At the beginning of this week I was on another flight (this time coming home) and had about 5 hours of uninterrupted reading time. I read the second half of Flying Witch vol. 2, and all of vol. 3. It was the first time I’ve ever read an entire 単行本 in one day; feels pretty good. Probably the biggest benefit of reading Flying Witch at this point is that I have nearly perfect comprehension — I only had to look up maybe five words throughout 1.5 volumes — which allows me to essentially put 99% of my effort into improving my reading speed. I’m still much slower than if I were reading something in English, but that just comes with practice.

Throughout the rest of the week I finished vol. 4 of 甘々と稲妻, which feels like it’s actually getting more difficult as the series goes on — the author makes creative use of handwriting in addition to regular fonts and it seems to be ramping up ?Aside from that it’s not too bad; I like to alternate between manga with furigana and without to make sure I’m not getting lazy.

Finally, I’ve been playing a little bit of Persona 4 here and there; basically just because I was in the mood to replay it and figured I might as well do so in Japanese. It feels a little like cheating since I’ve played it (at least the beginning) multiple times in English, but it’s still good practice. Chie and Yousuke each have a characteristic way of talking that can be hard to decipher at times but it’s fun regardless. I’m also dabbling a little bit in ひまわり (the visual novel that our dear departed Bot-chan’s avatar came from). I’d started it a while ago but didn’t get very far since I was looking up a lot of words instead of trying to maintain momentum — we’ll see how I do this time around.