October 2023 Check-in

New week, new card!

I recently started watching VTuber 椿鬼いろは again and realized I could simply make an Anki card whenever thanks to the power of ShareX. So this is my first Final Fantasy XI card and my first VTuber card, all in one! Adds a bit of extra flavor to my reviews!

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I hope you all can forgive a slightly early post, but I really enjoy doing my monthly check-ins at the very end of the month! The older I get, the quicker time seems to flow, so we’re here again already!

This month felt really, really good for immersion. September had a lot going on and my confidence and momentum was shaken a bit, but I was able to get back into the groove!

Finished
Re:Birthday Song～恋を唄う死神

I ended up making 215 Anki cards from this visual novel! I loved it so much. It felt like my first true VN experience. I had choices and answers! It felt really satisfying to finish. I am looking forward to other people in the VN club to get further along so I can gush about it all over again. This was the VN that really made me feel the power of utilizing visual novels for language learning. Between the amount of voiced lines, being able to replay lines whenever, and the imagery for extra context, experiencing a story has never felt so easy. And boy howdy did I enjoy experiencing this! I laughed, cried, yelled at some characters. In the end, I had read over 1,400 pages after converting my character count. It did not feel like I read that much at all! I was simply clicking next a lot and following each route’s storyline.

Finished
青春ブタ野郎はバニーガール先輩の夢を見ない

I finished volume one of the 青春ブタ野郎 series! This is one I had sort of a vague interest in, but I don’t think I would have started it had it not been for the book club choosing it last time! Overall, I enjoyed it! It has a bit of a different vibe than what I’m used to. Perhaps a bit more laid back? High school comedy type of thing. But there’s a lot of social commentary going on as well. I do think I’d like to continue this series in the future when the mood strikes! I originally started off by reading along with the audiobook, but honestly I still just prefer to read without it. I may listen to it for some background noise one day though! I mined a total of 73 cards from volume one. It was a pretty easy read! Some of the cards I mined just because the sentence was cool and I wanted a monolingual definition for something. Thankfully I’m allowed to cheat in my own Anki.

In progress
Un:Birthday Song～愛を唄う死神～

Re:Birthday Song got me so hyped up, I had to read the other VN set in the same universe! I’ve only had a couple sessions so far, but I’m really enjoying it. It follows two established Shinigami from the previous game as they are on a job. We got bits and pieces of interactions with those boys before, so it’s kind of fun to get more depth here! I’ve been into mining way more than usual lately, so I already have 35 cards mined from here despite not being too far in.

In progress
心霊探偵八雲 1 赤い瞳は知っている

I knew I would start this one eventually! Perhaps it was the Halloween mood stirring within me, but I recently started volume one of the 心霊探偵八雲 series! I’m still in the first chapter, or rather File, but I’ll probably end up finishing it and moving on to the second File later today! I really, really like when a book that has long chapters is broken down into several parts. I’m currently in part eight. Having it broken down further does a lot for my mental space, so it makes it easier to read more and more. I have 18 cards mined so far from this! Most of it is oddly enough from the prologue. So if you’re starting this and finding it too difficult at first, please don’t worry! It gets way easier!

In progress
愛を与える獣達

A web novel I’ve been reading on my phone! It is definitely for 18+ readers. I’m not terribly far into this one either, but I do read from it in small but frequent batches lately! Only 6 cards mined so far. I have some more sentences ready to be turned into cards, but since I’m doing this from my phone the process is a bit different. I highlight the sentence(s) I want and then “Share…” them to a channel in my dummy discord. From there I just turn on my clipboard inserter extension and yomichan + Anki Connect normally from there. This has been the fastest way I’ve been able to do this. Thanks to people in the 別次元の図書館 server for helping me figure it out!
This web novel has been great at keeping me reading even on the weekends, when I’m a bit more likely to be distracted by other things. Fitting in at least 10 minutes a day of reading really isn’t too hard. I have a few other things I’ll bounce around to, but nothing I’m as committed to!

Tracking again!
My increased reading and feeling less and less like I had to be as fierce of a reader as I used to be as led me to begin tracking again.

I had previously deleted my old spreadsheet because that’s just how sick and tired of tracking I was at the time, but thanks to old screenshots and my Learn Natively I was able to salvage some numbers. I’ll still never know my one true count, and that’s okay. I’m starting from here. My goal count is only somewhat arbitrary. My friend was telling me about how some parents participate in a challenge to read 1000 books to their children before kindergarten, and so I decided I wanted to read 1000 books worth of text before I die. I took a somewhat longer page count, in the 300s, and multiplied it by 400 since that’s roughly a page of characters. I learned how to make progress bars too! I decided to also add my Reading and Listening streaks here too. I only just started them but hopefully it’ll help keep me accountable. If I forget, oh well I’ll just start over! Already had to do that with the reading streak!

At the end of the day, I’m just happy I was able to fight the idea in my brain that “reading a novel is for longer periods of time”. I was having such an easier time reading a visual novel because it was just small chunks at a time. When I went to go read a book, there were way more characters on the screen. To counteract this, I changed up my ttu-reader just a bit…

On a scale of one to ten, how ghastly does everyone else find this? Between my aging eyes and instant gratification brain, I have finally found my own secret sauce. I’ve been reading much more due to the smaller chunks. I took this screenshot yesterday morning but I’m already much further along in the book by over 20,000 characters after reading just over an hour. I used to love reading vertically but at this point, I’d rather just read in a way that makes me want to keep going. I hate getting caught up in “But the true and proper way is to….” ways of thinking. Sure, it means I can’t identify a salad fork from a fork fork, but the food gets in me regardless! And so does this text. I’m having a blast! I really just needed to make a few changes to get back into reading more often.

Anki tinkerings and progress~
So aside from properly laying out my Anki card goal in my spreadsheet, I’ve thought about and tinkered with Anki in other ways.

I’ve thought about deleting Morphman, especially this past week, just due to it sometimes re-setting my count. I had finally hit over 10,000 morph variants, with over 8,000 unique morphs, when suddenly my number lowered after re-calculating after a new card session. I’ve come to the conclusion that there has to be something weird about marking cards in my Sentence Bank as “Known” with a tag, and then deleting any “0T” cards, or cards with no new information.

So instead of deleting Morphman from my life forever, I have decided to utilize another Anki addon for my Sentence Bank called “Cross Profile Search and Import”. This allows me to create a Sentence Bank user profile that I can access from my main profile.

I like to import the card first and then add the word and definition information on it, because that way my tags tend to stay on. This works so well! I really wish I had done it sooner. My main profile is now not nearly as cluttered, and I can keep much more cards in my Sentence Bank profile without having to worry about syncing concerns. Cards I end up using get tagged with a tag of my choosing, and in my case I went with “Used”. So I can then go back to my bank profile and delete those cards so I’ll never have a duplicate.

I now only have Morphman reading my Mining deck, grammar deck (my personal one, not any I may have also downloaded), and still the 四字熟語 deck definitions so I can always have a card with an easy to understand definition. I don’t use that deck too often, but every now and then I like to! I no longer really care about cards being tagged as 1T, 2T, etc in my Sentence Bank. Words I actually need to learn usually only have a few sentences anyway, or unluckily none at all. I’ll slowly go through and purge unnecessary cards from my bank over time, but for now I’m just happy with this workflow.

My Anki streak still remains! During the week I tend to do more cards, and finish up any mined cards over the weekend without really adding too many new ones. I’d really like to hit 10,000 mined cards eventually, since that was a goal I used to have but never thought I’d be able to reach. Heck, I’ll even continue onto 20,000 if I’m still enjoying the process. I can’t mine cards without immersing, and it’s easier to immerse the more I know, so it’s just a fun flow for me.

Aegisub

I’m still slowly making my own subtitles for videos in Aegisub! This was a long video, but I’m super excited for it to be done so I can have a Yakuza Anki deck to add to my Sentence Bank. The process of typing out sentences that are on the screen is kind of meditative sometimes. Other ones I plan on doing are Twisted Wonderland (which is also in progress), and Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker. Endwalker should be a bit easier since I ended up copying all the text when playing through it the first time. Some people may lament not being able to have cards for their favorite video games, but not me! I’m gonna make this happen even if it takes a long time!

In addition to my Japanese stuff going well, I’m also pleased to report October in other aspects of my life has been okay too! I got to consume some delicious pumpkin products, including a cold brew coffee! My boyfriend makes his own syrups and made one he calls “Harvest” syrup. Very fall flavors, very good in coffee! It’s only just begun to get cold here, but I hope November continues to be good and cozy too.

A final note! I have turned on paid subscriptions for this blog since I've received a pledge! If you want to help support me in anyway, I would very humbly accept. I don't think I'll have any important paid posts in the near future, but any and all appreciation for the weekly writings I do warms my heart! I especially have loved reading some comments people have left talking about their own journeys! Thank you all so much for your support every week reading my posts, it means so much! Learning Japanese is one of my favorite activities, and I love sharing all my thoughts and continual progression on it. これからもよろしくお願いします！
Happy Halloween everyone! See you next time!