Author: Aka

List of completed JP media (2023 edition)

~ Aka ~ Leave a comment

Visual Novels

  • Tsuyuchiru Letter – Jan
  • ATRI -My Dear Moments- – September

Novels (Light or otherwise)

  • 本好きの下剋上　第五部 VIII – March *favorite*
  • 俺のクラスに若返った元嫁がいる – March
  • キノの旅 1 – June
  • 妃殿下の微笑 ~身代わり花嫁は、引きこもり殿下と幸せに暮らしたい – July
  • 本好きの下剋上　第五部 IX – September
  • 恋になるまで、あと1センチ – October 
  • 3分で読める! 誰にも言えない○○の物語 – November
  • 誰が勇者を殺したか – November

Audiobooks/Drama CDs

  • この素晴らしい世界に祝福を！ 2 – May
  • この素晴らしい世界に祝福を！ 3 – June
  • 本好きの下剋上 drama CD 9 – June
  • 青春ブタ野郎はバニーガール先輩の夢を見ない (vol 1) – August

Manga

  • 魔女先輩日報 (2 volumes) – Feb
  • マジで付き合う15分前 (4/6 volumes) – Feb
  • 私の拳を受け止めて！(4 volumes) – March
  • 雪の下のクオリア (1 vol) – July
  • どうも、好きな人に惚れ薬を依頼された魔女です。 vol 1 – July
  • Pericoラブコメ短編集 ラララ・ラブコメディ【総集編】(1 vol) – August
  • 気になってる人が男じゃなかった 1 – December

Anime

  • 86 (technically, just the last 2 eps that I hadn’t watched) – June
  • Violet Evergarden movie – June
  • 転生王女と天才令嬢の魔法革命 (12 eps) – July
  • Horimiya (13 eps) – July
  • SPYxFAMILY (25 eps) – July
  • 劇場版「鬼滅の刃」 無限列車編 – August
  • 名探偵コナン 犯人の犯沢さん (12x10min eps) – December
  • Pokemon Concierge (4x18min eps) – December
  • わたしの幸せな結婚 (12 eps) – December

3D Club

Video Games

  • レイトン教授と不思議な町 (DS) – Feb

Bonus: Japanese-adjacent

碧之軌跡 (繁中; Switch) – April *favorite*

ジョゼと虎と魚たち (anime, watched with subs) – May

Thoughts

All in all, a good year of finishing things! I don’t dislike any of them, and only had 1 dud movie that’s enjoyable enough when I watched it but ultimately forgettable. Those in bold are those that really stood out in how they pleasantly surprised me, would highly recommend them.

Here’s to another year of finishing more things! First up, the final volume of 本好きの下剋上 that I’m more than halfway through.

Tools for learning Japanese via immersion (inspired by TMW meta)

~ Aka ~ Leave a comment

Intro

A summary of tools that are very helpful when learning Japanese through immersion. This is heavily based on what I personally know and use from the “meta” in TheMoeWay discord, sorry if I missed out any favorite tool you have.
Also, I use Windows PC and Android, so I’m only listing tools for them here.

Updates:
13 March 2023 – added mpv websocket

Light novels/novels

  • Yomichan
  • Browser supporting Yomichan
    • PC: Chrome/Firefox/Edge/other Chromium-based browsers; personally I prefer chromium-based as they have better support for asbplayer for mining subtitles later)
    • Android: Kiwi browser (afaik the only modern mobile browser supporting addons)
  • Ttu reader (github page: https://github.com/ttu-ttu/ebook-reader)
  • Books in epub format

Manga

Pre-processed OCR

  • mokuro – read manga in a browser with easily Yomichan-able text

On-the-fly OCR

  • PC: ShareX + manga-ocr – very, very accurate for manga, also good for short bits of text from games and novel scans etc. Won’t work well with long text though.
  • Android: OCR manga reader, or Kaku

Anime

Streaming

  • Japanese subs from Kitsunekko or other sources
  • streaming sites, eg. YouTube, Netflix, zoro.to etc.
  • asbplayer to display soft-subs + mining with Yomichan
    • alternative: mpv + stream url

Local

  • either one of these:

3D (TV/movies etc.)

Same workflow as anime. Might be harder to get good streaming sources though. More niche stuff may require access to private tracker torrents.

Games (including visual novels and some emulated games)

  • Something to hook the text:
    • Textractor + TextractorSender or Textractor websocket plugin (older meta was to send to clipboard, this eliminates the need for that)
    • Agent, if the game doesn’t support Textractor
    • (if neither Textractor or Agent works for your game, then you’ll need to use OCR. Or find the script in txt form somewhere. Sorry.)
  • A texthook display webpage, either of these will track time and chars read, and reading speed:
  • If it’s a console game, either emulate it, or use a capture card and OCR.

Mining

Stats tracking

  • ExSTATic
  • Spreadsheet templates
  • TMW discord immersion bot

Extras/alternatives

  • jidoujisho – all-in-one video, reading + mining app on Android.
  • jpdb – good for checking relative difficulty of a series. Also can be used as an Anki alternative for studying and remembering vocab.
  • fsrs – custom scheduler for Anki
  • JL – overlay hooked text, eliminates the need for a separate browser page to display the text. Supports look-ups and mining, but Anki templates are less configurable than Yomichan (it doesn’t support fancy templates relying on handlebars).
  • Google Lens/Vision OCR. May be possible to do it with Chrome browser, or use the API key + an app like ocr-reader.
    • limitation for API: free for 1k images/month, then paid after
  • Arujisho – monolingual/bilingual dictionary app for Android
  • Marv’s vndb & Seiya Saiga user scripts – for better navigation of vn-related sites

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to the various tool and guide authors, and the general TMW community; without them I wouldn’t have learnt as much, and be having so much fun immersing.
Here’s a list of some of them, check them out for more details and resources:

How I started 2023: re-installing software due to corrupted Windows

~ Aka ~ Leave a comment
My desktop view with Rainmeter widgets + visualizer with music playing. GIF screen capture performed with ShareX.

How did you welcome in 2023? For me, it was certainly memorable, because my Windows PC got corrupted during New Year. I suspect it’s due to a botched system restore – it could still work after the restore, but fail to boot after, and I couldn’t repair it from recovery either. I ended up creating a Linux USB to access the hard disk and backup my files to my external HDD (note to self: should do it regularly in the future), and also a Win10 install USB.

The Windows installation went smoothly enough (and it seems I don’t need to enter any OEM key, it’s automatically detected I suppose). Even upgraded to Windows 11 with no fuss. That leaves me with a very clean copy of Windows… and a bunch of software to re-install, heh. Thought I’d take this opportunity and go through the list of software I use in this post.

My software install list

Software I install, roughly sorted by the ones I need first. Going to leave details for the Japanese-learning related software and addons for another post.

  • Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Brave) – yes, I use multiple browsers for different purposes
  • Everything – fast search for files and programs
  • Microsoft PowerToys – especially for PowerToys Run, to launch programs/files/folders quickly
  • Volumouse – quick way to control volume and mute/unmute with scroll wheel
  • Ditto – clipboard manager that supports search
  • Spotify – need my ad-free music fix
  • Notepad++ – because plain Notepad is just eww. Also, immediate switch to Solarized colorscheme (light)
  • AutoHotkey – useful hotkeys, especially for media controls (eg. play/pause)
  • 7-zip – nicer than the default zip program, and supports .7z and .rar
  • VLC – plays pretty much any media file thrown at it
  • Discord – because most of my socializing is online nowadays 😂
  • Game launchers (Steam, Epic Games Store, others later when I want to play the games )
  • WorkRave – ergo break reminders
  • Rainmeter – totally optional, but useful for quick checks on the date, weather, etc. The music visualizer is so pretty~ I still want to add a clock and disk space widget later though.
  • Translucent taskbar (from Windows store) – also totally optional, but I like how it looks
  • WinDirStat – check which folders are taking up space
  • ShareX – advanced screenshot and audio recording
  • Anki – flashcards (a must for my JP learning)
  • qBittorrent – for the times I need to grab torrents
  • StepMania – rhythm game I play with a dance pad for some exercise. I only have anime songs in it right now though, lol.

A quick sidenote on Rainmeter – it sure has advanced quite a lot since I last used it many years ago. The skins are so pretty and advanced now. I’m using Sonder for the weather, calendar, system meter, and music visualizer (Firefly style). Also using JAX core to jazz up my sliders, start menu, and now playing widget.
Took a look at reddit and there are so many fancy visualizers now (can even layer it so it appears partially behind another object), very impressed, but I’m lazy so I just go with the basics.

And that’s my list! Do you have any software you can’t live without?

    Game recs if you love reading

    ~ Aka ~ Leave a comment

    Nobody:

    Me: here’s a list of game recommendations if you love reading!

    • 80 Days
    • Ace Attorney/Phoenix Wright series
    • 999 series
    • Any good visual novel (too many to list here)
    • Trails series – there’s so much dialogue my mum actually asked if I really was playing a game 😂