This week I took the plunge and started watching anime with no subs (had been doing J-sub for a little bit and decided to go all the way). As expected it’s harder to follow along than before, but not as much as I’d expected — I think if I was at 75% comprehension with J-subs then I’m at 65% now? Definitely encouraging. The hardest part ended up being the fact that I apparently use subtitles to cue me into the fact that there’s something new happening, so in their absence I found it a little harder to multitask. I’ll finish up K-On next week and probably then move onto something a little more challenging.

I’m just about done with vol. 6 of ５等分の花嫁 (will be finished by the end of the day), and that’s still going pretty well. I hit my first major wall today in the form of five messages from the male MC to each of the heroines, which made me realize it’s been a long time since I’ve had to break down a sentence word by word and puzzle it out. I’m still on my 1/wk pace and at this rate I’m actually going to run out of books — vol. 9 is due out in the middle of April.

I also took a brief dip back into 甘々と稲妻 this morning, as I had just gotten into the bath when I came across the aforementioned sentences and didn’t want to skip over them (it seemed like an emotionally important moment), and received a minor shock when I realized that, in contrast to ５花嫁 which has furigana on every kanji, here it only appears on names for people and ingredients/dishes. It was gratifying, then, to realize that I was actually able to read the entire chapter without any issue. I ran across a few recently-learned vocabulary words and some N2 grammar that I hadn’t seen in the wild.