Fallynleaf's study log

Made it to level 57!

I spent my usual fourteen days on the past level. I realized a few days ago that I was fast approaching my WK forum anniversary, and that that day was almost certainly going to coincide with my level-up day, so I wanted to get this post out as soon as possible so that I could post my year two overview (which should be coming very soon!).

Also, I’m going to be reducing my daily lesson count to 8 (3 kanji + 5 vocab) instead of 10. I came very, very close to running out of lessons at the end of this level, so I did a bit of math and realized that either I needed to do more kanji each day (and therefore level up quicker), or do fewer lessons each day and keep my two-week pace. I chose the latter because I think this is a better pace for Tobira, and I like using my WK level-ups to motivate me to stay on track with the textbook. The good news is it should lighten my review load a little bit, because I’ve had more older items coming back, and the latter half of the 50’s don’t tend to stick as well.

Last level was me sowing (neglecting my translations to work on some writing projects instead), so this level was me reaping (having to crunch extra hard to catch up on the translations before TJPW’s biggest show of the year) :smiling_face_with_tear:. I did kind of get into a groove with them, though, and they weren’t as hard as I was expecting! My stamina has improved a lot.

I tried timing myself for the first time, and I determined that at my current rate, it takes me about an hour to translate 600 characters. This includes the initial rough draft of the translation, researching the words and grammar I can’t figure out, watching the video and following along with the transcript, posting my questions in the pro wrestling thread, and then implementing edits and doing the final polishing.

So standard TJPW shows are about 2-4 hours of work, press conferences tend to be 4-8 hours (depending on if they have one or two parts), Korakuen shows are about 9-10 hours, and big shows like Wrestle Princess are like 15 hours. I’d estimate that maybe an average month’s worth of shows is about 20 hours (minimum) of translation work for me. This month is, uh, not an average month!

According to one of my friends, professional rates for a translator are like 500 characters an hour, which felt shockingly low to me, considering how so much of the time I spend on it is due to a lack of Japanese skill, which presumably a professional would not have to deal with :sweat_smile:. I think I still have plenty of room to get faster. I kind of wish I’d timed myself for some of the earlier ones, just to see how much I’ve already improved.

My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 5556 (and 4100 on KW!)

Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:

While watching a DDT show, I noticed these comments in the chat: “頑張れ電波!” “電波がんばれ”. I was like “Huh? Radio waves?” My immediate thought was that they were referencing ふりーWiFi (TJPW tag team consisting of Hikari Noa and Nao Kakuta. ビビビビビ!), but this was DDT, so that didn’t make any sense. Then I realized that the stream was bugging out, so the fans were trying to encourage the video signal the same way they’d cheer on a wrestler, haha! Here was another comment that made me smile: “このシングル楽しみだけど、電波…ファイト!”

I also was amused by this comment during a TJPW show from a fan who was remarking on Hyper Misao’s, er, way of schooling the rookies: “噓を教える悪いセンパイ” :sweat_smile:.

I found out that a friend I’d made in a pro wrestling discord is Japanese, though he’s not currently living in the country. He was incredibly charmed by the fact that I’m learning the language for wrestling, and that I’m attempting to translate TJPW. He also loved my senryu translations, and asked if I was familiar with kakekotoba (掛詞). I confessed that I wasn’t, so he linked me to this famous example. I’ll admit, it did my head in a little bit, haha!

This is another one that isn’t exactly “fun”, but the Pro Wrestling NOAH wrestler Daisuke Harada had to retire unexpectedly (after a 17 year long career) due to health concerns from a previous injury making it unsafe for him to keep wrestling. His retirement match was a one minute exhibition match with his longtime tag partner Atsushi Kotoge, who was also his debut opponent. Their tag team, 桃の青春, was one of my favorites in NOAH, so I was devastated to see Harada retire, but I was very touched that he chose Kotoge to be his retirement opponent.

They played a short video recapping Harada’s career before the match, and I think I understood almost all of it! It was mostly just a list of notable moments, with text in the corner of the screen giving the details, so it’s not a huge accomplishment or anything, but it was still nice to be able to fully appreciate the video. It’s amazing to me how Kotoge was there for practically every major moment in Harada’s career…

feelstana

One of my friends found a Light/L Death Note doujinshi that I had stumbled across in a thrift store in Alaska and bought for her probably ten years ago. It occurred to me that I can in fact read Japanese now, so I asked my friend to photograph it for me so that we could finally understand the plot, haha.

I only had time to skim it for now, but I did burst out laughing when I saw this page:

It’s the Mother of Ultra!! Oh, sorry, the Mother of Ul*ra, ahaha.

I recognized her immediately thanks to having translated Kamiyu comparing Juria Nagano’s hairstyle to hers (see this post). I didn’t read enough of the doujinshi to get the full context for why she’s here, but I’m sure it’ll be an adventure.

上級へのとびら – Chapter 2

Managed to finish the second chapter, though it came kinda down to the wire. My translations have been keeping me busy, and there was a certain five hour AEW PPV last weekend… :sweat_smile:

とびら:今週末、何をしますか。

私: 日曜日には長いプロレスのPPVを見ますから、普通より土曜日にはもっと勉強しなければなりません。

This is another one where I feel like a lot of what the chapter taught me, at least in terms of the reading (which was on 日本語のスピーチレベル), was stuff I’d either picked up on my own or had learned though Tofugu and this forum and the like. It did occur to me that with my translations (and manga reading, honestly) I’m getting quite a lot of practice with 話し言葉 and not quite so much practice with 書き言葉, so that’s probably something I should keep in mind :sweat_smile:. I already feel like I have a tendency to answer the exercise questions with language that I encounter in my translations, which tends to be 話し言葉. I’ll eventually even this out a little more when I have the time/energy/skill to dive into reading novels in earnest.

I did laugh when the 読み物 mentioned different speech styles and warned that if a woman says “俺も腹へった”, people will be startled. I remember Shoko referring to herself and the rest of the TJPW roster (remember, this is a pink princess-themed women’s wrestling company) as “俺たち”, and I’ve heard the wrestlers use tough guy speak on multiple occasions, though perhaps not as commonly as wrestlers in other companies use it.

Reading/Listening:

Spanish: (reading: Cantoras) (listening: Bob Esponja)

I managed to get 29% of the way through Cantoras before the read every day challenge ended! I’m hoping I can finish it by the end of the next reading challenge.

I started watching Bob Esponja again for the listening challenge. I can’t tell if it’s any easier than the last time I watched some of it, though the difficulty usually varies pretty heavily depending on the episode. Some of the settings/themes are in areas where my vocabulary is a lot weaker, and my comprehension suffers as a result.

I finished the winter read every day challenge with a perfect score! As usual, I signed up for the listen every day challenge for the off-month. I haven’t really had to try at all to keep up with it with Japanese, since I’ve been really busy working on the translations and watching shows :sweat_smile:.

I translated two senryu!

ちょっと声変えて2度目の問い合わせ

衣食住 すべてそろった 偽装品

I finished… a lot of TJPW translations :sweat_smile:. The Nagoya show was already partially done, though.

2023.02.18 TJPW CITY CIRCUIT WINTER~名古屋公演~ (part 2) — (24 words added + 2 kanji)
2023.02.21 KEIJI MUTO GRAND FINAL PRO-WRESTLING “LAST” LOVE ~HOLD OUT~ (TJPW portion) — (0 words added)
2023.02.22 TJPW press conference (part 2) — (20 words added + 2 kanji)
2023.02.25 TJPW CITY CIRCUIT WINTER~蒲田公演~ — (9 words added + 2 kanji)
2023.03.02 TJPW press conference (part 2) — (13 + words added + 3 kanji)

From the Nagoya show, I added from the word 云々(うんぬん), meaning “and so on, and the like, etc.” (or “yadda yadda” as rodan put it), and I also added from the word (あふ)れる, meaning to overflow, to brim over, to flood.

From the first press conference, I added from the word (きずな), which means bonds (between people), (emotional) ties, relationship, connection, link, and I also added from the word 対峙(たいじ), which means confrontation, squaring off against, standing facing each other, etc. (I love this kanji!).

From the 2.25 show, I added (fief, allowance, pension, grant, happiness) from the word 貫禄(かんろく), which means “presence; dignity”. I’m guessing that this one shares the same phonetic component as (ろく), which makes it nice and easy to remember. I also added (waves, billows) from the word 怒涛(どとう)(いきお)い, which means “with great vigour; in leaps and bounds; with the force of surging waves”.

From the second press conference, I added (another one with a phonetic component that I think I can guess, since I just learned a few levels ago. And hey, looking at the keisei script on that page, it looks like I’m right!) and from the word 嫉妬(しっと), meaning jealousy or envy. Both kanji have that same meaning. I also added (dark, not clear) from the word 曖昧(あいまい), meaning vague; ambiguous; unclear. This is kind of a neat one because it looks like is the phonetic component (yep, checked the page, and sure enough!).

Very grateful for the keisei script for teaching me these things! And to rodan for the help as usual. I want everyone to appreciate their brilliant solution for translating the pun in Mahiro’s apology here: “睡魔”に負けて“すいま”せんでした” (“My falling asleep… was inexsnoozeable!!”).

New resources:

I finished getting my Notion page set up! It’s optimized for a smaller window, so it might look strange if you fullscreen it on a wide monitor. I even found a spot to feature my latest senryu translation on the main page. I compiled almost all of my senryu translations here, with the newest ones on top and the oldest ones on the bottom. I’ve done a lot more of these than I thought!

The 図書館 page has my progress on the actual books I’m reading (not a lot of activity there, as you could probably guess from all of the times I’ve posted about failing to make progress on my manga reading :sweat_smile:), and the 勉強 page is mostly just a compilation of quick reference links for my TJPW translations and Japanese resources in general. I was going to delete the timer, but I decided to try it out first, and I found that having a timer running actually did help me be more productive. The spotify playlist on the main page is a bit vestigial, though. I don’t listen to music while studying, and I don’t really use spotify, but I liked how it looked aesthetically, so I kept it :sweat_smile:.

The sticky notes page is basically a collection of odds and ends that don’t really belong anywhere else, like Japanese study resources that I want to hold onto but aren’t actively using at the moment, various projects that I want to do but currently have on the backburner, etc. I also went back through my study log and compiled all of the media that was recommended to me or which sounded interesting according to other people’s descriptions. The list is almost entirely recommendations from other people, or paraphrased descriptions from my friends on discord or folks on twitter. At some point, I hope to get around to actually reading/watching some of the stuff on there!

I’ll probably add and remove stuff from Notion over time as my own process shifts, and as I start to check out the things that have been recommended to me, so don’t rely on it as a stable resource, haha, but pretty much everything in there will remain immortalized in this log. Notion is sort of just a distilled down version of my study process that cuts out all the messiness in my study log and threads like the senryu thread, so it’s a convenient resource hub, but all of my actual learning happens in the messiness, so I think of Notion as like something nice to have but optional.

Honestly, I’m glad I only found it fairly late into my language learning journey, because I feel like as a beginner, I would have either gotten overwhelmed by it, or would have gotten way too distracted trying to figure out the perfect way to study, haha. But at this point, I already know basically what works for me and what I’ve got going on and where I’m headed, so I can remove all of the chaff and just keep the stuff that I actually need and let it be a nice supplemental tool rather than taking over my studies.

I found out that unfortunately, Yomichan is no longer being maintained. The good news is that it looks like TheMoeWay has forked it and will be rebranding it as Yomitan. So that will be a bit of a shift, but hopefully not a huge one.

I discovered YomuJP from Tofugu’s Winter 2022 resources. It’s another place to go for free graded readers (they have stuff from N6 through N1). As I think I said before, I’m reaching a point where I feel increasingly less of a need for graded readers, so I haven’t felt particularly inclined to browse these, but I thought I’d hold onto the link in case I changed my mind.

MissDagger is starting a book club for A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar! As one of the enablers who encouraged her to start it, I’m totally planning on participating! The goal is to very gradually read through all three volumes of the dictionary cover to cover, with people encouraged to ask questions and share examples from their immersion along the way. Conveniently for me (and inconveniently for anyone who hates pro wrestling), I have compilations of my wrestling translations saved in easily searchable master documents, so people might be getting some TJPW examples, haha.

I think the timing of the club might actually work out just about perfectly for me. If we make it all the way to the advanced volume, and if I stay on pace with my own studies, I think I’ll be studying advanced grammar by that point. I just ordered myself a copy of the third volume, so I’ll be ready :triumph:!

Next steps:

My immediate next step is finishing that year two overview!

Besides that, I’m about two (short) TJPW show translations away from being caught up, so I’m on track to finish those soon and then have a few days to rest until Grand Princess. Then I’ll, well, have Grand Princess to translate :sweat_smile:.

I think that’s enough to focus on for the time being.

Onward to level 58! 行くぞ!

9 Likes

Today is my two year anniversary of joining the WK forum! :partying_face: :cake:

As I mentioned last year, I consider this the day I started seriously committing to learning Japanese, so this marks two years of consistent study! This post is an overview of my journey so far, touching on where I’m at now and all of the main tools that have been the most helpful for me.

I’m still using most of the tools mentioned in the overview of my first year, so I’m not going to repeat the information in that post.

Where I’m at now:

Kanji

I’ve reached level 57 on WaniKani, so I’ve learned over 1,900 kanji, including 32 kanji that I learned on my own which are not in WK.

Grammar

I’ve completed book one and two (lessons 1-50) of Minna no Nihongo and the first three chapters of Tobira, and am somewhere between N4 and N3 in grammar ability.

Vocab

I’ve learned over 6097 vocab words through WaniKani, as well as 1,073 vocab through Anki that I mined from native Japanese media. Additionally, I’ve learned 2,129 words (through Anki) from my textbook Minna no Nihongo, and 217 from Tobira, many of which overlap with WK, but many of which don’t. These are the words I consider essentially my working vocabulary, which I am comfortable using when producing Japanese.

What I can do:

  • Can read without feeling a need to use ichi.moe because the majority of sentences have few enough unknowns that spot-checking unknown words with Yomichan is sufficient, though reading without a dictionary is still impossible most of the time, except with some circumstances, like reading some wrestling content.
  • Can read a fair number of tweets without needing to use Yomichan (which I don’t have on my phone) or the auto translate, and can skim-read for wrestling information pretty efficiently.
  • Can read many manga sentences without any grammar or vocab lookups, though plenty of sentences still contain unknowns, and I can’t understand enough from context to be able to read without a dictionary.
  • Can follow along with a transcript for pro wrestling comments and promos and generally understand at least the gist of what is being said.
  • Can understand lots of scattered words and phrases in spoken Japanese, and occasionally catch full sentences, though I often make mistakes and miss nuance.
  • Can write fairly complex multi-part sentences about simple everyday things and pro wrestling, though my working vocabulary and grammar are limited enough, I’m not able to express much nuance.
  • Can handle short interactions in writing, though I’m very slow at composing my responses, and I’m still learning how to navigate what level of politeness is expected in different contexts, and which words are used only in text or only in speech. I also make a lot of mistakes, but usually my meaning still comes across regardless.
  • Can understand and translate senryu poems, for the most part.
  • Can understand and translate pro wrestling promos and backstage interviews as long as I have a transcript, though it’s rare for me not to make at least several mistakes.
  • Can recognize almost every kanji that I encounter. Reading without furigana is easy.
  • Can write a lot of kanji (poorly), but only a few from memory.
  • Can more or less guess the stroke order for most kanji, and can get the correct kanji to come up by drawing it on my Japanese keyboard IME pad 99% of the time.

What I can’t do:

  • Carry on a spoken conversation. I still have yet to try this, but I feel like I would struggle a lot and my answers would be incredibly stilted.

Essential tools

As introduced in my last post, I still use Yomichan, Anki, and KaniWani every single day! If you don’t know what any of these are, or are looking for resources for them, please see my previous post. I don’t really have anything to add there, except that Yomichan is no longer being supported by its creator, so I will probably eventually move to a different tool that does the same thing when another person inevitably takes up the mantle.

I do have one new Yomichan addon:

I no longer need ichi.moe, and I haven’t been practicing writing kanji lately.

Textbooks

I finished Minna no Nihongo (described in the previous post), and am currently working through Tobira. I also own the grammar workbook, though not the kanji one. I like Tobira so far, though I’m only a few chapters into it. I don’t feel that there was a large jump in difficulty after MNN, though I’m also coming at it from the perspective of having read lots of native material over the past year that is far more difficult than any textbook. Your mileage may vary if your only reading experience is from textbooks and graded readers prior to starting Tobira.

So far, I would say that Tobira has been useful for helping refine a lot of my slapdash knowledge that I’ve picked up by necessity through my immersion. The grammar workbook also has a lot of production practice, which might not be what everyone is looking for, but I think I’ve benefited from it despite finding it difficult in terms of the amount of time and mental effort it takes to produce sentences in Japanese.

Smartcat

This one is a translation resource, not a Japanese learning resource! Important distinction there. I felt compelled to mention it because it has been really helpful for me, but it’s obviously not necessary unless you want to full-on translate something and not just read it.

Smartcat is a CAT (computer-aided translation) software. It’s web-based, so Yomichan still works on it, and the way it splits everything up line-by-line is pretty helpful. It’s also free, which is awesome.

It learns from your previous translation choices, which is really handy for stuff like wrestling, which machine translation and dictionaries often struggle with. You can also upload your own glossaries (I made a word list from the NJPW English book, for example). The cost of it being free is that your own translations get used to train machine translation, but honestly with wrestling stuff, that’s almost more of a plus :sweat_smile:. Ultimately my goal is to prevent false rumors and such from spreading, and the better machine translation gets, the less that happens.

Something that’s especially fun about Smartcat is that it tells you what percentage of the text you’ve translated, so it’s really handy for tracking overall progress and splitting up the workload into more manageable chunks, and it’s good for the part of my brain that likes to watch numbers go up, haha.

WaniKani userscripts

Again, see my other post for the full list! These are just the new additions that I’ve discovered since then.

For WaniKani itself:

  • Level Duration 2.0 — This one is not actually new! I just forgot to include it earlier in my study log, so it never made it into the one year anniversary post, and I didn’t notice I’d forgotten it until I had to reinstall everything. All this script does is show at the top of the dashboard how long you’ve been on a level. Handy!
  • Overall Progress Bars — This is another script for adding a WK progress bar to the top of your dashboard. This one has a bar representing each level, with different colors representing the SRS stages of all of the items in that level. There are three display options, and these two are my favorites:
  • WK Extra study mover — This script allows you to move the extra study UI (or hide it completely). At first, I wasn’t really bothered by the position of the new feature, but after having it for a couple weeks and ignoring it completely in favor of the self-study userscript, I started to feel like it was taking up valuable real estate, so I used this script to move it to the sidebar instead.
  • Dashboard Progress Plus — This script adds visual indicators of SRS stages of items, as well as a “90%” kanji box, plus gives you a popup with item information when you mouse over the items. I installed it pretty much entirely for the last thing, because sometimes I’ll prelearn the kanji a day or two before officially learning them, and this lets me check my memory by simply mousing over the items without having to open them in a new tab.

For KaniWani:

  • KaniWani: Disable Enter on Wrong Answer — This is a script for KW, not WK, but it’s handy. It won’t let you proceed with the enter key if you get a review wrong. I kept accidentally just powering past wrong reviews, which especially caused problems when I got marked wrong because of a synonym I hadn’t added yet. This script solves that problem.

For the WaniKani forum:

  • Forum: Details Keep Open State — This is a script for the WK forum that simply keeps the details tags open while editing. Just a small quality of life thing, but really helpful if you’re someone like me and are prone to making long posts, or editing wiki posts on a certain pro wrestling thread :sweat_smile:.
  • WaniKani Forums: Emoter — This script lets you upload your own custom emotes! I used it to import some favorites from a wrestling discord server I’m in.

unbridled_joy

Useful resources:

Again, these are in addition to the resources already listed in last year’s overview!

Notion is a note-taking and productivity app which I only recently discovered thanks to this cute template that bellynx made, and I totally couldn’t resist trying it out :sweat_smile:. I really like it so far, though! Click that first link to browse my Notion page.

Nihongo Stats is a stats aggregation tool that a WK user put together for Japanese language learning apps (Wanikani, BunPro, Anki)! It’s similar to wkstats, but has a different presentation and offers some graphs and data that wkstats does not have. My two favorite parts are the review accuracy and total items graphs. I don’t think other tools have offered visualization for this kind of data before, so it’s cool to see!

WaniKani History is another WK stats site with a heck of a lot of stats and other information!

昔話童話童謡の王国 is a website with a collection of 450 Japanese children’s stories with audio. I had fun listening to these as I read along for the listen every day challenge last year. They’re pretty accessible if you’re somewhere in the N5-N4 range and are equipped with Yomichan.

A Year to Learn Japanese is an in-depth guide to, well, learning Japanese that I really appreciate because it lays out different paths and gives multiple options without trying to claim that any one is the right way. I don’t really reference this guide much, but I did work through the pronunciation section last year and feel like I benefited from it a lot.

The Japan Foundation overdrive library is a digital library for US and Canada residents which consists of broad genres such as manga, literature, Japanese language, art, history, culture, society, cooking & food, etc. There are 1,800 titles total, and they’re completely free to read! Many of these books aren’t in Japanese, but they do have some that are. Last year, I enjoyed reading Japanese–English Translation by Judy Wakabayashi.

Book Manager | ッツ Ebook Reader is a tool for reading epub files in the browser so that you can take advantage of Yomichan while reading. I haven’t done a lot of actual book reading yet, but just from trying it once, I could immediately see how useful this is, and am anticipating that I’ll be using it a lot going forward!

The daily senryu thread on this forum is a lot of fun, and it’s a great way to learn random new things about Japanese and/or Japanese culture! It took me a while to really warm up to the style of senryu poems to the point where I felt like I could understand and appreciate them, but now I’m quite fond of them. Don’t be afraid to just jump in and try your hand at translating the latest poem! I have a compilation of most of my senryu translations from this thread on Notion.

Also, I wrote a short guide to learning Japanese with a pro wrestling focus! There is probably zero new information in there if you’ve been following my study log and/or the pro wrestling thread. It essentially gathers the resources that have been most useful to me (minus the WK-specific ones, though I do mention WaniKani), which I wish I’d known about from the start. I’m sure that whoever comes after me will figure out an even better and quicker path, but hopefully it’ll help pave the way a little for other fans :blush:.

My current study routine

Disclaimer: I am currently unemployed and don’t have family commitments, so I have a lot more time to study than most people. Learning Japanese is currently one of my primary hobbies, along with watching Japanese pro wrestling, so putting this much time into Japanese is neither desirable nor achievable for many people :sweat_smile:.

I spend quite a lot of hours immersing myself in Japanese each day. A lot of this time is passive immersion that I don’t count as studying, though I am steadily picking up more and more in my passive listening. Sometimes I have partial translation, sometimes I’m completely on my own. It’s a lot of (unsubtitled) spoken Japanese as well as written Japanese on places like twitter and interviews and blog posts and such.

For active study, I have sort of a three-pronged approach which is only slightly modified from my routine last year, as laid out in the previous post:

WaniKani

  • I do at least three sessions a day, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once at night. On most days, I break this up into smaller sessions if possible (it’s easier to do 20 reviews in one sitting than 50).
  • I do a consistent number of lessons every morning. For most of WK, I did 9 vocab and 3 kanji, but I’ve reduced the number in the later levels, since there are less radicals and vocab items, and I have more leeches now. In the latter levels, I would do 7 vocab and 3 kanji. When I run out of kanji, I do 10 vocab a day until I level up. As of a few days ago, I’ve gone down to doing 8 lessons a day (5 vocab and 3 kanji) to keep my two-week level pace. The first day on a new level, I do all radical lessons, and for the majority of the levels, I would generally do a few kanji and some vocab on those days, too.
  • After doing my lessons, I drill myself on the new material with the self-study quiz.
  • I fell out of practice with using the leech training script, but it would probably help me now, because I’ve picked up a lot more leeches over the past year! When I realize I’m confusing two kanji, I usually take a moment to compare the differences and figure out what was giving me trouble (the niai visually similar kanji script is helpful for this).
  • I’m also doing KaniWani to practice recall. I’m more lax with the SRS intervals on this, but I try to do my reviews at least two or three times a day. My KW is set up to only give me new items after they’ve reached guru on WK, so there are usually a few days of delay between me initially learning them and then practicing them here.

Tobira

  • Tobira is currently my primary form of grammar acquisition. I’ve picked up a lot just through exposure with my translations, but my understanding is very slapdash and surface level, so I’m using Tobira to fill out my understanding of intermediate grammar. I try to complete one chapter each WK level (about every two weeks), though the chapters have more content than the MNN chapters did, so I have to push myself a little harder to keep up this pace with Tobira.
  • The first thing I do for each chapter is add the vocab for the 読み物 reading to Anki while I’m still finishing up the previous chapter in the workbook. I’ll have several days to run through the cards so that I’m ready to start the next chapter immediately. Then I’ll work through the chapter in this order:
  • Read the first half of the grammar section (covering everything that shows up in the 読み物).
  • Read the beginning of the new chapter through the 読み物.
  • Skip to the 内容質問 section and do the 読み物 questions.
  • Run through the vocab for the 会話文 reading in Anki while doing the 読み物 reading and related exercises.
  • Read the second half of the grammar section (covering everything that shows up in the 会話文).
  • Read the 会話文.
  • Do the 会話文 questions in the 内容質問 section.
  • Read the rest of the chapter and do any remaining exercises that aren’t conversation practice or kanji-related.
  • Do the workbook exercises for that chapter.
  • I try to make at least some progress on the textbook every day. Some days, this means more work than others! No matter what else I have going on, though, I always make sure I at least clear my Anki reviews.

Reading/active immersion/translation

I’ve told this story many times on the forum, and readers of my study log got to watch it all unfold in real time, but the short version is that my favorite wrestling translator, Mr. Haku, left CyberFight (an umbrella company for several pro wrestling promotions, including DDT Pro Wrestling and Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling) at the end of 2021, which devastated me. I was super depressed at the time for other reasons and cried a whole lot over this, but eventually dragged myself to my feet and decided that I would try to take up the mantle and translate as much as I could on my own, hoping that I would soon get replaced by someone who was actually qualified to be doing this.

Well, fast forward about a year and four months, and I’m still here! I started out translating for DDT, then took over from a friend with TJPW after DDT got an actual professional translator again. I took the TJPW translations public last summer after I got fed up with misinformation circulating due to bad machine translation, so there’s a bit of extra pressure, since I’m now doing this for hundreds of strangers in addition to the handful of friends I was translating for before :sweat_smile:.

I still can’t do everything that Mr. Haku could do (live translation on twitter is beyond me), but I’m doing the post-match comments now like he used to do. Slowly but surely, the quality of my work is improving, and I’m making a lot less mistakes. It is, however, a huge time suck with pretty much weekly deadlines (if I want to stay ahead of the next show), so I have to sort of fit the rest of my non-TJPW immersion around it whenever there are lulls in my translation workload.

I just calculated my average translation speed, and it factors out to be about 600 characters an hour (at least for pro wrestling. I imagine it would be slower for a domain I’m not familiar with, haha). This includes the initial rough draft of the translation, researching the words and grammar I can’t figure out, watching the video and following along with the transcript, posting my questions in the pro wrestling thread, and then implementing edits and doing the final polishing.

So standard TJPW shows are about 2-4 hours of work, press conferences tend to be 4-8 hours (depending on if they have one or two parts), Korakuen shows are about 9-10 hours, and big shows like Wrestle Princess are like 15 hours. I’d estimate that maybe an average month’s worth of shows is about 20 hours (minimum) of translation work for me.

I’m not sure I’ve ever posted my actual process for doing the translations before? I’ve refined it a lot since the early days, thanks to having better tools now and also a better grasp of the language. Here is basically how it goes:

  • I start by watching the TJPW show. Live if possible, if not, then I’ll wait for the VOD to come out (usually takes three days) before starting the translation.
  • If it’s a live show, I’ll wait until the next day for the transcripts to be up. If it’s a VOD show, I can get started right away. I’ll go to the TJPW results section of shupro’s (週刊プロレス, known primarily for their weekly pro wrestling magazine) website and view the detailed write-up of the show (this is only available if you have a subscription). They typically transcribe the post-match promos there, and all or most of the post-match comments. I’ll copy everything I want to translate into a word document.
  • Then I upload the raw Japanese text to Smartcat. Smartcat splits it up sentence by sentence, which makes it a lot less overwhelming to parse. It also has its own machine translation, which is more literal than DeepL, so sometimes it’s worse and sometimes it’s better. I have a wrestling glossary I’ve added, so it’ll bring up those suggestions when those words occur. I also usually paste the transcript of the dialogue into DeepL as I work through it, mostly for suggestions for some more natural ways to word some of the sentences.
  • I’ll work through the text sentence by sentence, spot-checking with Yomichan as needed. Often Yomichan won’t be enough to understand wrestling-specific uses of words ((ぎゃく)エビ(がた)め, anyone?) or other slang the wrestlers use, so I’ll have to try googling in Japanese. I’ll search for “[term] プロレス” or “[term] 意味”, stuff like that.
  • I keep a sort of master document of all of my translations (well, they’ve gotten long enough now, my master doc is split into several files :sweat_smile:) along with the original Japanese so that I can quickly go back through and search for previous instances of a certain word or phrase, or find examples of how I translated something in the past. I’ll highlight all of the lines in the original Japanese that are particularly confusing to me as I go through it, then un-highlight them when my confusion has been resolved.
  • When I come across words which contain kanji that I already know, I’ll add them (along with their surrounding sentence) via Yomichan to my main immersion deck in Anki. I decided to focus on words with kanji because I thought it’d be the best way to reinforce what I’m learning here on WK, since I only have limited energy for flash cards, and I often have an easier time memorizing kana-only words naturally over time without needing SRS. New cards get funneled to an inactive deck that I only add cards from when my regular Anki workload is low enough (so, when I’m not actively trying to learn textbook vocab).
  • I’ve also started adding kanji (and the words which contain them) that I come across during my translations which aren’t in WK. For these kanji, in order to learn them more thoroughly, I’m forcing myself to memorize how to write them. I don’t add every kanji I come across that isn’t in WK, but after I reach level 60, my plan is to add anything I don’t recognize to Anki.
  • Once I’ve finished the rough draft of the translation, I’ll watch the post-match interview videos on twitter (TJPW typically posts them there, so I’ll save all the links as I see them), following along with the transcript. Sometimes watching the video clears up my questions, because I’ll realize that there was a mistake in the transcript, or seeing the line with context will make it make sense to me suddenly, though my Japanese often isn’t good enough for me to catch a whole lot. For the VOD shows, I’ll watch them along with the transcript on my initial viewing, which is an interesting experience because I’ll catch a lot more of the dialogue that way.
  • When the draft for the comments are done, I’ll share them in the pro wrestling thread, along with all of my questions. This is a vital step! rodan has been very patiently helping answer all of my questions and give suggestions for how I can improve the translations, which really helps bring them to that next level and make me feel confident about sharing them.
  • I’ll edit the draft, implementing all of rodan’s suggestions to the best of my ability, and doing any additional smoothing over.
  • Then I’ll copy and paste the translation into a blog post on my wordpress blog. It takes a little bit of time to get everything formatted and tagged correctly. I’ll come up with a few bullet points to mention in a tweet promoting the link to the translation, then publish the post along with the tweet, and that’s it! It’s done!

Currently, pro wrestling is the only domain that I am actively mining additional vocabulary from, since it’s obviously my main priority right now. I do plan on eventually moving on to mining words from manga and novels and other sources, but I have more than enough on my plate with wrestling, so that’ll have to wait until the wrestling words have slowed to a tiny trickle, and I’ve gotten through the backlog of cards on Anki. I’m planning on ramping up my Anki workload after reaching level 60 on WK, so hopefully I’ll be able to actually clear that backlog soon. Also, believe it or not, a lot of the wrestling vocabulary shows up in other places, including my textbook, manga, and even senryu poems. And yes, putting in the time in Anki has absolutely paid off here.

I’ve also really enjoyed doing the read every day and listen every day challenges on this forum, but honestly I get more motivational benefit out of those with Spanish than I do with Japanese, because keeping up with the TJPW translations is pretty much daily work as it is :sweat_smile:.

Something important to note here is that yes, I’m aware that spending all of this time translating instead of merely reading and learning to process sentences in Japanese inevitably slows me down. Translating requires you to understand every single sentence, even the ones that are far above your level, and even the ones that are poorly phrased or riddled with typos or improperly transcribed.

But as much stress as it has brought me, it also brings me a lot of joy, and it makes each week an adventure. It’s a path I chose because I didn’t want to give up being able to watch TJPW with my friends who aren’t proficient in Japanese. I chose that over fast-tracking my own Japanese skill. Unlike with a medium like manga or a video game or whatever, I didn’t exactly have a choice in the timing. I couldn’t afford to wait.

So I guess if there’s any advice in all of that, it’s that I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this path to anyone else, but it definitely was the right choice for me. Sometimes I think you have to make choices that let you actually use what you have now at this point in your journey, even if it’s inefficient and therefore pushes back that theoretical endpoint of fluency.

Next steps

I’m very, very close to reaching level 60! I’m definitely going to write up a way too long post synthesizing everything I’ve learned over the past 2+ years, so that should be coming within the next couple months. I’ve already started transitioning to using Anki to learn kanji that aren’t covered in WaniKani, and I’ll be ramping up my vocab mining there as well when I’m no longer doing WK lessons.

I just started Tobira, and at the rate I’m going, it’ll probably take me another six months or so before I finish it. I’m planning on using Shin Kanzen Master after that, though I don’t have a concrete plan in place for that in terms of scheduling.

I’m not planning on retiring this study log once I hit level 60! Obviously the format will shift slightly, since I won’t be able to time my updates with WK levels anymore, but the central structure will remain the same. I’ve really enjoyed tracking my progress and watching how it has evolved over time, and I’m hoping I can keep it up as I work through the intermediate level and beyond!

Here’s to another year! :blush:

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Happy cake day! :cake:

It is impressive how far you’ve come in 2 years. The dedication and the consistency!

I wish I could say the same, but considering my own grammar study have basically been standing still since I left Japanese language school… I just don’t know how to study grammar in a way that would work for me. Maybe I’ll figure it out, or I’ll keep muddling along and remind myself to actually lookup grammar sometimes too, but I find that I do so many vocabulary lookups that I don’t want to slow down my reading even more to look up grammar unless I really can’t understand what I’m reading (and it seems critical). :woman_shrugging:

It isn’t something I’m worrying much about, but sometimes it does pop to the front of the brain and wave at me. xD

I recently installed this script, in fact I changed around a lot with my dashboard so it would be more useful for the little bit of info I can get from it. ^^

Anyway, just wanted to say hi and let you know I’m still here cheering you on!

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Congrats on your year 2 milestone!
I really appreciate all the resources you listed. The pro-wresting one is so good!

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Something that might help is getting a setup that makes lookups way quicker and easier? I know you enjoy manga (and I enjoy it, too!), but manga is notoriously difficult to do quick lookups with, which means extensive reading tends to sound a lot more appealing than spending nine million years trying to intensively read every page. I’ve found that I tend to let grammar go with manga a bit more because of that, whereas with my translations, since I’m working with easily copy-and-paste-able text, and in a browser with Yomichan, it’s way, way easier to do lookups, so I’m much more likely to actually do them (though I guess having the pressure of publishing my translations also encourages me to get it right… :sweat_smile:).

Maybe you could look for a novel in ebook form that you can use for intensive reading purposes? Or find a website with content that you like. Then you can keep extensively reading manga and visual novels guilt-free, haha.

I’ve had by far the most luck learning grammar through textbooks, but I am aware that this is directly the opposite of most people :sweat_smile:. For me, the scaffolding there really helps, where it slowly adds new grammar on top of what I already know so that I have time to get really familiar with the old stuff and can just focus on learning a handful of new grammar points at any one time. Then I don’t have to worry so much about not fully understanding some grammar in my reading, because I know I’ll get to it eventually in my textbook, so I can just try my best with my knowledge at the moment.

Thank you!! The continued support means a lot! :heart:

Thank you! I’m so glad to hear that the pro-wrestling guide is helpful! I put a lot of time into it trying to create the resource I wish I’d had, so I’m glad it’s helpful to others!

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happy cake day! you’re so inspiring! :cake: :sparkles:

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I am planing to get to novels this year, but I suspect I’ll spend too much time figuring out more complex sentences to try intensively reading. :joy:

Early on, I found intensive reading necessary I guess to understand anything, but now I feel like it is so hard to squeeze that last bit of nuance out, that I usually don’t bother. Also, I’ve realized I tend to be confused now mostly when stuff is kinda wispy anyway (in manga), so while I know I could grasp things a bit better, it won’t be as good as I wish it could become.

Maybe when I stop filling my reading time with book clubs all the time, I can get back to some easier (vocabulary wise) stuff, so I can focus on squeezing that last bit of grammar knowledge out of it. I feel like that is kinda where I fall now. But it still takes a very different mindset.

Like, maybe, get back to Zenitendou that was just a bit difficult for me last year, and the difficulty mostly lay with the grammar and nuances that I hadn’t been able to grasp when I was learning the basics of those grammar points.

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Haha, yeah, unfortunately, for me the main thing that has really helped with understanding that nuance is more directed grammar study like working through a textbook :sweat_smile:. I’ve started to see loads of gains recently just from spending time with the proper grammar explanations in Tobira with lots of examples that are understandable at my level, and then immediately seeing those same structures in my wrestling translations, and suddenly they’re way easier to understand than they were before, even when I felt like I had enough of an idea to at least get the gist of it. There’s a lot of “this has this specific sort of feel to it” nuance that I miss from just using Yomichan to look a lot of stuff up.

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Happy (belated) cake day, @fallynleaf !

Your post wrapping up your progress after 2 years is great and inspiring – you have made a lot of progress in one year (I read your first-year wrap up too), especially in the writing aspect. Congrats! :smiley:

While it may be too early, I’m already looking forward to your next assessment next year (no pressure for your studying until then, though!). It’s just so satisfying to see one’s hard work pay off and I hope you can continue to strive and reach the point you’d like to be at when it comes to Japanese proficiency.

頑張れ!

Apropos: just noticed that this overview post has excellent timing and could end up being doubly useful if you decide to repurpose some of the things in there to use it for your soon to be made level 60 post. :wink:

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Thank you! And I am planning on writing an update next year :blush:! I think a lot of the time it can be hard to see our progress in the moment, but year by year, you’ll see a lot of growth, so doing these types of reflections can give you a lot of confidence in your learning (and help inspire others in the process!) by proving that you are actually getting somewhere with all of this.

I especially enjoyed looking back through my “what I can do” list from last year and realizing how much further I’ve come. I’m definitely going to try to keep doing those for as long as I can because I feel like it helps contextualize my progress both for myself and for other folks. If I do manage to make it to an advanced level with Japanese, I’ll look back on all of these posts and compile which resources were most useful to me at each stage. Maybe if I ever manage to burn all of the WK items, that would be a good time for that post…

You discovered my secret plan :scream:. The benefit of keeping a study log is you can repurpose your own writing over and over again and only bore your handful of regular readers. It’ll be new to everyone else :wink:.

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Well, kinda the reason I came up with the crazy cover to cover dictionary read honestly. To get review of that stuff now that my grasp of the basics is pretty solid. I don’t know if it’ll work, but I decided with so much interest it couldn’t hurt to try. ^^

What I find with textbooks is just that there are too few examples in continuous text. Where you can put it in context and where the usual parts are skipped, so you get used to seeing it more realistically. Example sentences by their very nature have to include the context or be bad example sentences; and also can often feel contrived. So if there was a textbook that mainly focused on a lot of texts with grammar explanations, maybe having a 50/50 split, and where each grammar was shown off more than once in the reading section… Well, I would seriously consider that. I don’t know if that would work, but I know the typical format hasn’t worked well for me in the past, so… :woman_shrugging:

Also, maybe I haven’t had time for enough immersion while doing grammar studies before, so maybe if I study just a small bit while also immersing (a lot) so I see the grammar used naturally more while studying… Something like that, maybe.

Otherwise, I do know that things will get clearly very slowly over huge amounts of consumption, lol. Maybe not in a way I can explain it, but it certainly worked for me in English, so… :3

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A happy belated WaniKanniversary - keeping at it for so long is an achievement, and I hope you continue to provide your (very) comprehensive posts in this log for some time to come

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Thank you for the continued support! You’re one of the few people who started around when I did who managed to stick it out all the way to level 60, so I’m glad to see you still sticking around!

I worry all the time that my posts are too long or too full of information that doesn’t matter to a single other person here, haha, so I’m very glad that they’re appreciated!

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First off, thank you for posting this log, I love organization and when I discovered you using such a organized study log of Japanese apart from your enthusiasm… I just couldn’t anything but see you as a godsend (some kinf of guidance for my own Japanese study). I started rather recently but I just learned Kana (in a very different way than yours, though), but well, enough talking about me. Could you tell me how did you do this whole “add audio to each MNN vocab card” exactly? Like, the resource you grab these audios from, and some tutorial to add them? Thank you so much.

(PD: I’m Spanish and although I’ve read just up to this point, your commitment to the language learning seems insanely amazing, again, thanks).

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Thank you so much for your comment! That really made my day! I’m so glad this log has been so useful to you! :pleading_face:

Wow, you are very brave for reading this log from the start (prepare to learn more about pro wrestling than you probably ever want to know… :sweat_smile:)! I’d recommend taking my recommendations with a grain of salt, haha, since I’m sure my path is far from the most efficient one! It has worked out really well for me, though. I can say that.

I do highly recommend creating your own study log if you love organization! I truly wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t have mine, I think.

The easiest way to add audio to a preexisting Anki deck is by using the Forvo pronunciation downloader addon. There’s also the Yomichan Forvo Server addon which lets Yomichan pull from Forvo audio if it doesn’t have audio for a word.

If you have further Anki questions, I can try my best to help troubleshoot, but I’ve been tinkering with it so much over the past few years, I’ve forgotten a lot of what I’ve done with it to get to the point where I’m at now, haha :sweat_smile:. My one year overview and my two years overview have the most complete lists of my current setup/tools.

I’m so jealous of you for already being bilingual! That’s super, super cool!

I’ve found that my love of language learning has only grown over time. When I started this log, I had no idea that I’d get as far as I have with either Spanish or Japanese! The WaniKani community is a really friendly and encouraging place, and it has got me to try so many things!

Good luck on your own journey, and I hope you stick around!

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thanks, I’ll try those add-ons out. If I stick around (which is very likely) don’t get surprised if I contact you again in search of your Anki layout (very neat and appealing). :v:t2:

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hmmm

Screenshot 2023-03-26 12.22.54 PM
Screenshot 2023-03-26 12.21.52 PM

I’m looking forward to the update:) As I’ve probably said before I get a lot of motivation from following your progress with your languages(: Of people here on the forums who inspire me you’re sharing the first place with Daisoujou, so thank you for sharing your journey and for teaching me about pro wrestling :bowing_man:

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Made it to level 58!

As Beyond_Sleepy pointed out, I’m actually technically running a bit late with this update, whoops :sweat_smile:! My brother is currently visiting, so whatever spare time I have has been going mostly into my translations (besides the usual daily SRS workload), which has caused me to fall a bit behind on nonessential stuff, like updating this log. I spent the usual fourteen days on the past level, though I honestly sort of intentionally delayed it by a day by not trying very hard on the last kanji I needed to level…

This is going to be the Grand Princess edition of my study log, sorry in advance!

I wrote an essay on Yuka Sakazaki and Mizuki’s story going into their match at TJPW Grand Princess ‘23 on March 18. I’m really proud of it because it weaves together lots of different pieces from 2020 through now. I tried to write it to be pretty accessible, even to people who haven’t been following these characters. The translations cited at the start of it are Mr. Haku’s, but the rest of them are all mine. It’s such a strange experience citing my own translations, but I’m so glad that I did it because the reception to the essay has been incredibly positive. And not a single show preview written by other people actually covered the actual story going into the match, because most of the fans haven’t been following anything the wrestlers have actually been saying…

This kind of heavily story-focused essay is my favorite kind of wrestling writing (it’s quite literally the thing that got me hooked on pro wrestling in the first place), but it tends to be unpopular among the fandom at large, so I really wasn’t sure how it would be received. It’s especially uncommon for people to write this kind of thing for women’s wrestling. Funnily enough, Yuka and Mizuki got me so invested in 2020, they got me to write the first show full show preview I ever wrote, haha, for Wrestle Princess 2020. So I guess it’s no surprise that the sequel to that match got me to write something, too…

Grand Princess was so good, and so affirming :sob:. Yuka vs Mizuki in particular was just spectacular. Being able to follow that story from 2020 all the way to now has been SO rewarding. That’s what it’s all about! That’s what I’m here for! That’s why I’m doing all this! Despite all the stress and the hard work of doing the translations, seeing it all come together like that in my essay, and then seeing the story play out onscreen like that, it makes all of those translations and the time I’ve put into learning Japanese totally worth it.

I realized that the timeline of that feud lines up just about perfectly with my Japanese language journey. I technically started learning Japanese on September 29, 2020, though I basically just learned hiragana and katakana and then stopped there until I signed up for WaniKani in December (and even then, I didn’t start learning grammar until I got actually serious about Japanese in March 2021). So I started right in the middle of the original Yuka vs Mizuki drama, not knowing at the time, of course, that I’d ultimately have to be the one to finish Mr. Haku’s work with translating that story.

Part of why I picked up the translations after 2021 in the first place was because I couldn’t let go of Yuka and Mizuki in particular. I refused to give up on those characters and those stories, and the story they gave us was just so good :sob:.

I’m so glad that I was able to keep following it, and that I was able to help so many other people follow it, too. That kind of story, that’s what pro wrestling is all about. The power of love :pleading_face:.

feelstana

Something that was unbelievably cool to me is that a total stranger wrote an essay that’s a queer reading of the Yuka vs Mizuki match (it will go under a paywall on that newsletter eventually, but it’s free to read for now. I’m hoping the author will crosspost it elsewhere), drawing heavily from my translations and my own essay :pleading_face:! I don’t fully agree with their interpretation of the match, but I’m so touched and delighted that someone is using my translations to do queer readings of wrestling stories! That’s, like, the bread and butter of my own pro wrestling fandom, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped would come out of my translations.

I have a lot of thoughts on the Yuka vs Mizuki match and the show as a whole that aren’t super relevant to this study log, haha, but I wrote a lot more about it in my 2023 wrestling journal! March is shaping up to be an incredibly busy month for wrestling, so I’m trying to get my journal as caught up as possible before mania weekend… So far it’s still missing Kenny Omega vs El Hijo del Vikingo, though if you check back in a few days, hopefully it’ll be all caught up!

My burned item count as of the beginning of this level: 5683 (and 4185 on KW!)

Fun encounters with Japanese outside of WaniKani:

A couple days after I wrote my essay, the 2023/3/29 (No. 2235) issue of shupro came out, which featured an interview with Yuka and Mizuki. I tried to use Mokuro (see the new resources section below) to read it, but didn’t have much success, so I ended up just attempting to skim it on my own. I was able to get surprisingly a lot from it! I almost jumped out of my chair in excitement when I confirmed that it was specifically that one line of Mizuki’s from 2020 (“Even though I like her so so so much, I’m going to hate her so that I can surpass her.”) that Yuka had fixated on, which made her so afraid to fight Mizuki now. My essay was right! I also fixated on that line, to the point of writing a 30k word novella about it, so I absolutely get where Yuka is coming from, here.

Then the TJPW twitter shared a pair of interviews with Yuka and Mizuki, and I totally got drawn in by their clickbait haha. What’s this about Mizuki’s “相手は彼氏のようなタッグパートナー”? :sweat_smile:. I had the help of DeepL and Yomichan to navigate these, since the text is all digital. I was like “wow these are some great interviews” and then I scrolled up, and sure enough, they’re the work of Mugiko Ozaki, who is my favorite wrestling interviewer. She always does such wonderful interviews with joshi wrestlers, and she’s really respectful of fan labor as well. One of my friends has translated some of her articles, and Ozaki helped my friend actually get paid for her work and got her translation published on the official website.

It occurred to me, “hey, I have a public twitter account now. I can thank Ozaki for her work!” So I composed a brief reply to her in Japanese, telling her how much I enjoy her interviews. Her English is actually pretty decent, and she’s working on studying it even more, but I wanted to try reaching out in Japanese, haha.

I also translated all the match posters for Grand Princess, in lieu of writing a full show preview, I guess. The thread of them all is here. I really enjoy TJPW’s poster design, but don’t normally bother to translate the text on them because they’re often really tricky to translate. Not in the sense that I have trouble with the Japanese meaning, but it’s hard to convey it in English without it sounding clunky.

I learned when I saw this poster that 熊猫(くまねこ) is another word for panda, which made the team of Haruna Neko & Andreza Giant Panda make a lot more sense haha, because it’s actually a pun! 猫熊猫

The hardest poster to translate was the cover of the official program: “どこまでもいこう。” I tried several different variations at first, but wasn’t really happy with any of them:

Let’s go as far as we can.
Let’s go however far it takes.
Let’s go to the ends of the earth.

Then one of my friends suggested this one, which I was quite taken with: “Let’s go on a journey, no matter how far it takes us.” I ended up going with that because I thought it conveyed the feel and the intent of that line the best.

Grand Princess had several video packages in the show. The one at the very beginning of the show had a couple lines onscreen with Yuka and Mizuki, and while watching it, I thought it said “Because I love you, I can’t lose”, and it almost made me cry right then and there. I went back to check after watching the show, and sure enough, I read it right :sob:! Really, that set the tone for the entire show.

Aja Kong posted this adorable photo of herself with Andreza after the show. It’s a パンダ with a 客寄せパンダ (context: see the translator’s note here)! Despite being backstage with him, she still paid the 1,000 yen price for the portrait.

I had a fortuitous moment when 浮気 came up for burn review right after I saw the word in the replies to some of Raku and Ram Kaichow’s tweets after their match, haha. I think I mentioned this last year when it happened, but Raku and Ram got married during the entrance of their match at the first Grand Princess last year, then roleplayed on twitter as a married couple for a while. This year, they were placed on opposite teams, which naturally became a plot point during the match. In any case, I successfully passed my review and burned that vocab item, haha!

上級へのとびら – Chapter 3

This chapter showed its age a little bit when it introduced 読解補助ツールs, and neither of the websites it provided worked for me, haha. Not that I really need them, since Yomichan does a much better job anyway. I guess Yomichan had probably just come out when Tobira was released, now that I think about it. And now Yomichan itself is getting phased out…

Here’s a sentence I came up with for one of the exercises. It started me off with “この論文は” and this was the first thing I came up with since I’d just had a conversation with a friend about this very thing, haha:

この論文はファンフィクションと同じぐらい文字数がありますが、言葉はもっと書きにくいですよ!

I actually technically haven’t quite finished this chapter yet. I’m on the very last couple of exercises in the workbook, but didn’t quite have the time to do them.

Reading/Listening:

Spanish: (listening: Bob Esponja)

I just finished season two of Bob Esponja! I don’t think I really have anything else of particular importance to report here?

Still haven’t missed a day of listening with either Japanese or Spanish. The listen every day challenge will be wrapping up in a few days, and then I’ll be focusing on reading again!

I actually managed to finally start Read Real Japanese Fiction! At first, I thought I’d try to get the most out of the book by listening to the story and reading along on my first pass through it, then reading with just the parallel text translations, and then reading it a third time and referencing the more in-depth notes in the back, but truthfully the translation notes are the most interesting part of the book to me, so I ended up just diving in and reading it incredibly intensively, referencing all of the notes and translations as I was reading. I got several pages through the first story, then ran out of time to read and had to stop for now.

I finished a lot of TJPW translations!

2023.03.04 TJPW CITY CIRCUIT WINTER~横浜公演~ — (4 words added)
2023.03.06 TJPW The Night Before GRAND PRINCESS ’23 — (5 words added)
2023.03.18 TJPW GRAND PRINCESS ’23 (part 2, part 3, part 4) — (45 words added + 3 kanji)

As you can see, Grand Princess was, uh, a lot! It was over 10,000 characters, and I translated it in about a week, which is easily my record so far. It’s my longest single translation yet. It took about 17 hours and 45 minutes total to finish.

As far as the new kanji go, I added from the word (そろ)う, meaning “to be complete; to be all present; to gather; to assemble; to be collected​” (the kanji pretty much shares that meaning). It’s actually the same verb that was in the senryu I translated last update, though it was just written with kana there!

I also finally added from Mahiro Kiryu’s name, 桐生真弥, and from Kaya Toribami’s name, 鳥喰かや.

I have a press conference and two small shows left to do, and I’m going to try my best to finish them before TJPW’s America show on March 31!! :triumph:

New resources:

Thanks to this thread, I decided to try using Mokuro to see if I could use it for reading shupro articles! It was quite the pain to install it, but I did eventually get it figured out (it helps to have the right version of Python…), and I successfully got it to give me HTML files of OCR’d shupro pages that I could read in a browser with Yomichan. However, it wasn’t very good at figuring out if the magazine text was vertical or horizontal (maybe the lines were packed too closely together?), so large chunks of the article were unreadable because it parsed the text as if it were read horizontally.

When it worked, though, it was great! Alas, it could not always be like this…

I ended up giving up on it and just skimming the article in the regular reader, which honestly went pretty well. My wrestling vocab is pretty decent, which helps a whole lot. I think once I finish Tobira, I’ll probably be able to read shupro fairly easily without needing to do too many lookups, rendering tools like this unnecessary.

I’ll probably still try Mokuro out for manga at some point, just to speed up that reading process a little. The main thing I was angling for was a tool that would make it easier to pull the entire context sentence with the word when adding words to Anki so that I don’t have to retype the whole thing. I’m still not mining words from manga, though, so that’s a nonissue at this time.

I did very briefly test it with 女装してめんどくさい事になってるネクラとヤンキーの両片想い 3, after discovering this bit of code from ChristopherFritz which will screencap your BookWalker manga for you. I was successfully able to combine this with Mokuro to get an html file of my manga that could be opened in a browser, and which I could then use Yomichan on! It seemed to do a pretty good job recognizing the text, at least on the pages I tested. I caught a lot of mistakes in the front matter, which used some heavily stylized fonts, but the actual body text seemed good. This should speed up the reading process considerably!

The other thing I tried out was Language Reactor, finally! I started watching the last season of Aggretsuko, and I thought that might be a good time to try it out. It’s pretty handy!

Hey, I know that word!

I’m still trying to figure out how exactly to get the best use out of it. Since taking the above screenshot, I turned off the furigana (I like it way better that way) and also attempted to mark all of my known words. I know a much larger percentage of the words used each episode than I expected! Unfortunately, I have Yomichan installed on firefox, and Language Reactor is on chrome only, so I couldn’t test how they combined (if at all). I’m regretting not trying it out a little earlier for Spanish, because I think it could’ve really boosted my learning from those shows. But I’m also unsure how easy it is to switch back and forth between languages…

I found a website with Tobira study resources. However, I’m not very enthused with how they approach the workbook exercises. They give an English translation of the sample answer for the exercise that’s provided in the back of the book, and you’re supposed to put that into Japanese. It feels very, well, Duolingo, for lack of a better way to put it. It’s definitely harder to come up with your own answers for the exercises, and without having the benefit of a teacher to check your work, it can be hard to identify your own mistakes, but I think you benefit way more from the exercises if you attempt to produce Japanese without such heavy prompting. So I really prefer using the actual workbook because I think it’s much more robust production practice as well as reading practice.

Also, this isn’t exactly a new resource, but WaniKani is undergoing some major changes that are about to break most scripts. So I’m fully expecting a bunch of my scripts to start malfunctioning when the change goes through during the week of March 27. Several script creators are planning on updating their scripts, so hopefully the major scripts will still work, but I’m a bit pessimistic about it. If I lose lesson filter, I’ll have to totally change how I approach WK lessons… I guess check back in a couple weeks to see if my strategy for WK even still works? :sweat_smile:

Next steps:

I’m actually going to be taking a very rare sort-of break over the next week! I’m keeping up with WK/KW/Anki, and the translations and the listen every day challenge, but I’ll be putting Tobira aside for a bit because my brother is visiting, and I don’t want to spend that time with my head in a textbook, haha. It’s bad enough that I’ve been putting in a few hours of work on my translations every single night after he goes to bed :sweat_smile:.

He’s leaving right before WrestleMania weekend starts, so I’ll go from being busy for social reasons to being busy for the opposite reason, because I’ll basically be locking myself in my room to watch a billion wrestling shows :sweat_smile:.

I can’t remember if I explained mania week before (I don’t think it was really relevant for me until this year, honestly…), but it’s America’s equivalent of January 4, イッテンヨン week in Japan, basically. WWE has their biggest show of the year, and for whatever reason, there’s a whole tradition of a bunch of other companies also having shows around that same time, so wrestling fans will travel to that city to see a bunch of indie shows, and it has really turned into an entire event.

I don’t watch WWE at all, so the main shows I’m interested in watching are TJPW’s and DDT’s, plus obviously Kota Ibushi’s matches. It’ll be TJPW’s first time doing a show in America, and many of the wrestlers are traveling to the U.S. for the first time! I’m trying my absolute hardest to get caught up on all of the translations before then because there’s a strong chance that some of my translation account’s followers will be at that show.

Also, the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar book club just started, so I’ll be fitting that around everything else! Might get a tiny bit of a late start, but should be able to catch up soon!

Onward to level 59! 行くぞ!

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My crazy club gets mentioned! Woop woop! xD

Man, I’m so glad I don’t have to worry too much about this. The only script that is important to me is double check, and I can wait a little while if it isn’t working on day one of the switch over. I would have been very sad to lose lesson filter while doing lessons since I used it a lot to manage workload (until I went full speed, then it mostly helped at level up to get to radical/kanji lessons).

I’ll cross my fingers scripts works well for you after the update. I know I will be checking out my script manager’s dashboard and triggering updates every so often until all my scripts work again (hopefully they all will).

This sounds really cool. From reading your updates, I’ve realized that following wrestling stories is more than just watching the shows/matches, so it sounds incredibly useful to have people write these kinds of essays.

I don’t have an interest in wrestling myself, but I love reading about your passion for it and the good things you are adding to that community. And sounds amazing to have the community responding and referencing your work to also add more value.

I wish I could borrow some of that passionate spirit of yours to spend more time on my own passions. Or maybe not borrow it, because I want you to still have it all, but you know what I mean. :blush:

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:blush:

Despite the WK overlap I think we’re both drawn to very different approaches too, but it seems to be working out for both of us.

Anyway while I’m here nice job fallynleaf; you’re so close to the end! And I definitely agree – I think I’m always going to be an outsider to the wrestling world, but it’s really cool when people are super passionate about something.

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