/jp/ - Otaku Culture

Just finished Flyable Heart. Suzuno's route ended up only talking me yesterday and today to finish (not counting the common route scenes which I read the day before yesterday). I must've read absolutely fuckloads yesterday because I finished it after only a few hours of reading today.

And with that, my first VN (or first anything) in Japanese comes to an end. I'm not sure exactly how long it took me in the end because I don't remember the precise date when I started reading it, but I think it was late July or early August, so I estimate around 3 and a half to 4 months.

Guess I'll just briefly summarise my experience, as far as I can remember it. When I first started reading it, there were so many lines that I could make little to no sense of at all, and the pace at which I could read was also very slow. At some point though, I can't remember exactly when it happened, but all of a sudden one day I just realised I was understanding most of what I read without much difficulty. As time went on, rather than rarely encountering a line I didn't struggle with, it became the reverse situation where I most of the lines gave me little if any trouble and truly incompressible lines were few and far between.

And now my takeaways from the experience:
- It is critically important that you enjoy/are interested in what you're reading. If the beginning of Flyable Heart hadn't caught my interest and got me to push myself onward in spite of how much I was struggling with it, I'm sure I would've just given up after a few days and been left full of negative feelings about my own abilities/intelligence ("I'm too dumb to learn Japanese", etc.).
- I should've used Anki. I did learn some words just from reading but I'm sure I could've learned so many more if I had taken advantage of Anki. I'll mine whatever I read next for sure.

I think that's about all I have to say for now. Maybe I'll think of something else to add later.