If people didn’t judge books by their cover then there’d be a ton of artists twiddling their thumbs
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Definitely true, but I’m not choosing books by how beautiful a cover is. I mean, beautiful or unique covers do catch my eye of course, but what I’m trying do to is try and understand what the cover is telling me. You can usually tell if a book is romantic, funny, scary, a mystery or horror or historical fiction or whatever, just by glancing at its cover. However, it seems that cover language is different in different countries, and I’m still not very good at interpreting Japanese covers. So many covers look like a scene from an anime, for example. Does it mean that the book is fantasy? For a younger audience? Or do the Japanese just really like this style for everything?
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Thanks, very interesting video!
A pretty crazy (and of course totally unrelated) detail for me was 硝子 (ガラス) 
- didn’t know at all there is a way of writing this in kanji 
plus it means “child of the nitrate” which is crazy, weird and fitting, as is so often 
By the way did you catch the horror books (especially one where he said it’s really really horror) he presented?
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I did, they were among the ones I noted down
I’m more intrigued by his top 1 though. From the cover I would dismiss it as a YA book, but from the description and reviews it seems it’s not? Those cover designs still perplex me a lot after more than a year of reading.
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My impression is that usually means “this is a light novel” – eyeballing my booklog shelf, the anime-style covers are pretty much all LNs, and the non-LNs are different styles.
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Jan 5, Thu of Week 2 of Winter Q1 2023 
Today I listened to 君の膵臓をたべたい Ch.2 [2/2]. There might be some drama, but still in evaluation period whether I like the story.
Then, So-matome N3 Listening Ch.1 [3/5] about Keigo. I manage to get it correct at 8/10. Explanation is just on the paired page, or by listening carefully in addition to seeing answer keys.
Then, half an episode of 緊急取調室 EP.5. I avoided opening transcript side-panel, but Language Reactor is helpful to make Netflix pause without resting screen (as well as rewinding from next chapter preview and credits).
Then, I listened to JP-CN podcast on Podbean, about horoscopy. It’s a little puzzling when I look up Kanji forms.
- うさぎ年 (this year) => 卯年
- ねずみ年 => 子年
- へび年 (somehow IME doesn’t suggest) => 巳年
- 辰年 => This one is just as expected. Dragon = 龍 (りゅう / たつ; also 竜).
There are also other unspoken ones, like 午年 (the year I think I am born in), and 戌年.
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Mmm, one of the more common of the kanji-for-loanwords words. Reminded me of 硝子のハンマー, which is a pretty good locked-room mystery by the author of 新世界より.
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Sorry of the off-topic, I should probably make a different thread, but would you say that this is a light novel then?
. 
I immediately thought “light novel” and “romance”, but judging from the blurb and reviews it’s probably none of those things…
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Interesting, never seen it until now.
In the video it also appeared in the title of a book: 硝子の塔のなんとか
Yep, exactly my impression. I guess we need you to read them now, in order to find out
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Mmm, that’s not quite the ‘light novel’ style of anime art but it’s still kinda anime-ish. Maybe they just wanted to stand out a bit in the bookshops compared to other stuff with more ‘sober’ covers? Or the author liked the cover art for a previous book and wanted the same artist again, or some other random reason. 
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The only true way to know for sure 
Good points, random reasons like that need to also be taken into account.
I made a separate thread on the matter so as to stop being so off-topic here.
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Well, “common” is relative 
Other than the odd book title, I think it can show up in fantasy settings where the author wants to downplay the modern feeling that ガラス might give – jpdb lists 400 books with 硝子, including Spice & Wolf; and of course it’s more likely in older texts. I think it’s usually furiganaed when I’ve seen it.
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Day 3 of Japanese horror movies!
Last night’s watching was: 着信アリ or “One Missed Call” as the English title. I think this is probably one of the few instances were I think the English title is better, it sounds more foreboding. I’ve heard of this one but never seen it, think I saw the American remake but I hardly remember anything about it, so it was probably like most American remakes of movies - the original is way, way better.
This one was like リング but jacked up on caffeine, instead of a seven day period from curse exposure to death, this one is two, and you get to know the exact date and time as well as your last words. Fun premise, and the movie does make good use of the knowing that you know this but then subverting your expectations.
Definitely the one with the most creepy scenes so far (there was some very cool creepy scenes) and the most violent. I enjoyed this one, it felt a bit more slasher/movie monster-esque and not quite as ‘serious’, but still fun to watch. I have to say I do love this era of Japanese media, the late 90s to early 00s had some really cool horror films and games (and many other medias outside the genre).
The main lead was good too, she felt pretty genuine plus she spoke clearly which my ears very much appreciated. No grumpy ex-husband man in this one since mostly everyone is a uni student, but there was an older guy who acted as the lead’s support character and thankfully he didn’t mumble and talked pretty clear too.
It got pretty whacky near the end though, as each section of the film tried to outdo the previous. It was plot twist after plot twist so it felt like an over encumbered , lopsided plot twist sandwich, but it was still fun to watch if you didn’t think too much and about how things didn’t make much sense anymore.
I feel like I’ve been talking more about how I’ve enjoyed these films so far rather than how much they’ve been helping me listen to Japanese 
I think this is really good listening practice though. Before when I tried to watch things with the sole purpose of learning from listening it felt like I was having a hard time and not really learning much, because I was so focused on trying to learn. I feel since I’m distracted by enjoying the film I’m not concentrating on listening to every word so it goes in and I understand it better.
this feels like I’m just trying to convince myself that I should just watch more movies 
I think this has been the easiest one to understand so far, everyone spoke pretty clear, there was just the one hip cool dude character guy who used a lot of lingo that I didn’t understand.
When you can understand the mumbly guys I’m pretty sure you can say with full confidence that you perfectly understand Japanese.
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Day 5, 5th of January
Decided to re-listen to the Teppei episode (#5) that was a bit confusing before. Went a bit better today, it seems I got confused by him trying to explain something by using different ways to describe it. Still had to use the pause function along with re-listening to passages liberally to understand some things.
Topic was Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. He talked about how Hiragana and Katakana were pretty okay, but Kanji was difficult (using different ways to say “something is difficult”). But for a person that knows Chinese, Kanji would be very easy and that’s something one could be jealous of.
It’s really neat to see how much information I can actually get out of these episodes. Last challenge I was very frustrated all the time and even wanted to not join the listening challenge again, but I’m glad I stuck with it. Even something small like this feels like I’ve overcome a huge mountain.
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original post LINK
オススメの動画 
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Lemon / 米津玄師【日本の歌で日本語を勉強しよう #01】LINK
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【神奈川Vlog】江の島／Kanagawa Enoshima Vlog in Japan LINK
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【日本語会話】特別な気持ちで使い分けよう！「〜とか〜とか」の代わりの3つの表現 LINK
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5 TIPS TO FLUENT JAPANESE | By a teacher / language leaner LINK
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Speak Japanese FLUENTLY after how long? LINK
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Walk around and learn Kanji !! (Kobe) LINK
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Why you can’t understand JAPANESE NATIVE SPEAKERS LINK
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NO KATAKANA BATTLE with YUYU (You will learn lots of VOCAB) LINK
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【Japanese listening】Japanese weird superstition LINK
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Japanese Religion Shintoism / How to visit Shrine LINK
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Life lessons I learned from Sakura. LINK
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Listening in Japanese | Travel around Mt.Fuji !! LINK
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日本の生活で気をつけたほうがいいこと LINK
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【日本語会話】日本人ならこう言う #2 〇〇が好きです → ??? LINK
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Pregnancy/ Early child education with みっちーさん♡ LINK
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【東京Vlog】秋葉原 ／ Akihabara in Japan LINK
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11 ways to say “Thank you” in Japanese | " I’m grateful"/ “I appreciate it” in Japanese LINK
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【JLPT N3文法】ないで / なくて / ずに の用法 LINK
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どうして「ば か」は馬と鹿って書くの？ LINK
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【日本語の単語】運転するときに使う日本語 LINK
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京都駅Vlog／Kyoto station vlog LINK
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@ nihongonomori2013 ゆか先生にインタビュー【日本語の聴解】 LINK
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【日本語の聴解】日本の塾について LINK
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【日本語会話】「世話」と「面倒」を間違って使っていませんか？ LINK
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【JLPT直前対策！】1時間でJLPT N2文法 LINK
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WHY Japanese DON’T SAY “NO” and my opinion about harmony LINK
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(updated if I stumble upon something interesting
)
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Day 4 & 5 - Just an episode of Sakura tips each day while on the bus, since I had less time the last two days… but still managed to squeeze in some anime since the new season is starting…
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January 5th!
Today is my birthday so we went to a Cat Cafe, and listened to Japanese music on the way there are back (~2h total)
When I got home I decided to make an origami cat since it seemed like a fitting thing to make today. It went pretty well other than I misunderstood something right at the start and started with the paper facing the wrong way, so I now have a white cat instead of an orange one.
I also watched the top 30 novels of 2022 video that @omk3 linked in a previous post - honestly, I didn’t understand a huge amount, but I caught bits of it and noted down a few of the book titles to look up later. One was described as something like ‘Its a mystery the first time you read it, but a horror the second time you read it’ and that sounded intriguing. (Disclaimer: Thats what I THINK he said ) I love when you reread a book knowing the ending and you get to see all the clues you missed the first time
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硝子の塔の殺人 was one of my best reads of 2022. It’s basically an ode to mystery novels. I adored it.
I used to agree with that but feel like I’ve run into enough exceptions I don’t trust it anymore. This one is the first example to come to mind:
I think the style may just be in vogue right now for book covers
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Today I tried to watch 2 episodes of ばなにゃ:
From the first episode (except the 10 seconds in the beginning, I guess…) this seemed rather understandable, but sadly the second episode was a fair bit harder from the vocab perspective. I didn’t get much there, and I couldn’t find Japanese subtitles. Guess I’ll have to try that again some other time.
Off-Topic
What’s the timestamp/title of that book? That does sound intriguing, especially because I have no idea how that would work.
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So youtube handily suggested me an interview with the author of the new Impulsive Reading Pick (チュベローズで待ってる AGE22 🌺 - Informal Reading Group) and it was a blast. I haven’t laughed so much watching a celebrity interview in Japanese before, usually they feel rather stale to me. The book shop lady’s comment at the end especially killed me 
Also, @valkow, I know you’ve mentioned having a lot going on in your life, so no pressure, but I recall you follow Johnny’s and the book in the club above is written by a Johnny’s member (加藤シゲアキ)
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