ough! did you miss me...
17 May, 2025
Hullo! It's getting to be around the time where I make another one of these. After all, it probably would've been bad form to just make a website and then not put anything on it... Anyway, here I am!
Have I been up to much in the last *checks watch* five months..? Well... no, but also yes. I've spent a lot of time being tremendously depressed (too depressed to plan a suicide, don't worry!) but also some wonderful changes have happened in my life. For starters, I moved out of Ireland! Yippee! I live in the Netherlands now, far away from my awkward home life and with a lovely housemate I met through video game tournaments (lol). I have some kind of employment lined up, but at the time of writing, it'll be another month or two till I actually get paid some cold hard cash.
It's been tough breaking away from my old "depression schedule", packed to the brim with such engaging activities as "couch" and "desk" and "phone" and "bed". However, I'm making progress - I'm writing this just a few minutes after I arrived back after a lovely sunny bike ride, and I've also been drawing again. If progress continues, I'll be back to the old Nora any day now.
"Huh? Who's Nora?" I hear you mumble. That'd be me! I also changed my name. Don't worry about it. It's all for the best (I think). I still have a long way to go, transition-wise, but for now, I'll use my new name while on the computer. All that other crazy crap can come later.
I'm still continuing my Japanese language-learning journey - if you follow me on Bluesky, you may have notice that I'm unable to shut up about it. I must admit, it's kind of taken over my spare time. I've been trying to every spare moment reading or listening to the language. If the wording of this post feels a little stunted, it's because I'm listening to 不思議の国のアリス (Alice in Wonderland!) in audiobook form in the background.
I've also purposely avoided consuming any kind of media in English. This means that most of what I've read and watched and listened to in the last couple months was kind of incomprehensible to me, but it really does help. It helps me get used to the sound and rhythm of the language, I occasionally pick up new words, and it ensures I don't start slacking off and enjoying stuff in English when I have important Japanese learning to do. Important... well, it's important to little old me.
I can't lie, I have my doubts about this method, but others have walked this path before and come out the other end with wonderful results - most notably, every dumbass baby that ever learned a language before. I've even done it before! I learned the horribly irregular language of "English" as a child by hearing it, speaking it, and reading it nonstop! And if dumbass babies can do it, a dumbass adult like me can do it too. I try not to buy too much into that bullshit about old dogs not being able to learn new tricks or whatever. I have no problem accepting that the older you get, the slower you learn, but I don't think it's worth worrying about.
Here's what I've been using as my immersion material!
Yotsuba&! - Cute manga about dumbass toddler. The language is pretty easy, so I was mostly able to follow along just fine. Except when the adults talk.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (manga) - Oh man! This was too damn hard. Too many kanji words, too much talking, too boring. I love me some joejoe, but at the time, this was too much dictionary work to be enjoyable.
Pokémon FireRed - Yay! I can play Pokémon with my eyes closed, so this was perfect. Older Pokémon games don't use any kanji, which is kind of a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, you can pronounce all the words on the screen without a dictionary. On the downside... as a learner, it's kind of a pain to figure out exactly what they're saying because so many Japanese words have the same kana spelling. A Japanese kid is obviously gonna know what they're talking about, but a chump like me is going to spend some time in the dictionary trying to guess if the word means "spoon" or "army" or "brown" or whatever. (I just made those up, but that's what it feels like sometimes)
Nichijou - This was fun, although I only watched a couple episodes. I didn't really understand it, but those are some funny kids.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (anime) - Hell yes. This was it. I've already seen Part 1-4 of JoJo, so this was absolutely perfect. I knew what I had to do. I torrented all of Part 1-5, sat my pretty little butt down, Minecraft on one monitor, JoJo on the other, and pressed play. It was wonderful. I spent the weeks before moving to the Netherlands fully absorbed in the Minecraft-and-anime cave.
Pokémon Shining Pearl - This remake isn't really very good, but it's a version of a game I know like the back of my hand, WITH kanji. I spent a lot of time looking up kanji in the dictionary with this one... It didn't stay fun for long. At least I learned from it!
Space Battleship Yamato 2199 - This was pretty good. I had seen the original with English subs, so I kind of knew what was going on. It started getting very politics-heavy in the last couple episodes, so I technically still haven't finished it... oops! Also, I am contractually obliged to say that the Reflective Satellite Cannon is the coolest thing ever invented. Hassha!
Kamen Rider 555 - Oh my god. I've never seen something so cool in my life. Open Yo Eyez... Futha Next Faiz. This is long as hell! I'm about halfway through at the time of writing. I feel like such a baby for watching so much stuff for kids and teenagers, but what the hell. You only live once.
Shin Megami Tensei III - Another kanji game - I'm so brave! This was the first game where I started abusing Google Lens. It turns out taking photos of kanji and looking them up in the dictionary is much easier than looking them up by radical... But it's still a pain! It's still a bore! Augh, augh, augh! At least SMT kicks ass.
Invincible Superman Zambot 3 - Ughhhhhhh this SUCKED. But it was fun sometimes. I hate that main character, the ending was good, also it was really annoying how 1 in 4 episodes would look beautiful and then the rest would look like shit.
Dragon Quest IV - I played the PSX version. It's fun! I was fully absorbed in the rhythm of "get to new text, take photo of screen, look words up in dictionary, add new word to flashcard deck, repeat". I'm starting to tire a lot of that now though.
Tsukihime - I read a bit of it on the excellent web port that somebody made. This was very enjoyable for the simple reason that I could use a quick-n-dirty popup dictionary whenever there was a word I couldn't read (which, I'll readily admit, was most of the time). Just hover over the word, press shift on my keyboard, and I'd get a little dictionary window. It's called Yomitan if you want to try it out! It makes looking up kanji words so much easier.
Dragon Ball - I found a version online where you can hover over all the text to get it in plaintext form - you know, text that you can highlight and therefore use a popup dictionary on. Again, this makes it a lot quicker and easier to read. Yay!
Shin Megami Tensei - I wanted to play a game in Japanese but I was so tired of the Google Lens grind, so I downloaded the original SMT for the Super Famicom. It's all in kana, so I don't have to take photos of the screen. I'm having fun!
Audiobooks - This is a recent addition to my method, after I realized that reading would likely get easier if I had a stronger grasp on the sound of the language. For that reason, I'm just trying to listen to audiobooks at any spare moment I can find. Audiobooks are typically a lot denser than TV - a lot more talking and a lot less sound effects and dramatic silences. The downside, of course, is that I lose a lot of the context for what's being said, but I'm trying to look for audiobooks where the narrator gives all the characters distinct funny voices. There's loads on Youtube!
Anyway, that's just about it from me for now. Hopefully, I'll remember to make more of these, but I'm incredibly forgetful. You'll just have to take what you can get, I'm afraid. Bye bye! Till next time!
