Komi-san is as good as ever and I’ll need to go buy some more of it since I blazed through the last batch I bought. Standout moments this week were an explanation of how to play a particular type of 花札 game (which I had a lot of trouble with at first) and a section which featured 井中 speaking freely in her ずうずう弁 accent (where I was gratified to find that I understood her perfectly — my mild interest in 東北方言 is paying off it seems. Bonus: coming across かろう for the first time in the wild, then hearing it in a song almost immediately afterwards and realizing that I’d actually heard it years ago — the mysteries of passive immersion!

I didn’t end up having as much time as I expected for reading this weekend so I wasn’t able to finish Flying Witch vol. 8, but I’ll polish it off next time. Something I’ve been noticing though, is that the series has gotten noticeably more complex as it’s gone along — it’s no longer the beginner-friendly series that I started with. It could be that the setting has been developed to a point now where the reader can be expected to have a working knowledge of the magic system and should be able to handle more in-depth topics, or maybe this is just a natural progression as more characters are introduced. Either way, the number of text-heavy pages has increased a lot over the last three volumes and it’s nice to find that I’m still able to keep up with the same ease that originally drew me in.

I’m trying once again to get on the audio immersion train, so I put away four or five more episodes of Toradora. A lot of the plot points are still hitting me as brand new (despite this being a rewatch) but I’m still having a pretty easy time following the story, even if a decent amount of the banter goes over my head. There were a few points where I was able to pick up secondary meanings for vocab I already learned based on context (as one example, I learned 谷間 as “valley” but that’s not all it means).