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Index Hello and welcome to my Learning How To Learn Japanese guide series! My name is Kenshin_sama, and today I’d like to go over a basic overview of what these guides will be about. What I aim to accomplish with this series is share some of the observations I made while studying in hopes that they aid you in finding a sustainable method for yourself. While many of the techniques I discuss can be applied to almost any area of study, I’ll be writing these guides specifically for those who want to learn Japanese. Guide format: After dedicating several hours to writing this guide, I came to the realization that I’ve put in far too much information to consume all at once; and after some deliberation, I decided to break my guide into a series of smaller guides to provide moderate break points and make it a little less intimidating. Each guide will be dedicated to certain lifestyle aspects or learning techniques that can make the process of learning Japanese easier. Every time I create a new guide, I'll add a link to an index at the top of each entry for convenient navigation. What you should know before you start learning Japanese: Gaining proficiency in any new language is going to require a substantial time investment throughout the entirety your life; make sure you can justify that kind of commitment to yourself before getting started. There are plenty of reasons you might want to consider learning Japanese other than for increased enjoyment of your hobbies, but make sure they’re enough to keep you motivated. The key to studying effectively is studying consistently. In the wise words of James Raymond Watkins, “A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.” If you can spend more time studying, great, but it is imperative that you take the time to study almost every day, even if it’s only for a short duration. I’m not sure if this is still a commonly held belief, but I think I’ll go ahead and address this argument in case you get the wrong idea. It is not impractical to learn a completely new language as an adult. You may have heard it said on occasion that the best time to learn any new language is at a young age. I’m not willing to verify the accuracy of that statement since it’s not exactly relevant to this guide (I’m not writing this for 5-year-olds), but I can say with some certainty that it is never too late to get started. I’ve heard plenty of stories about people who’ve started learning their second language in their late 20s or older, and have achieved fluency in that language with enough practice. Just know that it’s perfectly normal to suck at learning a new language at first; your age is not to blame. Afterword: Thank you very much for reading. It was not my intention to make the introduction post this long, but I wanted to be sure I made some of my points as clear as possible. I'd greatly appreciate it if any of you would be kind enough to share your thoughts on this guide. In part 2, I’ll be going over a certain method of learning Japanese grammar through Anki. I'm almost positive that this method won't take over as the primary go-to for learning grammar, but I figured it'd be worth sharing anyways since it's working well for me and I haven't seen it brought up in any other JP guide (at least the ones promoted on this site). Hope to see you there!

Foreword - No VNTS again, so time for another my own VNTS Review here. I hope that you'll enjoy my VNTS Review here, and once again I would hope that someday we'll gonna have VNTS as well. Welcome to this week VNTS Review even though I'd write this on Wednesday here so I'm quite late for this, and seeing that we did have Mangagamer's Otakon announcements at last Saturday I'll comment about the announcement in this review as well. As for the title, I'm sure that some of us would recognize it as Esperanto language, but let's see what we updates that we have at this week beforehand (I'll explain the title in PS later). For this week, seeing that we have Otakon announcements from Mangagamer, I would say that this week is definitely a good one. Other than Otakon announcement, we also have sizeable updates from the fan translation section compared to the last week, and not so favorable news from Sekai as well. With that done, let's see what I can write for this week as well. Yesterday we have surprising news from Sekai, which unfortunately is quite a bad one namely that Sekai fired off all of their marketing staff. While understandably they probably in dire need of money so they think that they should be able to do the marketing be themselves fine, unfortunately seeing the former CEO bad reputation I wouldn't be so sure if it's would be the good decision from Sekai or not. Anyway, it show that Sekai perhaps have some problem inside of the company itself so maybe some of the their partner would have doubt on Sekai. Enough my assumption here for now, and apparently Sekai did assure us that the projects will do fine for now so there's that. Now that Sekai did have some scandal here, they also list off some of their ongoing project at their site here, and out of all those updates the only thing that shown some clarity was Rewrite with the retranslation progress was at 35% (To me it's redundant project though). Let's just hoping that everything will work out somehow, especially for the projects that wasn't listed at the post (ie Majokoi, Harukuru, and Baldr Sky). We did have Your Diary+ release back at last Friday on Steam. While the graphic for Your Diary itself is looking good, unfortunately the translation for that is pretty awful and there's no H scenes for that. As for my opinion here, I can try to tolerate the translation there but lack of H scenes will surely wouldn't do much favor to the people there. Oh and as for the translation, according to Pabloc back at VNDB it's worse than Konosora initial translation and for the note Pabloc himself was the one who retranslated Konosora, so if I may say here it would be need more than five years if one want to retranslate Your Diary (Konosora retranslation need almost five years to be finished). As for the removal of H scenes, while we knew that there's console version of this, Hobibox still don't have the excuse to only released all age version without 18+ patch because in Japan we also have Your Diary+ that was have the H scenes as well, and more importantly Hobibox could do it like the publisher nowadays (Did they didn't know either Fakku or Mangagamer?). In the end, I guess it;s a shame that we did get not so good release of Your Diary, considering that I find that the graphic itselves were quite nice to see. Fan Translation A week after starting the project, the translator for Summer Pocket did have a plan to release the trial patch for that at 26th later. While obviously it wouldn't cover the translation up to the endings, at least it should be enough if we want to see of what kind of the translation that Summer Pockets will have. For the VN itself, I'll try to talk more about it later but let's just said that it's more or less could be treated as a tribute to KEY's past VNs with many similar plot points. As for Summer Pocket's progress, the common route translated line count was at 2,810 lines while for others 1,446 lines were translated, bring the total translated lines was at 4,256 lines (Out of 111,484 lines, so the percentage for translated lines of Summer Pockets was at 3.81% translated). Other than Summer Pockets, we have Pure Pure was at 80.25% translated with Hibari's route was at 20.56% roughly translated, 264 out of 268 lines from Oreimo Tsuzuki were finalized, Eustia was at 49.76% translated along with 40.06% edited and 39.08% TLC-ed, and Harugi's was at 12% translated for the overall progress with Tonoko's route was at 31% translated along with Branch was at 23% translated (With additional progress was at 8% edited). We also have a word from Musumaker project in which apparently they already finished with the engine issue for inserting the text, so at least from there hopefully it should be easier if we talk about Musumaker engine work (Also interesting to note that the team will remove the mosaic for Musumaker). From Loverable, the translator himself say that the team will revised the translated scripts from the start and they'll remove the honorific from the translation later, so let's wait for the further news here. As for the current progress for Loverable, right now it was at 82.33% TLC-ed. I think that's all for the updates in regard of fan translation, and obviously we didn't have Otakon announcement for this section lol. Mangagamer Before going to Otakon announcements from them, let me say congratulation for the release of short nukige Sweet Switch back at last Thursday. And of course seeing that Mangagamer like to announced the exact date for their next release after the current release for most of the time, this time obviously Mangagamer did announce the exact date for the next release. As for the next release in question, it is Tsui Yuri in which it'll be released at September 6th later. So congratulation of mod Dergonu in regard of the release here, and if you've been waiting Tusi Yuri for more than two years, take a note of the release date. The first announcement from Mangagamer Otakon panel is shoujo ai VN Kotonoha Amrilato, which I'll like to call it Amrilato from now on. As for the premise, it was in regard of a girl (Rin) who mysteriously transferred to the another world where the sky that did have the eternal sunset color. After that, Rin obviously want to know what was happened and from there she met another girl (Ruka), in which the usual trope that everyone spoke Japanese even in another world didn't happen because Ruka only understand Japanese a tiny bit with her dominant language was the unknown language (Juliamo). Obviously with that circumstance both Rin and Ruka wouldn't be able to communicate very well, and of course the only solution is that Rin learn Juliamo. What make this VN unique is not the isekai premise, but rather Amrilato allow us to learn Juliamo language along with Rin in order to understand the world by ourself. While Juliamo language here is a fictive one, actually it was based on a real language called Esperanto in which some of the word in Juliamo should be familiar if one been learning Esperanto. I'll hope that the translator able to translate this properly, because it would be hard if one want to translate this properly if we'd looking from learning the foreign language aspect. The second announcement is otome 18+ VN from Kalmia8 Horny Magical Princess (Or I'll call it Sukehime from now on, with 'suke' was shortened from 'sukebe' which mean pervert). The premise is that we have a cute alien came to the Earth in order to search for her husband, and after landing on the Earth she found two handsome virgin men who the alien think was good enough to be the alien husband candidates (Forget to said that since the alien spoke Japanese as well, there wouldn't be major communication problem between her and two handsome men just like Amrilato lol). Even though it's 18+ otome which in theory is interesting enough, unfortunately this is the least interesting announcements to me for now. But if you've been take a liking to Boukaku from the same developer, this should be an interesting announcement to you. Oh, and the alien girl herself (The MC for this VN) is far more cheerful compared to Boukaku's MC. Almost forget to say that the translator already translated 4% of it according to her Twitter here. Their third announcement was surely came off as a surprise, considering that the company in question was already bankrupt. But seeing that I'd been wish the announcement since last year Otakon, the surprise is quite good to me here. As for the third announcement, it was Haretaka in which it was dubbed as the best Chuablesoft VN. The premise is more or less just like MoeNovel sky themed VNs though (Konosora and Miagete, but instead of glider or telescope we'll gonna have rocket here), but at least we knew that this is gonna be better release compared to MoeNovel one because the mere fact that Mangagamer will release it uncensored (ie include the H scenes). As for the progress right now it's been already fully translated and edited, so perhaps we'll gonna have Haretaka did the beta testing in near future. Anyway, while I did say that it's surprising that Mangagamer did announce Chuablesoft title in which as we know is a bankrupt company, Mangagamer did answer that they already have a talk with the new license owner for Chuablesoft, which automatically mean that they should already cleared the license problem for Suki Suki as well. Seeing that Suki Suki was still in beta testing, I hope that it'll be finished in the near future and after that they'll release it. Forget to say that actually it's not a new thing though that a work from bankrupt company released overseas, because in the past we have the examples of that from JAST (Romanesque and more recently Schatten). The fourth announcement from them was another Alice Soft VN, and this time it's Escalayer in which we'll gonna have a magical girl going to fight of the evil organization to defend the peace of the town. While the premise is absolutely cliche with the same pattern as Haruka as well (Both Escalayer and Haruka did share the exact same gameplay with slight difference), this VN was obviously Quof's next project because Haruka is more or less a nukige (Interesting to see that this is the second time that Arunaru didn't involved himself in Alice Soft VN), and therefore Escalayer should be the nukige as well. While it might be a nukige here, actually it could be treated as the gameplay VN with merely had high sexual content because the sex in Escalayer (And Haruka) did improve the character status so the sex here is quite necessary. In the end, whether you want to call this a nukige or not is up to each people. As for the difference and the similarities with Haruka, I'll write about that later on. That's all for this week VNTS Review, and see you next week. PS - As for the title, it should be obvious that it was an Esperanto language. Which in this case of the title, I simply translate the localized title for Haretaka (Farther Than the Blue Sky) into the Esperanto here.