This week I had a long flight with plenty of time for reading — followed by a few days where I barely had enough time to clear my Anki cards (vacation is suffering). Fortunately I was able to frontload my immersion to a large extent so I still have a decent amount to report on.

First off, I read all of Komi-san vol. 10. It seemed like the whole volume focused on this new character Rumiko, who’s pretty interesting — she uses a ton of ギャル slang and for all intents and purposes might be a totally different language. Whenever it introduces a new word you get a translation of it (into plain Japanese). I’m both relieved and disappointed that it’s tapered off as her character has developed. Aside from that, the reading is still pretty smooth.

The other manga I read this week was vol. 12 of ５等分の花嫁. This is still probably the most difficult series I read just in terms of vocabulary — there were a few points where I didn’t understand anything until I looked up some words. I’ve reached a point where I feel like the benefit of skipping over stuff is starting to decline, so I’ve been allowing myself to use the dictionary more often.

Finally I continued my replay of Persona Q2. I’m continuing to run across grammar that I know for sure I hadn’t studied when I played it a year ago, and a lot of the reading is coming much more easily than before as well. Feels good to see that noticeable improvement and I wonder if I should start casually re-reading some of the manga I read when I was first starting out (and skipping stuff).