This week was pretty busy for me so I didn’t manage to meet my reading (time) goal most days. I did read all of 外つ国の少女 vol. 1, which, though it’s not very text-heavy, does have an interesting writing style that I had a bit of difficulty puzzling through. The main characters are a little girl (シヴァ) and a gentle monster of some kind (I don’t know if he has a name, but she calls him せんせー), and they both speak in very different ways. There’s a fair bit of the archaic speech I’ve run into before, plus one or two occurrences of the “have to do” grammar point ~ねばならぬ, which I’m glad I actually recognized when I saw it — I’ve had a terrible time remembering it in my Bunpro reviews. Also a fun little payoff from something I remember Chrouya saying a long time ago; “醜い and 見にくい have the same reading. Coincidence?” so when I saw the monster referring to himself as 醜い I knew exactly what it meant. Each page has a fair number of sound effects too, which is great — there aren’t too many of them but they’re used consistently in similar places, which really helps give a feeling of what they’re supposed to represent.

The other major piece of input I got this week was a replay of the Persona 4 Golden drama CD. One day I had to ride my bike to-and-from work twice in one day, which left me pretty much exactly enough time to listen to the one-hour episode. The first time I listened to it I was surprised by how much I comprehended, and this time felt like a minor improvement on that…maybe 5% higher (which is actually an appreciable difference based on an article Tael shared earlier).

Finally (and I’m not even sure if this counts) I downloaded the 6k core Anki deck and customized my cards to focus on sentence comprehension. My plan here is just to casually go through when I have a spare minute, immediately deleting any cards I understand. I’ve actually already learned a couple of patterns this way, like using つ as an age counter for young children.