisation .
Anki decks
- KD kanji: doing my best to ignore sinking recall stats and focus on remembering the jukugo examples.
- JLab: resumed testing my listening skills. Oftentimes that means repeating the same clip a dozen times before it starts making sense, but then I get a huge sense of achievement when it comes up during reviews and I can nail the meaning instantly
Week 81. Navigating through the usual end of term storm, squeezing Japanese where possible.
Reading
- Reached episode 47 of 狐の嫁入り. Nice twist in the story, curious to see how it will develop.
Grammar
- Completed another chapter, fairly easy. Decided to light it up by practicing writing the kanji on my buddha board. Very soothing and oddly satisfying when it comes out looking not too shabby
Anki decks
- KD kanji: the FSRS algorithm is adapting to my shaky memory by lowering the total number of items per review session and by spacing the occurrence of new cards . Early indicators are good, let’s see if average recall inches back to the 85% target.
Week 82.
Reading
- Reached episode 56 of 狐の嫁入り. Just when the story seemed to reach a happy conclusion, there’s a twist in the plot and I smell trouble afoot. Nice.
- My Japanese news app Todaii appears to have gone through some UI overhaul. The new AI features seem to interfere with the in-built dictionary on my tablet unfortunately. They also stopped citing their sources and content imported from NHK is labelled as originating from Todaii
Time to ditch the app and go back to NHK.
Listening
- Latest episode of Speak Japanese Naturally, where we are treated to an omakase dinner in a sushi restaurant.The delicious looking food was so distracting I struggled to pay attention to the dialogue
- Watched an old episode of Moomin from the 90s. Most characters speak relatively slowly, which definitely helps with comprehension.
Grammar
- Enjoyed the most thorough explanation I never knew I needed on “Talking to yourself with な”
Anki decks
- KD kanji recall stubbornly stuck at 75% accuracy, with large variations between reviews. As with WK I struggle to remember words that I never use myself, for example “brandish” or “disregard”. But I’ve also accumulated leeches for kanjis that are used frequently, like 連 as in 連絡.
Week 83.
- Reading
Binge read on Satori and finished The Wedding of the Fox and the Bartender 
Enjoyed both stories and the voice acting.
Reading comprehension is improving. There were a couple of episodes where I had to click on the translation to follow what was going on, but on the whole I was surprised at how much I understood from reading the text.
I played each episode first before looking at the page and let’s just say I need more listening practice
Picked up my ドラゴンボール manga to witnes クリリン getting trounced by “Jackie Chan” 
- Anki decks
Daily KD and JLab reviews. Editing cards and customizing the mnemonics is helping marginally with remembering new kanjis. Looks like my brain is simply saturated. Retention of mature cards is 87% so it’s really the new material that takes longer to stick.
- Grammar
Started the “-て form revisited” chapter on Human Japanese Intermediate. It’s finally starting to click. Brian Rak doesn’t shy from repetition. His explanation may feel long-winded at times, but this is what I need to get grammar to sink in!
Week 84. Why do days only have 24 hours?!
Started 歳月の門 on Satori and reached episode 5. The keigo took me aback at first, but so far I’m enjoying this series.
Doggedly completed my daily reviews on Anki, revived a dozen of leeches to give myself a second chance at squashing them 
Week 95. Half way through the year, time for some stats
Kanji SRS
Anki stats for the Kanji Damage deck still baffle me, but let’s start with the good news: I only missed 2 days of reviews these past 6 months
Large red and orange bars indicate recall failures. No orange means no new cards. Reducing my desired retention paid off and took me out of review-only sessions with no new material. However….
Median difficulty got worse and sent me back to difficulty hell
One way out: decrease the desired retention rate again! My daily retention varies quite a bit, but 80% seems reasonably optimistic:
Anyway, I have no interest in becoming an FSRS expert. As long as I keep challenging my brain, and get a kick from recalling new vocabulary, it’s all good.
I’m spending about 20mn a day on Anki. I prefer to read and to listen, which is way more fun
Week 96.
-
Reading: reached episode 13 of 歳月の門, where the meaning of the title is revealed. This was an intriguing prelude. Found myself skipping the longer grammar explanations because I want to know what happens next
-
Anki decks: no big change since optimizing FSRS, I guess it’s too early to tell.
-
Grammar: Human Japanese Intermediate, started the chapter on… trains! Wasn’t expecting this, but why not?
Week 97. 
- Reading: reached episode 17 of 歳月の門. Was this all a prelude to something akin to 1001 Nights?
- Anki deck: the material is getting more outrageous, Steven Schultz must have anticipated the burn out near the end of his deck and decided to crank up the shock factor to help with retention. Unfortunately, his references go a bit over my head, and I end up rewriting mnemonics and translations to something that makes sense to me. That is probably a good thing?
- Grammar with Human Japanese: inching slowly through the Trains section. Getting confused with the still almost all hiragana spelling, I wish there was an option to switch on the kanji. The author limits kanji to those characters that have been introduced in previous chapters, which makes sense if you only use that resource to learn Japanese.