Learning Update 1
Since my last post about why I decided to study a textbook again, I've actually only read one chapter of Tobira on my own, did a little bit of the grammar workbook companion, and read some of chapters 1-3 with a study group in the discord server for VR Nihongo.
At some point I investigated how far Nakama 1 covers relative to Genki and it is about the same as Genki 1. However, Tobira mainly covers content after Genki 2, so I went back and refreshed my memory with Genki 1 and learned the grammar in Genki 2 I was less familiar with. I finally have read through the main grammar explanations in Genki 1 and 2 that I needed and am working on the harder points in the grammar workbooks.
Parallel to that, I've been participating in weekly reading sessions of Tobira in VR Nihongo. For speaking practice, I still talk to my Japanese friend weekly and now I attend a VR Chat language exchange held by sleeping_now.
I feel that I'm still struggling to string together complicated sentences when speaking, but I am definitely learning slowly and I can understand anime better, at least with subtitles. I also seem to be able to understand some Vtubers a bit more than before, and that's exciting.
I'm excited to finally move past the beginner level of genki and proceed to Tobira. My next plan is to reread chapter 1, finish chapter 1 in the workbook, and continue to the next chapter, and so on. At the least, I've been studying the vocabulary with Anki at the same place of the VR Nihongo reading group.
Additionally, I've also been getting some reading practice with Genshin Impact, which let's you change the text AND voice language without restarting the game! It has tons of book excerpts you can read, so I look forward to trying those out. I already tried one with a couple folks from VR Nihongo and it was quite fun and educational, especially when combining all of our kanji knowledge to parse the text.
A while back, I was trying to play Tales of Vesperia in Japanese but eventually switched to English because I was struggling to understand the gameplay as it became more complicated and required reading enemy information and item information. I find that dialogue is mostly fine for me, but I am afraid to mess up the game or miss something when it comes to gameplay. Now I've been too immersed in Genshin, but I hope to return to Vesperia for the story eventually... But I digress.
As for manga, I'm currently very slowly reading Jujutsu Kaisen volume 1 (as in I infrequently pick it up and it's left in my car glovebox lol). I still have a bunch of other manga to get to.
Regarding vocabulary, I'm still working through the core 6k deck and have about 300~ words left. I recently dropped my new card limit to 5/day because the review amount was overwhelming me (80-100+ words/day on average). Once I finish that, I'll unsuspend the flipped copies I made (English to Japanese recall) as I realized I struggle to recall words I should know.
Anyways hopefully this blog post will give me something to reflect on and keep myself accountable moving forward. :b Apparently the previous post was around October, so that means it's been 4-5 months and I'm still only 1 chapter into Tobira... Although that's mainly because I didn't realize I missed content before it.
Now to update my practice media list... I started FMA volume one but have left it hanging for very long.. I still haven't touched Yotsubato 4, and I think I should be on the third Koupen-chan book, but I also haven't touched that in forever so I actually don't remember...
