This week I read 炎炎ノ消防隊 vol. 2, played a bit more of Astral Chain, and watched four episodes of とらドラ with J-subs.

Fire Force is probably going on hold for a little while. I like the anime and the manga has been enjoyable, but I know I wouldn’t be following it if I hadn’t seen the anime already. I’ve picked up a few patterns here and there, and run into some of the kanji and vocab that I’ve learned on WaniKani recently, but I feel like it’s not very well suited to my reading approach. I’ll probably pick it up in a little while but for now I think I would be do better to spend my time on something else.

I’d started (re)watching Toradora way back in April and just let it fall by the wayside, so I’m trying to get back into it. The subtitles I’m using are almost aggressively accurate — as one example, in this most recent episode I noticed that somebody said すんません instead of すみません, following the actual pronunciation instead of the dictionary word. I’m probably catching 75-80% of the conversations.

Most of my time in Astral Chain was unfortunately spent stuck on one of the advanced training battles, so I didn’t get as much immersion time as I would have liked. One thing I did want to report on is that there’s one character who (to my recollection) hasn’t “spoken” any kana at all except when it’s used in names. All of her dialogue consists of bare nouns and adjectives all in kanji, without even any particles. I’m curious how she sounds in English.

Footnote: I decided to get back into Octopath Traveler after shelving it for a little over a year. Since that time my Japanese has improved by a huge amount and I’m now keenly aware that the English dialogue takes some major liberties. It doesn’t really count as immersion imo, but I’ve become so fixated on these bizarre changes that it’s caused me to pay close attention to listening to the dialogue.