Fallynleaf's study log

This is a really good point! I think this comparison is spot on.

And yeah, it’s definitely an interesting cultural difference for sure. In Mexico, it seems more similar to how Japan does it, where publications more or less keep kayfabe (or rather, they don’t break it). There was a neat book by Heather Levi where she published her findings on lucha libre after spending extensive time studying it in Mexico, including training to be a luchadora, and one of the things that really struck me was that even during training, they never outright said that the sport was predetermined or fake. It was something that everyone knew, but they didn’t actually say it out loud.

Honestly, I don’t really understand why a lot of American fans get so upset over wrestlers “exposing the business” by using insider terms and that sort of thing. Kenny and the Bucks, for example, are often accused of doing that, but if you pay any sort of close attention to their work (especially their vlog), they actually do a pretty incredible job at weaving together their characters with the real people, to the point where it becomes impossible to fully separate them. I think instead of killing American kayfabe, in many ways they’ve reinvented it. The fact that they make little insider jokes and remarks tricks people into thinking that their character work is them shooting.

Don Callis, too, is absolutely this type of wrestler. I’m not convinced that a single interview he’s done is 100% shoot. There was this interview with him from November 2020, right after he showed up to do guest commentary for Kenny during his match against Hangman, but before Kenny turned heel. At first blush, it’s a seemingly shoot interview, focusing heavily on their real-life family connection. Callis even mentions Kenny wanting to “put him over” (for non-fans who might be reading this, this is slang for Kenny scripting the outcome of the match so that he loses to Callis).

But if you read it after December 2, 2020 (when Kenny turned heel and won the title thanks to Callis helping him cheat, launching an entire story where Kenny is essentially being manipulated and controlled by Callis, who views himself as “The Invisible Hand” pulling strings behind the scenes and controlling the entire industry), the whole interview suddenly comes across completely differently. There are lots of little touches foreshadowing the story to come (like Callis mentioning that if AEW didn’t exist, Kenny would have come to Impact, because Callis would have made that happen whether or not Kenny ever agreed to it), and just doing a lot of work to build up the history of their relationship, which would become essential background for the story that was about to kick off in a few weeks.

Sorry for the very long-winded example, but all of this is to say that I think kayfabe in America is protected and maintained more than people think, but it takes a different form than it has in the past, and some fans who are stuck in the past have yet to realize this. I think in some ways, this is similar to how it works in Japan, where wrestlers acknowledge some things that we know are factually true about them (like the fact that they have shoot names) and about the business that they work in, and that allows it to feel plausible enough that we don’t always notice the fact that we’re getting worked.

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That 彦 is not in WK; however it is the one in 山彦 (echo; the word is taught as やまびこ in WK).
It is also a component of 諺 (ことわざ).

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That’s really neat to know, thank you! I’ll add that kanji to my Anki deck as well :blush:

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Made it to level 23!

It took a little over twelve days, but I was a little late on getting the last bits of this post together :sweat_smile:

As expected, this was by far my busiest level yet, just in terms of real life stuff. Trying to balance NaNoWriMo on top of family commitments during the Thanksgiving weekend was very difficult, and trying to add Japanese study on top of that was nearly impossible! Thankfully, November is over, which frees up a few hours of time each day. I’m very excited to get back to studying more!

One cool thing is that I befriended another Golden Lovers fan a couple months ago who is fluent in Japanese! I’ve been talking to them about language learning and wrestling (Japanese wrestling was also a major motivation for them to learn the language), and they also started with Minna no Nihongo! It’s super encouraging to meet someone who was able to reach extremely high level proficiency with the language who started out with the same resource that I’m using now.

I’m so grateful for all of the people on this forum and outside of it who have offered me encouragement and advice and answers for my questions. Y’all really help keep me going. It means a lot!

My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 1117 (and 652 in KW)!

Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:

I struggled to remember the reading for (みや) at first, but then I realized it’s in 竜宮(たつみや)’s name in 大海原と大海原, and a friend pointed out that it’s also in the name of Pro Wrestling NOAH’s shining young ace, Kaito Kiyomiya: 清宮 海斗. After that, I had no trouble remembering, haha. Truly wrestler names are the best mnemonics.

My mom bought some Japanese candy, and I noticed that one of the packages said のど飴. This was shortly after I learned 喉飴, and I was very pleased to see the word in the wild!

I also had fun trying to read a few of my brother’s Japanese Magic: The Gathering cards. They apparently released a set recently with alternate art where the Japanese artists were given a lot of artistic freedom, and they’re absolutely gorgeous (there’s some great reading practice on this page if you’re a nerd). I got initially stumped over ライブラリー (I blame wrestling and the word ライバル for sending me down the wrong track), but my brother figured it out right away as soon as I read it out loud, haha! I was impressed by my ability to read and understand a fair amount of the card descriptions.

I could read this cute cat tweet shared by TJPW wrestler Nao Kakuta! I’ve still yet to learn either of those kanji through WK, but I’ve learned both of those words in MNN well enough to apparently recognize them without needing furigana.

I could also read TJPW wrestler Mahiro Kiryu’s tweet here: “飴食べ終わった…” It was funny because twitter tried to show it to me based on a topic it identified (I don’t follow her, but I follow several other people who do follow her), and it showed it to me under “tweets about candy.”

Poor Yumehito Imanari posted a picture of a “無理ゲー”. I feel sorry for him, but also the timing of this tweet was very fortuitous for me, because I had just failed the review for that word, and seeing it here genuinely helped me remember it better.

Syuri and Giulia from Stardom then helped me with 罰ゲーム after this tweet exchange. I had just learned it that day, too, so I was excited to immediately see it on twitter!

Something that I found extraordinarily cute was that during Death Triangle’s match on AEW Dynamite this week, the three of them hit a tag team move together, and they said “せいの” when they were setting up for it. せいの is a word I learned from NJPW because Yoshi-Hashi, Hirooki Goto, and Tomohiro Ishii say it all the time when setting up for their team moves (it basically means “ready, go!”), and the Japanese commentary team and the wrestlers they were feuding with made fun of them for doing that earlier this year.

What’s notable about Death Triangle saying the phrase in AEW is that it’s in America, not Japan, and as far as I’m aware, none of the wrestlers speak Japanese fluently (though they’ve surely picked up bits and pieces). There’s already a pretty strong language barrier in the team, but it’s between English and Spanish, not Japanese. My understanding is that Pac doesn’t speak much Spanish, and Penta El Zero M doesn’t speak much English. Rey Fenix is the only one of the three who speaks both languages. So, they’ve seemingly gone with Japanese because they’re essentially all on the same page with it!

While watching Pro Wrestling NOAH, I realized that I could now read all of the kanji in NOSAWA論外’s name. I’m not the biggest fan of him (as a wrestler or a booker), but apparently 論外(ろんがい) is a word meaning “out of the question” or “outrageous".

Go Shiozaki finally took Katsuhiko Nakajima’s bait and made his triumphant return to NOAH, challenging his former tag partner. As I saw one fan photographer frame it, it’s “「俺がノアだ」 vs 「I am NOAH」”. I enjoyed this tweet that Go posted after he returned to the ring. Ibushi’s “ベビー” typo appears again, haha!

I also can read almost all of the kanji in 日本武道館! Nippon Budokan is one of the most famous wrestling venues in the world. It’s especially symbolically significant for NOAH, though for many years, they were unable to run shows there. It’s the perfect venue for Go vs Katsu reprising their feud over this title, especially now with the identity of the entire company seemingly at stake.

One of my favorite matches happened at 日本武道館: Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi’s second singles match, in 2012. Here’s a fantastic essay about it. This match is infamous for one spot in particular: Ibushi decides to moonsault off of the balcony onto Kenny, and it gets him banned from the venue for six years. His next time wrestling here is in 2018, for NJPW instead of DDT. He faces Kenny again, in their third ever singles match.

In the past fifteen years, only one match besides G1 finals has managed to sell out 日本武道館. It was the same match, twice: Kenny Omega vs Kota Ibushi, once in 2012, and then in 2018. They did it for DDT, and then again for NJPW. This is one of my favorite Golden Lovers facts because it really speaks to the power of that story.

I think 日本武道館 is probably my third favorite wrestling venue. It’s after 後楽園ホール (which is probably my favorite), but I like it better than the 東京ドーム. My second favorite is KBSホール, which is easily the most beautiful wrestling venue in the world. It is unfortunately fairly small, which means that the bigger companies don’t run many shows there, and the shows that do happen tend to be lighter on the drama.

Here’s Miyu Yamashita and Yuki Arai standing in front of the gorgeous stained glass backdrop at KBSホール in a recent TJPW show:

みんなの日本語 Lesson 16 – 17

This is the first time I did not quite manage to finish a MNN lesson before I leveled up, due to being so busy! I guess I technically finished the lesson, but I still have the 復習(ふくしゅう)D left to do, as well as adding the lesson 16 grammar info to my notes (so, probably two more days of work).

I did, however, already start running through the lesson 17 vocab on Anki, so I should be prepared to dive right into actually reading the lesson as soon as I wrap up 16. And with December being a lot less busy, I don’t think I’ll have much trouble keeping up my usual pace from there.

I updated the MNN kanji by WK level spreadsheet with the lesson 17 kanji! (Just a reminder that it’s possible to sort the chart by WK level or MNN lesson number, whichever is most useful to you).

Reading:

I bought volume 2 of 大海原と大海原! I only just started reading it, though, so I am quite behind on the book club! I will catch up as best as I can, but it will be hard. So far, chapter 8 seems to be going pretty easily, so I’m hoping to finish it tomorrow.

New resources:

Tofugu posted a review of the Todai Easy Japanese app, which is similar to NHK Web Easy. The app looks interesting, so I’m making note of it here in case I want to try it in the future. At the moment, though, it seems to be both too difficult for me now, and too easy for where I hope to be in the future :sweat_smile:. I don’t really need easy dictionary lookups, as Yomichan takes care of that for me, and if I want to save words that I find and turn them into flash cards, I have Anki for that. The JLPT stuff is useless to me, and I don’t really like all of the clutter around the words in the sentences (I suppose this is what happens to you if your primary engagement with Japanese text in the wild is through twitter). The subtitled videos feature, though, seems potentially useful, since I don’t really know other tools that do that.

My mom also offered to buy me some Japanese study books for Christmas, so I should be getting the next set of MNN books a little sooner than I’d planned! Sadly, the NJPW English learning book doesn’t ship directly to the US, so I’ll have to buy that one on my own through Tenso the next time I order wrestling merch.

Next steps:

First and foremost, I want to catch up with the book club! I also want to make up a little time with MNN, and hopefully get back to some things that I’ve been neglecting, like practicing writing.

I’m also hoping to get back to sharing fun stuff in the pro wrestling thread! There have been some great free matches and exciting developments over the past month, and I’m eager to finally have the time to post about them!

Onward to level 24! 行くぞ!

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You might appreciate this joke version I saw in a manga then! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

compared to the real facade (the sign’s right to left, conveying an older more traditional style):
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You don’t have long at all to wait for 武 though!
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Might turn out to be relevant for the ringname BUSHI as well (and the company name Bushiroad for that matter)! Who can say, only time and one more level will tell…

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Made it to level 24!

It took thirteen days total, which feels so short considering that it wasn’t exactly the easiest level for me. It did occur to me that since I started WaniKani at the end of December 2020, I’m about on track for two weeks per level, despite my really uneven start. It’s a cool feeling to realize that I’ve managed to stick with this for that long. At this rate, I should finish in a year and a half.

One thing I’ve been struggling with is that I’ve been dealing with slightly more reviews since my accuracy dipped a little bit last month. As it turns out, doing reviews when you are exhausted and distracted is a bad idea! I think I’ve managed to push most of those back along, thankfully.

I’ve also struggled a bit with the various words for theory, righteousness, law, judgment, etc. It’s easier to get them confused for one another, which means missing more reviews, which means more items in the apprentice pile. Bad timing for this to happen when a lot of older items are coming back as well.

To compensate a little bit for this, I’ve reduced my daily lesson count to 12 instead of 13. A very small decrease, but it should add up over time. A more positive note, though, is that I think my Anki kanji deck is working, so I should be able to add more kanji that are causing me trouble to that deck if I need to.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a great past couple weeks for me. I got my free time back, but have been too depressed to really do much with it. However, I have been able to keep up my Japanese study, at least! I was very relieved that even at my most miserable, I could still motivate myself to do reviews and textbook exercises and read manga. It’s a nice distraction, honestly.

December also came with the bitter news that my favorite wrestling translator, Mr. Haku, is going to be leaving CyberFight at the end of the year. This means no more live translation threads for DDT or TJPW, since he was apparently doing those entirely on his own because he personally wanted to. It’s one of those moments where I’m honestly a little staggered by how much free fan labor contributes to pro wrestling. I never would have gotten into those companies’ current products without his work, and it’s really bleak to think about how much I’m losing when I watch them now because my Japanese isn’t there yet.

It makes me really regret the fact that I didn’t start learning Japanese in December 2019 instead, or April 2019, or any point earlier than when I did. If I’d started earlier, I’d be farther along than I am now, and maybe I’d have more of a chance to be able to watch DDT/TJPW and understand without completely relying on translation.

But then again, I have to remind myself that when I started watching wrestling in the first place, I started with the Golden Lovers’ DDT matches that happened before Mr. Haku was even hired, and I was able to watch them without understanding a word, and it was still somehow enough to pull me into this weird and wonderful world. The beauty of wrestling is that you can watch two people in a match together and just know that they love each other without them ever needing to verbally express it. Ultimately, it’s a story told with people’s bodies, and that part of it transcends language.

I think it hurts so much now, though, because I know what I’ve lost. I had a taste of being able to actually follow along with all of the jokes and the quirks in the stories as if I were fluent, and now I don’t have that anymore. What stings the most is losing Hiragana Muscle, honestly. I’ll probably still watch any future shows, but I’ll miss so much of what makes that show so fun and delightful without Mr. Haku translating the plot.

I guess it all comes back to what NOAH wrestler Masa Kitamiya said: プロレスは諸行無常. I think about that quote every single day of my life (someday, I will learn all of the kanji in it). Every day, I think about how transient these stories are, all of these moments in time. But I’d failed to consider the transience of the experience of watching wrestling in itself, the people and fans who make that possible and enjoyable. I expect tag teams I love to break up, my favorite wrestlers to retire, stories of heartbreak and separation and longing. But when my favorite translator leaves, I’m blindsided. I suppose I’d taken it for granted that even if the story turned sad, at least there would still be a story for me to follow.

But, ah, this is a little off topic for a study log, isn’t it? But I don’t think it’s possible for me to separate all of this from my studies, because it informs every aspect of what I do, and why I’m doing this. I guess there’s nothing left to do now except keep going. Eventually I’ll get there.

My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 1246 (and 762 on KW)!

Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:

My brain keeps trying to trick me into believing that if I listen close enough during DDT and TJPW shows, I’ll be able to magically understand everything they’re saying without Mr. Haku’s live translation threads on twitter. I can’t say that I have good or even okay comprehension, but I do feel like I’m catching a few things.

Speaking of things I can’t yet understand without help, though, I read this translation/summary of Kota Ibushi’s latest podcast episode, and I really enjoyed hearing him talk about doing calligraphy. Apparently Ibushi has been writing random characters with a brush pen to help him get back to normal function in his right arm after he dislocated his shoulder. He’s been practicing with a lot of kanji that he normally types on his smartphone that he wouldn’t know how to write in real life.

Murata (a commentator for NJPW) says that having the option to write them on a computer makes you forget even the most basic kanji if you don’t write them for a while (relatable!). He thinks that writing practice is probably good training for your brain as well, which I agree with. It was nice to read this as I’m trying to get back into the habit of regularly practicing writing myself.

One highlight of the past couple weeks for me was this amazing essay about Kota Ibushi’s whole career up until now. It taught me the word 喜怒哀楽(きどあいらく), which the author of the essay describes as “joy, anger, sadness, and enjoyment or fun”, and which encapsulates the spectrum of these emotions that art should strive to create and facilitate. The author uses 喜怒哀楽 to describe the emotional whirlwind of Ibushi’s 2018, starting with the Golden Lovers reunion and ending with the two of them parting ways, once again separated by diverging ambitions.

Apparently Ibushi has used the term 喜怒哀楽 when describing his ideal of wrestling. I feel like that comes across so well in his art. With wrestling in general, really. I think that theme is apparent all throughout this study log.

I saw a picture show up on my twitter feed that perfectly embodies the 喜怒哀楽 of Ibushi’s 2018. It’s Ibushi and Kenny standing together in 後楽園ホール at the very end of the year, at the end of their short-lived second run as a tag team, though no one knew it at the time. There’s an interesting collection of photos in the #顔が見えないプロレス写真 hashtag (what’s a non-clunky way to translate this, “pro wrestling photos where the faces aren’t shown”?), but this one is my favorite.

Shortly after learning it, I saw 位置 in this tweet from Pro Wrestling NOAH wrestler Takashi Sugiura (who is known for his pet dogs to the point where his faction’s shirt has a picture of his dog on it), where it was part of the word 定位置(ていいち). Apparently 定位置 means home position, origin, or usual place. So his caption for this picture says that the dogs are sleeping in their usual position today as well.

I laughed when I saw Yuna Mizumori refer to 後楽園ホール as “Korakuen Hole” in this tweet. She almost had it!

This also made me laugh. Saki Akai did a promo for DDT in English, and she did a pretty good job at sounding fluent! Then Mr. Haku revealed her secret: she wrote the whole thing out phonetically in hiragana. This is the kind of content I’ll really miss seeing from Mr. Haku after he leaves CyberFight.

I saw this gorgeous fanart of NJPW wrestler Douki, and I realized I could read the kanji on it, and that’s how I found out how to spell his name in kanji (normally his name is stylized just as DOUKI, without any kana or kanji). I just learned 鬼 this past level, and I think 道鬼 is an extremely cool name, honestly. It’s very fitting for his overall look.

I also saw 反則 used in a promo from Kenta during the NJPW Best of the Super Jr. and World Tag League finals! Kenta was proposing a no disqualification match, and I appreciated that the video was subtitled. I also understood Katsuyori Shibata’s entire announcement during the show, though he didn’t say much! Basically just: “January 4, I have a match, that’s all”.

From this twitter exchange from Michael Nakazawa, I learned that apparently part of the reason why AEW has so little coverage in Japan is because 週プロ doesn’t have many people who can handle interviews in English, and AEW doesn’t really have anyone who can handle Japanese media interactions (there’s 対応, which I just learned!). Nak was so frustrated (歯がゆい was a new use of 歯 for me) that he ended up pitching shupro himself. I hope his article is well-received and the magazine decides to publish more.

I’d wondered about this, honestly, because AEW has so many relationships with Japanese promotions. Just off the top of my head, they’ve shared or borrowed talent from NJPW, DDT, TJPW, Stardom, SEAdLINNNG, Marvelous, and ChocoPro. But they don’t seem to have much presence in Japanese media, and don’t offer Japanese commentary or really provide much support for Japanese fans. It’s the same problem I have now with access to DDT/TJPW content across a language barrier, except in reverse. Maybe AEW or shupro should hire Mr. Haku, if he wants to do media instead of translation work, haha.

みんなの日本語 Lesson 17 – 18

At the time of leveling, I had not quite managed to complete lesson 17, but as of the time of finishing this post, I did manage to wrap up the last of the exercises! I’m also just about done learning the vocab for lesson 18 and should be able to get started on that as soon as I’ve finished adding the lesson 17 material to my grammar notes.

I was a little slower than I’d hoped because there was another large review in the workbook that covered material from lessons 8-17, and it took me a couple days to get through it. I believe this puts me at about two thirds of the way through MNN 1? These longer reviews are hard because they bring out some of the more uncommon grammar, which I’m generally pretty good at recognizing in my reading, but have a much harder time producing. I got 79/100 points on this review, haha, but I think that’s decent for doing it without referencing the textbook or my notes at all. As long as I’m able to read all of the sentences and understand exactly what they’re saying, I don’t really worry about making mistakes when trying to produce Japanese.

With the lesson itself, none of the grammar especially tripped me up this week, though I did have more trouble with the listening comprehension exercises because the ない-form sentence patterns for “please don’t do”, “must do”, and “need not do” were difficult for me to catch in spoken speech. I’m sure this will get easier with time, though!

My entire strategy with the textbook is to just push forward as long as I can comprehend everything, and only reference my notes if I get something wrong and don’t understand why. This means I make a lot of mistakes because I’ll misremember a verb group or forget a て-form conjugation or forget which particle goes with a particular verb, but I think I learn more from racking my brain and just trying something and getting the answer wrong, haha, then I would if I pulled out the textbook whenever I got into a pinch.

I updated the MNN kanji by WK level spreadsheet with the lesson 18 kanji! (Just a reminder that it’s possible to sort the chart by WK level or MNN lesson number, whichever is most useful to you).

Reading:

I managed to read the first two chapters of volume 2 of 大海原と大海原! The chapters in volume 2 are longer than those in volume 1, so that makes it a little harder to catch up. I’m still a chapter behind the book club, and will likely remain so for quite a while, but I’m trying my best.

Learning the various uses of the て-form has really helped make more complex sentences easier for me to understand, so I’m very grateful for that! I was excited that I was able to understand something in chapter 8 on page 23 that I probably would have struggled with if I hadn’t just learned it in MNN:

(cut for spoilers)

I was able to effortlessly understand that 鮫吉 was asking 黒巻 to what extent that she knew when he asked “どこまで知っている”. Really cool to have moments like that where it all comes together.

In other reading news, I… might have started a massively overambitious project, which is attempting to sort of make up for the lack of translation for DDT and TJPW shows going forward. The companies upload show descriptions and transcriptions of the post-match comments after each show, but of course, all of this information is in Japanese. Reading the comments is, however, pretty vital if you want to truly be able to follow the storylines. Just for my own sake, I wanted to try to read them.

I’m definitely not proficient enough at the language to attempt to do this sort of large scale translation project, because reading is very slow for me, and I frequently make mistakes when translating, but I figured at the very least, I could run this text through DeepL and then clean up the comment translations with Yomichan and ichi.moe.

So I started doing this! I don’t think I’ll make any of these translations public, at least not at this point, because I have no confidence in them, but it has been an interesting learning experience so far. I’ve frequently been diving into monolingual dictionary entries for clarification (though I’ve been machine translating those with the help of Yomichan/DeepL also, haha, so it’s not really a lot of additional reading practice).

When trying to translate the comments (here, warning for very rare pictures of blood in TJPW) after the experimental TJPW Inspiration show on December 12, it was interesting trying to figure out what Nao Kakuta meant by saying that she didn’t want this match to be “その経験の過程” (as far as I can tell, she’s basically saying that she doesn’t want her first hardcore match to just be a stage in the process of gaining experience?), and it was interesting seeing 路線 used here: 東京女子のハードコア路線で, because I understood what she meant by that, but that wasn’t the sense I had of 路線 before.

A friend of mine who is more proficient in Japanese than I am volunteered to tackle the rest of the TJPW comments, so I will probably mostly just be working on DDT, going forward. We’ll see if I’ll be able to keep it up! Depending on how much work it ends up being, I might slow down on reading manga and such after finishing volume 2 of 大海原と大海原, at least until I become a more proficient reader. I want to prioritize the DDT comments since that’s a much more immediate concern.

I think I might try to put posts about the DDT comments in the pro wrestling thread instead of in here to try and keep some of the clutter down in this thread and also perhaps invite more conversation about the content (or answers to translation questions, haha).

New resources:

Tofugu published an article on using こそあど言葉 to refer to things that you can’t physically see. It’s an interesting read that addresses a grammar problem we don’t really have in English.

Next steps:

My main priority right now is maintenance: keeping up with my three SRS (WK, KW, Anki), continuing to progress in MNN, and trying to at least avoid falling further behind in the book club, even if I’m unable to actually catch up. Depending on where I’m at emotionally in the next couple weeks, this might be all I’m able to do, and if it is, then that’s okay.

If I’m able to, I would like to post more matches in the wrestling thread, and also work on translating those DDT comments! I want to properly get back into the habit of practicing writing kanji daily (instead of just occasionally) as well, though that is probably my lowest priority currently.

I already really miss Mr. Haku’s translations, but I’m determined not to let that discourage me. Even after studying for just a year, I’m in a much better position to be able to navigate Japanese content on my own now. The thought of losing his translations last year would have been an unfathomable loss. Now I feel like the stories are still within reach, albeit barely. I’ll just have to work a lot harder if I want to keep them.

Onward to level 25! 行くぞ!

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Yeah it’s a real overload of such similar words. I was the same way briefly, though I am at least now super comfortable with that one level since I chose to play Ace Attorney. The kanji related to court, judgment, and the like are all pretty deeply ingrained for me now if nothing else.

But anyway, enough about me, mostly wanted to pop in and just say yeah, I’ve been through similar periods, and it can be really bad. Hope it relents for you soon enough, but at the least, you’ve got a few random internet strangers who want you to feel better, heh.

That said, much respect for keeping up with the studying. It can be hard to do absolutely anything at times, I’m sure.

That is a real shame about the loss of translations, like you mentioned before. It sucks that you won’t be able to follow the original Japanese on your own as soon as you’d like, but for whatever it’s worth, I’m pretty confident that eventually, you’ll get there. Your project sounds like a great way to keep practicing exactly what it is you care most about getting better at, so I think it’s a great idea.

頑張って

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I’ll sheepishly admit to just skimming much of this thread. The wrestling stuff is just beyond me.

(Forgive me for “fast-forwarding” through the 'rassling bits [to use my Dad’s term]. For what it’s worth, I’m sure some people enjoyed the 小野(おの)洋子(ようこ) “singing” in the [to me] otherwise utterly fantastic Get Back series about The Beatles. I had my thumb on fast-forward though.).

I’m truly impressed with all the reading you’re doing outside of WK already (I struggle to find time to read for pleasure or personal improvement — in any language — these days.

Some things leap out at me, though:

We’re all guilty of doing these sorts of calculations, but “finishing” really isn’t a thing with kanji … or even WK, for that matter (they keep adding items — which make me happy FWIW). And it really doesn’t matter how long it takes to get to level 60 or burn every item or finish every textbook or read every manga on your list. It’s all about the journey and dawdling along the way, not the destination.

Oh, man. This resonates. It’s SO much easier to create mental hooks for concrete physical objects than it is for conceptual things like this.

I literally burst out laughing recently when I first saw the WK meaning for (こう). I barely understood the English words, much less the concept!

I suspect that you’re entering the phase where I find myself now: it becomes much easier to remember readings than it does to remember meanings. And, weirdly, I start answering both meanings and readings correctly on auto-pilot. I’m often shocked at how well I’ve memorized the correct WK-provided meaning for a character out of Pavlovian recall. Sheer repetition (from frequent mistakes) is an awesome thing.

Quite literally, it’s usually best not to think about reviews too much: an incorrect answer is as valuable as a correct one (you’ve informed the system that you don’t know the item yet).

Just an off-hand thought: You mentioned the item inspector script recently. I’ve started using it over the past several months before every one of my review sessions to review Kanji and Radicals (not vocabulary) in the Apprentice 1 and 2 stages (using it to launch the Self-Study Quiz script). Getting “extra” reviews of early stage kanji has proved invaluable to me since I only study on WK once per day (missing the short-interval reviews).

IMHO, this is NOT cheating. The whole point is to review what you find difficult more frequently. At some point, the newly introduced characters are by far the most difficult, so it makes sense to review those items more frequently. The SRS will handle the other, later-stage stuff, but in the early days (or for things that have fallen back to the early stages) it just makes sense to get in as many reviews as possible.

I hope all is well with you and yours. I don’t know Mr. Haku, and I don’t know if he’s passed or simply withdrawn but I do understand loss. The D word is a heavy word.

From what I can see from your study log, you’ve got much to celebrate. I’m flatly amazed (and somewhat envious) at how much you’ve been able to accomplish in such a short time!

I second the thought: 頑張(がんば)れ!

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Starting yesterday is better than starting today, starting today is better than starting tomorrow, and starting tomorrow is better than never starting. Try not to get too hung up on what-ifs, that you started at all is great

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Thank you all for the support! It really does mean a lot.

Don’t worry, it’s totally fine! It’s mostly for my own benefit :blush:. If anyone else gets anything out of those parts, I consider it a bonus.

Honestly, the only reason I get so much done is because I don’t really read for the purpose of study outside of my textbook, haha! I’m just at a point where my special interest (wrestling) is so intricately tied to the Japanese language, I can happily spend hours each day completely immersing myself in it. The vast majority of the “reading” that I do is extensive reading/passive immersion and not a lot of active study, which makes it less of a mental strain, since I just notice what I can and let the rest go. But a consequence of that is that it doesn’t benefit me as much as more active study would, so I progress slower.

Yeah, I’m pretty aware that level 60 in WK is way closer to the start of the journey than the end. The main reason I want to get there, though, is so that I’ll be able to spend more time SRSing vocab and kanji from native media instead of doing WK lessons. WK’s method works really well for me, so I’m planning on sticking with it to the end, but I’m also looking forward to my WK reviews eventually tapering off, haha, and being able to put a bunch more cards into my Anki deck each day instead.

Same with my textbook. I see it more as the beginning stage to getting me to a point where I can read native media with less struggle, so that’s what motivates me to keep going. If I complete all 50 lessons of MNN and reach level 60 in WK, all I’ll have accomplished is that I graduated out of the beginner stage. But that in itself is a really exciting prospect, because that means that reading will be substantially easier, and I’ll have more freedom to customize my study according to the stuff I want to learn instead of trying to absorb a more general curriculum of knowledge.

I feel like my study log is all about the journey, haha! At least, that’s how I think of it. That’s part of why I let myself ramble so much about every small victory.

Unfortunately for me, readings are still harder for meanings, haha, though there are a few kanji that I consistently fail to remember the specific meanings that WK wants me to give :sweat_smile:

I did start doing some kanji reviews outside of WK’s SRS, but I started doing them in Anki, not WK. The main reason is because I wanted to force myself to learn how to write the kanji by hand from memory.

Here's a card I created for one of my leeches:

This one tests recollection (the information in red is the only stuff I force myself to remember when it comes up. The rest is just one example word containing the kanji, both readings for it that WK uses, and the radical that jisho gives for it):

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And this one tests recall (it’s very bare bones, but basically it provides me with a prompt word containing the kanji I’m supposed to recall, but replaced with kana instead. I have to then write the kanji from memory. If I fail or struggle, back in the review pile it goes):

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So far, forcing myself to learn how to write the kanji from memory does seem to do the trick, though of course it’s more time-intensive and I can’t do this for every single kanji that I learn. For leeches, though, it’s a great way for me to give them that extra attention they need to stick.

Thankfully, he is alive and well! He is just no longer doing the translation work that he used to do, which is unfortunate for the thousands of fans who relied on him to be able to follow DDT and TJPW’s stories. He used to live translate 2+ hour long shows on twitter, often multiple times a week (whenever the companies had a show that could be streamed live, basically), and would also translate press conferences, backstage comments, occasional tweets from the wrestlers, and even quotes from internet autograph sessions where the wrestlers would autograph portraits for fans.

Some of the translation work he did in an official capacity as part of his job with the company (his first paid translation with DDT was apparently “Loser Anal Explosion Deathmatch”, to give you just a taste of what DDT is like as a company), but the absolute lion’s share of translation work that he did was apparently just because he wanted to. So the live show translations, the backstage interview translations, etc., basically the meat of the stories and the stuff that makes the characters so compelling, none of that will be translated anymore going forward.

It’s kind of funny, but the thing that triggered my depression in the first place actually happened before Mr. Haku announced that he was leaving CyberFight. But that announcement a few days later was quite the bitter pill to swallow on top of what I was already feeling.

But, well, there isn’t really anything that can be done about it, so I’ll just have to try my best to make up for the loss of his translations.

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I’m completely new to WK, but I’ve spent the past day or so reading through this thread—it’s been such a goldmine for learning resources, especially reading practice! I’m not yet at a level that I feel comfortable with reading Japanese, but when I’m ready to take the leap I feel prepared with lots to draw on :blush:

I honestly found myself fascinated with this whole thread. It’s super cool to see how you’re able to use wrestling both as a motivation to learn Japanese and as an active way to immerse yourself in the language.

Wishing you luck in your learning! I will happily follow this thread in the future— I’m looking forward to indirectly learning more about Japanese wrestling lol :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’d always heard that you can eventually get pretty good at “guessing” the reading for many characters, but I never quite believed it. There is even the Keisei Phonetic-Semantic composition script to help you formalize the relationships, but I think sheer repetition is all it takes to start recognizing most of the patterns.

It’s definitely not a 100% thing, but I was very surprised after reaching a certain stage how often I knew the reading but not the meaning. Its a weird kind of intuitive feeling — I can’t always express exactly why I might know the reading, but my intuition is right more often than not. The exceptions to the “rules” are often even easier to remember because they are exceptions.

I’ll lay odds that you’ll eventually get to the same point. Sooner than you think, too.

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Oh wow, thank you so much for this reply! And welcome to WaniKani!! I’m delighted that this study log has been so helpful for you, and that you took the time to read the whole thread! And I’m touched that the wrestling bits are part of its charm haha instead of being a turn-off.

One of the things I set out to do when I started this log was compile all of the resources I was finding along the way with the hopes of it helping other people in addition to helping me keep track of them, so it makes me so happy that this was useful to you!

Definitely feel free to pop in at any time if you have any questions :blush:. And if you ever decide to start a study log of your own, I would be happy to follow it! I think this thread has been a really useful part of my study process, and it has really helped keep me on track. I encourage you to find a space to talk about the things that you love, too, and the things that bring you joy during your studies. That’s the stuff that really keeps you going, I feel.

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Made it to level 25!

Another twelve day level! Also another busy level, due to the holidays. I was remarkably productive, all things considered, though. Today also marks the one year anniversary of when I started using WaniKani!

I have a lifetime account now! I regret not buying it last year when I first started, but I have it now! I figured that if I reach level 60 in a year and a half from now, that’ll mean another six months to burn most of the items, so I’d be paying about as much for the annual subscription regardless. There’s a chance I could fall off of WK or need to slow my pace further, in which case the lifetime subscription would really come in handy, though I feel like that’s unlikely at this point.

In other news, I managed to bring my review accuracy back up! And look at that, my daily review count is back down to around where it was before:

Taking on a big translation project is definitely a bit of a trial by fire when it comes to Japanese language learning, but so far it hasn’t been too discouraging. Quite the opposite, honestly. I just try my best and try to learn what I can, and if I can’t quite figure something out now, it’s okay. In a weird way, I feel like I’m learning stuff that I wouldn’t have learned from Mr. Haku had he still been translating, since I’m very poor at recognizing wrestling moves and such, and I’m learning the names for some things just from reading the show reports. I’ve lost a lot, but I’ve also gained a few things, and hopefully I’ll continue to gain more and more as I get better at this.

I guess the one positive to a project like this is that wrestling is always happening, and even in the English-speaking wrestling world, I’m always missing things. Missing things is just part of how the medium works, since there’s so much happening at all times. You can’t follow every single wrestler on twitter, or watch every single wrestler’s vlog, or read every single interview, or follow every single storyline in every single company, even though they inevitably intersect.

So unlike trying to translate a novel or a manga or something, the most important thing is what’s happening right now, not what happened in a show months or years ago (though the past of course is always informing the present. But in wrestling, we are always in medias res). My translations can be imperfect and improve over time and there isn’t really any pressure to go back and fix the earlier ones later. It’s very freeing, honestly.

My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 1363 (and 871 in KW)!

Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:

While translating the DDT comments, I noticed that I now know all of the kanji in Jun Akiyama’s name, 秋山準! His name actually taught me the first kanji I ever learned, which I picked up purely from immersion before I started actually studying the language: 山. I didn’t know the meaning or the on’yomi reading, but I learned やま thanks to realizing that Jun Akiyama (秋山準) and Miyu Yamashita (山下実優) shared a kanji. I actually just learned the last kanji in Miyu’s name the same level! Jun Akiyama truly makes an excellent mnemonic for 準, though, because he’s a very highly regarded legend who wrestles a fairly traditional, straightforward style (in contrast with DDT’s company style). A standard indeed!

I loved this tweet (warning, it contains some photos from a hardcore match) from referee Kiso after Hyper Misao vs Shunma Katsumata in the 12.17 DDT show. He said that it was as though Misao was fighting not only Katsumata, but also the audience, the past, the future, the darkness in her heart, and something else that we cannot know. He thinks it’s excessively cool that she shed blood and put herself through so much physically just to shake the hearts of the crowd, and he says that the highest priority isn’t the euphoria of the performer, but bringing happiness to the person watching the work.

I also liked this tweet that Misao retweeted from a fan, which references a four-part documentary series that TJPW did which is currently beyond my ability to watch (though it does appear to have Japanese subtitles, so perhaps it’s closer in reach than I thought!). The fan singled out a quote, presumably from that video, and said that they thought Misao vs Shunma conveyed without words that the reason why Misao was fighting was “to save herself, and to save children like the one she once was.”

This tweet from AEW wrestler Hikaru Shida taught me (and her opponent Serena Deeb) a new word: 自業自得(じごうじとく). It means paying for your mistakes, suffering the consequences of your actions, reaping what you sow, etc.

I enjoyed this tweet exchange between NJPW wrestler El Desperado and DDT wrestler Chris Brookes. It’s fun to see them continuing to flirt on twitter, and I appreciate that the Japanese is fairly easy to read haha because Chris is still a beginner at the language.

My favorite match from the past couple weeks was Chris Brookes, Maki Itoh, and Minoru Suzuki vs Saki Akai, Kazusada Higuchi, and Yukio Sakaguchi in the 12.26 DDT show. I talked more about the lead-up to this one and linked an absolutely delightful video (with English subtitles!) in the pro wrestling thread. I loved the part at the end of the video where Chris bought some merch from Suzuki’s store and then asked for the receipt, and Itoh was surprised that he knew the word for receipt, haha! Thanks to WaniKani, I knew that one, too :blush:

In the match that followed, my favorite part was a spot where Itoh tried to climb up on the turnbuckle to do a signature move of hers where she asks the crowd who’s the cutest in the world (before covid restrictions prevented yelling, the crowd was supposed to shout “Itoh-chan!”), then she attacks her opponent. However, in this match, Suzuki didn’t understand what she was trying to do, and he kept attacking Sakaguchi with single-minded focus before Itoh could say her line. Itoh got really frustrated with his interruptions, but then Suzuki climbed up onto the turnbuckle the exact same way that she would, and Itoh and Chris excitedly yelled out Itoh’s line with Suzuki’s name instead. There’s a fantastic fan photo of the moment here.

The caption on that photo says 世界一かわいいのは? (which is Itoh’s signature line), but when I went back to listen to the clip again, I think she might’ve said かっこいい instead of かわいい for Suzuki. Either way, it was wonderful, haha!

Itoh posted a nice tweet about the match afterward, which doesn’t really say anything especially significant, but I just appreciated that I was able to read most of it from my twitter feed on my phone without having to look anything up.

みんなの日本語 Lesson 18 – 19

At long last, MNN introduces the dictionary form of verbs! Obviously this part of lesson 18 was not new information for me. The textbook is still hesitant to introduce informal speech, but at least we’re getting more mid-sentence verbs, which is handy.

My progress on the textbook was a little slower this past week due to the holidays, but I did manage to complete lesson 18! This was the easiest lesson in a while. I was very grateful for this, because I needed a bit of a break.

I was going through my Anki cards for the lesson 19 vocab during NJPW’s December 24 Korakuen Hall show, and literally right after I added audio to 乾杯(かんぱい), the KOPW 2021 End of Year Party Match started (in Japanese, 忘年会マッチ ウイスキーコース. There’s a WK word in there! These were the rules, and here’s a clip of the stipulation in action), and 乾杯 was said many times, haha. This was one I already knew, but it was a fun coincidence. That match was the most DDT match I have ever seen in NJPW, since DDT regularly does matches with a drinking stipulation, and NJPW does wild stipulation matches almost never.

葛󠄀飾北斎(かつしかほくさい) was one of the vocab words for lesson 19 (it’s the name of a famous Edo-period woodblock artist and painter). His name had a pre-existing card in the Anki deck I downloaded, but interestingly, it was labeled (FIX) by the person who put the deck together, and the furigana on the card didn’t match the furigana in the book. I looked up the word 葛飾北斉, the name on the card, and Yomichan actually brought up an entry: “Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) (incorrect kanji)”. I looked again, and sure enough, the last kanji on the card was wrong, and the correct spelling was the one listed in the book. I wonder why the incorrect kanji spelling has its own dictionary entry, and why the person who made my Anki deck noted that the card needed fixing without actually fixing it. It just seems bizarre!

Also, Hokusai’s name has a familiar non-WK kanji! Here’s 葛 again! I noticed that MNN used the abbreviated version, 葛󠄀, instead of 葛.

If you don’t recognize his name, Hokusai is the artist who printed 神奈川沖浪裏(かながわおきなみうら), The Great Wave off Kanagawa, and 凱風(がいふう)快晴(かいせい), Fine Wind, Clear Morning, as well as many other beautiful prints. Apparently he was also known by at least thirty names during his lifetime, and his name changes were so frequent, they’re often related to changes in his artistic style, and are used for breaking his life up into different periods (does this explain the “incorrect kanji” version of his name? I searched for it on his Japanese wikipedia page, wondering if there would be any clarifying information there, but it didn’t come up).

I updated the MNN kanji by WK level spreadsheet with the lesson 19 kanji! (Just a reminder that it’s possible to sort the chart by WK level or MNN lesson number, whichever is most useful to you).

Reading:

I remain not caught up on 大海原と大海原, though I finished chapter 10, and am just a few pages away from finishing 11! If all goes well, I’ll make up a little bit of time over the next week, since the schedule gives an extra week to finish it because of the holidays.

I started translating post-match comments for DDT shows! I also started adding new vocab words to Anki that I’m learning from this translation project, with the qualifier that I’m currently only adding words that contain kanji that I already know (ignoring the kana-only words for now), and which I’m not going to eventually learn in WK. This should keep things from getting too excessive, and should hopefully help me build more of a wrestling-specific vocabulary over time.

Part of the reason why I’m bothering to SRS these is because Yomichan is almost too convenient. I’ve found that it allows me to read more easily, but at the cost of allowing me to get away without properly learning how to read a lot of words, since I have a tendency to learn to recognize words by sight without internalizing their reading. But if I put them in Anki, it tests me on the reading and constantly reinforces it through audio, which helps my auditory comprehension, which is actually more important than reading comprehension with wrestling!

My biggest fear with trying to translate DDT is that I’m inevitably going to miss out on a lot of the jokes. But, well, that can’t really be helped, so I’ll just have to try my best.

The links below go to more in-depth posts in the pro wrestling thread about some of the things that were funny, interesting, or confusing to me during my reading (including some free match links, if you’re interested/curious)!

TJPW 2021.12.10 Inspiration (see previous study log post) — words added: 路線

DDT 2021.12.12 Never Mind 2021 Tour in Shinjuku — words added: 直伝 秒殺 本部(席)

DDT 2021.12.17 Dramatic Explosion 2021 — words added: 先発 合戦 相打ち 入り乱れる 強引 軍団 電流 禁断 浴びせる 乗り切る 組む 不在 一戦 視界 連係(技) 持ち前 指折り 敗戦 手加減 一方 場外 本番 借りを返す 和解 実現 設置 持参 開戦 無数 画びょう 転じる 連発 感動

I also finally added 流血, despite first encountering this word ages ago. If I’m going to start a wrestling vocab deck, I might as well fully commit :sweat_smile:! All of the flash cards contain the context sentence I encountered the word in as well as the definition(s).

I added 38 cards in total this week. Some of them are already paying off, haha! 場外(じょうがい) especially is a very common word in wrestling when the wrestlers go outside of the ring. Just goes to show that frequency indicators aren’t really helpful for my purposes.

New resources:

I found out that jisho has a page that explains how to best utilize the search function, including a list of all of the tags it uses. This is a really helpful resource for getting the best use out of this dictionary!

I got the next set of MNN books (though it’ll probably be three months before I actually start them)! I also now own A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar. Just briefly flipping through it, it seems just as useful as the beginner volume, honestly maybe even more useful, since there’s a lot more grammar in the second volume that has already tripped me up while trying to read manga. I appreciate that the intermediate volume has furigana instead of romaji.

I’ll probably end up picking up the advanced volume at some point, but I think the beginner and intermediate volumes are fine for where I’m at now. I’m tentatively considering reading through the entire beginner dictionary after I finish MNN, partially as review, and partially as a way to sort of synthesize my knowledge. I’ll definitely be due for a rewatch of the Japanese Ammo with Misa absolute beginners playlist, too. I think it’ll help fill in some of the gaps, especially regarding casual usage.

I’m trying not to think too hard about my study plan for the intermediate stage, since it’ll be solidly over a year before I get there, haha. But I’m currently looking at moving to Tobira after MNN 初級1 and 初級2. MNN has an intermediate series, 中級, which supposedly brings you roughly to N2, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a slightly different style than the beginner series, and it’s harder to use it for self-learning, so Tobira seems like a better option.

I’m hoping that by the end of the intermediate stage, I’ll be able to be done with textbooks and also transition fully to a monolingual dictionary. Maybe that’s too ambitious, or maybe I’ll reach that point sooner than I think, but for now, I’m going to just work on slowly building up a solid base of vocab, kanji, and grammar, and see where that gets me.

Next steps:

This is the last study log entry I’m going to be making in 2021! I don’t really have a set list of goals for the next year, though I did end up making a post in the thread for goals for Japanese in 2022, which includes a little reflection on how much I managed to accomplish in 2021 (substantially more than I ever dared hope!).

My main concern, as always, is taking it day by day and week by week and focusing more on what I can do in the here and now rather than setting my sights on accomplishing some lofty goal. If I keep doing what I’ve been doing, I’ll continue to progress.

I do hope that 2022 is a better year for all of us, though.

Onward to level 26! 行くぞ!

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Funnily enough - when I was progressing through Wanikani I used the Notes section as a place to write down a nonsensical personal mnemonic as I learned the kanji, pretty much entirely just as an excuse to type the sound as wanikani expected it and link some muscle memory in, and wouldn’t you know it:


I don’t think I knew literally anything about Jun Akiyama at the time except his name and that he ran AJPW or something. He wouldn’t be the only wrestler I unwittingly used as a mnemonic for a kanji in his actual name :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Congratulations on the lifetime membership and I’m glad the translation project is already showing its positives! The biggest leap I made in understanding was when circumstances caused something I was passionate about to draw me far forward out of my comfort zone (I wanted to play Yakuza 7 really bad before the English release date was announced), and I get the impression you’re capable enough (and DEFINITELY passionate enough) for the task, so good luck and I think you’ll get a lot out of it! (even if what brought it about is a bummer)

I would help more with bits you mention having trouble with but honestly I haven’t seen the need yet since your impression generally sounds good to me. :slight_smile:

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Ahaha, that mnemonic is incredible! What a fun coincidence! I feel like DDT-era Jun Akiyama would appreciate this, since he’s shown himself to have quite the sense of humor over the past couple years, despite his reputation as being a very “stern” wrestler! I don’t know much about the classic AJPW guys, but as far as bald old ex-AJPW presidents in their 50s go, I like Akiyama better than Mutoh at least.

Thank you!! That is great to know, honestly! I worry constantly about getting the wrong idea about things, so it’s good to hear that I have a better idea than I think!

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Made it to level 26!

It took 15 days, which is a little on the longer end, but I don’t really mind, because I had a lot of stuff to work on!

Mood-wise, it’s been a bit up and down still. But my enthusiasm for learning Japanese has not waned at all, thankfully! I’ve especially gotten a lot of reading done over the past couple weeks, and I’m pretty proud of that! Eagerly looking forward to the day when reading gets a lot quicker for me.

My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 1523 (and 965 on KW!)

Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:

In non-wrestling news, I just finished watching the short drama 消えた初恋. The version I found was subtitled in English, but the subs were fanmade, and I think they might be partially machine translation, because I noticed a lot of common machine translation mistakes, haha, like messing up the pronouns. I was surprised at how much I could understand from listening, though I definitely would’ve floundered without the subtitles.

There was also an instance where the subtitles used correct pronouns, but gendered the speech in a way that it wasn’t in the Japanese, and it seemed like a bizarre translation choice to me because one character did not react at all to another character using he/him pronouns for the person he was dating, and then that character later reacted with homophobic disgust upon finding out that the other character was dating a man. I knew enough about Japanese not to take the subtitled pronouns at face value, haha, but personally, I would have translated this differently!

In any case, the show was cute but didn’t have a whole lot of substance. It seems like a good candidate for practicing more everyday language, though, particularly language relating to high school and relationships.

I adored this tweet from Hyper Misao, the protector of love and peace in TJPW. She proclaimed herself an ally to all people who aren’t good at the atmosphere at the end of the year/beginning of the next, then said “一緒に怯えましょう!!!!”, or “Let’s be scared together!”

I laughed at this whole exchange between DDT’s Chris Brookes and NJPW’s El Desperado. The Japanese is very easy, which I appreciated. Maki Itoh wasn’t too happy with Minoru Suzuki after their tag match together, so she was not thrilled to hear Chris talking about being excited to be in Suzuki-gun now so that he can be in the same faction as Despy, haha.

Despy and Chris had another exchange a few days later after Chris’s match against DDT’s mascot Pokotan. I genuinely burst out laughing at this because Despy tweeted at him “you bastard!!” and Chris just said “仕方ないよ…” (along with the smiling emoji crying a single tear).

The first week of January is a very busy week for Japanese wrestling! I believe I’ve already talked about this, but it’s イッテンヨン week! I ended up watching a whole bunch of shows from a handful of different companies.

The best one was TJPW’s イッテンヨン show; highly recommend watching that one if you get the chance! I watched it with English commentary, though the video had an issue where it would briefly switch to Japanese commentary if it took too long to buffer. In one instance, I heard just a few words before it switched back, and I realized to my surprise that I recognized both: ()りを(かえ)す and 相打(あいう)ち. I had just added those to Anki from the DDT recaps, and it was already paying off! That felt pretty good.

I did learn one new word in Japanese from the show, thanks to Akki’s commentary! ムキムキ, which means muscular!

I also really enjoyed Pro Wrestling NOAH’s new years show. Go Shiozaki vs Katsuhiko Nakajima was awesome (though the match wasn’t quite as good as their last), and I got chills at the end of it when Katsu won and then proclaimed: “俺たちがノアだ”. It was a really cool way of taking Go’s words, “We are NOAH” (which, incidentally, Go now no longer can say, since part of the stipulation for the match was the loser giving up the ability to say “I am NOAH” or “俺がノアだ”), which drew on Go’s connection to the fans as the ace, and then transforming it into an inherently selfish thing, since Katsu was using it specifically to refer to himself and the other members of his faction Kongoh, not the fans. I’m interested to see where both of their characters go next, though of course there’s a part of me that is still somehow hoping the two of them will reunite as a tag team someday.

I thought that line was also an awesome way to subtly build up to one of the marquee matches in the NOAH/NJPW crossover show, since Kongoh was slotted to be in the main event vs NJPW’s most popular faction, Los Ingobernables de Japon, and most of the build to that show was between those two factions, with Kongoh’s leader Kenoh in particular doing most of the speaking for NOAH’s side of the crossover. However, NJPW had other plans, and Kongoh’s match ended up getting moved to the semi-main event :pensive:. Alas!

The sort of flagship イッテンヨン show, NJPW’s Wrestle Kingdom, traditionally on 1.4, now expanded to 1.4, 1.5, and 1.8, was a little bit of a letdown this year, as I was expecting. The funniest thing to me, though, was that I ignored the beginning of Wrestle Kingdom night 2 to watch NOAH, and and then a couple hours after NOAH’s show wrapped, the entire NOAH roster showed up midway through the NJPW show to promote the crossover on January 8! It made me laugh because NOAH counterprogrammed the first part of a show that they then used to promote a crossover that they were a part of.

Oh, I think I forgot to mention this in the last update, but I was very amused by one of Kenta’s post-match comments leading to his match with Tanahashi on January 5. Kenta said that he deserves to be IWGP US champion more than Tana because he pronounces “Costco” the American way, and even pronounces “IKEA” incorrectly like Americans do. He says that he’s now more comfortable with miles and pounds instead of kilometers and grams, and he understands exactly what a gallon is. So, therefore, the US title is clearly meant for him! It was hands down one of the funniest promos all year. Sadly, in the actual match, Kenta both lost his title and picked up a few injuries, so it wasn’t the best day for him.

The actual NJPW/NOAH crossover show was fun, but a little underwhelming. I tried to buy the PPV through Abema, but made the mistake of ordering the ticket through the English language service (I was a little wary of Abema’s region blocking), then couldn’t get my ticket to work and wished I’d just bought it through Abema’s site in Japanese! I’m at a point where my Japanese is good enough, it’s not too difficult to navigate Japanese digital storefronts. I ended up watching via someone else’s stream, haha.

Any sort of NJPW/NOAH crossover these days is a bit loaded with skepticism and cynicism, considering how the relationship between both companies went in the past. I’m not sure this new show really did enough to dissuade those fears, though the last few matches in particular were a lot of fun. I’m hoping it leads to more in the future, because they sowed a lot of interesting story seeds. It’s always nice, too, for NOAH to benefit a bit from NJPW’s increased English language support, since not a lot of NOAH stuff gets subtitled, and fan translation leaves a lot out.

In other news, I loved this tweet from CyberFight president Sanshiro Takagi, containing a photo of Yoshihiko after his DDT match with Chris Brookes. I recently had the realization that I genuinely care about Yoshihiko (a wrestler who is quite literally a blow up doll) as a character, and I get worried for him when he loses big matches, just as I do for my favorite human wrestlers. Here in this photo, Takagi describes him as 黄昏(たそが)れる. This is a word that apparently means to fade into dusk, or to wane, or to look melancholic. The second kanji, 昏, is not in WK! I ended up adding both this word and that kanji to Anki. It’s a neat word, and if Takagi is using it, it’s probably worth learning for me.

Takagi is apparently very strongly encouraging the DDT roster to become fluent in English. He aims to increase the number of overseas subscribers from 30% to 50%, and to strengthen their relationship with AEW. It’s quite a different world from when Kenny Omega was there originally and the only person on the roster he could talk to was Michael Nakazawa, haha (well, and Kota Ibushi, but through “telepathy” and not words). If you ask me, the number one thing Takagi could do to attract more English-speaking fans would be hiring someone to do live translation on twitter as well as translating all of the post-match comments like Mr. Haku was doing. I feel like the company didn’t realize just how important that kind of work is for making their shows and their stories accessible to English-speaking fans. But, well, we’ll just have to see how things go for them!

Speaking of kanji that aren’t in WK, guess what I saw in my Hobonichi planner?

The 兎 here is read と just like the name of our villainous rabbit empire 兎津叉 in 大海原と大海原!

みんなの日本語 Lesson 19 – 20

I don’t think I have much to report on for lesson 19. I managed to get through it as well as complete 復習E afterward!

One thing that’s kind of funny to me is that I noticed my listening comprehension is often better with wrestling than it is for the textbook listening comprehension exercises, despite the fact that the textbook should be easier for me because theoretically I know all of the vocab. But the voice actors always seem to speak very fast, and wrestlers and commentators often speak much slower! I think it helps that real life conversations tend to have a lot more pauses, especially if you’re exhausted because you just wrestled for twenty minutes!

Lesson 20 has been going well so far! I got legitimately really excited when I looked at the grammar section and saw that we’re finally learning casual speech! I wish the textbook introduced this earlier, but I’m beyond happy that I’ve made it this far. Even though I already could recognize plain form verbs, I’m looking forward to getting more structured practice with them. I can already feel myself making another leap in understanding with the language as I start to fold this into my established knowledge. Sentences are just getting easier and easier to navigate.

My MNN Anki deck has just over 900 unique cards currently, and I’m feeling pretty good about that. There’s a lot of overlap with WK vocab, but I keep the two of them separate in my brain because I treat the MNN vocab as essentially my working vocabulary: these are the words I feel comfortable using in conversation, and I have a general grasp on when and how to use them. With the WK vocab as a whole, things are a lot spottier. I feel fairly confident in my recognition and recall, but generally hold off from using them when attempting to produce the language because I don’t understand the nuance and actual usage.

I updated the MNN kanji by WK level spreadsheet with the lesson 20 kanji! (Just a reminder that it’s possible to sort the chart by WK level or MNN lesson number, whichever is most useful to you).

Reading:

I signed up for the read every day challenge for winter 2022! I was already pretty much doing it, albeit informally, and I thought I might as well try tracking my reading every day to see how often I manage to meet that goal. The DDT translations have definitely been keeping me on my toes, so I don’t know if I really need the pressure of the challenge to motivate me to put work in every day, but I think it has helped a little bit.

I… did not manage to use the extra week to get caught up on 大海原と大海原 :sweat_smile:. I was too busy reading other things instead. I did finish chapter 12, though, and started chapter 13, so at least I didn’t fall further behind than I already was. I’m still enjoying the book, but on some level, I’m also looking forward to being done with it because I’m definitely not at a point where I’m reading fast/easily enough to be able to juggle manga and the DDT translations at the same time.

My picture books finally arrived! I wrote a review of all four of them, including some photos, and posted it in the read every day challenge thread. And wow, that thread gets substantially more traffic than this one, haha! People seemed to really like them. As I mentioned in that post, I read these extensively and not intensively, and I plan on revisiting them once in a while as I continue to learn.

DDT’s December 25 show was long as heck, and so was the recap for it! It took me a full week to translate it, and my translation ended up being a little less than 3,000 words! The January 3 show was shorter, and the recap for it was, too, but I still found plenty of new words :sweat_smile:. As usual, click the links below for full posts where I talk about the shows and mention things that I thought were really cool or beautiful, plus Japanese language questions I had while trying to translate them.

DDT 2021.12.25 Never Mind 2021 in Yoyogi — 66 words added (for a total of 104)

DDT 2022.1.3 DDT25周年開幕スペシャル!全席3000円興行!! — 36 words added (for a total of 140)

As I mention in the second post, another fan took up Mr. Haku’s mantle and started live translating the DDT shows! When I discovered that translation thread, I was so happy, I almost cried. It felt so good to once again be able to watch along and have a better idea of what was happening, especially the parts that aren’t mentioned in the text recap later.

I considered whether continuing my own translation project was really worth it if we have translations again, but I think I’m going to keep doing it. For one thing, I really want to have more complete translations of the post-match comments besides just summaries squeezed into tweets. Having the full comments (or as close to full comments as I can get, since they don’t transcribe everything on the website) is really important for really getting a sense of the characters’ personalities.

Also, there’s no guarantee that this fan will be able to keep doing this, so it’s really a good idea for me to continue improving my Japanese as much as possible in the meantime in case we lose another translator. We’ve learned that we can’t rely on DDT/TJPW translation continuing to exist. It’s best for me to prepare for a world where I have to do this on my own.

I can’t remember if I mentioned this last time, but a note on how I’m handling this influx of new words on Anki: I ended up making three separate Anki decks for kanji, my textbook vocab, and now the new cards from Yomichan. I’ve tried, at various points, to combine the three decks, but the thing that made it hard was the change in card formatting, honestly. My decks are aesthetically consistent, but they have different types and amounts of information, and that ended up being more frustrating than I anticipated, haha. It was hard for me to mentally switch gears back and forth while going through them.

The nice thing about having separate decks, too, is that it allows me to have a contingency plan if I ever get too overwhelmed. I’m prioritizing the textbook vocab above the rest on Anki, so if I need to, I can neglect the other decks.

So far, I think the wrestling vocab has added 15-25 minutes to my daily Anki study time. That’s not too bad, but it has definitely required a little adjustment! I also created a leech for myself by adding 実現 right after I learned 現実 in WK, haha! So far, I’ve been able to keep the meaning straight in WK, but I fail every other review for it in KW because I forget the order of the kanji :sweat_smile:.

New resources:

I tried to go looking for an Anki add-on that would auto-suspend cards once their due date reached a year or more, but it was surprisingly difficult to find one. I guess suspending cards after a certain time isn’t common practice like I had assumed? I did find out that if you do a search for “prop:ivl>=365” in the browse menu, it pulls up all of the cards with a review interval that long or longer, so I guess it wouldn’t be too hard to manually move them out of the deck, but then that raises the question of if you’d truly be saving time doing that instead of just clicking the “easy” button when the cards come up again, haha! I guess for now, I’ll leave things as they are.

Tofugu shared a bunch of new Japanese learning resources for winter 2021, and out of everything in this round-up, the one that stood out to me is KayoShodo’s calligraphy courses. I started following her on twitter because her account seems useful!

Next steps:

My main goal right now is to keep up with reading every day! My top priority is the DDT recaps, but I do want to finish 大海原と大海原 before the end of the month!

I’d also like to get back into reading more in Spanish, I think, but that will probably have to wait until I’m done with 大海原と大海原, so I won’t commit to anything else at this point.

Onward to level 27! 行くぞ!

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Out of curiosity, what would your goal be with suspending those cards? For me it seems like if you get it right after a year or more, it’s likely going to get to three years or more anyway, and then after that even longer, and if you don’t get it right, then it maybe shouldn’t be suspended anyway, but perhaps there is something I’m missing in my thinking.

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Well, my main line of thought was mostly with regards to making the most out of my time. I feel like my time is better spent looking at cards that I actually need to be studying. Once a card reaches a year or more, I feel like I’ve made the best use out of SRS for learning it, and either I’ll see it again in media somewhere and refresh my memory, or I’ll see it and realize I’ve forgotten it and then have to look it up in a dictionary again, thereby refreshing my memory, haha. Either way, at that point, I think I’d rather just let natural SRS take care of it. Words that I need will stick around in my memory, and ones that I don’t need can be looked up just like all of the English words I’ve forgotten over the years :blush:. But maybe this isn’t a wise way to use SRS?

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Thank you for your answer! I definitely don’t know the wisest ways to use SRS, so if that works for you, that’s great. :+1:

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