by jake

Japanese reading goals for 2025

I realize I’m posting this quite late. I wasn’t sure what I would pick for my goals at the beginning and ended up setting them up sometime in the first month. These numbers have now been dramatically adjusted, and I took the opportunity to finally make note of them for future reference.

To begin, my adjusted goals. Below the fold, a bit more on how I got here, plus any updates throughout the year.

  • 165/121 hours (20 minutes per day) of focused audio input
  • 58/52 volumes of manga
  • 22/26 audiobooks
  • 6/6 novels

As always, tracking will be done on Bookmeter and Anilist.

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by jake

Cmoa regional spotlight: 九州

Cmoa has come out with a new regional spotlight — three of them in fact, all of which I missed. Reposting the contents here for my future reference. 九州 isn’t a region of Japan that I have a ton of knowledge nor a particular interest in, but I would have said the same about 和歌山 before I read サマータイムレンダ.

I was surprised to see 沖縄 considered to be in this region, and also that はるかなレシーブ didn’t make an appearance. Seeing 進撃の巨人 in the 大分県 section was pretty funny. I don’t really get the logic there.

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by jake

Moyase PWA

Moyase is now available on the web here. It’s a Progressive Web App, which means it can be “installed” to work offline. This means that iOS users can finally use Moyase without me having to go through all the hoops (not to mention paying) to publish on the app store.

To install:

  • Safari on iOS: Tap the “Share” button and select “Add to Home Screen”
  • Chrome and Firefox on Android: Tap the settings menu at the top right and select “Add to Home Screen”
  • Chrome and Edge on desktop: Tap the “Install app” button at the far right of the address bar

For other platforms not covered here, refer to this page on MDN.

I’ve decided to try re-enabling comments on my posts. I turned them off a while ago because I was sick and tired of dealing with spam, but I’m going to give it another try. In order to leave a comment, you need to create an account on this website, and your first comment has to be approved manually. We’ll see how it goes.

by jake
by jake

Anki mining layout

I don’t really use Anki anymore, but a little while ago I read through 沈黙 and, as an experiment, added every unknown word to Anki with the intention of studying them for a while after the fact. That never really came to pass but I did spend some time making a nice card layout in the process and I figured I should post it somewhere.

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by jake

Cmoa regional spotlight: 近畿

Comic Cmoa, the website I get all my Japanese ebooks on, recently ran a promotion about manga set in the 近畿 region, home to 和歌山 and my favorite dialect 和歌山弁. As a big fan of all the various dialects I’ve tried to find a list of manga set in each prefecture before and have always come up empty-handed, so I was pretty excited to see this. Since I’m not sure if they’ll remove this page at some point, I wanted to make a copy of the list here for my own use in the future.

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The trailer for Megalopolis has a lot to say about how “visionary” and “ahead of his time” Francis Ford Coppola is, and I guess that extends to using AI-generated Japanese text on the signs. The two signs visible in the frame at the timestamp say レアオロテンｄ　ウｒｒホアツイ and ナフイネ (or maybe オフィネ), both of which are complete nonsense and the font is so inconsistent I simply can’t believe any actual human effort was involved in their creation.

by jake