Home post - October 6th
Sorry for the long post, I’ve tried to break it into sections so its easier to skip, just had a very exciting day and wanted to share parts of it.
Realising I'm very close to my reading-adjacent personal goal
Today I realised I’m close to something like a big personal milestone.
I’d tried and failed to learn Japanese a few times, textbooks and classes really didn’t work for me, and I kept struggling with Kanji - So when I restarted learning Japanese almost a year ago I wanted it to be different this time.
I decided to try Wanikani and to focus primarily on the goal of racing towards being able to read - particularly manga.
I sat down with general vocab lists (Genki, top 1k words, etc.) and specific manga vocab lists (よつばと！, しろくま, and a few others) and added all the words which seemed useful / common / re-occurring to Anki.
Since I’ve been adding to it from other manga (からかい上手の高木さん, 大海原と大海原) as well as things I came across (e.g. video games, overhearing in anime) and items I burn in wanikani.
Excluding wanikani-burned items from Anki, I only have 70 vocab items left to learn!
Through this process I’ve learned at least 789 vocab items, and actually a bunch more as many of the words I learned I later burned in wanikani. This isn’t including verbs which I track separately and are harder to get solid numbers on.
I only uncovered this because this morning I was vocab mining, and I asked myself “why are you trying to find new vocab? don’t you have plenty waiting to learn still? wait, how much do I have left?” - and then I realised that the majority remaining unlearned in anki are from burning in wanikani, and that I really did need to find more =p
So in that spirit I spent the majority of my non-work time today working on typing up most of chapter 2 for 王様ランキング.
王様ランキング
I’ve been working on typing up the first 2 chapters and mining unfamiliar but repeating vocab (within the context of the story), as well as any grammar patterns the leap out at me.
I haven’t ‘properly’ started reading it, but I’ve been breaking down sentences which leap out at me, skim reading to check I roughly understand moving pieces, and making character sheets showing important details (e.g. familiar relationships, tensions).
I think I might try also do this process for chapter 3 before I go back and ‘properly’ read it from the beginning. This will be my first manga outside of a WK book club.
Even though I have tried to not read everything, I think I’ve accidentally absorbed the majority so far just from my skim reading and typing.
Fun words from 王様ランキング
So far it’s mostly been learning medieval fantasy theme words and a few general words
騎士 きし knight
剣術 けんじゅつ kenjutsu (sword martial arts)
王冠 おうかん crown
死刑 しけい death penalty
身なり みなり appearance
裸 はだか nudity
I think today’s favourite word has to be 「ソードマスター」 meaning sword master。
Why I am so super excited for 王様ランキング (2nd personal goal?)
I am honestly so super excited to read 王様ランキング.
When I visited Japan I wanted to pick out some beginner friendly manga so I scoured all the lists I could find online and picked a good selection, and then on top of that I bought this book - something about it just spoke to me - it wasn’t on any lists, in fact googling for it gave me no results in English - I just really liked the look of it, it had furigana, sentences didn’t seem too long - my Japanese wasn’t good enough to actually assess difficulty but it seemed like a fun gamble.
I was really quite stumped about not being able to find anything about it online in English, once back in my hotel room I was able to work out the title and kanji used in the authors name and was able to find entries for it on the Japanese internet.
Since then they’ve announced an anime for it, and there are now plenty of English results, it turns out I’d picked it up ~7 months after they’d started publishing and it just hadn’t made its way across yet.
This book has been sitting on my shelf for nearly 2 years, it had seemed impenetrable, but thanks to recent reading with the ABBC when I picked it up this time for a look it seemed… tractable - which seems like I’m close to a 2nd personal goal =O
Looking at カラフル and 時をかける少女
I spent some time breaking down parts of the few few paragraphs for カラフル and 時をかける少女 to assess them for difficulty and usefulness of vocab.
時をかける少女 seemed to have a lot of school specific vocab and some strange verbs, I loved the movie of this when I was a teenager.
カラフル seemed more fun but does have a lot of death / afterlife specific terms and seemed still quite a bit beyond where I currently am in terms of grammar and vocab, but I collected ~60 words in a spreadsheet from it, still have to decide which subset are worth Anki-ing at this point - but I suspect I’ll slowly chip away at making a カラフル vocab specific Anki deck as I think I’m too intrigued to not try it at some point.
Starting a grading reader, but being too tired to finish
I started reading a graded reader 絵姿奥さん, but was too tired to make significant progress, so I’ll finish that tomorrow.
:: TANUKIDATE 20211006 :: 
.
) and Nagisa copies it, he clearly looks up to him as much as he looks up to Haru. He’s gonna do it Just Like Rin. <3 But poor Haru feels like he’s just being pushed into stuff he doesn’t want all the time, and he’s not happy about it. He just wants to run away into the water, and I don’t blame him.
(Gonna make a proper post a little later!) How’s your recovery going??
)
.