I took a very long break but I wasn’t idle the whole time. I’ve written a kind of ridiculous amount of pages in the last couple months, probably around 50. I’ve been wanting to start a youtube channel just for funzies so I tried my hand at writing some scripts and it is as hard as I thought it would be. Getting to the point without just dryly reciting the plot of a book is a serious challenge. When I was in college I wrote all the time and that kind of thing became second nature, but I’m very rusty. I think it will just take time and more and more practice. Anyway, here is something I wrote a couple months ago about my continued attempts at learning Japanese. Enjoy…

It’s interesting to be a 35 year old man who is slowly regressing to a teenager again. For years I avoided anime almost entirely for a variety of reasons but as I’ve started this immersion learning folly I’ve been catching up simply because it is the most available media in target language. I also watch a fair amount of dramas but they don’t curate their language as closely to target a specific demographic. Depending on the age range they are trying to reach anime will have very digestible vocabulary and grammar for someone who doesn’t have a high level of fluency. Dramas on the other hand are generally written for adults and they also have to be acted in real time by people who are conveying their lines with more than just their voices. You never stop to think about how much real physical action can distract from a vocal performance until you are desperately listening for every word you might actually know in order to grasp some kind of meaning. After watching hundreds of hours of both anime and drama there is definitely a difference in how much I can comprehend. Anime is usually professionally recorded in isolated settings and they pace of their speech is largely determined by the needs of the animation itself. This has both positives and negatives because listening to such carefully curated content can kind of skew your ear and deaden you to what natural speech really sounds like. Films and dramas are often harder to engage with but they offer a more realistic portrayal of what a native speaker sounds like. There is an old joke in the Japanese language learning community that if you try to pick up too much from watching anime then you will end up sounding like an anime character and natives will instantly clock you as a fraud. It’s a silly and outdated idea born mostly from elitism and a more school-minded approach to learning, but there is a difference you have to be aware of.