japanese people are great! so caring! so friendly! so willing to talk even to foreigners like me who have really bad japanese and keep making politeness / social blunders all over the place!

now i've watched 30 episodes of hunter x hunter (all that they had!) on animelon and started glancing at the manga every so often. the manga's easier to understand than the anime because the anime's cut out a bunch of lines so you have less context for the vocabulary you don't know, but the scans are bad so it's still hard to read. i couldn't find it on any of these free manga apps with clean scans. i've also seen 10 eps of parasyte and 5 of chobits; i'm trying to watch anime 2+ hours a day and really think i'm learning a lot. the good thing is, i can watch anime and concentrate "enough" on it even when the house is so noisy i can't do anything else.

i'm thinking of writing hunter x hunter fanfic... there's some prompts here and i can probably fill one of them, providing i claim there's a timeskip where the characters are of legal age:
http://pbam.dreamwidth.org/4604.html

i started trying to read japanese fanfic on pixiv, it turns out pixiv fic is a lot easier to read (it's FF.net quality) than syosetu fic so i think i'll try practicing with that rather than those out-of-copyright stories i was using earlier. at this point i need to stop focusing on stuff that's outside of N2 level, meaning no anime that's too difficult or story that's too archaic, and just "cram" for the exam's level instead.