Aozora's Log for Japanese and French

[Aozora]

I started listening to the audio drama series "Are You Alice?" It's good for when I go on walks. I've listened to it in the past so I'm familiar with the content. This time around I feel I can hear the unknown words fairly clearly (if only I could write them down, maybe I will do some transcription exercises later). My comprehension is pretty good, but I could still do better.

I've read 42 pages of Miyama Monogatari since my last update.

[Aozora]

I'm almost done volume 1 of Miyama Monogatari. So far the plot of the novel hasn't advanced very much, so I will start on volume 2 next. It turns out there's a third volume which hasn't been released by Tsubasa Kadokawa yet, so I'll have to keep an eye out for it. So far it feels like a longer novel arbitrarily cut into shorter pieces so they can sell 3 volumes instead of 1.

I've watched 8 episodes of Durarara (4 episodes into the sequel x2 now) and 3 episodes of Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha de Aru.

I've been working on my Japanese Anki deck a little more slowly as I have more reviews to do now. I started this Memrise course on Pitch accent because for the life of me I couldn't distinguish the different pitches http://www.memrise.com/course/272235/ja ... roduction/

Annnnd, I haven't worked on French this week.

[Aozora]

I finished Miyama Monogatari vol 1 and I'm 60 pages into vol 2. I find the pacing a little slow (many flashbacks and memories and introspection) and when the characters talk, they are kind of slow and repetitive--maybe it wouldn't feel that way if I read much faster, though. There is a fantasy world and a normal world and the characters and narration in the fantasy world have a bit of a dialect/they use some unusual wording. If you haven't familiarized yourself with different Japanese dialects, that might be confusing or intimidating. Other than a few odd words, I don't find it hard to read.

I also watched Bakemono no Ko which was a good movie, and I watched 2 episodes of Tanaka-kun was Itsumo Kedaruge. Plus I listened to some more Are You Alice? (and one of the chapters was out of order on my mp3 player, very frustrating). It feels weird to log my anime watching, but I do feel watching more stuff for the Super Challenge is helping my listening. I heard a few words from my recent vocab studies too. The constant combination of books + films + vocab study really feeds into each other, I can't wait to see how things are in a few months.

[Aozora]

I read 40 more pages of Miyama Monogatari. I watched a few more episodes of Durarara and I listened to 2 hours of an audio drama on Youtube. This channel has a number of audio dramas or audiobooks with different voices https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Q2m3 ... SyA/videos
The one I listened to today was ソフィーの世界 (Sofii no Sekai).

For French... I watched a couple episodes of Peppa Pig. The dialogue is nice and clear, it's easy to make out what they are saying and learn a few words, even if it's really kidsy stuff.

[Rotasu]

I really want to watch Durarara too but when I watched the first episode of the second season, there were so many new characters and I wasnt as interested has I was with the first season. I do know what happens in the end Izaya baby u so cute so wondering how you liking the seriers? (Hopefully you watching the second season xD)

[Aozora]

I really want to watch Durarara too but when I watched the first episode of the second season, there were so many new characters and I wasnt as interested has I was with the first season. I do know what happens in the end Izaya baby u so cute so wondering how you liking the seriers? (Hopefully you watching the second season xD)

In my opinion the first two episodes of the original and season two are similarly cluttered and confusing--they both introduce a ton of characters whose stories overlap and need another episode or two to back-track and unpack what is going on. I watched the first season recently, so I wasn't surprised when the second season started that way too. The animation quality was never that high, but sometimes in the second season it's pretty bad ^_^; I'd say if you enjoyed season 1, give season 2 a try, maybe 5 episodes to get a feel for if you like it or not.

[Aozora]

I read 18 pages of Miyama Monogatari, and listened to the second part of ソフィーの世界 and 39 minutes of Are You Alice? I missed doing my reading yesterday, but the weekend is a good time to do extra reading. I'm tentatively going for 10, 000 pages for the Super Challenge.

I just decided that starting next week I want to transcribe 2 Japanese Pod101 advanced blog lessons a day for two weeks. The lessons are basically 1 page blog entries with audio and script on various topics. I'll listen to the audio and transcribe it as best I can, and then check the transcription and write it out again correctly. I'll also study any new vocab the the lessons.

[Aozora]

Finally, finally finished Miyama Monogatari. It was dragging for a while, but now I can read other things now I don't know what kind of review to give the book series, especially since I've only read 2 out of 3 books. It's not bad, but kind of slow, it can take 20-50 pages for anything to really advance plot-wise. My next book is called Online! and I also took the Japanese translation of a novel called Princess Academy out from the library. I will try to read them at the same time to mix things up a bit.

Over the weekend I drilled a little over 100 vocab mostly from Juu-ni Sai. I used paper flash cards, but I'll go through the words with anki and sentence examples later. I'd like to reread Juu-ni Sai soon-ish to consolidate that vocabulary. Right now, paper flash cards seem to be a pretty easy and non-tedious way to get the words in my head. Making the cards gets the words in my head, and then flipping through them as many times as I want is easy and I like the tactile aspect of it. Of course, I can't have tons of little papers piling up. Maybe I will just trash the old ones once they're in anki.

[Aozora]

Japanese

I'm over 50 pages into Online! and I like it so far. It's about high school students who have to play this demonic video game or they will die--plus every time they die in the game, they lose the function of different body parts in the real world until they die. It's fast paced, which is a nice change.

I listened to some more audio dramas and watched some Japanese Let's Plays on Youtube. I tried some podcasts, but I don't know if I even like podcasts. I wasn't really enjoying them so I stopped.

I'm working through my Anki deck at a good pace right now. My kanji stats tell me I have 979 unique kanji in my deck of 490 seen cards. Of course this deck is just a recent-ish add on to my studies, but it's nice to see how many kanji I'm actively seeing and reviewing.

Overall, I'm feeling pretty good. I'm really motivated to learn as much as I can! Reading children's books is probably giving me a false sense of ease, but I don't think that matters. When I'm done with these books I'll take another crack at light novels and regular novels and see how things go. In the mean time I'm learning some nice collocations and learning some word readings I might not have without furigana.

French

I'm so focused on Japanese, I can't make time for French. How do people do it? As my drive to learn Japanese increases, my drive to learn French decreases. I don't want to drop it, though, it will just come back to taunt me another day.

[Sizen]

I'm so focused on Japanese, I can't make time for French. How do people do it?

By missing many precious hours of sleep, in my experience.