Board 8 > Lopen's kanji learning quest topic... FUNSHINE TURBO...?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Actually this probably isn't really going to be very funshine or turbo and is mostly as a motivator/log for me.

But like three or four people on the board might actually know what I'm talking about here so they can follow along if they want and offer encouragement or heckling or whatever.

I'm using this flashcard program thing called Anki to help assist me in memorization. I'll be posting the stats for my flashcard deck in this program every day after I finish. I'm using a site called Kanji Damage to actually learn the Kanji (and that's what the deck's cards are from too). I've already learned hiragana and katakana and a lot of grammar stuff from a class I took a few years ago, but every time I've tried to learn kanji I've failed, making my knowledge of Japanese pretty worthless!

I will also be attempting to read this Subahibi (some VN that hasn't been translated to English that newbie says is good) thing in Japanese alongside learning kanji to help motivate me so I may post some stuff about that too if I feel like it.

I advise everyone to turn away unless they've done this before and/or are interested in seeing someone struggle through this. Or just wanna hear my charming commentary, I suppose.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Starting deck stats (I tried this a few months ago... didn't get very far as these stats show):

Card Maturity
Mature cards: 0 (0.0%)
Young cards: 60 (1.8%)
Unseen cards: 3327 (98.2%)

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 80.0% (20 of 25)
First-seen cards: 80.0% (48 of 60)

Keepin the same deck. It'll be interesting to see if any of the cards become "mature" because it's been months since my last session. I dunno how this thing really works but whatever.

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This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Mature cards are cards which would take at least 21 days before they reappear. imo on top of the anki deck you should set up line quotas that are manageable in one or two hours.

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

Ah.

Yeah I will set up a line quota once I get an idea of how slowly I do a line. It's probably gonna be really damn slow at the start considering how few kanji I actually know

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Anki, eh? My sister used it for the same purpose. I hear it's quite good.

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It's iubaris, not Lubaris.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure the idea behind the program is a pretty sound one-- I'm just not sure I'll stick with it. Was your sister successful in learning Japanese pretty well?

Anyway, after a little over an hour of reviewing we're now with:

Card Maturity
Mature cards: 31 (0.9%)
Young cards: 49 (1.4%)
Unseen cards: 3307 (97.6%)
Average interval: 133.8 days

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 64.6% (84 of 130)
First-seen cards: 72.5% (58 of 80)

As expected many of the cards that were in there became "mature" having next times of 1 month to 2 years. I played it safe with them, though, and went with "again" if I was at all shaky. 31/60 of the "old" cards getting a "good" on the first shot despite me being overly careful is pretty encouraging though, I guess.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

There's a program that extracts the text from programs as you play and copies them into your clipboard, which another program immediately fetches and gives you results from several different translation engines for. Pretty sure it was made specifically for untranslated visual novels, in fact.

But don't let that stop you from expanding your number of languages.

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Ace Detective in Sir Chris' Police
http://i53.tinypic.com/o0ce3q.png

I'm actually just using the VN as a motivator to help me learn Japanese, since studying without any context will be boring. I'm not using Japanese as a tool to play untranslated VNs/etc. Ideally I'll use the language for something actually useful not just to play untranslated games... but even if I don't, "just for knowledge's sake" rather than a desire to play untranslated stuff would be closer to the goal, really. Not to say it's not a benefit I guess, but yeah, that's not really the goal.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

In fact I kinda wish that was the goal since this would be way freakin easier if it was just about understanding what the characters mean. It's the fact that there are anywhere from 1-5+ pronunciations for each character (usually 2 will get you more) based on the context in which the character is used that's a real pain. Well, aside from there being thousands of characters-- that's not really that daunting though if you learn them in the right way. (Kanjidamage is good at breaking them down into components so you're remembering them more like words than random pictures)

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Well, I can't speak for you Lopen but at the start it took me about three hours, with a translation, to get through the first scene of Subahibi (about 150 lines) and by the end I was going a couple hundred lines per hour.

I highly advise against using Translation aggregator for the most part (there are some subparts of it which function similar to AGTH+Rikai, but imo the advantage of easily pasting subparts into google or Japanese-Japanese dictionaries far outweigh the convenience of having stuff autopasted for you. Not to mention there already exists a program which autopastes that I can give you Lopen)

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

Went to sleep early last night and didn't get around to studying, but I'll probably do a double session today with one late night. Just did one now for the morning.

Card Maturity
Mature cards: 31 (0.9%)
Young cards: 69 (2.0%)
Unseen cards: 3287 (97.0%)

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 71.0% (132 of 186)
First-seen cards: 77.0% (77 of 100)

The main problem continues to be the kunyomi as they're not in mnemonic. I get some of them but I'm not sure what I should do if I can reliably get the whole card but don't immediately remember the kunyomi until I see the card. My idea has been to do "again" once and then if I don't get it the second time but still get everything else to just pick the lowest level for the card that isn't "again."

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Hm, would you mind if I start posting my progress here too? (ALSO HI SEPHS YOU SHOULD DO IT IF YOU'RE SO INCLINED)

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

People joining in with progress updates is the essence of funshine

At least I think.

Even though I did explicitly deny any actual funshine being in the topic.

But knock yourself out.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Yeah so I'm done with the Kanji damage deck, so I can see several future courses open for my decks:

1) Decide to add some other deck to the kanjidamage one. Hesig, stuff on JLPT1 (Japanese Language Proficiency Test, numbered from 1-5, 1 being the hardest. ) While this is "great" for just learning a bunch of kanji and looking good to other people, the vast majority of the stuff I wouldn't be using.
2) "Organically" start adding kanji, kanji compounds or slang that I don't know on first sight while I'm reading VNs. While obviously this would improve my long term VN comprehension, the problem is that I would have to record every instance where I pause in my reading, which disrupts flow and "ruins" the main motivational part of my study
3) Just finish my current kanjidamage deck until I have no young cards left, then start a new sentence deck where I put sentences into it, like sephsblade is doing.

Probably the main thing I want to do in this topic is to record the number of times I need outside help per 1000~ lines of reading. Back during Eustia my rate was close to one question per one hundred lines, and all the way back when I first started it was something like once per 10 or once per 25. So I should probably aim for a question per 500 or 1000 lines, or maybe only ask questions when all available dictionaries fail.

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

From: meisnewbie | #010
I highly advise against using Translation aggregator for the most part (there are some subparts of it which function similar to AGTH+Rikai, but imo the advantage of easily pasting subparts into google or Japanese-Japanese dictionaries far outweigh the convenience of having stuff autopasted for you. Not to mention there already exists a program which autopastes that I can give you Lopen)

Huh? All you have to do in Translation Aggregator to translate specific parts is highlight them in the original text box.

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Ace Detective in Sir Chris' Police
http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/8823/therearepartsofmethatar.jpg

I'd probably do #2 if I was you, but it really depends on how often you see these rogue kanji. You could just copy/paste the stuff into a temp document before you make the actual card-- don't see how that'd slow you down all that much from the "look it up" step.

Anyway statz after today's run (still owed a double-- maybe later tonight):

Card Maturity
Mature cards: 31 (0.9%)
Young cards: 89 (2.6%)
Unseen cards: 3267 (96.5%)

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 73.8% (166 of 225)
First-seen cards: 77.5% (93 of 120)

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Rad Link 5 posted...
From: meisnewbie | #010
I highly advise against using Translation aggregator for the most part (there are some subparts of it which function similar to AGTH+Rikai, but imo the advantage of easily pasting subparts into google or Japanese-Japanese dictionaries far outweigh the convenience of having stuff autopasted for you. Not to mention there already exists a program which autopastes that I can give you Lopen)
Huh? All you have to do in Translation Aggregator to translate specific parts is highlight them in the original text box.

True but inadequate. I want to see TA parse netslang, Sengoku era battle strategies, sayings conjugated into a different form or just plain nonstandard Japanese. Heck at least from what I know you only get one possible definition while rikai gives multiple and can be (fairly) easily updated.

Anyway can't do anything owing to the power outage whoops ask send or hgr for advice if I'm not back by tomorrow

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You're messing with me! You're messing with me, aren't you!?
You're making fun of me, aren't you!? Aren't you!? You definitely are! I'll murder you!

Anyway now that I have access to my stuff now:

Asked 6 questions where I had no clue on, 1 of them a repeat question from two days ago (argh)

So,
1 usage question
3 definition questions
2 grammar questions

Might as well try to get in as much as I can while the humming noise still stops me from sleeping

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

1.3k lines read. 2k~ lines in game because I skipped a 600 line h scene LOL. 12 questions.

3 subject confusion
6 definition questions
1 Verb usage correction
2 Grammar construction problems

Done with Rizu's route. Probably need to go back and grab the normal ending before starting on another route. Thankfully, I can skip through the common route script.

Current line count: About 7k. Or halfway through the game.

Also Cards:

2987 Mature
400 Young (11.8%)

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

kanji good times

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peace comes from within

really hitting that 1 per 500 or 1000 huh

Easy day I guess. If it was earlier I might actually do more but I'm tired.

Tomorrow gonna be KICKING IT UP A NOTCH when I actually try and read some of this Subahibi thing. I'm probably going to only know like every tenth kanji if I'm lucky, but whatever.

Mature cards: 31 (0.9%)
Young cards: 109 (3.2%)
Unseen cards: 3247 (95.9%)

Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 76.2% (199 of 261)
First-seen cards: 77.9% (109 of 140)

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

there's like ten kanji in the intro

really hitting that 1 per 500 or 1000 huh

Definition usage problems don't really "count" because usually it's a word used or expressed in a way I haven't seen before, which would obviously vary from writer to writer and depend on the strength of my dictionary/willingness to use more dictionaries before asking. Everything else is me genuinely not know or giving up on a sentence before asking. Subject confusion sentences I really should learn to read properly though; you'd think after about 50k lines of Japanese I should be instinctually getting the correct subject in the sentence even when it depends on context.

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

what we're al hijacking lopen's topic now

uhhhh

kanjidamage: you know the score

Unique cards: 1800
Mature cards: 95%
Young cards: 5%
Correct mature: 97.6%
Correct young: 95.1%
Correct first-seen: 45.1% (i'm not sre how as I didn't study the cards before they appeared but WHATEV)

SENTENCES: a deck of sentences. 95% of which are a deck taken from tae kim's grammar guide (a guide for grammar by tae kim i hope that helps) and 5% stuff taken from weeaboo porn with plot games, or as newbie calls them "high culture"

Unique cards: 502
Mature cards: 12
Young cards: 288
New cards: 202
Correct mature: DIVIDE BY ZERO
Correct young: 62.7%
Correct first-seen: 36%

50 lines a day of either subahibi if i hate myself or eustia if i hate myself a little less







ELOPEN

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"Biting is excellent- it's like kissing only there's a winner."

It could be worse I could make lopen play muramasa if I hated him. Aka f/sn with more unique kanji

Well lopen could transition onto fate hollow ataraxia if he wants after playing through rabbit hole I

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You're messing with me! You're messing with me, aren't you!?
You're making fun of me, aren't you!? Aren't you!? You definitely are! I'll murder you!

I don't understand a single s*** of what's going on in this topic, but I do practice kanji so is this something I should look into?

Way it is now I'm just randomly memorizing kanji as I look them up, and it's a pretty fruitless endeavour really... I wish Japan would just convert to kana only.

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Signature change in progress... Please wait.

Way it is now I'm just randomly memorizing kanji as I look them up, and it's a pretty fruitless endeavour really... I wish Japan would just convert to kana only.

Have you ever read all hiragana or all katakana Japanese before? It burns the eyes and it's incredibly difficult for greenhorns like us to tell where one thing begins and another ends.

Having kanji can provide an easy way to remember the pronunciation, hints to its definition because of which radicals are attached to them and also makes the sentences shorter. Sure you need to know about... let's say 2 thousand before you're "fully" functioning but how many English words do you think you need to know before you can approach normal functionality?

Anyway to answer you're question, all of us are using the kanjidamage flash card deck from www.kanjidamage.com (just read the introduction and you'll know why we picked it)

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

Card Maturity
Mature cards: 31 (0.9%)
Young cards: 129 (3.8%)
Unseen cards: 3227 (95.3%)

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 77.1% (216 of 280)
First-seen cards: 80.0% (128 of 160)

Started too late today to start Subahibi, so no progress there.

Also wanted to brush up on grammar from my old college TEXTBOOKS before starting so I'm going to do that tomorrow before starting. Will do that during the day, though. I want to say sentence structure is the one thing I retained from college Japanese so it shouldn't require more than a refresher-- if that.

I dread a build up of cards because I don't seem to be nailing down the kunyomi for these reliably-- and every time I fail to do that I'm choosing "hard" rather than "good" meaning the reset time is low. No build up yet though so maybe it's not going to. I like the 20 cards a day pace though so I'm probably going to keep with that. I'll be through the deck in about half a year at that rate-- not too bad.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Don't be afriad to try to work the kun's into the mnemonic if you can, though for most of them it's kind of hard ("what the hell sounds like momekenokara")

and you might find twenty easy in the future and want to increase. Unless you want to spent your last month doing like 500 a day, I would suggest to resist the urge!

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"Biting is excellent- it's like kissing only there's a winner."

Yeah I totally did that with a couple. Like compare I said the dude is comparing clubs instead of heels (kuraberu totally sounds like engrish for club). But most of the time it's pretty tough! Maybe I'm just not creatiive enough.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

So I downloaded this Anki thing and uhh...

Question 1: "one"

I think there's something I'm doing wrong here, because this program can't possibly expect me to have a kanji keyboard... right? I tried typing ichi as well but nothing happens...

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1. That's optional for the deck, but if you need to type something in either use the default microsoft IME or look up and install google IME.
2. whoops forgot to record my data yesterday

Deck:

Mature Cards: 3011(88.9%)
Young Cards: 376 (11.1%)

5 questions for about 1k lines. Up to 8k. 500 lines from getting Rizu's normal end and about 300 lines pasted so I'm guessing about 500 from the Miku branch (looking in the script files is too much of a pain so...)

1 ending usage question
1 subject confusion
3 usage questions

Also played two Eustia sidestories, mostly without having to paste stuff.

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

That's optional for the deck, but if you need to type something in either use the default microsoft IME or look up and install google IME.

What do you mean optional? And "if" I need to type something in? When you start up the practice program you instantly get presented with an English word you have to translate. Is this what you guys do? Please explain...

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I mean you don't have to do it because it doesn't actually do anything to the deck, for example, I never type anything out and I just write the kanji with my finger while saying the kun/onyomi. And yeah, "if" only applies to cards which 1) aren't radicals or 2) aren't the kanji looking for a definition.

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

Well you easily set up windows to type in japanese (under language and keyboard in control panel) it's not necessary- the text box is just there for you to write an answer done if you want. The idea is you press show answer and... it shows the answer, plus 4 more buttons on the buttom- again, hard, good and easy. For the kanjidamage deck, the idea is you go from kanji to keyword or keyword to kanji. There's also a lot of other stuff you can choose to try and remember explained on the kanjidamage site. If you remember the stuff, press hard/good, if you don't again (the first time, if you didn't look at the cards on the site ahead of time, would obviously be Again).




ARGH NEWBIE

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"Biting is excellent- it's like kissing only there's a winner."

Thanks, that explains it perfectly!

Where it says "x months" over those buttons... is that real time? It seems ridiculously spaced out... or do you just have like a bajillion kanji in your deck?

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Yeah.

Basically Anki is a spaced repetition program, which means that as you get it right more and often without forgetting it, it lengthens the interval between times it shows you again. The average interval in my (now finished) deck is 3 months and I think I have at least one card which I don't get to see again until two years after.

You should just give up, you have all the recessive genes anyway imooo

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

They get more and more spaced out exponentially as you answer them correctly.

I was uh also a little too forgiving on myself when I reached near the end of the deck (500+ cards a day thanks to the stupid pace I was going), so that didn't help.


'newbie i will fite yu

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"Biting is excellent- it's like kissing only there's a winner."

Oh hey just noticed this.

I did Anki+KD over the space of about three months. Started at ten new kanji/day (20 cards), before going up to twenty new kanji a day. Got pretty intense after a while (500 reviews a day augh), but now it's back down under 100, which is nice. I still add all the new kanji I encounter in VNs or manga or whatever, of which there have been ~1450 since then.

For grammar I used Tae Kim, which worked well. I should probably do a review of the site now though...

For vocab I started out with Smart.fm's Core 6000....which was great, until Smart.fm closed down. ;_; Currently using the Japanese CorePLUS deck in Anki, which has the Core 6000 plus the next 20000 most important words, doing 20 cards a day. I could do more, but I don't feel like having the number of reviews go crazy. Have 16000 left to go there. I delete words I know well from the deck, and might eventually start deleting stupid words I run into, since I don't want to waste time on words I'll never use.

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All the stars in the sky are waiting for you.

Mac, I forgot are you mostly off of rikai/TA already (I'd say 80-90%~ of lines that you can coldread) and if so when did you get off? And this is for something like, let's say, 11eyes level of difficulty. Can you give a rough number of lines read/TLed before you got there?

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

I never kept track of lines, sorry...but 80-90% without TA is probably fairly accurate. It just never seems that way because the one hard line can take as long as the nine easy lines combined. >_<

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All the stars in the sky are waiting for you.

You can check the scriptsizes page on TL wiki and give a ballpark number

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

seven

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"Biting is excellent- it's like kissing only there's a winner."

Card Maturity
Mature cards: 31 (0.9%)
Young cards: 149 (4.4%)
Unseen cards: 3207 (94.7%)

Correct Answers
Mature cards: 0.0% (0 of 0)
Young cards: 78.5% (248 of 316)
First-seen cards: 80.0% (144 of 180)

Alright... well... time to try Subahibi. Going to just go for an hour minimum see how far I get. If I'm enjoying it I'll keep going till I get tired.

Didn't brush up on grammar like I wanted to but hopefully it won't be too bad.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Yeah that was a disaster. The basic lines were fine but once particles started getting mixed and matched and stuff parsing the sentences became a mess cause I only remembered the basic stuff well. Gonna refresh and try this again tomorrow.

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

Seven lines exactly ha

Mature Cards: 3032 (89.5%)
Young Cards: 355 (10.5%)

Got 1k deeper into Miku's route, she's kinda kawaii with how maji haji she is kyuunnnn

Also replayed some random scenes from subahibi because they're hilarious

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.

The basic lines were fine but once particles started getting mixed and matched and stuff parsing the sentences became a mess cause I only remembered the basic stuff well.

Not really a solution to that except practice really!

or so people tell me

: (

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"Biting is excellent- it's like kissing only there's a winner."

Mature cards: 6019 (97.0%)
Young cards: 188 (3.0%)

Correct:
Mature cards: 95.7% (18242 of 19060)
Young cards: 90.1% (61142 of 67869)
First-seen cards: 66.9% (4164 of 6223)

There's my current KD stats.

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All the stars in the sky are waiting for you.

From: sephsblade | #047
Not really a solution to that except practice really!

or so people tell me

: (

I'm sure practice is necessary to mastering it but actually knowing the rules can't hurt. I'm sure there's a method to all of that madness that can be figured out to some extent without just diving in, though I'm not sure my books will get into much detail on that-- though at the very least I could nail the use of the particles down cause said books do explain that pretty well I do remember that much!

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No problem!
This is a cute and pop genocide of love!

oh right forgot to record the errors I had in reading:

1 grammar
2 definitions

How the hell can I fail at reading the word "snobbish"?

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Eh? You Serious? Easy Mode? How Disgusting!
Only Elementary School Kids should play on Easy Mode.