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, 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. 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!