🌌Study log 12/4/2025

⛅Weather report: chilly, sunny

🙂Mood report: normal, hopeful

✅Finished tasks: 16

⏱️Total time of study: 6h 15 min

Big review is almost finished. I just have to finish making Genki grammar flashcards.

🌱I’ve been reading キノの旅 and started a reading journal where I summarize what I just read in Japanese. I try to use the new words I highlighted and it makes them stick better than flashcards. I actually haven’t studied any flashcards for 4 months and don’t miss them. I might go back eventually, but I found that I was spending time on flashcards that I could’ve been using for reading.

🌱I’ve had a lightbulb moment recently where active study works better for me - so I turned a passive activity like reading into a more active one where I read out loud and write in my reading journal. As I get back into studying after a 6-month break, I want to incorporate more active study methods like writing, shadowing, speaking, doing crossword puzzles, etc.

🌱I’ve also started working with a language coach and it was such an amazing experience! We talked about challenges with studying languages with AuDHD, monotropism and a bunch of other stuff. It was so nice to talk to someone about a shared interest because I can’t really do that with anyone in my real life. We also talked about how to incorporate more Russian into my life since I want to reactivate it and start immersing in it and writing in it more again.

🌱I think my main takeaway was that it might be better for me to make Japanese my main focus for now. Since all activities feed into each other - listening helps reading, reading helps writing, writing helps speaking - they all work together to strengthen the language until I start thinking in it, which is what happened to me with French. Of course I’ll still immerse in other languages, I’ll just mainly focus on Japanese. I’ll get way more out of it this way. I’ll also start doing weekly updates, so stay tuned!

I also learned today that Madam M's obi (帯 - the sash around her waist) being tied at the front rather than the back is probably a reference to historic high-ranking courtesans (oiran - 花魁). Like they really aren't subtle about how her "massage parlor" is actually a brothel lol

university professors love to create the most fucked up pdf ever known to mankind. it's enrichment for them.

what HAPPENED here

link: https://bsky.app/profile/brainvsbook.bsky.social/post/3llc72lyhu22j

google translate defaulting to chinese at first

okay but for those of us with interests in both the murderbot and the daomu biji fandoms this is kinda hilarious

(english-side-only really, i get that the kanji and hanzi are completely different)

our good (air)ship murderbot! thanks google

[N2] 光が死んだ夏

In February I tackled a manga, that I've been curious about for a while: When 光が死んだ夏 was published as a tankōbon in 2022 and was immediately a hit, I unfortunately only read the very first chapter before I gave up.

This was because it is set in a rural area of Japan and is told almost entirely in dialect, which I didn't have any experience in back then.

Now that I'm more used to reading various texts in Japanese, I wanted to try reading this series once more and found that what was a significant hurdle a few years ago, was now easily manageable and I was able to read the 6 volumes comfortably back to back even.

There's of course the (eldritch?) horror and the grief of losing your best friend paired with the confusion over the thing that replaced him becoming him, but interwoven with that is also the theme of being young in a rural and mostly elderly community steeped in incomprehensible traditions. And both of these themes mesh extremely well!

I would recommend N2 reading abilities, but the manga has furigana on all kanji and is not particularly difficult to read except for the dialect, which you can look up and also will get used to after a while.

You can read the first few chapters and all new chapters for free on the publisher's official site:

I used my cute little mood tracker as a way to also mark when I'd finished my daily Anki and reading practice, and I've officially finished about a month straight! :3 it really helps with keeping me consistent (also I can see that the last month kinda sucked for my mood overall lol)

A recent convo I had about how Finnish people tend to hug way less than some other cultures do, made me wonder how common hugs actually are in different cultures. So, help a lad out and tell me when was the last time you were hugged? (like, properly, not one of those "blink and you miss it" one-arm-over-the shoulder deals).

Please choose the option closest to your situation.

(Also would be neat if folks would reblog and mention in tags where do they hail from, since that was sorta the point sparking this poll in the first place)

This came as a result of Light Novel publishers believing that people don't read the blurbs on the back of the books. So their answer to this was to.... make the blurb the title.

Despite this, however, Light novels with overly long titles have very rarely topped in the best sellers, as the books that sell still tend to sell the best are ones with more traditional short titles.

So of course this trend has no bled over into manga as well because if something bullshit insane marketing scheme is proven to have no real effect other than to confuse and frustrate its consumer you gotta spread that shit to EVERYTHING.

i refuse to believe that image is a title

i cannot read it but it looks like a whole paragraph

Oh this is just the first page.

This Light novel is 196 pages long except it's literally just the title.

This is modern art.