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soo my wife picked up some random 100 yen BL volumes at the used bookshop today because the cover looked funny. turns out, the main character comes from the prefecture directly on top of ours (as in, i have friends from there!!) and speaks in dialect randomly throughout the first volume. northern dialects hardly ever appear in manga and i've been wanting to train my understanding of them, so it was a nice surprize.
i then read the 2 volumes of it that she'd bought, and while there were almost no words i didn't know, i read so slowly in small print that it took... oh... probably 5 hours. SIGH.
went around town and to some different shops today; despite being valentine's day we saw basically NOTHING advertising it (only "some" chocolate and "some" alcohol), and only saw like two couples on dates / dressed up for dates. kinda disappointing because i thought there'd at least be fancy cakes or displays in town or something. in anime/manga you always see the "here's some chocolate i made/bought myself!!" deal but apparently valentine's day is literally nothing more than that. also that "i made myself" actually just means melting pre-bought chocolate into a mold that you like, you're not actually mixing cocoa powder or anything (and the darkest chocolate i saw was only like 50%!!). i'm also currently on the hunt for eel, because i've seen eel in holiday sushi and eel with sauce on it (that i can't eat since it has sugar), but no PLAIN eel that i can just cook myself. despite, y'know, being an anime staple food. maybe they get common in summer?
anyway, if it's a "normal" manga (shounen, BL, shoujo, action) then there's now so few words/phrases i don't know it's just the same as reading a scanlation in english to me. political manga/anime i still don't get. i haven't been looking up words i don't know, instead i've just "kept reading" and frankly even though you can learn them from immersion you sure learn them a lot more slowly than if you just looked them up (at the point where i'm at anyway)... probably after one more year in japan i'll be able to say i'm "fluent" at japanese, or so i hope...
i then read the 2 volumes of it that she'd bought, and while there were almost no words i didn't know, i read so slowly in small print that it took... oh... probably 5 hours. SIGH.
went around town and to some different shops today; despite being valentine's day we saw basically NOTHING advertising it (only "some" chocolate and "some" alcohol), and only saw like two couples on dates / dressed up for dates. kinda disappointing because i thought there'd at least be fancy cakes or displays in town or something. in anime/manga you always see the "here's some chocolate i made/bought myself!!" deal but apparently valentine's day is literally nothing more than that. also that "i made myself" actually just means melting pre-bought chocolate into a mold that you like, you're not actually mixing cocoa powder or anything (and the darkest chocolate i saw was only like 50%!!). i'm also currently on the hunt for eel, because i've seen eel in holiday sushi and eel with sauce on it (that i can't eat since it has sugar), but no PLAIN eel that i can just cook myself. despite, y'know, being an anime staple food. maybe they get common in summer?
anyway, if it's a "normal" manga (shounen, BL, shoujo, action) then there's now so few words/phrases i don't know it's just the same as reading a scanlation in english to me. political manga/anime i still don't get. i haven't been looking up words i don't know, instead i've just "kept reading" and frankly even though you can learn them from immersion you sure learn them a lot more slowly than if you just looked them up (at the point where i'm at anyway)... probably after one more year in japan i'll be able to say i'm "fluent" at japanese, or so i hope...
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