Language Journal: October 8th 2018
Well, shocker. I'm actually enjoying one of the two books I thought I'd hate. Inari konkon was DEFINITELY not my thing. I called that one pretty quickly.
I just couldn't bring myself to force myself through the translations. In the end, I was more just trying to guess at rough meanings based on Kanji and only even bothering to translate the words I wasn't confident with if I thought they might be common/useful. Usually I was wrong.
The book probably wasn't all that bad. But, it was definitely Manga aimed at young girls.
The flip side would be こえ恋 which has turned out to be half decent. Where the other one was maybe aimed squarely at middle school or younger girls mooning over boys, this one is aimed, probably still at girls, but more likely high school aged. And the content isn't so sickening that it couldn't appear to boys as well. There is is some comedy. And while romantic interactions seem to be the main driver of the story, there is a lot of just "normalness" to it all.
In short, it isn't too deep in the romantic content. The situations are a lot more flexible. The comedy is largely driven by the extreme characters. And I've actually found myself motivated to learn all of the words. Most of the new words are in some amusing context. And, the book also omits the Furigana. Aside from one newly introduced character who spews out longer sentences with "bigger" words I can actually follow along most of the time.
I've even created flash cards just to help cement concepts or phrases which I got because I enjoyed the sentences.
In short, so far, this is the best book I've read for my level. I'm engaged in it. It is challenging but doable. And I keep wanting to come back to it.
Also, it means I may actually finish all 4 books in less than 2 weeks. Sure, I skimmed over Inari konkon, and Orange was fairly simple because it was 2 volumes of continuation. But still... that is pretty crazy.
I didn't dive super deep into Orange, but I also feel like I generally understood everything. Inari had the burden of also being the longest book which explains a little bit of why I was so willing to ignore a ton of it.
I don't really know what else to say. I guess it hasn't been too long since my last post on this. So I don't really need to say anything. But, this FEELS like a huge accomplishment. I'm like 90% through my fourth book in 2 weeks. My latest box only just shipped this past week. For the first time, I DEFINITELY will have time to re-read some entire books. I can dive deeper and make some better flashcards.
In short, what I guess I want to say is this; manga works. It is definitely not great if it is your only tool. And it definitely takes time to get to a stage where you can actually get through them in any reasonable time frame. But, what I think it has done is drastically raised my immersion level. It has also put a lot of words and a lot of kanji in much better context. My translations are getting much closer to what is on the flashcards even for my existing decks. I'm getting a much better feel for the language.
Making sentences is still my weakest link. But, another thing I can do once I get even better at reading is to change my card format to more of a cloze deletion style to promote more chances to have me build my sentence making ability based on more natural sounding cards. Again, manga isn't exactly, always "natural" Japanese. But, after enough studying you start getting a bit of a feel for what is natural and what is just an aspect of a particular character or archetype.
But, I probably won't make such a switch until I can read more books, more quickly. It will take time to verify if the sentences I'm building with cloze deletion are actually good, representative sentences. Even if I think I have a fairly good grasp on what is manga-ese and what is natural Japanese, I don't really want a false sense of security and start teaching myself terrible practices.
Anyway, yeah. 2 weeks = 4 books = feeling good.
BTW, right now I am procrastinating. The aforementioned verbose character has a wall of text on the next few pages. And, as I mentioned, he is very quotable, so I want to make cards from anything novel and that means a lot of work ahead of me. It also means a lot of looking up Kanji based on radicals because the book doesn't have Furigana for anything except the first time they introduce a character (or one word, which I assume was just a super uncommon word).
Most characters don't have words I need to look up, but this character has managed to stump me just about every time.
Procrastination done for now.
I just couldn't bring myself to force myself through the translations. In the end, I was more just trying to guess at rough meanings based on Kanji and only even bothering to translate the words I wasn't confident with if I thought they might be common/useful. Usually I was wrong.
The book probably wasn't all that bad. But, it was definitely Manga aimed at young girls.
The flip side would be こえ恋 which has turned out to be half decent. Where the other one was maybe aimed squarely at middle school or younger girls mooning over boys, this one is aimed, probably still at girls, but more likely high school aged. And the content isn't so sickening that it couldn't appear to boys as well. There is is some comedy. And while romantic interactions seem to be the main driver of the story, there is a lot of just "normalness" to it all.
In short, it isn't too deep in the romantic content. The situations are a lot more flexible. The comedy is largely driven by the extreme characters. And I've actually found myself motivated to learn all of the words. Most of the new words are in some amusing context. And, the book also omits the Furigana. Aside from one newly introduced character who spews out longer sentences with "bigger" words I can actually follow along most of the time.
I've even created flash cards just to help cement concepts or phrases which I got because I enjoyed the sentences.
In short, so far, this is the best book I've read for my level. I'm engaged in it. It is challenging but doable. And I keep wanting to come back to it.
Also, it means I may actually finish all 4 books in less than 2 weeks. Sure, I skimmed over Inari konkon, and Orange was fairly simple because it was 2 volumes of continuation. But still... that is pretty crazy.
I didn't dive super deep into Orange, but I also feel like I generally understood everything. Inari had the burden of also being the longest book which explains a little bit of why I was so willing to ignore a ton of it.
I don't really know what else to say. I guess it hasn't been too long since my last post on this. So I don't really need to say anything. But, this FEELS like a huge accomplishment. I'm like 90% through my fourth book in 2 weeks. My latest box only just shipped this past week. For the first time, I DEFINITELY will have time to re-read some entire books. I can dive deeper and make some better flashcards.
In short, what I guess I want to say is this; manga works. It is definitely not great if it is your only tool. And it definitely takes time to get to a stage where you can actually get through them in any reasonable time frame. But, what I think it has done is drastically raised my immersion level. It has also put a lot of words and a lot of kanji in much better context. My translations are getting much closer to what is on the flashcards even for my existing decks. I'm getting a much better feel for the language.
Making sentences is still my weakest link. But, another thing I can do once I get even better at reading is to change my card format to more of a cloze deletion style to promote more chances to have me build my sentence making ability based on more natural sounding cards. Again, manga isn't exactly, always "natural" Japanese. But, after enough studying you start getting a bit of a feel for what is natural and what is just an aspect of a particular character or archetype.
But, I probably won't make such a switch until I can read more books, more quickly. It will take time to verify if the sentences I'm building with cloze deletion are actually good, representative sentences. Even if I think I have a fairly good grasp on what is manga-ese and what is natural Japanese, I don't really want a false sense of security and start teaching myself terrible practices.
Anyway, yeah. 2 weeks = 4 books = feeling good.
BTW, right now I am procrastinating. The aforementioned verbose character has a wall of text on the next few pages. And, as I mentioned, he is very quotable, so I want to make cards from anything novel and that means a lot of work ahead of me. It also means a lot of looking up Kanji based on radicals because the book doesn't have Furigana for anything except the first time they introduce a character (or one word, which I assume was just a super uncommon word).
Most characters don't have words I need to look up, but this character has managed to stump me just about every time.
Procrastination done for now.
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