Weeknotes #12

School fucked me up so let's try and get back onto the habit.

Life

It's summer vacation! No real big plans. No trips. Opted to not go hard on job searching because I don't want to have any excuses for not doing well in summer school. But I'll list some of the things I'm focusing on:

• Japanese learning! Been studying on and off for years now but fell off the last couple years pretty hard. I've been making an effort to do vocab drills and read/listen to Japanese every day. I've been pretty successful at this to the point where I basically held off an reading English books entirely. My reading speed in English is above average so it's frustrating toe get back into that "beginner reader" mindset but now that I've made the effort to try, I can already see big improvements.
• Room cleaning. Haven't started this in earnest yet. Waiting for my dad to go on a trip so I have the house to myself.
• Summer school.

Uhh some lower priority stuff:

• Working on this website. Not currently my highest priority but I never like how it looks and there's always stuff I want to add but right now it works.
• Reading (in English). I wanted to read more this summer, and well I am, but I can't knock out a book in Japanese at the same pace I can in English and I'm fine with leaving English books on the back burner for now.

School

Unfortunately the summer fun edition includes school. Survived last semester with okay grades. I'd like to graduate next semester so I need to do summer school to get all my requirements. I need to take the math placement exam again because my scores expired and I need math and chemistry credits still. Since I haven't taken a math class in a while and I need to get a certain score in the placement exam to get the classes I need I've been refreshing my math skills with Khan academy. My summer classes don't actually start until July but on the weekdays I go to the library and just study math.

Pleaase let me graduate soon. Get me outta here.

Japanese

Originally part of the Reading/Watching/Gaming section but since it was long I decided to split it.

As I mentioned, been reading a lot in Japanese. I'm focusing mostly on light novels because they're easy to read on my phone when I'm out and about and word lookup is fast. Specifically I'm using ッツ Reader as a progressive web app installed via Firefox and with Yomitan browser extension. All on Android idk if this works on ios. So far I've read にせものロマンス by あいだ, a doujin yuri novel. And in progress I got 勇者の旅の裏側で by 八月森 and 泣き虫スマッシュ! がけっぷちのバドミントンペア、はじまる!? and 平河 ゆうき. 勇者の旅の裏側で is a bit on the longer side for a ln so I wanted something shorter to read alongside it since staying on the same thing for a while can hurt my motivation.

泣き虫スマッシュ is a Tsubasa Bunko publication, aka, its for kids. There's furigana and it's shorter and simpler. Obviously there's truth to the idea that you shouldn't add furigana to what you're trying to read when it wasn't there while learning Japanese, but I also don't see the point in getting rid of furigana that's meant for native speakers. Like yeah, young native speakers, but reading a kid's book with furigana is really helpful for me to get back into that "rhythm" of reading without stopping to look something up. Like I remember in elementary school sometimes we'd do exercises where we just read without looking anything up until after we were finished. If you don't know how something is pronounced, sound it out. Since Yomitan is so convenient it's tempting to look things up all the time and you can't really sound out a word in Japanese, so just reading without stopping is a nice change of pace.

While light novels are my main focus, I'm dabbling in other things as well. Slowly but surely making my way through Shimeji Simulation. Played some Nekopara vol 3, though playing in Japanese where I actually have to put some effort into reading and I can't just zoom through it in 3 hours has made me realize this series isn't really, for me, lol. Watched some of the Sasamiya anime (the corny ass studio DEEN animation honestly feels nostalgic.) Made a seperate youtube account just for watching Japanese videos so my algorithm just gives me more Japanese videos.

Side note I've seen Shimeji Simulation rerecorded as a beginner manga, and while I think mostly "the best beginner work to read is something you're genuinely interested in but also if you find it too hard it's okay to put it on hole and try something else so you don't lose motivation" I do find the phenomenon of blanket recommending 4koma interesting. Like I don't think Shimeji Simulation is super complex grammar or vocab wise, but it does require the skill of having a feel for when you're not supposed to understand something and for when something is probably wordplay, even if you don't know what the exact joke is, understanding when it's probably there so you can investigate it further is something that just develops with experience. And without that experience I imagine it can be a bit frustrating to read. On top of having a lot of wordplay, Shimeji Simulation is also surreal so you also have to sus out when something is just strange and the reason you don't understand isn't necessarily because of a lack of language knowledge. I've also been taking a peek at the English fan scanlation and have noticed a lot of puns that are missed or ignored.

4komas in general are a format that revolves around having a punchline, so even if they're simple and don't always have an overarching plot, they still have challenges associated with reading them. I'm not saying I don't think beginners should read Shimeji Simulation or other 4komas, I think you should read whatever you're interested in, but I do think it's strange that they've become the default beginner recommendation rather than like a Corocoro series. This isn't a personal recommendation since I haven't read these in Japanese myself but Splatoon and PokeSpe are both Corocoro series with a lot of adult fans and since they're tied to popular games a lot of people will already be familiar with the setting-specific lingo and rules.

Reading/Watching/Gaming

I've pretty much exclusively been playing visual novels. I had a visual novel log in my drafts so I won't go into detail here, but visual novels sure do have a lot of suicide huh. It's not a topic I'm specifically sensitive to in fiction really, but it's gotten to the point where I have a "death by falling from a high place" sound effect stuck in my head. So taking a break from that grind to replay VA-11 Hall-A. There's actually a suicide here too but uh it's mentioned in passing and not something you witness in detail multiple times per playthrough.

Since last time for Lily and I's anime watch party uhh, we finished Brave Bang Bravern, added Medalist to our lineup, finished Medalist, added Witch Watch and Umamusume: Cinderella Gray. And The Apothecary Diaries still ongoing. Things are getting so serious in The Apothecary Diaries... And now in Witch Watch too??

I have a lot of friends who are into Umamusume so I wanted to watch Cinderella Gray, I like Oguri Cap :)

And since Road to the Top is free on youtube I ended up watching that on a whim myself.

I like horsies :)

Manga hm not a lot to report that wasn't in my last manga log. I saw a trailer for Takopi's Original Sin so I decided to read the manga. Pretty good! I think it's a lot more successful than some of the other "omg this is so depressing and fucked up" manga I've read at both soliciting the desired emotion response and telling a cohesive story. Ponko of the Stars is an easy comparison to make as these two have like, the exact same setup, the main difference being Ponko knowingly manipulates the kid whereas Takopi is just kinda stupid and messes things up. Takopi definitely did a better job at making me sad and had a more satisfying overall story in my opinion.

Okay that was a pretty good return to weeknotes! Let's keep it up, gang. And let's finish that vn log too.