holy crap.

I’m not the type of person to share stuff like sharing haul photos of Japanese books ( it’s only meaningful if you actually read the books you hauled) or my handwritten Japanese writing but I thought this was interesting to share since I’ve been going at Japanese for so long.

holy crap I still have this notebook where I use to work on remember the kanji. I’m not the type of person to keep everything like those frightening hoarders on TV. A good rule of thumb is to throw shit away if you haven’t used it or worn it etc in over a year. If anything I would love to be a danshari expert like SAKAI MASATO. He loves throwing crap away.

SO I’m surprised by the fact that i was able to fill up a whole page in such a neat manner. Writing so that the letters fit between the lines is a big deal to me because I’m lazy and I hate writing stuff by hand. It’s evidenced by the messier picture. Of course there are worse pages but 3 pics are enough for this blog post. Coincidentally I also found little entries I wrote in Japanese which is cool (entries where i just wrote something in japanese without looking up how to write x word on the computer because that’s pointless… might as well type it on the computer then) because I’m like oh I was able to do this then. I would think this notebook is from 2008 or 2009 maybe 2010. For remember the kanji reviews I usually wrote it anywhere and everywhere and then threw the paper away. nowadays I do kakitori reviews on anki because I eventually had to convert the cards over since I can read Japanese and it’s nonsensical for me to stick with the original format of key word + whatever.

So anyways if you just look at this notebook I look like I”m super hardcore and dedicated to Japanese learning right? at least to some random person who doesn’t know Japanese. It looks intimidating lol. If you look closely you’ll notice I’m not just copying the chinese character OVER AND OVER AND OVER OVER AND OVER AGAIN which is a strategy that is very much emphasized and used in Korea probably even now for learning hanja ( those poor kids). It’s great that the emphasize working hard but stupid learning methods are stupid and wasting people’s time and energy that could be put to better use. I was doing remember the kanji where you remember the story and write the kanji. Of course I didn’t fill up the whole page in one day though it would be easily done if all you did is copy the same character over and over again which is just stupid since it’s not effective.

I think I started remember the kanji in 2008 or 2007 and I used anki and it’s 2016 and I”m still using anki and i converted most of it to kakitori and i average 10 cards a day? But the thing is writing by hand isn’t that important nowadays for any language, not just japanese, so I try to not put excessive time into my heisig deck so I don’t go out of my way to add more cards unles I come across some word that i really want to know how to write by hand. Sometimes I want to learn to write a certain word just because I want to not necessarily because it’s useful or common. I still haven’t broken down and drilled the japanese surname/first name anki deck. I don’t care!!! I’ll literally read a japanese novel and for x character they’ll put the furigana on the name the first instance and then the next time i read the book and get to the next instance of that person’s name i don’t know what that person’s name is though I recognize the kanji or the meanig of the kanji and i keep reading and if they do not repeat furigana again i finish the book not knowing their name. if they repeat the furigana then i might remember it at that point or remember it for a little while and then forget it again. I don’t think it’s too bad because even if i don’t know the reading, I do recognize the kanji and or the meaning of it. I just don’t see the point of me putting effort into name readings. words are more important to me. most of the japanese names I can read are probably names I learned from talk/variety shows because they have so many people on the shows.

rather than writing, I think my time is put to better use reading or listening! I am just apersonthat hates writing stuff by hand whether it’s english or korean or japanese. I just hate writing… the physical movements with my hand are just so demanding for me. But I still want to know how to write Japanese so I’m glad I stuck with it! another upside is that i can do remember the kanji/kakitori reviews on anki while watching tv which is something i cannot do with regular sentence/cloze cards… probably has to do with the part of the brain i use.

Learning Japanese from Rose of Versailles

☃ ✾☆　☺ link to lines/transcript/script from episode 1-40!　ベルサイユのバラ　台本　セリフ　台詞　全台詞　全台詞 名言　名台詞　名セリフ on mediafire | EVERNOTE | .rar of gif and screenshots| tumblr posts &&

Wow so it has been a long time since I’ve done a i learned lotta japanese from anime post. I’ve done Iron leaguer and slayers and battle athletes victory in the past and I am glad I did THIS PARTICULAR anime after those since this one has its own challenges. I thought this anime was really fitting and at my level. It was great listening comprehension practice and they use a lot of interesting language that I am mostly familiar with (I’ve heard it before etc and it just sounds so pleasant and wonderful) but I could be more familiar with that language of course. Well currently I’m watching an anime with Japanese subs and kickass english subs so it’s been a breeze learning Japanese from it. for rose of versailles I haven’t added all the cards to anki yet but so far I have 105 cards with my MCD format. I’ll probably end up adding a few more. my god I have 616 cards from iron leauger ( 52 ep anime) well that was like 4 years ago! ~ Anyways the reason i haven’t done this kind of post in a long time is because I didn’t watc h anime! that’s what a shitty job will do to you. it sucks the life out of you at home and at work. i feel alive now. I did watch code geass akito because there’s japanese subs for it and that’s like the only new anime that intrigues me. everything looks like shit. is it just me?

I was able to get the lines I couldn’t catch from Japanese websites (this particular anime is VERY FAMOUS AND VERY POPULAR), Japanese peeps at lang-8 and japanese peeps at chiebukuro, and my ears after a re-listen + english sub help. I talk more about this in my other entries for slayers, iron leaguer and battle athletes victory probably. I feel so vindicated when even Japanese people go I’m so sure they’re saying this but it sounds like this or that’s really hard to catch etc etc. Of course that doesn’t happen every line I have trouble with but even sometimes I can tell that a particular is just unclear for some reason maybe something with the audio from the 70s. YOU KNOW that is ALSO ONE OF THE reasons i chose this particular anime. even though it’s old, it’s popular so it had a blue ray dvd release in which they probably fixed up the animation and the audio blahblahblah. But even then there are a few lines that are just unclear etc probably because of the voice actor.

lol this is what i Love about cell animation. they always end up screwing up painting in the color for somebody’s hair in a frame or scene usually but this time they messed up the guy’s face! lol. there’s no zombies in this anime !

I have a lot of anime on my que list and I’m only watching one at a time because that’s just what i feel like and i don’t have much time. I definitely wanted to make sure I don’t end up watching shit so I feel more inclined to watch old anime. as much as i love midorikawa’s voice (zelgadis) and sakamoto desu ga seems kinda interesting ( but probably will fail with the execution) there’s like a 99% chance it’s shit because it’s new anime. just my opinion but um.. somehow I ended up choosing this anime. I had put it on my list on MAL because I heard good things about it when it got licensed. I watched this show on a weekly basis though I did not watch every week. I usually watched 2 eps at a time but if i didn’t feel like it i watched just one. This isn’t the type of anime to marathon unless you’re at an interesting arc like the eps around episode 20. I watched with no subs and just wrote down the time stamp of the part I couldn’t catch or understand the line because the subs are so distracting whether it’s delayed one second or not. If this anime wasn’t popular and famous it would’ve been really difficult because of the all french names and how unrecognizable they are after they are run through the katakana machine. the english subs for this anime are pretty solid.

1) I love the animation style which is something I cannot say about most new people nowadays – of course it has its shortcomings in that it’s not as fluidly animated or just not as animated as new anime (this is an obvious one). also it’s awe-inspiring to think that people actually drew all these cells to make it look like it’s moving. I’m so glad it was made then and not in 2016 because if they animated it now it would look like shit just because i hateeeeeee the animation style + COLOR scheme nowadays.

2) love the voice acting and bgm – i mean there’s always going to be trends with certain voices being prevalent and popular but i really just cannot stand some of the voices nowadays and how they all sound the same. i esp cannot stand the typical “cool and indifferent af” guy with the hair and the moe people. BTW I love OSCAR’s voice!!!

3) oscar – omgs i was watching darake episode (show with junior the comedian) about pretty lesbian couples (or was it the one about the onabe poeple which is japanese for ftm transgender! ) and they kept using this the opening song of this anime… so i was expecting some yuri elements etc in this anime and i guess you could say there are some but not really. There are some pretty funny scenes (to me) /lines that only come up because Oscar is a girl (they were few and not forced!). I loved the lines in those scenes…. one scene involved a horse incident i believe? and the other scene involved rosalie? offering herself up to oscar. and another scene involved a very important ballroom dance party. You know if they made this anime in 2016 they would’ve made it unnecessarily forced or perverted like that bloody comedy anime (IT WAS THE same studio as welcome to the nhk or sayonara zetsubou sense I think so i was shocked at how shitty it was) that i couldn’t watch a couple years ago. what i love about this time period (I mean the 1970s not the 1700s) is that there’s dignity and class which is hard to find in 2016 anime lol at least from what i can judge from the pictures. there’s always ass hanging out, strange poses, etc. they do so many unnecessary cringe-worthy crap with stuff like this nowadays so i’m so happy it was made when it was made. I think this must be the OLDEST anime I’ve seen in its entirety. I can totally see why OSCAR is a really popular anime character. On a related note my favorite character from sailor moon is sailor Uranus!

for the people who are interested in this anime or like shoujo anime i say go for it because it is well-done. I certainly wasn’t into this anime after the 1st episode. It took me a couple or maybe a handful of eps to get into it. Also as with most anime there are some amazing eps and then some okay eps etc etc so it’s so hard to gauge how much I liked it/enjoyed it overall. There are eps that are like 9/10 or 8/10 then there’s eps that are from 6-7/10 for me sooooooooo…. There’s this one part where somebody goes crazy and the anime did a wonderful job depicting that with the background music and the animation. Like I said they gotta draw every frame so they sure af will not waste any. there were some amazing episodes and arcs that completely engrossed me ( i love me some court room scenes!). In fact there is this one episode in particular that’s very famous among the fans and made me SOOOOOOOO glad I saw this anime. I am finally in their “club” lol. It’s one of those scenes that made me want to talk about it someone or at least read someone’s blog entry about it or the backstory or the scene in the manga to see the differences. There’s 2 eps ( there’s obviously more eps with surprises) that stand out to me as far as being shocking since I had never expected to see ithat in this anime. Old anime can be edgy and shocking y’know.

I can’t recommend this anime to everyone because I don’t think everyone will like it since it’s shoujo and some people aren’t into that.I myself am torn because there’s amazing eps and arcs but some eps are not as interesting. Overall I’m glad I watched it because of the amazing eps or the shocking scenes that I thought I would never see in this anime.

the other day i was watching this super famous budget-heavy movie in theaters and this one was rather cgi-heavy and I was thinking to myself holy shit WHAT THE hell am i doing watching old shit as in “old anime” which is just worlds apart from a Hollywood as far as the technical visual quality. Then I thought TO MYSELF that’s not the deciding factor as to whether or not something is enjoyable for me. When it came down to it this movie with its high budget didn’t engage me or give me as much enjoyment as I derived from this olddddddddd anime. there wasn’t certainly any scene in the movie that engrossed as much as that shocking episode scene but it’s not fair to compare a 2 hours 30 minutes movie to a 40 episode anime. the anime is at an advantage with the 40 x 20 minutes duration.

BTW I hate one-liners in movies for a multitude of reasons. They’re really prevalent and there’s always countless one-liners in super popular movies for obvious reasons. When they do that unless it’s really good as in amazing I do not respond to it. I do not laugh, I do not grin, I do not make a change in my facial expression. I really don’t appreciate laziness that oozes from one-liners and “awkward” scenes that generate laughter from some people from the audience. As a movie watcher I feel generally offended at their laziness. They just assume that everyone is monolingual or don’t read books or don’t watch tv shows and think we’ll be impressed with the lazy crap they spew. I think the scenes where they try to portray awkwardness WITH INTent to translate that into comedy are usually reallllly lazy and repulse me. I am intolerant and immune to that stuff because I’ve watched so much awesome talk/variety shows from Japan.

So I was surprised with the ending song because at the end of the song there is this guy yelling something and I couldn’t catch what he said the first few times so I looked it up and it still didn’t make sense to me completely. I thought to myself damn why is this guy being so over-dramatic? maybe melodramatic is a better-fitting word? Why is saying such cheesy things? (it’s actually not cheesy lol once you find out the context). for the longest time I had no idea who the hell was saying this and to who he was yelling to until episode 20 something?? when that plot finally started. Yes I am not not good at recognizing voice actors. then LATER on I realize yelling part of the song disappears in the later eps. I’m not sure what ep it was exactly but man that’s unique. I applaud the writer or director or whoever that came up with this.

This anime does intrigue me to learn more about French history or the peope in it. The hobby or obsession that marie antoinette’s husband has seemed so ridiculous I thought they made it up for the anime but they didn’t. he really obsessed with that which is odd. I do like reading nonfiction provided it’s a subject I’m interested in and the writer does a good job. reading nonfiction is not the same thing as reading a dry textbook. I’m interested in reading the nonfiction just to see what the anime made up or included in it. I’m just curious. I’m not expecting this anime or manga to be super educational or thorough.

This anime was perfect for me for learning Japanese and I have come far from reading over my post on iron leaguer. Maybe this anime would have been too hard for me 4 years ago? who knows… This is what i love about having my blog. I write it for myself and I can look back at what I was concerned about or frustrated about and now I am like wtf you talking about. If you’re at a lower level then you’re probably better off learning more useful common Japanese from anime set in modern times or other medium but it doesn’t hurt to pick up random words/phrases effortlessly from watching anime if that ends up happening. At the end of the day AJATT does work. Enjoyment is a must and sometimes you can remember stuff effortlessly from anime.