Well this was really anti-climactic. I tried reading chapter 2 today, but got bored and frustrated and quit after 13 minutes and decided that it would be better to go back to reading easier stories instead. After all that build up, trying to finish Akyyaku Reijyou before the anniversary, it amounted to nothing.
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Hi Score Girl ep17:
In this episode, Haruo is driven out of his usual arcade in Mizonokuchi and falls in with a crowd at an arcade in Shibuya instead. The interesting part though is how Shibuya is portrayed as a place where everyone is rough and violent and sits on the ground.
Is this really a common stereotype of Shibuya? It's interesting to see, because I've never heard of this before. I've of course heard of Shibuya, but only in the context of that famous street crossing that shows up everywhere.
Also in this episode, Haruo plays Kaiser Knuckle, a game with a ludicrously unfair and nigh-unbeatable final boss, The General, who he beats by using a combination of attacks that Ono figured out which exploits a bug in the game's AI. I read a bit about the game, and apparently, the game is pretty much exclusively known for having quite possibly the hardest boss in fighting game history. And even using the Wulong trick that Haruo used, it still isn't easy.
I decided to try writing an essay in Japanese without looking anything up (other than the spelling of katakana names) as a challenge. Now I just need to figure out how to get it corrected so I can find out what the actually correct ways to express everything are.
Since I gave up on Cloudy Eyes Liliana yesterday, there's the question of what I should read next. Previously, the way I chose stories to read was by doing a search of the pre-made Web Novel decks listed on JPDB and sorting by "words known %" and starting with the highest, or the highest stories that aren't super long.
Ordinarily, this would mean that I'd read 嘘をついてごめんなさい next, as it is the first story on the list under 20k words that I haven't already read. However, it occurred to me that chapter length might be more important. The reason I immediately gave up on Cloudy Eyes Liliana wasn't just because it is significantly harder than the other stories I've been reading (which were specifically chosen to be the easiest on JPDB), but also that the chapters are so long.
I'd gotten used to the convenient bite-sized chapters of Akuyaku Reijyou, and while that seems to be a pretty unique case, I figured it was better to try to find a story with shorter chapters, so I went through all the stories at the top of the list on JPDB and calculated the words per chapter (using the word count from the JPDB deck and checking the chapter count by following the link to the actual story).
Here are the three web novels I've read so far:
いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば: 17848 words, 15 chapters (1190 per chapter)
ふわふわ日記: 13167 words, 22 chapters (598 per chapter)
悪役令嬢が私をいじめるのには訳があるそうです。: 23720 words, 147 chapters (161 per chapter)
And here is the monster, Cloudy Eyes Liliana:
濁った瞳のリリアンヌ: 376814 words, 250 chapters (1507 per chapter)
Meanwhile, here are the easiest stories (by word known %) listed on JPDB that I haven't already read (in descending order of words known, not that that matters since they're all like 88% or 87% and the number is only a vrey rough approximation anyway)
【書籍化】婚約破棄を狙って記憶喪失のフリをしたら、素っ気ない態度だった婚約者が「記憶を失う前の君は、俺にベタ惚れだった」という、とんでもない嘘をつき始めた: 34654 words, 38 chapters (911 per chapter)
【本編完結】俺の天使は盲目でひきこもり【番外編更新中】: 52279 words, 82 chapters (637 per chapter)
二度目の初恋を君に: 45858 words, 56 chapters (819 per chapter)
バイト帰りに拾ったのは家出してきた学校一の美少女でした: 36947 words, 35 chapters (1056 per chapter)
嘘をついてごめんなさい: 15597 words, 14 chapters (1114 per chapter)
振られた元カノに振り回される中、幼馴染みと再会した俺が立ち直っていく話。【完結】: 15467 words, 19 chapters (815 per chapter)
Although 嘘をついてごめんなさい has a very short total length, I'm planning to try reading 【本編完結】俺の天使は盲目でひきこもり【番外編更新中】next instead, since it has the shortest average chapter length. It's more than double the longest story I've completed so far (Akuyaku Reijyou, and even that took me forever), but hopefully having chapters of "only" 637 words (still longer than Fuwafuwa Nikki) will help.
Last edited by golyplot on Sun Apr 16, 2023 6:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
I read the first two chapters of 【書籍化】俺の天使は盲目でひきこもり today, which took 40 and 30 minutes respectively. It's surprisingly tough to read, and I found myself looking up a bunch of words and stopping every other sentence to put everything into Google Translate (I normally use Google Translate to try to understand what I missed, but with easier writing, I often read for multiple paragraphs at a time before translating it.)
Part of it the problem is that it is historical fantasy fiction, so there's 伯爵s and 執事s and 次女s running around. Also, there's lots of words written in kanji that are normally written in kana, e.g. 捻る. At least chapter 2 didn't take quite as long as the first chapter. Part of it is that stories normally get easier after the first chapter once the setting is out of the way and you get used to the vocab used, but it seems that there was also less unusual vocab. Or at least JPDB thinks that I had 82% known word coverage in ch1 and 87% in ch2 (for comparison, it thinks I had 89% coverage overall for the whole story), although the numbers of JPDB are only loosely correlated with the truth since JPDB obviously can't know exactly what I do and don't know.
Still, even though it will probably get a little easier going forward, I'm inclined to just give up again and try a different story. It's a bit frustrating though that I've now immediately abandoned two different stories in a row. And just when I thought that I'd gotten really good at reading too.
栗色のウェーブのかかった美しい髪は少しパサついていて、青い肌と相まって人形のようだった。
I was confused by the use of 青い to describe Anje's skin here. I checked Jisho, and apparently, 青い can mean "grey" when used to describe skin. Similarly, in ch2, her cheeks are described as 青白い, which can mean "pale" in addition to the obvious meaning of "blue-white".
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Hi Score Girl ep19:
Ono spent the night at a "net cafe" while looking for Haruo in Shibuya. This seemed bizarre and outlandish to me, but I looked it up, and apparently, Japanese net cafes are in fact a cheap place to spend the night. It sounds like they are far larger and more elaborate than I would have imagined. I always imagined internet cafes as just being a room full of computers and desks. TIL
The subtitles here said "Crap, Makoto's here", but I heard the Japanese say something like "ono no aneki" (Ono's big sister) instead. I haven't commented on it before, but it's pretty common for the Japanese to clearly be using different forms of address than the English subtitles. Which makes sense since different languages and cultures have different conventions, but it's still interesting to notice. Also, while I knew "ane", I'd never heard of "aneki" before.
It's also a bit amusing to see Makoto referred to as "Ono's big sister", since as sisters, they are both named Ono. I guess it would make more sense if interpreted as "the big sister of the Ono family" rather than "(Akira) Ono's sister", but it's hard for me to guess if that's actually the case (I'm guessing that it's still the latter and Haruo just uses Akira as the reference point since she's the one he knows best). Anyone know how this actually works?
Bunpo Check seems the best (for learning), it tends to find the most errors, although you kind of have to figure out for yourself what exactly the error is, most of the time for the simple stuff I am writing, it's enough to have it underlined, and I can figure it out.
For ChatGPT, I will ask it to correct the sentence, but sometimes I ask it to generate its own sentences/essay on the same topic to see if I can learn something new from it.
For humans, you can post on Hi-Native, HelloTalk, and iTalki, they all have the ability to make posts which native speakers will correct for free. I typically put my writings through as much self-editing (or proofreading tool) and correction as possible before posting, because if you have too many errors, people might not correct them all.
Bunpo Check seems the best (for learning), it tends to find the most errors, although you kind of have to figure out for yourself what exactly the error is, most of the time for the simple stuff I am writing, it's enough to have it underlined, and I can figure it out.
For ChatGPT, I will ask it to correct the sentence, but sometimes I ask it to generate its own sentences/essay on the same topic to see if I can learn something new from it.
For humans, you can post on Hi-Native, HelloTalk, and iTalki, they all have the ability to make posts which native speakers will correct for free. I typically put my writings through as much self-editing (or proofreading tool) and correction as possible before posting, because if you have too many errors, people might not correct them all.
Thanks for the recommendations. I signed up for Langcorrect and posted it there and got corrections from two people. I also tried Languagetool and Bunpo Check as you suggested. For some reason, Languagetool didn't offer any suggestions, so I assume I must have done it wrong, since my essay has obvious errors. Bunpo Check underlined the same mistakes that the humans on Langcorrect pointed out, although it doesn't say what the correct version is.
Anyway, here's my essay with corrections made based on the feedback from Langcorrect:
There's a lot of mistakes where both people suggested the same thing (e.g the misspelling of restaurant, the various grammar mistakes), but there are also some places where they suggested different changes. I found it interesting that one person suggested changing 廃棄 to 廃止, as Jisho lists "abolition" as a meaning for both, but presumably only the second is really used in this circumstance. (The other person suggested replacing the whole phrase with "(今)そのサービスは中止されています").
Today, I tried reading 振られた元カノに振り回される中、幼馴染みと再会した俺が立ち直っていく話。【完結】, which I'll just call Furareta for short. Oddly, the story doesn't have a title at all on syosetu.com. The author must have edited it to remove the title after the JPDB deck was created.
Anyway, the vocab was definitely a lot easier than Moumoku Tenshi thanks to being a modern slice of life high school romance rather than historical fantasy, although it was still a long slog to finish ch1, which took me 37 minutes to read. And ch1 still had several kanji I'd never seen before, including one that had furigana and hence is presumably obscure even to native Japanese speakers.
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Hi Score Girl:
In this episode, Haruo buys some sort of "game" which is actually just a slide show of a character rendered in various scenes (fighting a shark), set to Japanese music, and the episode shows several lengthy clips of it. I'm sure this was a real thing that was sold back in the 90s disc era, although it of course seems silly today. It's also notable that none of the background lyrics were subtitled, so being able to understand some words of it is a nice bonus of learning Japanese.
This episode also has Hidaka flash back to moments from the middle-school episodes again, and the juxtaposition made me realize for the first time that she had short hair in middle school but has much longer hair in the present. It's interesting to notice changes like that. Later, it shows some old photos of Haruo from the elementary and middle school periods, and I noticed that in one photo (top left here, for some reason it is super dark unlike all the others), his front hair is straight like it was recently cut, while in others, his hair looks more naturally uneven.
I always thought that 下の名前 was just called that because a given name is considered inferior to the family name somehow. But it suddenly occurred to me today that when written vertically, the given name would be written below the family name, and so it is literally the "below" name.
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Satori Reader:
I finished Closeup: After the Tokyo Subway Attacks yesterday, and thus started My Sweetie Is Japanese today. For some reason, it seems noticeably easier than the other "advanced" difficulty series I've read (Secret and Closeup). I also learned a bit about how miso is made. Apparently, you leave it out to ferment for months and it grows mold on top, and you just scrape the mold off afterwards.
Also, for some reason, the English title for ch1 is "Homemade Miso" but the Japanese title is "妻のこだわり" (My wife's obsession). I've never seen the titles differ like this before.
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Furareta:
I "read" Furareta ch2 today, and it only took 21 minutes this time, but that's because I was rushing through it while barely even trying to read it and mostly just relying on Google Translate, and then I also rushed through and barely paid attention to the Google Translate translations as well, so I only have a vague idea of what actually happened.
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Hi Score Girl:
In ep22, they go to an arcade, but then the police raid the arcade, saying that they'll "spank" any minors caught playing after 10pm. I'm not sure if that was meant to be literally or not, but either way, it was interesting to learn that there is that sort of curfew. I also found it interesting that the cops are wearing facemasks in this scene, since you don't normally see that, even in anime.
Also of note in this episode: In the opening scene, Haruo looks out the train window and sees dinosaurs, ghosts, and all sorts of strange beings. Obviously, it's just meant to be a silly gag, but it is still very strange, as the tone doesn't really match the rest of the series. This is the first explicitly supernatural bit since the ghost arcade they went to all the way back in episode 2.
Also in this episode, Ono laughs out loud at one point. Also, I learned the word 無口 today, as Haruo uses it several times to describe Ono as "silent". Although it's a bit weird because I just checked Jisho, and Jisho justs lists it as meaning "astomatous", a zoological term for creatures which literally have no mouth. The use of 無口 for "quiet" must not be that common if it's not on Jisho.
Yesterday, I briefly started researching my Japan trip again. I'd long had a vague idea about going in September or maybe early October, but had decided to avoid any trip planning until after the layoffs. As I've now survived yesterday's layoffs, I started researching travel again.
I first looked up the climate and discovered that summer extends later than I'd thought in Japan and that it would still be warm in September. I also learned that 紅葉 season is a lot later than I'd thought. Most likely I'll be going in mid-late October then, and even that is on the early side for 紅葉. But I don't want to push it later because then it will be bumping up against Thanksgiving travel, and I don't want to bunch up my trips too much. It's already pretty inconvenient that Thanksgiving and Christmas are so close together.
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Recently, my Youtube recommendations have been terrible, as foolishly watching even one or two videos on a topic (e.g. Celeste speedrunning) or even just random clickbait is enough to ruin your recommendations, but I kept checking anyway sometimes out of boredom.
Yesterday, I noticed that it had at least started recommending some Japanese videos again. One short video with a person and horse in the thumbnail caught my eye and I watched it out of curiosity, with no idea what it was. I assumed it would be an anime trailer or something like that, but instead it turned out to be a horse racing ad from the JRA of all things. I do think it is an interesting illustration of the different animation culture in Japan though. In the US, an ad like this would never be animated. It would all be live action instead.
Anyway, I checked the Youtube recommendations again and noticed what appeared to be a full anime episode, and watched it out of curiosity.
It turned out to be an anime about anthropomorphic horse-girl racing. It seemed kind of stupid to me, and also presumably targeted at an audience that I'm not in, but the whole time, I just kept wondering why anyone would put a full anime on Youtube in the first place. It appears to be based on a videogame series, so maybe the game company comissioned the anime as advertising, but that seems like a rather expensive method of advertising if so! It also seems like the Youtube Algorithm suddenly decided that I like horse racing for some reason.
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Furareta:
I tried reading ch3 Wednesday night. It seemed a lot easier than before, but I still found myself getting overwhelmed and becoming unable to focus at all after a while, so I stopped and "read" the second half tonight. It's frustrating that the chapters are so long for everything. I got spoiled by the ultra-short chapters of Akuyaku Reijyou.
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Hi Score Girl:
I finished watching Hi Score Girl tonight. In the final episode, Hidaka shows up again, with her hair cut short, and encourages Haruo to go after Ono and see her off at the airport again. It reminded me of a comment I read about Katawa Shoujo back in the day.
In Katawa Shoujo, part way through Shizune's route, Misha suddenly cuts her hair. I read a comment once saying that her cutting her hair is supposed to be significant and represents her getting depressed and giving up on her secret unrequited love for Shizune after Shizune and Hisao get close. I wonder if Hidaka's haircut at the end of Hi Score Girl is supposed to be similiarly significant, especially since she later tells Haruo to pursue Ono.
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Also, I finally hit level 50 on Wanikani yesterday morning. 10 more to go.
