Never expected I'd ever start anything like a blog, and honestly will probably abandon this before long. I felt I needed somewhere I can just get some thoughts out in a semi-public place even if nobody sees them though. Usually I just toss a lot of thoughts out into Discord servers I'm in, but I kind of want to distance myself from that so I don't clutter group chats and whatnot.
So, I don't really know why it suddenly struck me that today was the day I'd start, but I've heard keeping some kind of journal is good for your mental health. Personally it just makes me a little nostalgic for when I used to check the FKMTKrazy blog daily for new chapters of Manga. It feels like forever ago now, but I still have it bookmarked as a sort of perpetual reminder of those times.
I'm a little worried I'll just devolve into rambling, but I guess I'll just talk about whay I'm planning for tonight and other stuff. After all, rambling is kind of the point anyway I guess.
Tonight my plans are essentially just to play Yakuza Kiwami 2. I'll probably also end up reading some One Piece. I've been using both as Japanese practice material, and have been super invested in both lately. In Yakuza Kiwami 2, I'm just about done all the side content and will have to move on to the story soon, which is really nice timing since Kiwami 3 comes out soon. With One Piece, I'm nearing the end of the Alabasta arc. I've been chipping away at One Piece for almost 2 years of my Japanese learning now, and it has really shown me how much I've improved over the years. I went from struggling to understand a lot of what was being said and only really following the story based on prior knowledge, to being able to understand about 80-90% of the dialogue in any given chapter. One area I still want to improve with a lot is reading speed though. Currently it takes me around 15 minutes for each chapter I read in Japanese, which is fine I think, but I feel like I get really focused on numbers in a bad way. I'll see that it takes me 15 minutes to read a chapter and think "I can only read 4 chapters an hour..." and get disheartened about making any progress in the series since it's so long. It feels weird because I'm essentially being forced to not speed-read and I enjoy the contents of the story that much more as a result, but a part of my brain is concerned about not being efficient... I think I've gotten better with that kind of thing though. My attention span and focus have been steadily improving lately, and I think studying and language practice have been especially engaging lately.
For studying, my daily SRS studies for Japanese have been steadily dwindling again which is nice. I made the decision in November last year that I would stop adding new vocabulary terms after finishing the N2 vocabulary list of the JLPT and focus more on just immersion. I'm still learning Kanji because I feel you won't fully grasp them until you've written them dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times. But one thing I noticed I was really lacking on is just comprehension. When quizzing, I'd be able to see a word and know what it means and how it's read, what kanji make it up, etc. But... When actual reading a story in Japanese with the same words my brain just couldn't piece it together for some reason. So I decided that I'm just going to go all in on immersion now while adding in a few more kanji here and there.
Today, I'm adding 10 more kanji to my list putting me at 1060 kanji. It's an encouraging feeling to have some of the kanji I got tossed randomly by my SRS app be kanji I actually vaguely recognized but had never written myself. One of which was 曖, which I already knew one of the readings of because I would check the lyrics of some songs. It appears in the word 曖昧 (aimai) which I recognized because of the song 迷子犬と雨のビート by Asian Kung-Fu Generation. It was kind of exhilarating to see. There were a couple other Kanji that popped up today that I saw in Yakuza and in Assassin's Creed Shadows too which is really nice. There are a few kanji I've actually learned the readings of due to voiced dialogue in both games, and it certainly helps reinforce them heavily when I study them.
I honestly expected I'd run out of things to yap about by now but I can keep going for a while. I'll cut it off for now though, since my lunch break just ended and I have stuff I unfortunately need to get done today. Maybe I'll make another post later, but it honestly does just kind of feel good to talk like this.
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