on paper those furigana and/or radicals can definitely start to blur together a bit too much for my eyes to get them right the first try 
a “quick” lookup has turned into questioning my own sanity pretty quickly more than once
I guess an amendment to what I said earlier is that there isn’t a lot of evidence that looking things up repeatedly makes you directly learn any worse. It can definitely detract from your enjoyment, especially if it takes a lot of effort to keep looking words up.
My current approach to light novels is highlighting, then look up, or not, later. So, I complained a while ago why would Bookwalker limits at 50 highlights.
Manga is different. I might look up by page, but I would usually look up on a different device.
Kanji may have more values to be remembered than vocabularies, and “word roots” probably serve equal values.
Rather than hovering and computerized parsing, I am pretty used to normalizing vocabularies, and guessing word units.
I am OK with finger writing, but I have no idea how would I feel with single radical based dictionaries.
Electronic dictionaries probably almost always have History list. From there, I might make a hoverable vocabulary list. So, I added to Anki with Yomichan, but I rarely really SRS from there. (I actually do, but with selected items.)
20221219 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 98.95% 
I thought the conversation had ended, but it just paused for a little description (that had no mention of Wagahai-cat) and then continued, surely tomorrow it’ll end.
Japanese found under the leaves
浩然の気「こうぜんのき」ー Universal lifeforce; source of animation for all things; free spirit
曖昧「あいまい」ー Vague; ambiguous
持参金「じさんきん」ー Dowry
前祝い「まえいわい」ー Advance celebration
媒酌人「ばいしゃくにん」ー Matchmaker; go-between
Dec 19, Mon of Week 13 of Fall 2022 
MC has money? Anyway, he spent.
Also, vocabularies from Tate-Yuusha anime with JP sub, 1.5 episodes.
December 19th
Card Captor Sakura volume 2 – progress report
Yesterday: Finished chapter 7, continued up to page 86.
Today: Read up to page 104.
Short reading session today; Shaolan entered the scene and things escalated quickly – which in turn were luckily de-escalated by Yukito.
I remember not being too keen on Shaolan in the orginal series back then. I wonder if my opinion on him will change in the course of me rereading this series.
(I actually do like him in the still ongoing Clear Card arc of Card Captor Sakura and in Tsubasa Chronicles, though).
Word or expression of the day:
司る - (つかさどる) - to rule, to govern, to administer
Honourable mention(s):
羅針盤 - (らしんばん) - compass
December 15-19 
叙述トリック短編集 , 60-79%
Has it been so many days since I last updated? Until then I was joyfully reading more than a dozen pages from two different books every day, and was making optimistic plans about everything that I’d manage to read before Christmas. Then, immediately after that, I ran out of steam.
These last 5 days I’ve only barely managed to keep up with my advent reading and nothing else. I’m a little behind in that too, to be perfectly honest, but not by much. I don’t know why. I don’t think this last story is that much more difficult. It’s just that I have trouble concentrating all of a sudden. I probably need a rest, but I’m not giving up now. I said I’ll finish this book before Christmas and I will. Hopefully it’s one of those times when it feels like I’ve regressed in my language learning, then suddenly make a huge leap forward. Or I’m just tired and distracted.
Thank you for this. It’s what I’ve always believed, and what I practice, but it’s nice to see confirmation from someone else, especially when that someone is a linguist. I read ebooks so looking things up is easy, and I look up everything I have the slightest doubt about - quick refresher look-ups, as you called them.
@Stulti I use an offline dictionary (Takoboto on Android and Midori on iOS), and put the words I look up in custom lists within the app, one for each book I read. This way it’s easy to see if I’ve already looked up this word before, and even in how many books I’ve encountered it. Some words stick almost at once, with others I find I’ve looked them up in several books and still need to look them up again. That’s fine with me. Learning takes time, and a variety of context.
Dec 19 
・ 封印再度 (11% → 20%)
・本好きの下剋上 14 (58% → 84%)
Irregular Redglare reading updates continues. I read a lot since last time, mainly while taking the train back home. It was a long train ride. Lots of training 
I somehow hurt my back in the process.
Found the expression 雉も鳴かずば撃たれまい = the pheasant would not be shot but for its cries. I like how there’s a ば after the ず-form.
December 19
Home Post
Orange 
Swedish holiday traditions 
Holiday short stories in English
Don’t know if anyone noticed the vague posting I did Saturday, but that is when I wrote the majority of my level 60 post, so no actual Japanese reading got done, only hours of writing about Japanese learning. 
Then yesterday I somehow didn’t read at all. Instead I celebrated 4th Advent with lit candles, singing carols by myself, and fika (glögg, gingerbread cookies, and some other bits and pieces). But no reading.
Well, made up for it today. Again caught up with the Swedish holiday traditions reading, read a couple of holiday short stories, and then picked up Orange at night.
I think I’ve decided I’ll read Orange until it ends (volume 5 I mean), so finishing volume 5 1-2 weeks early, then I’ll read 神さま until I finish that (several weeks behind there, also behind on Orange actually). After that I’ll focus exclusively on Bustafellows until 9-nine- start, and then juggle those two.
This way I will hit 13 volumes of manga read for the whole year, meaning hitting my yearly goal of 12 manga/books with manga alone, so the 2 LNs and 2 Ask graded reader volumes (level 4, volume 2 and 3) will kinda be on top of that.
And lastly for my yearly reading, I’ll have the amount of Loopers I read. While I hope to get back to that. I will keep up with my book clubs first. If I have off time while reading the two VN clubs, I guess I can read a third one. xD
So that is me, commenting on my yearly stats about a week after everyone else. You guys were talking about that while I was on vacation in the UK, so had to save it. xD
People here have already shared plenty of great advice and I don’t have much to add, but just a small trick from me that I’ve been using:
If there’s a word you know that you’ve seen a few times but have trouble recalling meaning or reading even after multiple look-ups (which happens to me a lot), you could try taking just a few seconds to make a quick mnemonic for the word. It doesn’t have to be something good or even something you’re compelled to remember but I think consciously creating that link will make it much easier for you to draw upon and actually remember the reading when you see it later on.
December 19th!
Today I read chapter 50 of Mitsuboshi Colors, it had a page with really lovely artwork.
Perhaps I should mention that I have another way to memorize. Not SRS, but like flashcard or blinding. Though, Anki can also be adapted this way.
Column 1 - correct answer
Column 2 - hint
(Column 3+ - your answer)
Try to answer questions in a group of 10, and you would realize what you don’t remember. Then repeat the wrong questions. You don’t have to wait hours to repeat, just repeat in succession.
For Anki, I find 10-min interval useful, at the very least. Also, if I forgot a learnt item, but I might reset progress to have 10-min interval and within-one-day interval.
It will easily tell how much you need mnemonics, or whether will need to revise mnemonics. It was pretty much the trick I used with Wanikani during hard time.
But it is only short term memory focused, that may extend a little to medium term memory.
December 19th (Home Post Link)
Read:
NHK
修理「しゅうり」ー repair, mending
ホリミヤ
そもそも ー beginning, start
イラッと ー (する）to become suddenly irritated
面倒見「めんどうみ」ー taking care of someone
前言撤回「ぜんげんてっかい」ー taking back what one just said
Congrats!!! I pretty much only check this thread so hadn’t seen you post it, but I really enjoyed reading your write-up. 
Definitely! It’s usually not a thing people think about when you’re working in your native language, but this is probably one of the strategies you’d use to learn words in your native language too! Believe it or not, figuring out words entirely from context is still hard, even when you are working with an extremely high language proficiency!
For example, let’s say you’re taking a geology class and you’re reading through a wikipedia page on the geology of 富士山. You look at the word “andesite” and know that it’s a word you’ve learned/heard in class, and know it’s referring to a rock type (and from the context know it’s probably volcanic), but can’t quite remember how it compares to other volcanic rocks. Either hovering very quickly over the word to see a short description w/ a picture of it to remind yourself, or clicking through to the article and quickly reading it again would be a totally normal and even an expected way to interact with this article. One of the greatest strengths of the wikimedia model is allowing you to easily do these sorts of look-ups, both for the initial learning phase and for later reinforcement.
This happens in games that expect you to learn lots of new keywords, too, stuff like Magic the Gathering especially. They will use an ability keyword, and then in parenthesis will include reminder text for what that keyword does. Then on cards with higher text density, the assumption is that you’ve read “ability x (description of ability x)” enough times to just say “ability x” and have players understand what that means. You are adding new, field specific, vocabulary to your lexicon just by being repeatedly exposed to these short bits of reminder text, which aren’t all that different from having a vocabulary gloss with a reading or doing a quick highlight lookup with yomichan or in an e-book! If you play Magic for a long time, there are probably well over a hundred keywords you’ve learned in exactly this way, and most people probably wouldn’t even consider the method by which they learned them. (that and players’ tendency to informally refer to any card or ability that does a particular thing by the name of the thing that did that card originally. Here’s part of a rhystic studies video about that, including a fun discussion on the common phrase “bolt the bird”)
Interestingly with magic in particular, i’ve seen people use what are basically mnemonics to help them learn the game. The mantra: “untap, upkeep, draw” is burned into pretty much every player’s brain at this point, as well as common use of a visual hand sign demonstration for how first strike/double strike damage works.
Home 
December 19
人間椅子 -
ジョジョの奇妙な冒険57
132 - 187 (end)
I really hate this fight. I pushed through to finish the volume last night even though it put me squarely in the middle of Notorious BIG. Not only do I not like the stand but I am also disproportionately distressed when Giorno gets injured and in this one HE LOSES TOO MANY LIMBS. upsetting.
I still have the other half of this fight to go in volume 58. After that, it’s a fun fight, and then after that, I’ll get to sob my eyes out 
I finished 黄金仮面! What a ride. I love 乱歩 so much. Just pure 1930s action packed craziness from start to finish. I also spent an Audible credit on a 106 hour 乱歩 全集 (part one!) recently. It has a bunch of his short stories so I’ll probably work through those eventually.
However! Next year I’m likely going to take the N1 in the summer (if I can get a seat - it’s not offered in my country so I’d need to travel for it) so my reading from January is going to be much more focused on things likely to be on the test (read: not archaic grammar and kanji). As such I’m doing a close read of 半落ち and stuffing some nonfiction into my reading queue.
Naturally, I have my personal tastes so the titles will not surprise anyone:
死体は語る
男と女の悲しい死体 (both of these are the same author)
解剖学教室へようこそ
言ってはいけない 残酷すぎる真実 (this seems like it might be kinda meh, but I wanted to see how ‘unpopular’ or ‘controversial’ opinions are put forth in Japanese)
母という呪縛 娘という牢獄 (true crime)
also I need to resume reading
戦前昭和の猟奇事件 - it was rough going for me when I tried it back in April. See how I get on with it next year
I’m so excited to dive in 
But 3 more books to finish before I can start anything new.
December 19 Home Post
Well I did play some BU$TAFELLOWS as promised; I’m getting through pretty easily so far since I’m still in the part I read before when trying the demo, but it’s a good time! I forgot how absolutely stacked the voice cast is I look forward to playing more of it!
But as always I got up to some chaos as well… I was talking to my friend about niche childhood memories and one that came up was repeatedly renting the game pop cutie from family video (throwback huh) and I inadvertently discovered that it’s a Japanese game, and so I ended up messing with it which was very fun and nostalgic. And a pretty easy read for me so yay!
(Another adjacent fun thing I’ve been up to: recently I’ve been “rewatching” Free! with my partner (ie. they’ve never seen it and it’s been like ten years since I have so… it’s pretty fresh lmao) which has been a good time in and of itself, but language-wise sometimes there just isn’t a subtitle for what someone said or like a text message or something so I’ve been translating those on the fly and it’s gone pretty smoothly which feels good! It’s like I’ve actually learned something, who knew 
)
I use an offline dictionary called Imiwa which seems to work well - like you, I was struggling to do much reading while offline until a few months ago. It’s free and pretty good.
I know it’s probably too far from where you live, but if you ever decide to come to (western) Europe for this purpose, I would be (a) super stoked to host you, and (b) might even consider aiming for a big fail on my first attempt at N1
Day 40 Progress:
お隣の天使様 四冊 - 66.19% → 67.64%
Had an 11-hour workday on three hours of sleep so afterwards I decided to play some games with friends and I’m not going to fault myself for not doing much reading (but I will fault myself for not going to be like 3 hours ago)
Word of the Day:
Thank you 
Just downloaded takoboto and it seems quite easy to navigate. Now i just have to find time to sit down and read 
20221220 - 吾輩は狸である progress: 99.28%
The conversation. It is finally over.
Japanese found under the leaves
Forms
永い ＝ 長い「ながい」(Long)
びっくり has kanji! It’s 吃驚 (Surprise; amazement)
