Another rough week for me, but I did manage to finish 古見さん vol. 1 and play a little more of Persona 4 (though not really enough to comment on).

Something I like about 古見さん is that it uses a lot of noun phrases to frame different scenes. For example, at one point Komi is trying to screw up the courage to enter a café and order a drink, and the narration goes like this: 意を決して入る古見さん・一旦、出る古見さん・もう一度頑張った古見さん. It gives the scenes a great rhythm and feels like a creative way to add flavor to the text. A neat learning opportunity that I didn’t even recognize at first: the phrase 泣きそう is repeated a few times in one specific chapter, and I’d just interpreted this as “looks like he’s crying”. Coincidentally, somebody was asking about this exact construction in one of the study channels and I learned that そう can also mean “about to ~”, which fit the scene much better.

Lastly, the final chapter of vol. 1 involves Tadano and Komi trying to make friends with some of the popular kids, and this was my chance to have a series of Japanese school games explained to me. I have to admit my comprehension was pretty low for this part but fortunately the joke at the end was that Komi didn’t understand how to play either. The funny thing is that not one hour after I’d finished reading, my roommate and I were watching Nichijou and they played one of those exact same games. It got me motivated to go back and try re-reading that section to see if I can make some more sense out of it.