Homepost - Tigerdate: 20220119 
Tanuki Scroll XIX: 猫神(ねこがみ) 
Read today’s folktale, from Nagasaki Prefecture!
About a samurai and his pregnant wife and their beloved cat, タマ. The samurai is tasked with hunting a boar on the night his wife expects the baby to be born. The cat transforms into their maid to warn the samurai, but he mistakes the cat for a tanuki and shoots it with his bow and arrow. The cat runs back to the house and he chases it to find that his wife has gone into labour. He helps deliver the child and forgets about the tanuki. In the morning he finds that he’s killed his cat who was trying to warn him of the birth.
To honour the cat he makes a shrine, and people who love cats now go to worship the cat god there. It says that the shrine is still there today in くろかみちょう [黒髪町] but I can’t really find much about it. But there is a place nearby called “猫山ダム” 
☆ Learnings ☆
New Words
身重「みおも」ー Pregnant
イノシシ「猪」ー Wild Boar (I think I remember the kanji from the Zodiac, but I don’t remember the reading)
心細い「こころぼそい」ー Helpless; Forlorn; Lonely
祠「ほこら」ー A small shrine
Places
佐世保 「させぼ」ー Sasebo
Return of the Rikai Reply
I’m like half-perfectionist, half-just roll with it… it gets a bit awkward sometimes 
(I’ve never noticed this emoji before and I wanted to use it)
But yeah, it’s hard weighing up what resource will be best for you, with both your time and money, since they all get pretty pricey (worth the money though), and sometimes it’s hard to wager how good a resource is just from the free trial. I say this, but then I bought WK on a whim when I didn’t really have the money… soooo… 
You’re doing great though! You’ve been in each of these threads so far, and that’s a lot of reading. Even if it doesn’t feel it at times, just turning up and reading a short bit is progress in itself, and like you said, it’s not always noticeable just how much you’ve learnt until you get that poof moment and you’re like… waittttt, I can read this!
There’s been a few times I’ve read a paragraph without thinking, and have to stop to be like, I understood that! Then go back to read it again because I don’t believe it. But now brain is conscious that I am in fact reading Japanese and can no longer read it… thanks brain why must you be this way?
We all learn different anyways, any learning is still learning! Even if you learn wrong at the start - which really, especially with self-study, we’re gonna probably be learning a lot in weird ways - using other resources to learn and relearn the same things just cements it further. It’s hard to be consistently efficient with your learnings, even if we want them to be, I think it’d do more harm than good if we were always 100% on it with no chill.
Suppose I’ve just got wary of the internet being the internet, where some guy declares all out war because some other guy dares to say he prefers the green balls over the yellow ones when playing in the ball pit. 
But here’s definitely a welcome change, yeah there’s some threads here that go way overboard, but they don’t happen that often.
Be the tanuki, the 100% official bestest way to Japanese:
THE TANUKI METHOD
Transform yourself into a Japanese master
Step One of the Tanuki Method:
This fox and tanuki are way too cute I don’t even know what to do with myself anymore