This week I finished vol. 5 of 甘々と稲妻, read almost all of マグネット島通信, played the first two chapters of Astral Chain, and listened to another episode of HKBK.

甘々と稲妻 is almost to the point where I can read it without really thinking about it. There’s still some vocabulary here and there that I need to look up but it’s not too bad. When it comes to the new ingredients that are introduced in each chapter, I’ve started making my flashcards “monolingual”, where instead of a “meaning” field I just have an image of the food itself. 沢庵・そぼろ・蒲鉾 aren’t words that I have any association with in English but I know them when I see them, so having the image there to link it to real life has been helpful so far.

I’m 75% done with マグネット島通信, which is a decent pace considering that it’s about 300 pages as opposed to the 200 I’m used to. The story is getting a little weirder but it still feels pretty grounded; the characters are starting to get a little more comfortable with each other but they still use 丁寧語 and the social dance is very evident.

Astral Chain is really good, and one really cool thing about it is that even the US retail version lets you change the language completely to Japanese (both text and audio). I played about three hours yesterday and was mostly able to follow along despite the dialogue auto-advancing. A lot of the jargon went over my head but the story is pretty easy to follow and I don’t think I’ve missed any critical game mechanics due to misreading the menus. There was one point where I picked a dialogue option without really considering it and got a bad score, but when I replayed the mission it was obvious what I should have picked so at least I redeemed myself a little.