Hi everyone! I’m Mara, and I’ve had a study log on Natively for about a year and a half or two years now. However, I’ve started following (/lurking) more and more study logs here on WK, and I’d really like to join in this fun and vibrant study log community! So here I am.
Why “Unscheduled”?
Because 1) I thrive on chaos, 2) the world around me has (amazingly) become even more stressful than it was even during the height of covid. So I’m trying to be kind to myself and embrace learning Japanese as the nourishing and ever-changing journey that it is, rather than trying to strive towards my goals under some kind of arbitrary time pressure.
Speaking of goals, what are they?
My primary goal is to read novels and manga. Just reading is good enough, but of course I also would love to read more fluently and with more ease. I also try to work on listening, speaking, and writing (in that order) and while I see them as complementary skills they are also definitely secondary priorities.
Why a “learning” log and not a Japanese log?
Because you all are great and interested in more than just Japanese stats! I love reading about all of you all’s journeys in things like music and life as well.
I’m sure I’ll add more here later, like links to my Harta issue reviews or my Natively bingo board, but for now I’ll wrap it up.
Love that summary! Definitely, life’s journeys are far better when treasured rather than measured. May you have pleasurable and treasurable entropy at comfortably irregular intervals.
I’m back! After a month or so of bureaucracy from hell, then a week of travel, then a week of intense work stress, this is my first week where I’m starting to get back to normal again. My room is in an absolute state still, but I’m caught up on kanji reviews and that’s what really matters, right?
Kanji
turned writing reviews back on
started adding new kanji again
restarted kanji writing practice with 都道府県のおはなし
Reading
narrowed down my currently reading stack
paused 神様
starting to catch up on ひとりぼっちの〇〇生活
restarted daily 日本の歴史マンガ reading
continuing nightly 舞妓さんちのまかないさん reading because that’s just what I read at night to feel cozy and ready for bed
Exercise
restarted stationary cycling exercise
biked to work and back one day this week
nearly expired on that one last steep hill before my house, so plenty of room for improvement lol
Music
went to the learning session after work this week!
locked in new slip jig “Elizabeth Kelly’s Delight” by practicing with recording (fast!)
Buddhism
working my way through Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
not as good at daily practice this week as last week, but then, I haven’t needed it as badly this week either
Wow, now that I’m writing it down … that seems like kind of a lot! And I was considering adding Spanish reading too. Maybe I’ll hold on that and just see how this weekend and next week go.
Oh, but there’s one more exciting update! After long and careful consideration I have finally invested in a large color e-ink tablet. It’s still shipping, but I’m very excited for 1) reading Harta more frequently and more comfortably without having to find storage space for physical volumes, 2) enjoying a wider variety of book clubs without feeling pressure to make large book orders and thereby grow my physical tsundoku shelves, 3) enthusiastically taking part in speed run clubs when bookwalker offers limited time free editions! 4) Just generally having more flexibility with regards to reading material. Of course physical/paper will always have my heart, but digital has many advantages, particularly for those who are prone to collecting a very large volume of books and then running out of space. えへへ
Just finished week one of 図書室の怪談 on the new tablet! While I primarily want to read manga on it (which is why I got gigantor size) I also want to be able to read novels. Took a minute to get the fonts displaying correctly (ended up having to change the device language to Japanese before it would work) but now that I’ve got it up and running it’s pretty smooth!
It definitely feels different to read a novel digitally. I feel disoriented within the text, in the sense that I can’t tell how far through I am. I don’t know if other people get this but that kind of makes me feel fidgety/overwhelmed? But on the other hand, it can kind of put you in more of a flow state if you’re not aware of “where you are” at all times … Something to get used to, but for the sake of going on reading flights of fancy I think it’s gonna be totally worth it.
Also,
Forgot to say thank you for this in my last update! I appreciate it.
The study log entry you’ve all been waiting for … Tsundoku score update!
Last time I updated on Natively I was at 18 points, but with an undetermined and unpaid debt on account of buying new books during tariff panic. Since then I …
I think each of these books are worth one point, bringing me up to 13 points!
I just had to quote this from over on Natively. 1) That sounds like a great game and I want to learn. 2) Yes, this is what I strive for with my tsundoku game. Life is just too complex to fit into a simple set of rules!
reply zone
I got a Boox Tab C, and read with bookwalker. I don’t really do lookups on the device as I have a dictionary on my phone that I prefer to use. The screen is almost embarrasingly large which can be a little awkward for prose (I ended up enlarging the font size and then placing the screen further away so it didn’t feel as gigantic ) but it’s perfect for manga! I don’t like the feeling of the art being cramped onto a tiny screen that I get with other devices, but this one is basically the size of a large-ish manga when held open, so it’s great.
Thank you! I will try to remember to share more about it.
It looks from your Natively profile like you’ve only read the first volume, right? I found the dialect definitely challenging for the first 2 or 3 volumes, but after that it reduced to basically zero challenge. Eeeevery once in a while a character will say something that I’m not super confident about, but other than that it’s as easy as standard dialect! Just saying this to encourage you. Once you get used to it this manga hardly ever throws any language curveballs.
I’m reading on an e-ink tablet too
Hmmm… while I don’t quite feel that way while reading, it is annoying when you want to look back on something a while after you’ve moved on from that text (like… dozens of pages later).
With a printed book it’s easier to roughly approximate where something was (okay, you’ll still have some page fidgeting to do until you locate it), with digital, to me at least, it’s nearly impossible to recall the corresponding percentage or character count
And, while yes you have the percentage count to help with a sense of progress, it’s never quite the same as it is with feeling in hand the pages shift from the unread pile to the read one
How did I miss your WK study log for this long?! Yay, super excited to read all of your updates over here! I’ve set your log to watching now so I won’t miss it again.
Not gonna lie, despite having so many e-readers, I’m really jealous of a color one.. I’m finally getting to the point where I don’t have to Mokuro everything to read it, but even my largest e-reader is a bit small for manga… I have a December birthday so I’m thinking about a color one for my Christmas/birthday present to myself keep us posted on how you’re liking it in the next few months.
Yeah I miss having the physical sensation of moving through the book when I read digitally. I do use the device dictionaries though, so for me the near instant lookups are worth losing that.
Kindle also calculates your time to the end of the chapter based on your reading speed, and while it’s not perfect, it’s actually a really good motivator for me compared to physical books (except when I’m reading a LN and there’s 2.5 hours left in a chapter and then it isn’t ). I wonder if there’s a similar feature on yours.
I’m always the same, switching between whichever of time to end of chapter, total percent, time to end of book, page that makes me feel like I’m making the most progress. Shorter LNs with like 45 minute chapters are great for this, it always makes me push on a bit further to the end of a chapter when I probably wouldn’t if reading physically
Problem is now the only thing I’m reading on kindle is the 硝子塔の殺人 ebook which is both incredibly long and has incredibly long chapters… seeing 6 hours left estimated on a chapter when that’s the same length as some whole books is incredibly demotivating so I turned it to just pages
Imagine how it is for me with ttsu, after just starting a novel and it saying “53h left” after the first 2h
Thankfully I see the counter only when I open the pause menu, not all the time at the bottom of the screen like with the Kindle.
But that’s not the depressing part, noooo. It’s when Amazon says the average reading time for said book is 5h
OMG I’ve been wondering why you weren’t updating your log on Natively and somehow I totally missed this log so thanks for noticing I was missing the party and tagging me @cezarL !!!
Feel less bad now!
loads of replies to Mara
I have that book, thanks for the reminder! Renewed motivation
I love Thich Nhat Hanh and his legacy Plum Village. If you don’t have it, the Plum Village app is very good (if a little overwhelming).
I had that at first, too, and then that feeling just kind of drifted into the background
I have been waiting love this
stamps feet, whaaat??? that would be so fun to play with you. if you’re serious let’s do this. There’s an app where you can play with friends and I have the premium version so I can invite you to my table The app is also quite good, it has reasonable AI players (well, you can’t call them AI anymore, they are more like auto-bots that existed pre-AI revolution, and they are programmed to play as reasonable humans, which is really handy, actually, because a) you have to read a bit into the actions of other players and b) if you want to learn on your own you can magic up 3 robot friends to play with, or if I want to play with SO, we add 2 robots)
It’s not something they shove in your face, it’s hidden in a separate “about book” section that you have to want to open. But I’m a glutton for punishment I guess
Ok, I talked to SO about how in the heck do you teach this to someone online and we hatched a plan to keep it fun. We’ll teach you the rank and order of cards first, and then jump into games and do our best from there to introduce you to all the crazy rules as they come up.
So hurdle #1 is can you get this app where you are?
It might appear in German but there is English for settings once downloaded
There is English for controls and settings, but not rules
I’d say, let’s pm on Natively to find time to meet, and then read the beginner section of the rules just before. It won’t be memorable until you’ve played, so no need to prep much
bare bones English rules reference
So I found the most compact and correct rules in English, plagiarised them here so I could mod them:
They aren’t complete but it’s workable as a reference. And… it’s actually hard to pin down more than this because, house rules
Of course there are tournament rules but it’s incredibly common with friends to first agree on rules for the evening, it seems everyone has a favourite way to play
Thanks for all the comments everyone! I tend to check the forums on my phone during the day and leave little hearts on things, but I don’t have the patience to write longer comments on my phone, so that has to wait til I sit down with my laptop. Thanks for your patience. And now, it’s reply time!
First off, I must say that I am a ridiculous human and for some reason it did not occur to me that I needed to notify my friends of where in the internet I had gone. I’m sorry @mitrac and @shitsurei! Many thanks to @cezarL for having the presence of mind to ping mitrac.
Oh, I didn’t know about the app! I have downloaded it for later perusal-- it looks like an amazing resource!
Going back to this thought, I think with harder books it might remain an impediment, but I’m definitely finding that with easier books the flow state is starting to win! Also interestingly, I thought I wouldn’t like reading manga with the tablet vertical (thus one page at a time), but actually, I found it kind of reduces the overwhelm I feel when looking at a double page spread! So I can easily get into and stay in the flow state, and so far anytime a two-page illustration happens it is easy to spot and I just quickly rotate to get the full image, and then go back to vertical.
I started reading 花野井くんと恋の病2 this way the other day and I’m already 67% through! Wow!
Wow, that sounds great! I don’t think bookwalker has that type of feature, but I suppose if I start getting really into reading prose on the e-reader that I could look into different reader apps …
I must say, the color is definitely not perfect. It can’t do vivid colors very well and the color resolution is low. Also, if you turn on the night light that messes with the colors a lot. But, all that said, I still really like having the color. (Also, I just went to check and it seems like color vs black and white doesn’t particularly change the price that you pay for the boox tablet!?)
we live in a sci fi future where the distinction between bots and AI is something meaningful and applicable to our daily lives
I want to play card games with robots. Also with mitrac and mitrac-SO!
messaged you on Natively re: technicalities of playing Doppelkopf online!
皆さんよろしくお願いします！
May you have pleasurable and treasurable entropy at comfortably irregular intervals. 
… Tsundoku score update!
so thanks for noticing I was missing the party and tagging me 
love this
The app is also quite good, it has reasonable AI players (well, you can’t call them AI anymore, they are more like auto-bots that existed pre-AI revolution, and they are programmed to play as reasonable humans, which is really handy, actually, because a) you have to read a bit into the actions of other players and b) if you want to learn on your own you can magic up 3 robot friends to play with, or if I want to play with SO, we add 2 robots)
