Learning Japanese From Zero

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Thu Apr 28, 2022 4:51 am

In Glass Mask episode five, there's a sequence where Maya encounters pairs of words that are same except for pitch accent and realizes that you can express a lot of different things with the same lines just depending on how you say them.

However, what I found interesting is that the subtitler included a note explaining the ame/ame thing. (But didn't bother with the pairs in the following scene). This seems like a thing where knowing some Japanese lets you appreciate context that you wouldn't get by relying on subtitles, so that was cool to see. Sometimes it feels pointless to learn Japanese since everything is translated nowadays, so it's good to have encouragement.

Also, I noticed すなわち come up, a word that I've been trying to learn for months in the N3 decks, first on Anki, then on JPDB, so that was neat as well.


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I also watched a couple more Japanese songs. One in particular that caught my attention was 惑星ループ because of some oddities in the lyrics.

I noticed that the onscreen lyrics showed 宇宙 while the singer sang "sora" and 理解っている while she sang "wakatteiru". What's up with that? I've never seen anything like that. I guess this is one of those poetic usages enabled by kanji where people substitute a completely different word in the furigana, except there's no furigana here!

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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Apr 28, 2022 5:17 pm

golyplot wrote:I also watched a couple more Japanese songs. One in particular that caught my attention was 惑星ループ because of some oddities in the lyrics.

I noticed that the onscreen lyrics showed 宇宙 while the singer sang "sora" and 理解っている while she sang "wakatteiru". What's up with that? I've never seen anything like that. I guess this is one of those poetic usages enabled by kanji where people substitute a completely different word in the furigana, except there's no furigana here!

Yeah this is pretty common in vocaloid-original songs. There's generally no need for furigana since the song and the video with the lyrics written out are meant to be consumed simultaneously (although a lyrics sheet publicised separately would probably clarify the intended pronunciation).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri Apr 29, 2022 4:29 am

Glass Mask ep6:

Apparently, I was wrong about Hayami secretly sponsoring Tsukikage. Her sponsor is actually some rival acting group.

In this episode they play Little Women. My only knowledge of Little Women came from the 2019 movie, which is told in anachronic order, so it was a bit jarring to see them start scene 1 in the past (the movie begins with adult!Jo meeting a publisher, IIRC). I heard that the book doesn't do that, but it was still a surprise. Of course, I barely even remember the movie now, since that was nearly two and a half years ago.

This episode also marks the first appearance of Glass Masks's signature Extreme Method Acting, where Maya "lives as Beth" for a week. For some reason, Maya and Tsukikage are obsessed with that kind of thing. I remember the episodes I watched as a teen had her doing the same with Helen Keller.

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Anyway, I'm still going through this giant list of song recommendations (which is where all the previous posts about song videos came from, but I figured I'd give my own recommendation. So far, the only one I found really catchy was ウミユリ海底譚. I have no idea what the lyrics actually mean, but the music sounds nice at least.

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat Apr 30, 2022 4:58 am

Today, I finally managed to visit the Japanese garden at the city park, and got to watch the feeding of the koi. A Chinese woman and her kids were also there watching. She was speaking Chinese (her kids just spoke English), and I noticed that she kept saying something that sounded like "shoushin" . I eventually realized it must be the Chinese equivalent of 写真! (It helped when I noticed that she was taking photos on her phone). So that was a pretty neat discovery.

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Glass Mask ep7: Maya has trouble portraying the scene where Beth is dying of Scarlet Fever, so she runs around all night in the rain in distress and catches a fever for real, and ends up having to perform the play with a fever of 40C. Holy cow! I knew that Maya and Tsukikage were into extreme method acting, but I didn't realize it got that extreme.

I actually read once that Maya had to perform a play with a high fever, but I always thought that that was Wuthering Heights or something and that her being sick was just an unfortunate accident she had to struggle through. But here, it almost makes it seem intentional.

Incidentally, I read a bit more about Little Women and the movie and I learned that Little Women was originally written as two books, and the non-flashback scenes from the movie were taken from the later. During the climax of the play in the anime where Beth is sick of scarlet fever, I thought she was going to die, but instead, she triumphantly recovers. Presumably, the play they're performing only covers the first book, and she only dies for real in the sequel.

I was also really confused at first in the previous episode when they said that Beth was the third sister. I always assumed she was the youngest because the movie used a much older actress to play Amy, making Beth seem like the youngest sister. But apparently not.

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自分の容姿を見る手段がないため、自分で触って確認するくらいだろうか。

I was confused by ため here, because I thought of it as just being "sake" or "purpose" but here it seems to be listing a reason instead.



君はこの作文を明日の正午までには書いてしまっているだろう。
You'll have this composition written by noon tomorrow, won't you?

I was surprised by the use of しまって here, since it usually indicates that something happened regrettably. I guess this is one of the non-regrettable uses.


いつも一緒にいる乳母が色々話しかけてくれるし、兄姉達も頻繁に話しかけてくれる。

I expected 兄姉 to be read kyoushi, but I looked it up and it's actually keishi. WTF? I guess this is an example of how even when you know the kanji well and are confident you can guess the reading, you can still never actually be sure. It's a good thing I happened to check!
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon May 02, 2022 5:15 am

Glass Mask ep8: This episode was pretty confusing, and it made me feel like there was some cultural nuance I was missing.

First off, the episode opens with Maya taking classes at a normal high school, which was very confusing, because I was under the impression that she had basically dropped out and enrolled at a private school that is dedicated to acting. It certainly seemed in previous episodes like that Tsukikage Acting Troupe was a full-time thing for her, and she's even sleeping there. So what on earth is she doing back at normal high school. The only explanation I could think of is that the opening scene was supposed to be a flashback.

Second, there was the ongoing mystery of Tsukikage's benefactors. First the article comes out saying that she's secretly sponsored by Aoyagi Productions, then she claims its all malicious slander and she has no dealings with Aoyagi. Later she says that she's not being sponsored, but she did borrow money from them in the past.

Eventually, a guy from Aoyagi Productions shows up to talk to her in person and explains that they lent her 300 million yen to fund the studio and expect results soon, which at least clears up the ground truth of the situation. However, I'm still confused by why a) having a "sponsor" is treated like a shameful horrible scandal, and that b) Tsukikage denied it despite borrowing money from them. The relationship sure seems like sponsorship to me, so it makes me think that there's some cultural nuance going on here that doesn't translate. Does anyone know what's going on here?

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魔法の腕は高いのに、大銅貨すら知らない。

I can't make any sense of this sentence, and it is unfortunately one of the many example sentences on JPDB with no translation provided. Does anyone know what it means? It seems like "Even though your magic arm is high, you don't even know a big copper coin", which feels like a sentence that might make sense... if a couple of the words were swapped out, specifically 腕 and 大銅貨. It's almost like 大銅貨 means something completely different in this context, but I can't imagine what.

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I heard Noriko mention the onshitsu today and thought "oh, must be warm (温) + humidity (湿); she's probably complaining about the weather". However, it turns out that it was actually 音質 (sound quality). I guess this is yet another demonstration of how you often can't guess the meaning of words even when you know a lot of kanji. Stupid onyomi homophones!

Incidentally, I never noticed until writing that and seeing them next to each other just how similar 温 and 湿 look. I'd probably get them mixed up all the time if the later were more common. It's annoying how similar the kanji look, especially since a lot of kanji are basically a giant box stuffed with random bits, and there's only one tiny difference between two different kanji. It's like a spot the difference puzzle except the lines are microscopic and it's not like a normal reader would actually take the time to puzzle it over while reading anyway. I guess you just have to learn every possible kanji so well that you can intuitively fill them in from context.

To make things even more fun, both those kanji can appear before 度 in a common word. As if the frequent 待つ/持つ confusion weren't bad enough! Every time I see that one, I have to stop and look for the little fingers on the left just to be sure.
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Wanikani

The radical 太 finally came up for review again today. It’s been sitting there on my dashboard mocking me for nearly a year, but it never seemed to come up for review for some reason, even as I guru’d dozens of other kanji and radicals in that time.

I looked up the stats tonight, and I did the lesson for 太 on August 6th, but in all the time since then, it had only come up for review twice prior to this morning (Nov 23rd and Feb 8th). Meanwhile, in that time I did nearly twenty four thousand reviews. Anyway, it only has to come up once more now before I guru it (if I don’t mess up). Based on the past rate, that will likely take another three months, though I expect it to come up again much faster than that.

One other thing is that I’ve been wondering lately about why my review performance went down a couple weeks ago. There was a while when I was averaging 5-6 reviews per second, sometimes even more. But for the last couple weeks, I’ve only been managing 4-5. Given the timing, it occurred to me that this might be the result of not doing the weekly leech reviews any more, though if so, I’m not sure if it’s even worth it.

Anyway, I plan to start doing leech reviews again to see if that helps with review speed and accuracy. However, there’s a twist. The leech reviews were a huge pain, due to the huge number of leech reviews every week.

Even towards the end, I still had over 200 items to review every week. And now that I haven’t done any in over three weeks, I would currently have a pile of 298. Therefore, I decided to try tweaking the BBO script to limit it to 100 reviews, no matter how many leeches I actually have on any given week. Instead, it just takes the worst leeches until I reach 100, and in theory work my way through them over the weeks, without having such an arduous pile each week.

I was planning to do the first new leech review tonight just to see what it was like, but unfortunately, right when I was about to start, I accidentally hit the power button on my computer and shut it down. I decided that was a sign that I should call it a night, so I plan to start the renewed leech reviews next Saturday morning like before.

In other news, speed and accuracy were mediocre today, but it seems like I suddenly burned a ton of items for some reason. Additionally, I hit a new minor milestone of 20 resurrected items burnt (it was at only 16 yesterday, IIRC).

Sun May 01 2022:
Time spent: 43m
Reviews completed: 197
Reviews remaining: 2838
Reviews in next week: 3316 (+478)
Reviews in next month: 4066 (+750)
Accuracy: 81.22% (160/197)

Current item counts:
Apprentice: 1392
Guru: 1495
Master: 890
Enlightened: 1165
Burned: 2195

Resurrected item counts:
Res-Apprentice: 658
Res-Guru: 869
Res-Master: 548
Res-Enlightened: 570
Res-Burned: 20

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Glass Mask ep9: Strangely, the subtitles were a bit screwed up in this episode. Previously, they were in normal letters along the bottom of the screen, but in this episode, the subtitles were in tiny letters near the middle of the screen, which was really distracting. Even more strangely, the subtitles went back to normal partway through the episode. I have no idea how something like that could even happen, but I hope it doesn't happen again.

This episode also shows more of the trademark Tsukikage Training From Hell Method. The episode begins with her slapping Maya repeatedly in order to get Maya angry enough to perform a scene properly, and later when Maya has a crisis of self confidence and wants to give up acting, Tsukikage locks her in a shed for a week as punishment. I'd heard that Maya got locked in a shed overnight before, but didn't know the context. I think JdG showed a clip from Glass Mask once (presumably the 80s version) and called Tsukikage a "psycopath". I'm guessing it was from that scene, or whatever the equivalent was in the (French dub of the) 80s anime.

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Also tonight, I got curious about soba and read the (en) Wikipedia article to find out what it was. There was a photo in the article that astonished me - of a soba deliveryman balancing a ludicrously tall tower of boxes on his shoulder... while riding a bike. I just can't believe that's actually possible!

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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Tue May 03, 2022 5:47 am

The big news today is that I finally finished the N3 deck on JPDB.io! I had originally expected to finish it Saturday, but I got overwhelmed by the increasing review load and barely did any new cards last weekend. In fact, it would have taken even longer except that I ended up blacklisting most of the cards at the end of the deck.

I've complained repeatedly before about example sentences on JPDB not having translations, and occasionally blacklisted words for that reason. However, the last several dozen cards in the N3 deck literally had no example sentences at all, not even monolingual ones, so I decided to just blacklist nearly all of them. I set the deck to sort by frequency on JPDB to do the most common words first, so I guess all the cards that had 0 frequency (because JPDB couldn't find a single example sentence) ended up at the end.

Anyway, I started the deck for いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば, since JPDB lists that as the web novel with the highest fraction of words I already know (76%). Of course, that still means 851 new cards to go through, which will probably take me months to get through. I'm not sure if I'll actually go through with it all the way, but I figured I should try doing a media-specific JPDB deck as an experiment, and then read the story afterwards to see what it's like reading when I already know all the vocab.

So far, most of the words in the deck seem like they're more grammar than actual vocab, like "ように" or "なんか", so I blacklisted a bunch of those as well. There were a couple of Actual Words (like からかう) sprinkled into the new deck as well though.

I also unchecked the "Enable initial short term learning period" setting today, which will hopefully help with the recent excessive review load. I wish it were clearer what it actually did and whether you should have it on or not.
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One new word I encountered from the N3 deck this morning was the しも reading of 下. I figured I would probably never be able to remember it though, since there's only one example sentence on JPDB, and not a very good one at that. So I was very surprised when I saw it come up immediately afterwards while reading 濁った瞳のリリアンヌ:

この名前を聞いたときから、確信に近いものを持っていたし、下の世話をしてもらうときにも何度かチラっと見えたりもしてたし……。

Unfortunately, I still didn't manage to understand the meaning of this sentence, but I was proud that I at least managed to correctly guess the meaning and reading of 下の世話.

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ホント言うとね、トムのこと大っ嫌いなんだ。
I hate Tom, to tell you the truth.
彼は雨と雪が大好きなんだ。
He loves rain and snow.

Another new card from the N3 deck that puzzled me this morning was なんだ. JPDB actually has a bunch of example sentences for it (see above), but they all just have it at the end of the sentence and it's not clear from the translation what it actually means.

Edit: I looked it up and realized that this is just that stupid explanatory の grammar point again, not actually a word. I guess I should just blacklist this one as well then.

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Last night, I got curious about soba, so I decided to go out for dinner tonight and see what it was like. It was surprisingly difficult to find a restaurant with soba on the menu, and then when I got there, they said they were out and I ended up just getting the chicken udon anyway. I did try edamame for the first time. At first, I didn't understand how to eat it and tried just eating the pod whole, but the casing proved impossible to chew up and I had to mostly spit it back out. After that, I figured out that you could just squeeze the beans out of the pod.

Since I don't know how to use chopsticks, I just brought my metal fork from home and used that. I brought the chopsticks they provided home so I can try to learn later. If I'm going to be eating at Japanese restaurants, I really need to learn how to use chopsticks.
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Fri May 06, 2022 4:46 am

I did barely any Japanese study the last three days. Hopefully I can get back to that soon. I did watch Glass Mask episodes 11 and 12 tonight (w subs), in which the rest of the acting troupe is waylaid and Maya is forced to improvise an entire play by herself with all the other characters offscreen.

The bizarre acting challenges really don't let up here. I was expecting someone to give her the wrong script or something, since I heard that happens later, but what actually happened was a lot more extreme. It's a bit ironic, since I remember from the future episodes that I watched long ago that at one point Ayumi puts on a solo play of her own. I wonder if she got the idea from this incident.

The other interesting bit is how the friendly troupe helps her out with sound effects offstage, and at one point, one starts saying "chuu" to indicate mice. It was only a couple weeks ago that I learned from the annotations on Satori Reader's Hole in the Wall (a story about a mouse named Chuuya) that mice say "chuu" in Japan, the rough equivalent of "squeak" in English. It's really interesting how animal onomatopoeia are so different between languages. I already knew that dogs go "wan" instead of "woof" and cats "nyan" instead of "meow" in Japanese, but this seems even more different.

Also, I had trouble sleeping Tuesday night, so I read 濁った瞳のリリアンヌ to make myself sleepy and finally finished chapter 5. It's a bit ironic that I'm reading a completely different story from the vocab I'm studying. I'm currently going through the いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば deck on JPDB.io, although "going" is perhaps too generous a term. But that would to take a long time to get through even if it weren't for the fact that I barely did JPDB at all for the last two days, so in the mean time I'm continuing with the old story on the rare occasions when I actually try to read something in Japanese. At least it seems to be getting a bit more interesting, though I still often struggle to actually understand it. Chapter 5 even ended on a bit of a cliffhanger (the mother didn't give off a burst of magical energy when hugging the MC this time, presumably due to learning that s/he's blind and not loving her anymore?).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Sat May 07, 2022 5:35 am

話すことに関しては1歳になるまで禁止と自分に課しているので特に変化はない。

I mistook 課している for 果てる here, but apparently, it's a word I've never heard of before, meaning "to impose". It's also interesting that 課 by itself means "lesson". Wanikani taught the "section" meaning but never covered its other meanings (and only has a single word for it, 課長). I wonder where the "impose" part comes from, as it doesn't seem much like "section" or "lesson".

I'm also curious about the grammar here. Is that と a quotation or "and" particle or what? Not that I ever manage to understand grammar in the wild, but since I'm copying this here anyway, I might as well ask...

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I finished Noriko's podcast yet again today and started 4989 American Life again. As usual, I wasn't actually paying attention, but the word 脳みそ did pop out at me at one point this morning. It's a word I knew from WK that came up for review recently, but I don't think I've ever seen it in the wild before, so that was interesting to see.

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I've continued to do barely any JPDB. I've only done three new cards total over the last two days. And to think that for a while last month, I was doing 25 new cards a day! I've also done barely any reading on SR or syosetu.com. In fact, I didn't do any reading practice today.


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Wanikani

I missed 刻む (kizamu) this morning. In the past, I’ve had a lot of trouble remembering the reading for 削る (kezuru), and I guess this would explain why.

It’s pretty frustrating that Wanikani has two similar sounding words with similar meanings that both use the same mnemonic (keys) despite having different readings. I guess this shows how poor the mnemonics can be sometimes. Not that that’s the only example either - I still remember being frustrated about WK using the same mnenomic (hag) for hagemasu and hagane, and there are doubtless lots of other examples that I’ve forgotten.

In other news, guru’d 誇 today. 19 kanji to level 47!

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Glass Mask ep13: I was confused about Maya's schooling situation before, and this episode raised as many questions as it answered. Following Tsukikage's acting school being sabotaged and forced to disband at the end of the previous episode, Maya's friends are shown getting jobs, while Maya is shown in school, and also getting a part-time job.

The first surprise is that she is apparently in her last year of junior high, not a highschooler like I assumed. Though maybe I would have realized if I knew how the Japanese school system worked better. I just assume that any roughly teen-aged anime character is in high school.

In any case, the mystery left by Maya apparently dropping out of school (and running away from home) to go to Tsukikage's acting school leaves more questions. Like how did she just go back to normal school? The acting troupe looked like a fulltime thing, so did she have to repeat a year of school or what? Why weren't people surprised when she randomly rejoined school in the middle of the year?

Also, how did Maya pull all this off with her mom not knowing? Even after going back to normal school, she is still living on her own, sleeping with her former troupemates somewhere and taking バイトs to pay for the school trip. I can't imagine something like this happening in the US, let alone Japan. Does the school think she's an orphan or something?

In other news, this line seems like the most perfect encapsulation of Glass Mask ever:

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vonPeterhof
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby vonPeterhof » Sat May 07, 2022 8:17 am

golyplot wrote:I'm also curious about the grammar here. Is that と a quotation or "and" particle or what? Not that I ever manage to understand grammar in the wild, but since I'm copying this here anyway, I might as well ask...
It's essentially the quotation と, as if quoting a direct order.

golyplot wrote:Also, how did Maya pull all this off with her mom not knowing? Even after going back to normal school, she is still living on her own, sleeping with her former troupemates somewhere and taking バイトs to pay for the school trip. I can't imagine something like this happening in the US, let alone Japan. Does the school think she's an orphan or something?

It does seem like it's not unheard of for Japanese high school students to live on their own, like in cases when they enroll in a prestigious high school that's too far from their homes to commute, so it generally doesn't require much suspension of disbelief even if a lot of the time it's used in fiction it's for the narrative convenience of not having immediate parental supervision. On the other hand, from what I hear, Japanese schools tend to take a great deal of interest in their students' family lives, so it does seem like a huge stretch that a student would be able to keep the school and the parent from finding out about each other for any significant length of time (speaking without any familiarity with the specifics of the setup in Glass Mask).
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golyplot
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Re: Learning Japanese from zero by listening

Postby golyplot » Mon May 09, 2022 5:30 am

這い這いが出来るようになり、行動範囲も広がったことにより目が見えないことで、危険なことが増えるために誰かが必ず付いているという状態だ。

Why is there a なり here? What kind of grammar is that? I tried to look it up, but the only results that came up were for ようになる instead.

I was also thrown by the use of ために here, since I usually think of it AためにB as meaning "B in order to A". However, it can apparently mean "B because of A" as well. It's confusing that it has two basically opposite meanings, and it doesn't help that learning resources and examples all seem to focus on the first meaning.

While looking that up, I came across the following example sentence:

来年から一人暮らしするために、お金を貯めています。

I found this one notable because I only knew of 貯 as cyo/takuwa. I had no idea it also had that ta- reading.

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Glass Mask ep14: The end of this episode mentioned that Maya and Ayumi are now 14. At the beginning of the first episode, Maya is 13, and in episode 4, Ayumi is stated to be 13. It is also said that Ayumi and Maya are in the same class. In the episode 8, where they decide to play Takekurabe, it mentions that the heroine, Midori, is 14, the same age as Maya. It's really hard to tell when time passes in the series, so it's nice to get confirmation that time is passing, however vague.

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JPDB:

Every morning when I get up, I've typically had 15-20 reviews awaiting me on jpdb.io, sometimes as high as 30 on bad days, like back when I was doing 23 new cards a day a couple weeks ago. So it was a huge shock when this morning, JPDB instead showed 106 overdue reviews.

Apparently, the creator tweaked the interval timings overnight, which resulted in a huge lump of new reviews for everyone due to the adjusted SRS intervals. Up until now, I've been making an effort to keep my review count at 0 every day (which is required to do new cards anyway), but obviously that's impossible now. It's going to take quite as while to get through that pile, especially since a large mountain of reviews has a demoralizing effect on its own. (In fact, it is now up to 116, even though I did a few reviews this morning.)

Anyway, I didn't do much JPDB today, mostly due to being busy all day, but the demoralizing review wall certainly didn't help. I've always been less enamored with JPDB lately in general. It's quite a change from when I was gung-ho about racing through the N3 deck and doing 23 new cards a day. I maxed out new cards last Monday, but since I finished the N3 deck and started the いつも通りの日常で、、君からすれば deck, I've barely done any new cards at all. And obviously, with the new review pile, it will be a while before I can start doing new cards again.

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