February 2024 Check-in!

It’s been so fun to be able to easily make cards from Final Fantasy XIV! With the power of Voice Vox, I can also have some fairly decent text-to-speech as well. I love this card because of the way the Sylphs talk! It’s so cute!

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Another month about to close! This year continues to fly by, but thankfully I feel like I’ve made some good progress with a lot of things during this time.

At the end of January, I had some ideas for how I wanted this month to go. I talked about maybe continuing the immersion momentum of January, but quite frankly I think I need some more lowkey months in between higher-intensity ones! So this one was maybe a bit more lowkey, but I still got a lot of variety in I think!

I finished four books this month!

六人の噓つきな大学生 was the first book I finished. It was part of my bingo board in the award-winning slot. It was solidly okay! I was maybe expecting just a bit more with some of the hype I saw around it, but in the end I was satisfied with how things played out.

全力で生きる技術 is a book that rubygagotoku highly recommended! She has an excellent post about the book over on Instagram. I know next to no thing about pro wrestling in any country, but Tanahashi’s words in this book were incredibly inspiring and motivating. Definitely one of the top non-fiction books I’ve read, and one of my favorites this year too! It’s not too long either, which made the impact even more awesome!

Guin Saga volume 6 was exciting to read because it’s the start of a new story arc. As such, there were a ton of new characters introduced. Despite the title of the volume naming one of these new characters, I didn’t actually find that the book focused on him too much! Or perhaps I was too preoccupied with the イケメン the author introduced. I know I boldly stated sometime in January that I’d love to read two Guin Saga volumes a month, but honestly I’d rather just go with the flow. I’m no longer scared of its difficulty, but sometimes I’m just in the mood for other things. I also sometimes like to break my own rules for no other reason than it being fun and me being stubborn.

星を編む was also on my bingo board as my physical pick! My boyfriend bought this for me when he saw my eyes glittering at a 凪良ゆう book in the flesh at Kinokuniya. I hadn’t read 汝、星のごとく at the time this was bought, so I did that first and then slowly went through this one! Physical books aren’t harder for me because of the lack of a popup dictionary, but because I can’t change the text size at all. My eyes have been getting not-so-good these past few years, so I’m happy that I was able to finish a second physical book this year at all to be honest! Still have a third on my to-do list too.

I’ve been chipping away at other books this month too!

Last year I finished the 美しい彼 series as part of the 別次元の図書館 book club, so it has been fun to revisit those characters in the short story book interlude 美しい彼番外編集. Most of the stories in there are quite short, which makes it an easy book to dip in and out of. This way, I can savor the world for just a bit longer!

愛を与える獣達 volume 2 is one I started late last year. It’s quite a long book, but it also has fairly short chapters thanks to it being based on the web novel. I think I heard that the next volume loses these shorter chapters, but for now I’m enjoying reading this when the mood strikes. It’s a cozy read perfect for a cozy mood. Honestly I’ll probably have this one in progress for awhile!

The Japanese translation of Atomic Habits has been another inspiring read so far. I can definitely see why there’s been so much hype about this book in both English and Japanese. I’ve been in a self-improvement journey for a bit, so this is the perfect book for me at the moment.

I just started Re:Zero volume 4 the other day, thanks to feeling inspired again by watching all of the anime. Admittedly, I was feeling rather mild on the series after finishing the first three volumes. I think that’s because I was hyping it up too much to be my next series that was “the one” after reading all of 本好きの下剋上. While watching the anime, I realized that what I didn’t really like about Re:Zero was the amount of gore, I guess. I get icked out pretty easily, so having it be so repetitive grossed me out. Thankfully it lessens a bit, but I realized there’s so much of the story that really intrigues me. I have so many answers I’m now craving! I thought about just reading the light novels from where season 2 leaves off, but I’m a bit of a completionist. I’m excited to see how the light novels continue to differ from the anime!

So though I didn’t finish a ton of novels this month, I did make progress on my bingo board! Depending on my mood, it’s quite possible I finish this next month! So cool to see my progress on it, because initially I was hesitant to even make one of these boards. I’ve started working on someone else’s bingo board in the meantime for fun!

I have two in-progress visual novels going on, 剣が君 and Amnesia! Now that I’ve finished 星を編む, I’ll want something else to read while on the couch with my doggo, so Amnesia will fulfill that role. 剣が君 will end up being my food time read during March! Amnesia is the way easier read, so playing it on the Switch is quite comfortable. 剣が君 is still difficult at times, but sticking to it has made it become easier and easier.

Learning about Agent and how I can texthook a bunch of games has been a mind-blowing experience. I’ve never finished Final Fantasy IX in any language, so I was excited to start playing it in Japanese and be able to mind from it easily. I’m not exactly racing to finish it, but I appreciate that I have this as an immersion option ready to go whenever.

I’ve also still been playing Final Fantasy XIV, on my quest to figure out a character count of the game! I recently broke over 400,000 characters read, which would equal about 1,000 pages. I’m still not too far into the game, but I’ve been having fun with my experience point bonus so I have started to unlock more and more jobs. Those job story quests have been really fun to read through in Japanese!

The process of writing out all the different things I’ve been reading this month has really opened my eyes to how much I’ve done! It’s not quite comparable to January in terms of amount of characters read, but I appreciate how varied my content has been.

As for watching and listening immersion materials, it looks like I averaged about an hour a day at least of doing something!

I was enjoying keeping up with the 薬屋のひとりごと (Book club for the light novels are starting in March in 別次元の図書館 discord by the way!) and 葬送のフリーレン anime. But I definitely spent the most time on the Re:Zero anime seasons, and the movie too. As I said above, watching Re:Zero really made me want to dive back into the light novels. That thought process led me to start the 伯爵と妖精 anime too since I wanted to read the light novel sometime! Volume one is part of my bingo board. I used to think that I wanted to read the books before watching related media, but I’ve come around to the opposite idea! Getting the depth from the books after experiencing the story is more fun than I could have realized.

I’ve started to listen to more Drama CDs this month too. The one for 愛の巣へ落ちろ！was so good! There was a voice actor I recognized from a few things too that I felt had such a great performance in it. I’ll be reading that book soon too, so again I enjoyed getting a feel for everything first before diving back in for the depth.
So that one was probably my favorite drama CD this month, but I also really enjoyed listening to the Final Fantasy XV prologue audio drama and an hour-long Overlord one on YouTube. Final Fantasy XV is a game near and dear to my heart, so revisiting that world was great. The Overlord one was basically an hour long dungeons and dragons session! I thought it was very creative and funny.

Also on YouTube, while I’ll sometimes just find something random or related to a book, I’ve been enjoying listening to more of 佐藤まな’s videos. She just has a really relaxing voice, and I like a lot of the advice she gives. I’ll still sometimes try to shadow her as I’m listening!

Speaking of shadowing, it was something I tried to do this month. Well, I shouldn’t say “tried”, because I definitely did do it. I just didn’t do the amount I was hoping to do. Shadowing can be super fun, but sometimes if I’m repeating something too much it can sound like I’m singing. Which, I guess kind of makes sense!

Other forms of output I did included keeping up with my daily blurb journal. I haven’t missed a day since starting it. Some days have more written than others, but the point of that journal is to have a super low barrier of entry. One sentence that I can think of and write down.

Completing four books this month also meant that I wrote four 感想 journal entries. I always type these up first and then handwrite them.

I’ll be honest, I’m having a hard time dedicating more time to output. I know that the more I do of it in a day, the quicker I’ll improve but it’s just not what I enjoy doing the most. I want to at least make sure I’m trying to output in some way daily, but it likely won’t be something I want to focus on with all of my power. Slow progress is still progress, and I know I’m already better than I was before.

It has been another fun Anki month! I recently upgraded my Anki to the latest version (purely to get the FFXIV deck that is in the subs2srs deck folder. If you know you know!). This initially meant I would be losing the Runescape add-on (shown on the right side), so in its place I downloaded AnkiCraft!
AnkiCraft is based on Minecraft. If you set it up how it tells you to, you’ll be provided with some audiovisual feedback to help keep you focused! With each passed review, you gain a few resources that accumulate at the bottom of your main screen. What you’re supposed to do with these is open up your Minecraft game and then give yourself the items, and the correct amount of them, in game using the /give command. I made a world just for this purpose! My little Anki land. I plan on building in that world using the items I collected while doing reviews, and while I’m doing that listen to podcasts or more drama CDs. I used to do that a lot in English, so I’m excited to spend more time doing that in Japanese!
Thankfully, not long after updating my Anki, the Runescape Gamification add-on was updated! Of course I lost my progress that I had before, but that’s not something that really bothers me. I just like seeing the numbers go up! I also appreciate the icons that were added. There was just another recent update that added another skill and increased some of the exp gain, so it’s been really fun!

I downloaded a shared deck earlier this month called GameGogakuen's Japanese Production Flashcards, and it’s been amazing! I never really did production cards in Anki before, but doing a few of these a day have already made me more mindful. I can tell that a lot of love and care went into making this deck, so I’d definitely recommend it to others! I appreciate the writeup the author has too about why production cards are beneficial. That can be found in the description of the Anki shared deck page, so definitely take a look at that!

That deck inspired me to start creating some cloze cards from my own immersion material. With the power of AnkiConnect, making these cards just takes a click. In April I’d like to spend more time with production cards, after my immersion-heavy March.

I have some pretty heavy reading ambitions for March! I was inspired by my exercise goal for February, which was to try to exercise for 60 minutes every day. So far with that, I only missed 3 days, but still managed to do over 30 minutes for each of those! The goal wasn’t necessarily do 60 minutes every day or I fail. I wanted to set what I felt was an ambitious goal to see how often I could hit it. Having the goal made it more likely that I could muster up the strength each day to hit it. I’m going to apply this same type of thing to reading.

My March reading goal will be to hit 100,000 characters read daily. Of course, I really just want to do an experiment to see just how often I can actually hit that goal. My hope is that I can find a more sustainable number for the next official Tadoku round. But how cool would it be if I was able to hit 100,000 characters read almost every day?! I’m going to shoot for the moon but be happy just to see the stars.

Because of this goal though, my March weekly Substack posts will likely be weekly immersion roundups! I’ll be focusing so hard on immersion, and probably flying through a lot of things, that I’d appreciate the time to reflect on everything weekly. That way my monthly round-up post won’t be five times as long as this post ended up being!

I still keep a spreadsheet with some of my bigger goals. The almost completely arbitrary 130 million character count (based off of what I calculated at the time to be 1000 books read) and my road to 10k mined Anki cards. Also on this spreadsheet I’ve included my weekly count of books read so I can keep track of my average per week. As long as it’s above a certain point, I’m positive I can reach my yearly goal of books read.

One last thing on my mind based on that. My yearly goal is still to hit 225 total books read. I have a ton that I want to read that are of varying lengths, but I did some janky guessing math and came up with 21,000 characters per day in order to meet this goal. This seems totally doable even on my less energetic days, but I also know that March will make a huge dent into this!

Thank you for reading this far! I’m a bit surprised that I had so much to write about, but looking through my Tadoku logs made me realize that I was doing way more than I thought. This really is the power of tracking for me. I have the proof right in front of my eyes, because sometimes my feelings are just wrong.

If any of you would like to sign up for the March Tadoku round, please feel free! It’s more than just reading now, so if you’re more of a listener don’t be shy about joining! I especially love seeing other language besides Japanese participating. It’s nice to be part of something with other language learners!

See you all again soon!